Halo 2 Photography

[T Beezie]

I remember seeing that second one but I don't think you released it...

Yeah... sadly that map never even made it to the point of having a proper lightmap.
It was built before the release of H2G, in a time when only a select few SP BSPs could be converted.
Since it was an underwater level, the original lightmap looked horrible when trying to create an above water atmosphere.
But, due to circumstances which were out of my control, the map was lost before I was ever able to straighten out all of the kinks.
It had much potential, and breaks my heart that I never had a chance to finish it.


Delta Cavern

[Thrasher Alpha]

I remember seeing that second one but I don't think you released it...

Yeah... sadly that map never even made it to the point of having a proper lightmap.
It was built before the release of H2G, in a time when only a select few SP BSPs could be converted.
Since it was an underwater level, the original lightmap looked horrible when trying to create an above water atmosphere.
But, due to circumstances which were out of my control, the map was lost before I was ever able to straighten out all of the kinks.
It had much potential, and breaks my heart that I never had a chance to finish it.


Delta Cavern

The map looks great! Too bad that it was lost though :/

Mods like yours make me want to mod again even though I know I dont have the time...

[CaptainPoopface]

Yeah, that is a great looking map. I know that BSP is used in an underwater mod in the Killtrocity v2 map pack (it's not a very playable mod, if I recall, partially because it's a huge map and yes, the lightmap is terrible). But why not snatch that BSP and try again? There has been talk around here now and then about converting all the BSPs from the campaign, but it hasn't materialized. I would still love to have them.

[troymac1ure]

[XZodia]

Nice!

[troymac1ure]

Not sure if anyone else has done this before, but I thought I would since you posted your plugins I've been looking at wgit and all those.
The box on the left is all the screens, the lower left is each screen pane & the bottom box will have a list of all the individual bitmaps on that pane with abilities to move them around the pane and/or swap/inject bitmaps (as well as changing motion speeds, but I have yet to implement the scolling stuff as well)

[CaptainPoopface]

I like it! I remember having great difficulty trying to change bitmaps in the main menu. This looks really handy.

Maybe also include a way to change (not just remove) the color filter on the whole menu. I get tired of the old halo blue. Neodos made a custom main menu for me that is brown, with the various UI corner gizmos and scrollers replaced with brown poo-like blobs. I love that menu.

[troymac1ure]

We'll see. Things can be added as we go along. Just trying to get it very easy to redesign all the menus. I'd like to see a screenshot of the poo blobs!

So far it has the following capabilites:
* loads all menus (correctly I think, they look good on screen)
* allows bitmap ident swaps
* displays scrolling bitmaps
* allows repositioning of each bitmap
* allows changing scroll speed of each bitmap
* displays outline around selected bitmap

To do's:
* [major] Add save feature (so far all changes are lost when new screen/pane selected)
* fix display issue with left or upwards scrolling (doesn't wrap)
* Add bitmap repositioning via mouse
* Allow bitmap internalizing/injecting
* ? Adding / removing of extra bitmaps ? (not sure if this would cause major main menu issues; haven't looked into at all yet)

ATM it probably woudn't be too difficult to create a matrix style menu

A <very> quick example I threw together:

[Ogrish]

Cool, I was wanting to make a Custom Halo4 Menu to go with my maps

[troymac1ure]

Still working on it. Got the graphics part pretty much down other than depth sorting, but this should be quick once I get around to it. Now to work on the text placements and who knows, maybe I'll try to decipher the fonts at some point again too.

Also, fired up RTH for the first time in a long time last night & found a few bugs in the newer Entity versions (one completely disabling the POKE button, doh!). These are fixed and will be released in 2.1.19

[Grimdoomer]

[bumlove]

^So er what's the story there? Are you continuing the project or is it a open sauce, clean slate?

[XZodia]

I see we have another returning oldie =)

[Grimdoomer]

Got nothing better to do and I've been thinking about this project a lot lately. Got the last prerequisite out of the way today so I'm all ready to move forward now.

For those that don't know Mutation is a map building application. It will allow you to create your own maps based on an existing one, or by creating a new one from scratch using existing assets in other maps. Think H2Core+Guerrilla but it allows you to fully edit and customize your map before building it.

[T Beezie]

W.I.P.

Not alot of free time these days.. but I still like to dabble.
I was messing around with illumination maps, and came up with a fun idea.
Still need to work on team spawns and build the goals,
if anyone would actually play this, I'll try to speed up production on it.
Looking pretty groovy so far, thought I'd share.

[Click16]

Dude it's great to see old-school style mods. I'll play but I think I'm standing alone here...

[troymac1ure]

It's just so hard to come up with a common time, otherwise I would love to play H2 again (been a long time now).

[XZodia]

GriffBall in H2, cool. You should submit this to my make a mod competition!

[DoorM4n]

How did you make the custom illuminations on such a large scale?

[T Beezie]

It has a normal bitmap as a base, and the shader blends in a secondary illumination map.
The court is built out of resized mach cubes, and the basemap is a 256x256 color image.
The illumination map is a 512x512 greyscale image, the lighter portions of your illumination bitmap would be the parts that you wish to make glow.
There are also various values in the shader that you can mess with to get different effects.
The same method applies to any object, no matter what the size.. Although, I once tried to build a whole room plastered with such a shader,
and it eventually starts to kill your framerate. So there is certainly a limit to how much glow you can use, you just have to use it wisely.

[CaptainPoopface]

Ah, so that explains why I had terrible frame rate on my trampoline mod. It had about eighty cubes with the pulsating blue illumination from the cores on lockout. Lag was appalling for single player but no problem with multiple players on splitscreen. Something about how the engine pares things back in splitscreen.

Is it also a shader effect that makes the fusion coils on Zanzibar look like the light is bursting out of them right before they explode?

Good to see you back at it.

That looks like a fun map for dodgeball too, especially if you put some very-hard-to-kill stationary AI that hurl balls at the human players like snakejknight's rocketman mod. Could also make the ground slippery, put an air lift at each end of the court and one in the center and a death zone in the ceiling, and give players a weapon that pushes and a weapon that pulls other players, so they try to push and pull each other into the air jets that shoot them up into the death zone.

[Click16]

Got my bitmap injector to inject Mip Maps

[troymac1ure]

Nice job Click!
...and TBeezie, that just looks plain awesome!

[Click16]

Ok so I was expecting some sort of pain in the ass programming to inject into a skewed texture, but it works fine as is. So far all the supported formats are 32bpp ARGB textures, 32bpp XRGB textures, and all the DXT Compressed textures.

[CaptainPoopface]

Nice reticle Click. I wouldn't mind having a smarter bitmap injection program, although I'm not much of a skinner.