WIP: Fun Joiner Friendly Blood Gulch Mods

[DeadHamster 954]

We made things like this back when modhalo.net was called opencarnage.com, but I don't remember the lengths that we went through as it didn't last very long. The idea was to have a server with mods that would attract random players to the website. Didn't work out. 

We definitely knew about CSS / Joiner Friendly stuff back then, and what was/wasn't allowed. Which is why I'm a little curious though how you did this, since you can't have swapped a vehicle's model. I've noticed in a few spots you mention the word server and suggest not to download the map, would I be able to host this on a private game with my own PC or does it need to be uploaded to a dedicated server in order to function?

I know that the PC version doesn't do a checksum verification, and that the checksum can now be spoofed for Custom Edition. I'm guessing that this is a server-only map that has modifications done to the log scenery's ID values to make it act as a vehicle, thus passing it to the clients connecting?

If not, I'd really love to know how this works. I seem to remember things like this being possible "back in the days", and for some reason I'm remembering people using weapon tags, but it's probably a false memory. 

[Broomish 33]

Hi!

 

I've just joined the forum here after seeing this post!

 

Joiner friendly log mods are actually something I got working on Halo Trial many years ago now.

 

I've actually spent many hours over the past few months remembering how I did it and then trying it out on Halo Custom Edition and I have made some progress. 

 

But first of all I better say I didn't come up with this on my own. As DeadHamster has said, someone posted on modhalo.net how to do it. It is a shame that website has gone down now with all of the knowledge that was on there.

 

Anyway, here are some really rough steps which is the way I am doing it at least:

 

(yes, this uses HHT and HMT, but I have found that you can edit the Halo Custom Edition bloodgulch with these tools if you edit the 2 bytes at offset 4 which changes between Halo PC and Halo CE versions of the game)

 

Make Log Client Side Visible

In HHT

1) Expand [eqip] Equipment and select powerups\full-spectrum vision
2) Swap mod2 for mod2 - scenery\trees\tree_leafy_fallentrunk\tree_leafy_fallentrunk
3) Swap coll for coll - scenery\trees\tree_leafy_fallentrunk\tree_leafy_fallentrunk

4) Expand [itmc] Item Collection and select item collections\single weapons\plasma_cannon
5) Swap weap - weapons\plasma_cannon\plasma_cannon for scen - scenery\trees\tree_leafy_fallentrunk\tree_leafy_fallentrunk

6) Expand [weap] Weapon and select weapons\plasma_cannon\plasma_cannon
7) Swap BOTH mod2 for mod2 - scenery\trees\tree_leafy_fallentrunk\tree_leafy_fallentrunk

 

In HMT

1) Expand [eqip] Equipment and select powerups\full-spectrum vision
2) Put a tick in the "Unaffected by Gravity" checkbox
3) Copy NaN and paste it in all 5 text boxes below, overriding the values which were there before
4) Take note of the 6 hexadecimals in the text box next to the "meta" label, in the "Tag Information" section on top. For example, mine is D08F60

5) Expand [itmc] Item Collection and select item collections\single weapons\plasma_cannon
6) Change the respawn time to 32767

7) Expand [scen] and select scenery\trees\tree_leafy_fallentrunk\tree_leafy_fallentrunk
8) Replace the 6 hexadecimals in the text box next to the "meta" label with the ones for full-spectrum vision and click Save

[Kavawuvi 7,026]

15 hours ago, DeadHamster said:

We definitely knew about CSS / Joiner Friendly stuff back then, and what was/wasn't allowed. Which is why I'm a little curious though how you did this, since you can't have swapped a vehicle's model.

It's actually really simple, and I did not modify any Blood Gulch tags in doing so (besides the scenery tag to spawn the logs).

 

I actually take advantage of the fact that the game syncs biped spawning. What I did was build the map in such a way that it would spawn mini bipeds as a sort of "marker" for each scenery I wanted to spawn, and these markers would have the same tag ID as the original scenery. Therefore, the server will tell the client to spawn a biped with a given tag ID, and because the client has the scenery there, it'll spawn the scenery instead. You can do this with regular tool.exe, but it'll be really hard to do it because you have to modify all of the tag references in such a way that it produces a map with the correct tag ID order (if it's wrong, then clients crash upon joining). Therefore, I used invader-build to build it instead, since this can build maps in any tag order you desire. It also spoofs the CRC32 checksum.

 

Note that the scenery themselves cannot be bipeds, as vehicles pass through bipeds. So you will still need the scenery to be present in the same location and orientation as the scenery. Again, I used Invader to accomplish this by writing a small program that adjusts the biped table to do this.

 

15 hours ago, DeadHamster said:

I've noticed in a few spots you mention the word server and suggest not to download the map, would I be able to host this on a private game with my own PC or does it need to be uploaded to a dedicated server in order to function?

I know that the PC version doesn't do a checksum verification, and that the checksum can now be spoofed for Custom Edition. I'm guessing that this is a server-only map that has modifications done to the log scenery's ID values to make it act as a vehicle, thus passing it to the clients connecting?

Actually, if you have the map and you join a server with the same map, your game may potentially end up spawning twice as many bipeds. And, of course, if you join a server that uses stock Blood Gulch, you get the usual "phantom scenery" as well as potential crashing.

 

You're free to host it on the Halo client or dedicated server. It'll work either way, though I didn't swap the biped shader, so you may end up seeing some random 343 Guilty Sparks (I had to choose a model that was low poly and only had one node since Halo has a very limited space for objects).

[Broomish 33]

1 hour ago, Kavawuvi said:

It's actually really simple, and I did not modify any Blood Gulch tags in doing so (besides the scenery tag to spawn the logs).

 

I actually take advantage of the fact that the game syncs biped spawning. What I did was build the map in such a way that it would spawn mini bipeds as a sort of "marker" for each scenery I wanted to spawn, and these markers would have the same tag ID as the original scenery. Therefore, the server will tell the client to spawn a biped with a given tag ID, and because the client has the scenery there, it'll spawn the scenery instead. You can do this with regular tool.exe, but it'll be really hard to do it because you have to modify all of the tag references in such a way that it produces a map with the correct tag ID order (if it's wrong, then clients crash upon joining). Therefore, I used invader-build to build it instead, since this can build maps in any tag order you desire. It also spoofs the CRC32 checksum.

 

Note that the scenery themselves cannot be bipeds, as vehicles pass through bipeds. So you will still need the scenery to be present in the same location and orientation as the scenery. Again, I used Invader to accomplish this by writing a small program that adjusts the biped table to do this.

 

Actually, if you have the map and you join a server with the same map, your game may potentially end up spawning twice as many bipeds. And, of course, if you join a server that uses stock Blood Gulch, you get the usual "phantom scenery" as well as potential crashing.

 

You're free to host it on the Halo client or dedicated server. It'll work either way, though I didn't swap the biped shader, so you may end up seeing some random 343 Guilty Sparks (I had to choose a model that was low poly and only had one node since Halo has a very limited space for objects).

 

This sounds like a far superior way to do it, to be fair! The method I described above has its disadvantages. First you have to sacrifice a weapon which you will use to "spawn" your log instead.

 

Also, I think as similarly mentioned here, the log which is spawned this way does not have collision (so you can walk straight through the log). The way I got around this in my method was to actually have two copies of the log tag. One would be spawned as the scarified weapon, and the other would just be a normal scenery which has collision but does not sync to clients. What I had to do, was pair up the 2 types of log exactly (this was using SparkEdit) in order to get client side logs with working collision. And that was a very long and tedious process.