I’m Masterz1337, and I lead Custom Mapping Team, the oldest and (arguably) most successful mapping team for Halo CE. Since being founded in November '04, CMT has released at least 24 maps with over 887,936 downloads, and that's only on official Halomaps releases - total downloads easily break one million. Since its humble beginnings those seven years ago, the projects we have undertaken and the people with whom we have worked have shaped the Halo CE modding landscape to a degree no other HCE group has even approached.
The team began as a simple Halo 2 replication mod - CE was only a few months old at the time. While those efforts now seem crude and amateurish, products from that early era proved the enormous potential in Halo CE modding, showing the community that there was much more to be accomplished than mere multiplayer maps. Here are just a few of the advances and innovations pioneered by CMT members:
-Burst-fire weapons
-An understanding of netcode syncing (our map was the first to manipulate the netcode to work around the lack of data sent about vehicle collisions, allowing us to implement destructible, respawnable vehicles without using scripts)
-Properly done first-person animations
-Importing models with rigged vertex weights
-Custom HUDs
These feats may seem rudimentary, but keep in mind that CMT at the time was just a group of kids - I myself was only 15, lacking any development experience or artistic talent. In working with each other to accomplish what seemed to be impossible goals, many of our lives were influenced to the point where we are now basing our careers and educational plans around the skills we learned and developed.
We were still limited by what we had been given - outside of the occasional experiment, we only had access to the multiplayer tagset and had to restrict ourselves accordingly, but then a major innovation came along: HEK+, a utility that gave us the ability to extract tags from existing map files, including single-player content. This allowed CMT to take on the unprecedented task of a full campaign mod, an effort which is now known as SPV1. SPV1’s focus was around expanding the gameplay of the Halo 1 campaign, featuring content and gameplay based off experience and observation from Halo 2, the Halo 3 Beta, and even old Halo 1 betas. This project was easily the first to come close to matching Halo 1's existing quality bar, and most of the content ended up being repurposed, polished, and reused in a series of custom multiplayer maps - some of which are still played to this day. With the release of SPV1, we had over 4,000 unique downloaders and over 10,000 hits to our website in the first 48 hours.
Coming off SPV1's immense success, the team began work on another iteration of the campaign mod, aptly titled "SPV2." Unfortunately, due to a wide variety of complicated issues, the most that ever came out of that effort was a couple of buggy beta maps (only one of which was an official release). To put it simply, we wanted to put so much new stuff into the mod - not only was there nearly four times the amount of content found in vanilla, including an entirely new Brute enemy type; there were completely new BSPs and encounters - that we could not maintain quality and stability within such a broad scope, and after a few months, the team officially disbanded.
In July, however, the team came back together, bringing back old veterans while assimilating some of the top-notch modding talent that arose during its absence, and began work on what we now call SVP3. This third iteration is planned to feature both refined stock maps - with a focus on quality rather than quantity - released one map at a time, to keep fresh content flowing and interest high, while giving us time to focus on custom campaign maps, which are planned to encompass anything from an ODST squad to a cut mission from Halo 1 - more specifically, a mission taking place between A30 (Halo) and (A50), appropriately named A40.
Central to SPV3 is a project called Open Sauce, developed by elder community gentleman Kornman00. Open Sauce gives us the ability to make engine-level changes to the game, allowing us to add things such as vehicle boarding, normal and specular maps on all objects, and extra functions to our weapons, such as single shots on our battle rifle when scoped. These features greatly enhance the mod, but for those who would rather not install anything extra, we have been able to make the mod function without OS - anybody with Custom Edition can enjoy SPV3 on some level.
Despite the huge number things we've created and accomplished, CMT uses entirely custom-made content (with the exception of sounds). The release of the editing kit and the work the community as a whole has put into unlocking its secrets is nothing short of extraordinary, and, again, the degree to which it has impacted our lives is immense - the experience we have had with it has shaped our futures and created friendships that have lasted longer than any of us could have possibly expected. So many people who were once simple gamers have been inspired by the content we have created to take their own shot at becoming artists. While I don’t know what you plan to get out of all of this, I hope the story of my team can prove to you that HCE really is an amazing game, and that its PC community houses enough talent and passion to realize dreams I can pretty confidently say even Bungie never thought possible on this ten year old engine.
My email is mastersthe1337@hotmail.com, and our official forums are located at www.halomods.com/cmt. I would love nothing more than to help answer any questions or concerns that you have. Please do not hesitate sending me an email.
Vids
SPV1 (2005-2006)
Teaser Trailers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F_zlb2IvLw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs51kyOrPkc
Release Trailer
Multiplayer Mod (2006-2007)
SPV2 (2007-2009)
Developer Commentary
SPV3 (July 2011-Present)
Forums: www.halomods.com/cmt
Videos
These were done by our team member Ifudafi, who also helped write this post.
This demos our new battle rifle with grenade launcher functionality.
Related SPV3 posts in this thread
#34 - t3h lag
Originally Posted by Nero
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