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Skeezix the Cat

Skeez's coup de grâce megatut: Energy shields, shaders, and more energy shields!

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In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

  • Give bipeds and vehicles energy shields and shader plasmas
  • Manipulate energy shields to recharge at any rate you want
  • Edit the "thickness" of energy shields, so that they can leak damage depending on current shield strength
  • Make energy shields ignore a certain amount of damage while recharging
  • Improve the quality of most environment shaders in any Halo PC or CE map, giving better graphics (performance loss and everything!)

 

I'm going to start with the shader improvement tutorial first, as it is extremely simple and not relevant to energy shields.

 

 

Open ANY Halo PC or CE map in any meta editor, and find Shader Environment. Expand it, and click the first tag you see. On the right, look for detail level. The next part couldn't be simpler; make sure each tag is set to HIGH level of detail. Do that for each shader environment tag, and that's it! Some of them are already set to high, but a lot of them are medium by default and sometimes even low. Other shader tags are almost always set to HIGH by default, but occasionally you will find one that is set to "TURD". Do not change ones that are set to TURD, it will just make them look worse. If you find other shader tags that are set to low or medium, feel free to change them to high but it won't make a noticeable improvement.
veryhightextures6.jpg
Please note that you'll barely notice a difference on integrated graphics, ESPECIALLY if you have specular turned off. What you WILL notice, however, is that your framerate is even shittier than it was before. This tutorial can be used in reverse; find shader environment tags that are set to HIGH by default and change them to medium or low for significant performance gain. Other shader tags will help too. By setting most, if not all shader tags to medium or lower, you can seriously double or even triple your framerate without heavily impacting Halo's natural graphics.


Now we will learn how to give energy shields (without the shader plasmas, which are the wavy lines that show when the shields take damage) to bipeds and vehicles. This tutorial is assuming you have Eschaton, if you do not have Eschaton but can still do this tutorial, good for you. If not, please get Eschaton to continue. If you have Eschaton and certain plugins are not showing up in the plugin selection box, go to File>Preferences>Plugins tab and make sure "Entity: Show hidden" is checked.

 

Please note that Marines already have a type of metal armor, all you need to do is change the material type to an energy shield material and change the following values to 0: shield failure threshold, failing shield leak fraction, and shield leak percentage in each material type (chunk) in the materials section.

Open your desired map in Eschaton, and go to the collision model (coll) tag of the biped or vehicle you want to have energy shields. In the plugin selection box, choose starter plugins:coll.ent and wait for it to redraw. Search for a box that says "Maximum shield vitality". It is right above the shield material type drop-down box. For bipeds, it really doesn't matter what number you put in here because the shield strength is determined by the actor variant (actv) tag so just use 100. If you're using a vehicle, this number determines how strong the shields will be so choose whatever number you want. The Master Chief's default shield strength is 75. Directly under this is the shield material type drop-down I mentioned earlier. You can technically choose whatever material you want, but to get properly functioning shields choose either Cyborg energy shield, Elite energy shield, or Jackal energy shield. The difference between the three includes the colors of sparks when the shields take damage, certain strengths and weaknesses, and the Jackal's shield type reflects human bullets and needles (this can be edited, though via material responses).

Now you need to set how long the shields are stunned before they begin recharging. Find Stun time, and put in whatever number you want. This is measured in seconds, so if you put in 5 then it will take five seconds before your shields will start to recharge. If you put in 0, your shields will immediately begin recharging the instant you take damage. The next step is setting how fast your shields recharge. I'm not sure if this number is measured in seconds too, but the default for the Master Chief is 4 so experiment and use whatever you want.

The next step is to set damage multipliers. By default, most bipeds (and all vehicles) have 0 as their shield damage multiplier. To change this, find the "materials" section which should be right below the boxes we edited earlier and it will be set to "chunk 1". This represents a certain material or region on the biped or vehicle. Find "shield damage multiplier" and set it to 1. Then click on chunk 1 and repeat this process for all other chunks in your biped/vehicle that you want to take shield damage if hit. If you want, you can set certain materials or regions to have higher or lower multipliers for both shields and health to make "critical hit" zones, or areas where the shielding is more focused and thicker, like the skin of a Hunter to better protect it.

If you were using a vehicle, you're done now. Go in game and fool around with your Hog or Ghost or whatever's shields cool.gif If you're using a biped like a Grunt then continue on to the final step: Setting shield strength.

Expand the actor variant (actv) tag group, and find whichever AI you want to have energy shields. Click it, and using starter plugins:actv.ent scroll all the way down and find the "shield vitality" box. Whatever number you put in here determines how strong your AI's shields are. By default, the Master Chief's shield strength is 75, Elite minors are 100, and sword Zealots are I think 300. Use any number you want, and you're done! Your biped now has energy shields that will fail when they take enough damage and recharge if given enough time. If you want to take it a step further and give your biped a shader plasma, continue to the next tutorial. If you don't care about that and want to learn more about energy shields such as making them leak damage or ignore stun damage, skip the next tutorial and go to the one after it.


We will now learn how to give bipeds (some vehicles require Custom Edition, sorry!) shader plasmas to give them complete energy shields. Certain bipeds and vehicles react differently depending on how you do this tutorial, so be careful. I will try to give as much information as I can so that you don't accidentally screw up any necessary functions. This tutorial is assuming you have Eschaton, if you do not have Eschaton but can still do this tutorial, good for you. If not, please get Eschaton to continue. If you have Eschaton and certain plugins are not showing up in the plugin selection box, go to File>Preferences>Plugins tab and make sure "Entity: Show hidden" is checked.

 

Please note that Grunts do not have any functions to sacrifice in order to have shader plasmas. If you want, you could add a function to one in Guerrilla (CE) and PMI it into your map, OR you could use Elite_special if it's in your map. Simply change Elite_specials' mod2, antr and coll to Grunt and also change its udlg (dialog) and global to grunt. The elite melee damage reference doesn't matter; it won't cause problems if you leave it. Then go to the actor variant tag and set all Grunts to use the Elite_special biped instead of the Grunt biped. To make some Elites not be Grunts, make sure all Elite actv tags use the regular Elite biped. The only problem this causes is that Grunt minors are grayish white instead of orange.

Unzip and place the following plugin: Plugin with Functions in a new folder (name it plugins with functions) inside your Eschaton plugins folder. Open the map with your already shielded biped or vehicle and go to its biped (bipd) or vehicle (vehi) tag. Switch to the plugin with functions plugin, and find "modifier shader"

post-12947-0-49189000-1309024823_thumb.j

Change the LEFT drop-down box to SPLA. Not SGLA, but SPLA. Then on the right drop-down box, depending on the map you chose there could be up to four options. Cyborg, Elite, Sentinel or monitor. Cyborg and Elite are both the same except for color, and you can edit that color in the actual shader plasma tag (spla). Sentinel has fewer lines, and they're more spread out with a different color (again, you can change the color). I have never actually seen the Monitor's shader plasma because nothing shows up when I hit him, so I can only assume that he doesn't even have one. I've never experimented with this one much though, so go ahead and see if it does anything. The rest of the tutorial gets really tricky. There are four smaller drop-down boxes below the ones in the above image that say A in, B in, C in, and D in. There are three other sets of four small drop-down boxes just like them throughout the biped/vehicle tag except you can only see the third in Guerrilla which is what makes proper shader plasmas on some vehicles impossible without using CE. Some vehicles I've had trouble with include the Scorpion and Banshee, although it doesn't necessarily mean they won't work.

Now, depending on your biped/vehicle, you may or may not have any/all of these "in" boxes available. There may be twelve "in" boxes, but only four of them can be used. For example, if A in of the first set is in use, and you try to use A in from another set, both functions will conflict and either not work right or not at all. If this is too confusing, or I'm just explaining it poorly, don't worry about it too much. If your shader plasma doesn't work, just use a different "in" box (and be sure to change the first one you used back to whatever it was) and try again.

Now pick one of the boxes. I usually use C in, because most of the time only A in and B in are used by other functions. Click C in, and set it to "recent shield damage". Then scroll down slowly until you find the "functions" section. It's right below "widgets". Depending on the biped/vehicle, it will have a certain number of "chunks" which are independent functions. Since we can't add more functions without using CE, we have to sacrifice one. Usually it will tell you what function does what at the bottom of the functions section. You have to use a certain one or it won't work. As an example to this tutorial, I am using the Hunter biped. It has two chunks, one is for "illumination" and one is for "charged". Use chunk 1, because if you use chunk 2 then oddly in game the shader plasma will only appear while the Hunter is charging its weapon. This could be used for other cool stuff, but it's not what we want. With chunk 1 selected in the drop-down box, find "scale function by" and set it to C in (or whatever "in" box you used. So if you used "D in", then set it to "D in"). A few boxes below will be another drop-down box that says "map to". Set this to "very early". Congratulations, you're finished! Provided you already edited the Hunter to have energy shields, it will now flare a shader plasma when the shield takes damage.


Still with me? Good! Because I have one more tutorial for you. This tutorial explains how to make energy shields leak damage, for example getting hit by an AR round will damage your health while you still have shields but it only does 50% of the damage it would have done if you had no shields at all. It also tells you how to make your shields ignore specified amounts of damage while recharging. This tutorial is assuming you have Eschaton, if you do not have Eschaton but can still do this tutorial, good for you. If not, please get Eschaton to continue. If you have Eschaton and certain plugins are not showing up in the plugin selection box, go to File>Preferences>Plugins tab and make sure "Entity: Show hidden" is checked.

 

Open your map in Eschaton, and go to the collision model of your desired vehicle or biped. Using starter plugins:coll.ent (pretty much any modern Eschaton plugins will work). The following things are relevant to this tutorial and are in order, assuming you are using the starter plugins:

  • Shield failure threshold: This value determines at what point your shields will start to "fail". While your shields are "failing", they will leak a specified amount of damage to you when hit. For example, If you put in 0.6 for this box, your shields will start to leak damage to you once your shields are down to 40%. 0.1 would be at 10%, 0.05 would be 5%, 0.8 would be 80%, and so on. You must choose any number between 0 and 1 for this effect to work.
  • Failing shield leak fraction: This value determines how much damage is leaked to your health when your shields are "failing". The numbers used are the same as shield failure threshold, you must use a number between 0 and 1. If you use 0.2, then 20% of damage will be leaked to your health while your shields are failing. 0.6 would be 60%, 0.9 would be 90%, and so on.
  • Minimum stun damage: This is quite simply the amount of damage required to stun your shields. You can put any number you want in here, so if you set it to 20, then your shields will have to take 20 damage at once to be stunned. If it's 20 and you get hit by a Plasma Pistol bolt, your shields will take the damage but will continue to recharge as if nothing happened.

 

Unfortunately, you can only set one value for Shield failure and Failing shield. What I mean by that is that you can't set your shields to start failing at 50% capacity and leak 25% damage, then make them even weaker at 25% capacity so that they leak 50% damage. You can only set one level of failing and leak fraction, with one exception.

In the materials section, there will be one more box called "shield leak percentage" right above "shield damage multipler". If you put 0.25 in this box, then regardless of your shield strength, your health will take 25% of damage every time you're hit. This effect can be used along with shield failure threshold and failing shield leak fraction to make two separate levels of shield "thickness". The only problem is that shield leak percentage, like I said above, is independent of your shield strength; if you set this number to 0.2, and have failing shield leak fraction set to 0.2, then your health will take 20% damage while your shields are full and it will take 40% damage while your shields are failing. Since shield leak percentage is a multiplier box, you can set it to any number you want. If you set it to 5, then for some odd reason the Chief (or whatever you're doing this with) will take 500% damage to his health while his shields are up but normal damage if his shields are out. If you set it to -1, the Chief will regain health while his shields are up and takes damage to them. Please note that if you DO set it to a negative number, the Chief will continue to increase in health infinitely because there is no actual limit in the game to stop it from going any higher.

 

WaeV and Takka like this

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Tiddy-bits:

Didn't you read the announcement thread here? xD

It's been up all day today. Phil was going to let it die because of all the issues that couldn't be fixed, though after i asked him about possibly acquiring the modhalo domain he changed his mind and had Chevy fix it. AFTER I upgraded this server and bought the domain >.>

Wouldn't have pissed me off so much if it weren't for the fact myself and many others offered to help Phil fix Modhalo like Chevy did for a month and a half, but were declined citing that it wasn't worth it because the hardware end was fucked security wise. Only when I mention a new board does he actually decide to bring it back.


Oddly, this is familiar to you... as if from an old dream.  

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Bleh. This reminds me of the whole HaloModding.com fiasco with Pepsi. =P

I'm a fan of the activity this board has managed to generate. At the moment MH feels like it came out of deep freeze with some serious frostbite. But then, MH is useful for its archives of past posts.

Basically, my opinion:

RYylo.png

Sceny likes this

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Bleh. This reminds me of the whole HaloModding.com fiasco with Pepsi. =P

Yeah a while ago pepsi had his own forum up right?

Meh I'm not too sure how this will work out. I am surprised at how many new people this site has gotten recently though.

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Yeah - Pepsi and Nessa set up HaloModding.com with a slick new theme, revitalized activity, etc. There was drama; I don't remember when or why. Eventually, the entire forum went down with no archives of what had been posted there.

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