Editing kit-look at this

[jstatz]

wtf no no upfront Maya support?

Bungie themselves use maya. What the shit.

All of the maps, objects, etc for Halo are built in Max.

That said, if you check the help file there's a section called ".ass File Specification". This is a detailed rundown of the structure of an .ass file, which is the intermediate format any Halo 2 map starts out in. The intent here is to help any third parties who want to create exporters for Blender, Lightwave, Modo, Maya, or what have you.

The hope was that this would significantly streamline any community efforts in that direction, by not requiring reverse-engineering on their part to work out the file format.