HALO EXPOSED - Hardly Lebel, Multiplayer Designer Starts a Blog

[stunt_man]

I didn't realize how high-level this game was from the start. :o

Me neither. I just started browsing the Team Beyond forums around the Master Chief Collection launch, and I learned that the amount of things going on during a high-level match is dizzying. Unfortunately it seems like most H1 players are on PC - which was actually rather gimped during the porting process. Things like the pistol's stats, weapon spawn times, weapon pickup locations/orientations and even map geometry all received minor "adjustments" (read: oversights) which negatively impacted high-level play. So, the competitive community never jumped ship to PC, but rather stayed on Xbox - even to this day there are LAN tournaments for H1.

So now there are all these Halo PC kids (myself included) who honestly believed that the game had little competitive merit outside of scrim servers that have nades and powerups disabled -_-


Here's an interesting post from Ifafudafi about the pistol in the PC version:

for the curious:

When building a singleplayer map, tool specifically seeks out weapons/pistol/pistol.weapon, and weapons/pistol/bullet.damage_effect, and changes them before compiling them into the map.


pistol/bullet.damage_effect's damage modifier vs. elite energy shield is reduced from 1.0 to 0.8


pistol/pistol.weapon's error angle upper bound is reduced from 2.0 to 0.4 degrees (this is likely the magic jason jones change). So instead of starting at an 0.2 degree cone and ending at a 2.0 degree cone -- 10 times less accurate -- it merely goes from 0.2 to 0.4. Big change!


You can observe this in action by compiling a singleplayer map yourself with the stock HEK tags, which have the "old" values; looking at the memory while the map's running will reveal these tags to have the newer values, as will looking at them after extracting them from a built map with HEK+. (you can also verify this by just shooting walls with weapons/pistol/pistol.weapon and a clone .weapon located elsewhere)


Here's the fun part though: when building a multiplayer map, tool does nothing. Instead, when h1 xbox loads a multiplayer map, it will change the values as they're being loaded into memory. The kicker? Halo PC doesn't do this. (I've verified this on Custom Edition; I'm 95% sure regular HPC is also like this.) Halo PC multiplayer still uses the old Pistol max error of 2.0 degrees.


So, all along, PC MP players have been using the older, non-JJones-tampered version of the Pistol. Of course, pulling the trigger for every bullet (rather than holding it for automatic fire) completely bypasses the accuracy decrease, apparently by design according to this guy; so practically, the JJones change isn't as significant as it may seem.


Less known but arguably more significant is that plasma rifle/plasma rifle.weapon is also modified in the same way, having its error reduced from 0.5-5.0 degrees to 0.25-2.5 degrees; i.e., the HPC multiplayer PR is effectively half as accurate as its campaign & xbox MP counterpart

I made the same thread on halomaps, and needless to say it was immediately filled with shitposting aside from this gem.