What happened to OC? - CLOSED Carnage?!
NeX

Halo: Revolution

1,012 posts in this topic

Having played Sidewinder, here's some feedback to build on.

That Pistol is too much. Don't know what you'd do with it, I'd prefer you leave it alone because I love the weapon, but that's my feedback on it. Way too easy for someone who's played HPC for years to get right back into a mode with it, I instantly felt like I was playing H1 and TSKing everything. When you give me that strong a weapon to start with, I'm not going to trade it for anything on the map, and that's pretty much exactly what happened. I ran around the map with the pistol, taking down rockets, flamethrowers, plasma cannons, ghosts, warthogs (fully stocked with driver/passenger/gunner) and plenty others. No need to pick up a weaker gun when you're giving me a long-range 4-5 shot kill incredibly accurate weapon.

The carbine seemed useless, I would never trade it for my pistol as the main shots are weaker and the charged shot requires you to charge it.

Assault Rifle seemed well balanced, not overly strong, not overly weak.

Other weapons I never used. Rockets/Plasma Cannon I used briefly when I found them, but besides that no weapon seemed worth trading to.

Textures were ugly, all the weapons were noisy and pixelated. You need to run them through Photoshop's noise filters, and smooth out lines between features. On top of that, many were rather bland, and reflected like I'd expect a piece of plastic to. And kill that logo on the AR, it's ugly and takes away from the weapon. The map textures are mostly stock or very very similar to stock.

I did most of the texture edits for Inigo, after playing the map in-game I'm not so sure I should admit working on it, but if you'd like some advice or help with cleaning your weapons up I'd love to assist you, shoot me a PM.

The vehicles I didn't test, because I don't like vehicles.

The map overall is good, enjoyable and balanced. But most of all, it's fun. No disrespect to Tucker, but when his DeathIsland mod popped up I was ready to quit. I've never really enjoyed his mods, save his one on Danger Canyon which I did like. They're long, drawn out affairs, whereas this I was able to quickly find enemies and the gunfights were exciting. This is a mod I definitely enjoyed playing.

WaeV and Floofies like this

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Tiddy-bits:

The carbine seemed useless, I would never trade it for my pistol as the main shots are weaker and the charged shot requires you to charge it.

 

Yes, there's a lot of work to be done with that. I couldn't seem to dial in with the aiming on it, so I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing with it, but it's going to need a good change.

 

Textures were ugly, all the weapons were noisy and pixelated. You need to run them through Photoshop's noise filters, and smooth out lines between features. On top of that, many were rather bland, and reflected like I'd expect a piece of plastic to. And kill that logo on the AR, it's ugly and takes away from the weapon. The map textures are mostly stock or very very similar to stock.

 

I usually don't "disagree" with feedback, since it's opinion, but I have to here.

If you're talking about the metals/forerunner stuff, sure I'll take that one on the chin. Those are all thrown in last minute to keep it from being stock sidewinder with new cliffs and guns. I still have a few hundred textures to go through and see where they'd fit or what areas need them, so texturing is far far FAR from over.

 

If you mean the parts of the environment I've touched so far, that's where I'm going to make my stand. My cliffs are fucking BEAUTIFUL lol. Easily recognizable, but with so much more. They turned out exceedingly well, using a blend mode between the alpha channel of the original sidewinder cliff with a brand new icey-cliff texture that I did custom for this purpose. After the blend to keep the feel of the cliffs, while making them higher resolution and more fitting than the originals, I took the shader and gave the detail maps differing blend modes so that areas unaffected by ice allow the crisp rock texture to show through, and the other areas share the snow-y texture. 

 

The ice is wondrous as well, with the brightness in the shaders combined with the ambient occlusion giving the slick effect that ice should have, while keeping it bland enough to still look like ice. I took out the streaks for that reason - it just didn't look like ice.

 

I'm by no means the best modder out there, and there's a lot of work to be done on this project still, but I'll make my stand on the texturing and shader work. Tucker can reign supreme as a wonderful particle and effects artist. My main forte is shaders, and I don't think anyone currently does them better, other than perhaps CMT. Even Zteams shader work was shoddy, and needed a lot of redoing to get right. FTWs I won't even touch; the textures were "new", but laughably tacky. Everywhere. No semblance of blending or anything, just new textures everywhere.

 

I'll concede some of the unfinished weapons, and I've limited myself to 512x512s for just about everything. CE has a mapsize limit of 128MB, and I broke that with SW Loooooong ago. 512s are going to be more pixellated, but they are 1/4 the size of 1024s, and without losing that much quality, so it's a justifiable choice, in my opinion. Detail maps are definitely needed on a lot of them, and until final weapon balancing is done, I won't really crack my knuckles and dig into the weapon shaders. They look ok for now, and that's good enough for testing. Final release is still many months away.

 

The only ones that I'd really stand by 100% are the cliffs, the ice, and a few of the weapons, like the plasma rifle/cannon.

 

That Pistol is too much. Don't know what you'd do with it, I'd prefer you leave it alone because I love the weapon, but that's my feedback on it. Way too easy for someone who's played HPC for years to get right back into a mode with it, I instantly felt like I was playing H1 and TSKing everything. When you give me that strong a weapon to start with, I'm not going to trade it for anything on the map, and that's pretty much exactly what happened. I ran around the map with the pistol, taking down rockets, flamethrowers, plasma cannons, ghosts, warthogs (fully stocked with driver/passenger/gunner) and plenty others. No need to pick up a weaker gun when you're giving me a long-range 4-5 shot kill incredibly accurate weapon.

 

That's exactly the point, I don't want to deviate from the classic feel of the game. I'm happy to tone weapons up in usefulness, but the recoil on the pistol knocks it down quite a few pegs. Getting a 3sk with the revolution pistol is not anywhere near as easy as the stock version. That being said, I agree with not starting with it 100%. I plan on having the pistol available throughout the map, but not as a starting weapon, otherwise the games disintegrate into a pistol fest. To be honest I barely got this map ready for mod night in the first place - I stuck the new turret in the middle, slapped some carbines in with Sapien, and then built it and uploaded.

I will, however use this as an opportunity to outline what changes I plan to make from the mod-night demo:

 

  • Carbine. No idea how I'm going to make this one work. I may end up making it a beam-like rifle, but I'm completely open to suggestions. Textures need a little work, but that can all come after functionality.
  • Pistol.....well I've debated perhaps making it less useful against shields, and keeping the damage the same for spartan body. That way for it to be effective the shields need to be chipped away with something like an assault rifle, but it will keep the ability to devastate unshielded targets. This does hold implications for noshields gametypes, but that's not a large concern of mine. I may leave it be, and simply make it a place-able weapon as opposed to the starting set.
  • Forerunner metals - I have a large collection of them at my disposal, collected from every corner of the internet, ripped from later games, and a few custom ones to boot. I shouldn't have an issue finding ones to put in different spots, but I have only a limited number of them converted from their default formats into suitable .tiff and even fewer of them into .bitmap form. This will take a long time, but fortunately when the textures are all done, they can be reused throughout the different maps. Lots of clashing going on texture wise on this map, and there were a lot of stock textures that I didn't have time to get to replacing, so this is definitely high on the list.
  • Environment textures: I will definitely be touching things like scenery, but to varying degrees. I'm not going to waste lots of space by upgrading things like tree bark and leaves, when it's something no one looks at or appreciates more than once or twice, after the "new" appeal wears off. Rocks, on the other hand, will definitely get a makeover.
  • Weapon textures - most of them are unfinished, since I'm still playing with weapon functionality. I've made sure to add the basics (detail maps, cubes, etc) to the shaders, but they are far from finalized and pretty. Rocket launcher stands out the most to me in this instance, its detail map is much too big. The plasma rifle and plasma cannon, however, look fine to me. 
  • SKIES SKIES SKIES - as I'm sure was noticed, the sky was mountainous, but still had a sickly ugly cloud cover, and the stock planets. This will get a complete makeover, but will take some time. I won't do anything so awkward as putting large floating scenery up in the sky, unless it fits the theme of the map. No fleets of pelicans, sorry.
  • Scenery and balance - large works to do with adding scenery and placing them in ideal locations to increase the fun of the map - leaving some old "paths" in tact, while forcing players to use different ones at the same time. I really like the phoenix series for how it handled placing scenery to block and enhance things for gameplay. We'll see.
  • Detail Objects - I plan on making some new ones, such as cattails for around ponds/ice features in sidewinder. I think they'd look very cool while staying unobtrusive visually, and add to the grass detail objects. These are very touchy so I save them to last.
Takka, WaeV, Pfhunkie and 1 other like this

KsqHutE.png

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

To be fair, I paid less attention to the environment as opposed to weapons. I'd attempt to post screenshots explaining what I did and didn't care for, but being honest I've no idea how to play these newfangled HAC2/macfag-contraption maps you guys have come up with. Guess I'm getting old.

I'll still stand by my pixelated and plasticy comments, it's not neccescarily relating to texture size either. You should go through the rear-face of the pistol, as I seem to recall noticing it there. Can't say where else without access to the map.

As you've said though, this is still a beta, and for a beta it's fantastic. I had a great time playing it, and nothing I complained about took away from that. There's always room for improvement with any project, and I'm excited to see how this continues to progress.

As for your bitmaps/filesize problem, beings as you're making an entire map-pack, and as I've seen you suggest including the mod as an installation program, this is the perfect example of when the EOF feature takes preference over internalizing. When conure's bitmap internalizer first came out, it started the question of which process is better, overall consensus was that for single maps they should be internal, for large projects such as FTD or the FTW maps, EOF would be the preferred method for filesize reasons.

You would be best off creating 7-8 textures of varying sizes and bitmap types, all a single gray. Creating your maps as usual, and then before compiling for your final release, setting all of your weapons/scenery/etc. to use one of those custom grays. You then open a single map, EOF and inject, then rinse and repeat for each item in that mapfile.

You then save/overwrite your other maps' metas for the bitmaps, allowing you to basically increase the size of the resource-map bitmaps.map file, allowing you to use those same textures across maps. The meta's store the offset to that bitmap, so when you EOF the bitmap tag in one map you can reuse it across all your others.

It's a lengthy process, but it's realistically a lazy sunday's worth of work for a much better payoff in the end. Since you don't seem to have separate textures per-map for weapons, this is a really good alternative to the internalizing process, will kill individual map sizes and also greatly reduce the overall file-size come release time.

Normally, complaints of this is that a user can't have a single map from the pack, which isn't true so long as they have the bitmaps.map file. It won't interfere with any stock maps that they would also have installed, just other maps that used EOF and the external bitmaps.map (see: Halo FTW 1 Redux, and no other mod ever).

The other big complaint is that they must have the extended bitmaps.map included. This is a valid complaint, although as above not really an issue as it doesn't interfere with stock maps or the 1 mod that had ever made actual use of an external bitmaps.map

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This is being developed for CE as well, so an extended bitmaps.map isn't going to happen on this one. Individual map sizes can be a bit big, sure, but we're talking maybe 150MB for the biggest ones. If someone doesn't have a spare 5GB of hard drive space they shouldn't be gaming anyway. Good god, most movie files are about 1-2GB by themselves. Plus with hac2 load time is cut with caching anyway, so fuck 'em.

 

I was really banking on the idea that OpenSauce tool.exe was able to create a "mod" system, just for big projects like this. It creates an entirely separate resource file system that is shared between all maps that are of the same "mod" group (defined upon compilation).

 

Unfortunately, they implemented it in such a way (and I can't say that it would even be possible another way) that made it only useable by .yelo cache files, meaning OpenSauce is a required installation to even play the maps. So I scrapped that idea. OS is cool, awesome, and entirely unused enough to bother developing for it, not to mention it screws the rest of the PC community, as only CE players have the opportunity to use it.

Edited by NeX

KsqHutE.png

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Obligatory update: Finals week is here at last, taking my last one tomorrow morning. This project hasn't really moved much since mod night due to school and work, but I'll be working on it quite a bit over the summer, planning on release late in the season.

 

Just got the shade turret's HUD working, will need some feedback after a bit of testing.

 

Working on Timberland as well now, so I'm ramping up the pace a bit in the near future.

 

Will update as soon as possible!


KsqHutE.png

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm planning on releasing an as-is alpha pack of 3 maps, no textures, just for testing gameplay. I was just going to give it to testers, but I figure I may just release it here as well, if there's interest.

 

So far the plan is to have the pack consist of

 

Timberland
Ice Fields

Danger Canyon


KsqHutE.png

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Download link? I'm pretty excited for this! #hype

 

I'm planning on releasing

 

if there's interest.

 

was posted yesterday, obv there's no link yet :P


KsqHutE.png

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I keep having problems now after the patch for halo 1.10 released, but I didn't get the patch. I open the game and then it closes automatically. I found out that it is something with the mods, it's not the maps or the ui, so it cancels out some files, I know you don't work on this anymore and you restarted it all. But maybe you could think about that before something happens. Or maybe did I do something wrong? I don' have any mods except this one. Is this a common thing? How do I fix it?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I keep having problems now after the patch for halo 1.10 released, but I didn't get the patch. I open the game and then it closes automatically. I found out that it is something with the mods, it's not the maps or the ui, so it cancels out some files, I know you don't work on this anymore and you restarted it all. But maybe you could think about that before something happens. Or maybe did I do something wrong? I don' have any mods except this one. Is this a common thing? How do I fix it?

 

Can you list the files in your Halo/controls folder?

NeX likes this

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    No registered users viewing this page.