Things worth a little consideration from the almighty modder

[a bullet]

I've been popping in and out of the MGM forum looking for different tutorials through the discussion and such, and haven't found answers to a number of things. Sorry if these have been answered somewhere else. To start, is it humanly possible to import custom edition tags directly from a folder and/or tag pack on my desktop? I just downloaded the CMT Elite Biped tag pack and the in-folder tutorials refer to several Windows programs which I'm not familiar with. I'm working on an intel mac armed only with Fonzie's modding tool pack and a few other applications downloaded from halodemomods.com. I have tried to get these CE tags into a demo map using the 'load tag' or 'load tag recursively' tabs in eschaton but have been… unsuccessful.

I just tested a small guide in this thread, however HHK isn't being too nice and closes every time I attempt to open up a map.

Second, is there any way to have weather particles only appear in certain areas of the map? I have the c40 snow weather tags imported into a mod I've been working on for a while now, but can't get the ungodly snowflakes to disappear when the biped is located within the bases or in the caves. Several levels such as 343 Guilty Spark of the full campaign have particles 'disappear' when the biped walks under a sheltered area, which gives the realistic look I've been looking for.

BUENO



MAL



And this is the effect I'm going for (below) where it is raining outside but not inside the building.





Third, I have been trying to have spirits ripped from the b30 campaign map fly as effectively around bloodgulch as the banshees seem to be able to, but the AI pilots spawned in the vehicle either glitch and spin and lag until they are propelled outside the map or do not move at all. Is there any way to add 'objectives' or waypoints for the vehicles to really fly towards/away from? I was hoping I could find something as easy as moving spawn points in swordedit but I'm assuming it would be in the scenario>meta editor>reflexives>command lists>_ somewhere in eschaton.

Thanks

[TaxiService]

Hello! I am grieved to tell you that all of these things you want to do can't be done with our current tools legitimately. They all necessitate us to use custom edition tools.

Namely:

• · Our tools cannot import CE tags the way they are released on those sites. Eschaton right now can only import tags in the format that it exports.
  · The part of the map in which there is snow/rain/particles have to be defined while making the bsp. That's the only legit way to do so. (though maybe i can think about another way)
  · The path that the Spirit dropship has to follow must be defined by scripting in CE. :-\ Either that or those commands you found in the scnr; but i have no experience on neither.

Quite the luck! Tell me, what OS are you running? You can always emulate windows and try to actually use their tools to do this stuff! Either that or we have to find alternative solutions to these problems.

For instance:

• · if you want to import a certain tag from that pack, you can go find someone else's map that includes that weapon and export it from there! (or ask someone with CE to import the tags for you into a map)
  · To make it snow where you want you could make a scenery tag that uses an effect that spawns particles randomly in a certain area; and then duplicate this scenery everywhere around the map! This solution is a kind of a patchwork though; I don't know how effective it will be.
  · About the dropship… I don't know. :-\ What do you mean that banshees have been able to fly around the map effectively?

[Sparky]

1. The tags from hce.halomaps.org are typically converted to Eschaton format by people such as myself who have a setup with the Halo Editing Kit. Check out the Incyclopedia at HDM (do a search for it on the wiki) for lots of tags you can use with Eschaton from that site and elsewhere.

2. Weather Portals are added to an sbsp (scenario structure binary space partition) tag using the Halo Editing Kit tools (Windows XP). To someone who has experience with the HEK, it's kind of simple, but those tools are notoriously frustrating to use. If I were to make a map of bloodgulch or import one into 3ds max and add weather to the portals, it wouldn't be CSS, but it would actually be a rather simple thing to do -- except for the fact of the tools being so frustrating to use, like I said. If you really would like me to do that, I can spare some time to do that. You would have to use the map I gave you though, rather than import the sbsp from this map into your old map. (It might work, but it's just another task to frustrate me.) What I would do is import the sbsp into 3ds max, add some exact_portal volumes to the bases and caves, export it, build it with tool, manage it with sapien/guerilla, build the map with tool, test it in Halo CE, convert with Pearl, test it in Halo Demo, and do some touch-ups before archiving it for you... it's really an involved process and not something nearly as simple as a modding task in Eschaton. I would release it as a template for everyone to download and use for modding from HDM.

3. I don't really have enough information about the vehicle task, but maybe you would need to add chunks to the scenario file, which can't be done yet with our tools but is only another map-making task at this point. Scripting does not work with Halo Demo Multiplayer anyway; the engine does not handle it in multiplayer scenario maps. You can only script in singleplayer maps.

[TaxiService]

>2.

dude, that'd be great!! A bloodgulch predisposed to house rain tags!! If you did that you'd add a great template to your templates list. How long would it take, Sparky?
BTW when you go placing volumes (i don't know how volumes work, but i guess you can have volumes where it doesn't rain, right?) consider if putting some no-rain volumes below cliffs too! Under the red-side cliff, for instance, there shouldn't be rain! IIRC there is some sort of stone roofing or something, right?

I mean, do some considerations! It's something you have to do while viewing the bsp. I wouldn't want to have forgotten some of the bloodgulchean morphology! XD

[Sparky]

OK, I can do that now. Will take a couple hours probably. (If it works at all.)

UPDATE: This requires that I do a fresh take on bloodgulch. I've had lots of experience with importing bsps into 3ds max and fixing them up for additional export. I'm still figuring out the best way of getting it to work so that it looks like the original but is not the original.

Before I do anything fancy with the portals, I'm going to try to get it to work first with a "default" bloodgulch map, but that means I still need to fix it so it follows the sealed world rules. +seamsealer portals don't seem to work for me, although I haven't tried using one as a sealed area (like +exactportal) so it will probably work when I do that. If that works as it should, then I should be able to actually start putting out bloodgulch maps that are actually quite perfect replicas of the original bloodgulch, but with only intentional modifications.

It's a small task so either I do it tonight or I call it a night and try it tomorrow. We'll see. Again, if it works, then it's going to be my template for additional modifications / additions to the "original" bloodgulch sbsp.

Update 2: I'm having this problem:

Code: Select all

Couldn't read map file './toolbeta.map'
building intermediate geometry...
building collision geometry...
reducing collision geometry...
building collision bsp...
reducing collision bsp...
verifying collision geometry...
verifying collision bsp...
building portals...
EAX: 0xFFFFFFFE
EBX: 0x030BB901
ECX: 0x0012F260
EDX: 0x000002CC
EDI: 0x0012F260
ESI: 0x00000000
EBP: 0x0012F138
ESP: 0x0012F128
EIP: 0x7C90E514, C3 8D A4 24 ?????
EXCEPTION halt in \halopc\haloce\source\memory\array.c,#130: index>=0 && index<array->count

EDIT: This is taking much more renovating than I thought it would. I'm redoing basically all the portal planes and adding my own later, once I see some success in testing what can otherwise be considered the "original" bloodgulch version (but with all my fixes, it's not really). I was able to get by the error I reported above by removing all the exact portal planes. We'll see what sapien says.

Update 3: I think it will work. I just need to finish redoing the +exactportal volumes and that's all. When I imported it, I get the feeling that some of the exact portals were inverted, but perhaps that's not the case. I'll see.

[Sparky]

http://www.halodemomods.com/wiki/Bloodgulch_Weathered

[zapconquest]

http://www.halodemomods.com/wiki/Bloodgulch_Weathered

whoa that seems pretty cool

what are the bugs you mentioned existed?

[Sparky]

Pretty much only with the portals in that there are clipping visibility errors all over the place. I think I need to use fewer +portal planes. I tried experimenting with the +exactportal's but I think the issue is with the +portal ones instead. Either that or the player clipping boundary (or so I thought) might have been an exact portal on the ceiling... I'll have to test it some more later.

In that preview, you can fly up and out of the water volume in the banshee.

[Sparky]

I released 1.0 of bloodgulch weathered. Check it out if you're interested in using it as a template. It works quite well now.

Also, you know that means I now have access to a quite viable 3ds max file of bloodgulch. I'll upload it to HDM as a template for those who have access to the HEK.

[a bullet]

I recently encountered two more problems, which are both featured in the same screenshot. I have been editing the bitmaps of a series of weapons, but some (usually Covenant weapons,) don't look too well with the edited bitmap. This is mainly because a part of the 'shine' is still left behind giving them a bluish/purple tint. The entire thing could be removed by replacing the weapons\plasma rifle\fp\bitmaps\plasma rifle multipurpose bitmap tag with a solid black jpeg, but that also removes the shininess associated with the weapon. Is there any way I could somehow either change or remove the purple tint specifically while keeping the other effects added to the weapon in tact?

The second problem is the fact that the gametype section of the HUD seems to be untouchable. I have looked through all the sections of Eschaton 0.8 trying to tint the blue background to a yellowish brown like the rest of the HUD display, but cannot seem to find it. Any help such as where to look would be FANTASTIC.

Here is a screenshot with both problems featured:

[TaxiService]

Hey! It isn't fault of the multipurpose map if your PR is so shiny! (i mean, it's not only that) Let me explain you how a soso shader works!

• 

This is the warthog's main shader. The order of bitmaps is this:

• · main bitmap (the warthog!)
  · multipurpose bitmap (this is used to tell halo which parts of the main bitmap are shinier than others and, in some cases, where to change colors)
  · detail bitmap (this is the detail that you see when you go very close to the hog)
  · cubemap (this is the reflection map)

…um, okay. now that you know I should also tell you that you can edit the reflection with just some meta edits!
Try this:
- In Eschaton goto soso, weapons\plasma rifle\fp\shaders\gun
- In the Reference Swapper swap weapons\plasma rifle\bitmaps\cubemap plasma rifle with characters\elite\bitmaps\cubemap dark gray.
- In the Meta Editor (i am using Sparky's plugins but omitting the parentheses) goto Floats > Reflection Properties.Perpendicular Brightness and set the value to 0.8
- Repeat the last step with Reflection Properties.Parallel Brightness.
- In ColorRGBs > Reflection Properties.Perpendicular Tint Color set the color to one of your choice.
- Repeat the last step with Reflection Properties.Parallel Tint Color.

and that's it! These are the principal things to edit in a reflection. The cubemap, its color and its intensity.
There are like a dozen of cubemaps in bloodgulch. Go check them out and choose the one you like the most. (if you want a matteish cubemap i'd go for levels\b30\bitmaps\cube map forerunner interiors, but check the others out nonetheless!)
After you choose the cubemap take your time to calibrate the brightness and colors of it. Parallel and perpendicular brightness don't have to have the same value, so yeah! experiment!



About the blue HUD element: In my research i found no way to meta-edit it to another color. I too once was doing a orange HUD and there just was no way to do it with eschaton only! >.< We'll have to use an image editing program too!
Check out this piece of shit over here:

• 

That bitmap is the infamous HUD element that won't change. Simply because there is no way to make it change!! It is a static bitmap that stays over there doing nothing. How do we change it then? We edit its bitmap!!

You just have to export the bitmap (and its mask, i guess), make it orange in photoshop, gimp, flare, or any program of your choice, and import it (and its mask) back!!

Easy as a pie! (i'd write a lil shitty tutorial but i don't have enough time right now so buh-bye!)

[a bullet]

Lol, I know how to edit a bitmap and don't need a tutorial on that. Using photo editing programs isn't a problem, considering I have photoshop on my desktop and am exploiting everything Picnik.com has to offer before it shuts down in April. Thank you for your help! It fixed all my current problems and I just learned something new about eschaton.

[TaxiService]

i'm glad about that! C:

[a bullet]

I guess I can use this thread to post any particular questions I have in particular. To start off I have been wondering how to move around the moss plants in the cave sections of bloodgulch (if you can at all; I was hoping they would be under the decal tag in eschaton. I've been looking through the sbsp as well.) I do not particularly have to move them, but rather rotate them to all face upward as they will later be replaced with a different bitmap.

I was hoping for something as simple as changing the 'Yaw' quantity to zero in a certain tab in eschaton, but I really don't know where to look.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B


And second, although I do not have any picture demonstrations for this, is there any possible way to add a light reference to a scenery object? Similar to the flashing beacon scenery objects already placed in bloodgulch.

[Modzy]

Moss is a decal and has its coordinates in one of the last reflexives of the SBSP. Not sure if any current plugins edit that part.