Comparison shots between Halo CE, Halo CE SPV2 Beta and Halo CE SPV3:

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/3595/halod.jpg

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/126/halocar.jpg

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/1078/halomagnum.jpg

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/4002/halo3j.jpg

This is the best i can do.
Edited by miguel_antf on Jul 23, 2012 at 01:31 PM

Awesome

Those comparison helped me realize just how much more awesome this is than ever before. Keep working on it CMT!

Also, I know it's been discussed, but has anyone utilizing OS been able to make the geometry produce normals? Or is that currently not possible as a result of not having the source code?

Hey guys, figured I should show you guys what version our HUD is in.
This is the magnum zoom/scope.



Here's the older build from T&R to give you a idea how much has changed:



Edited by Choclate Thunda on Jul 23, 2012 at 06:49 PM

Loving the new HUD, however the transition between the light and dark gradients on the Grenade counter (Top Left) and Ammo Counter (Top Right) could be outlined in a way to make it look better.

Outlined here::


Edited by XlzQwerty1 on Jul 23, 2012 at 07:57 PM

Awesome...

every element on the hud looks 3D but the health/shield meter... might wanna add some shading to it

Yeah, we already agreed to not change it much on the base stuff because the design now fits better than we have before, plus we want to give that effect of it being "one bar" but still separate. On the 3dness, the reason is cause I flipped the gradient so your eye is drawn towards the shields on first sight 99.9% of the time.

Any way I'm off to work more on the HUD. BTW, anybody like the scope design?

The scope looks fine. You don't need to change the scope.

Hmmm, I think SPV2 looks nicer with the foliage, I likes zee trees, SPV3 looks a lil bare, I guess your adding trees laters?

Agreed

Finished the sniper HUD Its alot better even the scope.

The health bars look... cartoony?

I like it

nice work!

Yes, it is a weak graphics issue. That's quite a bad card you got there, amd e-450 apu. OS isn't really optimized, and running at 23 fps is horrible for any game. Try turning off motion blur and lowering the settings. Check the OS thread for options to lower.

Geforce Nvidia 520 is what i have and it runs a50 with no issue.

520? Yes, well done. That's because you have no weak graphics issue. ;)

ATI Radeon 9600 runs it fine. Cannot use VISR however as Shader Model 3.0 is not supported. That's not a huge issue though.

Thank you for stating the obvious Jaz, my previous card before i upgraded to run OS was an ATI Radeon 4200. It ran a50 lower than the FPS Tiel stated. So yeah. I did have a graphics issue.

Your graphics part that you have on your E-450 is the 6320M. Considering that, yes it is a graphics issue.

a50 made my old graphics card struggle in pain and now my new graphics card laughs at me when i play it.
Edited by Caboose 14 on Jul 26, 2012 at 10:08 PM

They stated that they have optimised it much better in the new versions,

They stated they optimised the assets. But it was only a50's exterior that was lagging for me, so I'm curious to see this claim's worth.

I was pointing out that you were stating the very obvious.

Oh sorry

Don't worry, we are nowhere near an argument.

Yet.
Liking the new HUD!

i was surprised that there wasn't any news on CE3 about the next installment of SPV3 'The silent Cartographer'. It's not far enough along yet?

CMT SPV3; “B-Team” Update

So, here we are again. If this is the first time you've seen an update since we released A50 (The Truth and Reconciliation), then you need to read this thread to learn about CMT's new main project: our remake of B30, The Silent Cartographer. You may have wondered what this means for the rest of our campaign project.

When we completed A50, there was much discussion about where we as a team wanted to go. Many of us disagreed on what to do next, but we all agreed that A50 had a slew of problems. We decided that it wasn't unique enough; the level itself didn't offer anything new or better compared to the stock campaign. There are multiple reasons for this, but we all agreed that the next set of maps required something fresh. We chose the level which we felt was the most interesting from the first half of campaign (The Silent Cartographer), which has become the team's primary project. However, that choice limited us, especially with the possibilities of our enlarged sandbox of weapons, enemies, and vehicles.

What does it all mean?

What was ultimately decided was that the majority of the team, which has been dubbed "A-Team", would focus on all new B30; while a smaller team lead by me (Masterz1337), the "B-Team", would work on revamping the other levels, much like SPV2 was supposed to do. For the summer, our focus has been on A10, A30, and B40, along with a tweaked and updated A50.

So, let's take look at where things are going. Keep in mind that these environments are still in their early stages, so most shaders are still holdovers from stock or SPV2. In time, they will e upgraded to match the rest of the project's visual quality.

A10 (Pillar of Autumn)

You should all be familiar with this, as it is based off the SPV2 Public Beta. The SPV3 version of this has gone through some significant changes - BSPs included. Our guiding philosophy on extra BSPs is now “short and sweet”. We've eliminated nearly 80% of the old copy-and-pasted hallways from the new areas, and we've overhauled encounters in many sections as well. Some areas have even been completely removed and replaced. We also are designing encounters and areas specifically to take advantage of new features like the VISR.

We've restored many things that were lost in the SPV2 version, such as the melee-able doors and Cortana's dialogue. (The hanger bay cutscene however, will not be returning, as even with OS we wouldn't be able to fit it into the map.) We're also in the process of overhauling the scenery, with some elements (like the Oxygen tanks) currently planned to be destructable. We've also totally redone how Brutes are integrated into A10, since in SPV3 a Brute is no longer equal to an Elite.









A30 (Halo)

We've totally gone back to the drawing board for A30's additions. For those that remember it from SPV2, you probably also remember it could take 3-4 hours to complete. Like A10, our goal is to do something shorter, yet new and interesting. Fans of the Halo books may remember the location known as "Alpha Base", which was a Covenant camp set up in a Forerunner structure, which the humans then invaded and took over. Our new BSP in A30 is based around the idea of Alpha Base: you and your Marines must storm and defeat the Covenant, and then hold them off as Pelicans bring in survivors, equipment and vehicles to set up the Human camp.

The decisions you make while storming the base will later influence how you defend it. For example, if you destroy turrets rather than pick off their gunners, your marines won't be able to use them when holding out against the waves of Covenant. If your left side is weak, the Covenant have a better chance of breaking through and flanking you. Our goal is to steadily expand the scope of the fight, rather than proceeding along a simple difficulty curve like a traditional Firefight-style encounter.

For the stock areas of the map, we are adding new optional objectives, obstacles, and encounters to keep the map feeling fresh. Like in SPV2, there will also be vehicle combat scattered throughout the map.















A50 (Truth and Reconciliation)

Not much is going on here. Performance problems with the map, as well as its design, make it near impossible to extend the exterior area of the map. While we could expand the interior, I think we've all seen enough of those endless hallways. The map is being polished, and bugs/other issues with the original released will be fixed, but this map won't be seeing additional changes on the scale of the others.

B40 (Assault on the Control Room)

This is the big one. It's of course huge, and we've overhauled the old SPV2 BSPs to better suit what we're doing in SPV3. I think these are some of the best work we've done. The map is massive - we've actually had to expand the limits for vehicle and biped placement in this map, and we've hit (and are currently trying to break) the encounter squad cap (1024 btw).

Unfortunately, we are cutting the Scorpion from this map. Why? Because the Grizzly Tank is just so much cooler. We even have a bit of Halo Wars reflected in the rest of the new areas. We're really going for a massive scale here, and some of the play spaces rival those of the Scarab encounters in size from H3.









So...

So, when will you be able to play them? Much of that depends on the A-Team. As of the writing of the post, A10 is awaiting some more BSP edits (if there's anyone who has experience with BSPs and wants to work on these with us, PM or Email me with some of your work and HCE background), but for the most part is done. A30 is being worked on daily.

These two maps and an updated A50 will all drop around the same time, which is ultimately dependent on the completion of the necessary assets. Since the vast majority of those assets are shared with TSC:Evolved, these maps are largely dependent on the progress of the A-Team. B40 will come some time afterwards, as it requires new assets that don't depend on B30 and contains far more complex encounters.

Still More Stuff

Loadouts
While I myself am no fan of Reach, and am not so crazy about loadouts being part of H4, this was something that we feel is very natural to H1's campaign and adds to one of the goals we started with SPV1: allowing players to explore H1's campaign in new ways. For some missions, where you spawn in a Pelican, we never felt it made much sense you go in with just the pre-set weapons. Our solution to this is to give the player access to multiple loadout selections. For example, in A50, where you previously always spawned with a Silenced Sniper and Silenced SMG, we now have four different weapon combinations to choose from depending on how you want to approach the mission. For missions like B30, we can let you choose if you want to storm the beach with a BRG or a BR, or an AR and a Rocket Launcher. A10 and A30 of course don't get load outs (as you don't start with weapons), but you can expect to see this being a CMT feature in any future maps where this applies.

Support Weapons
We wanted this feature in A50, but conflicts with OS kept it out. We now have it in using some clever scripting, so we're going to be making available a few new weapons using it. We plan to use this functionality to allow players to pick up Hunters' weapons as well as turrets off of certain destroyed vehicles like the Warthogs and Pelican. This will also be used on the Flamethrower and Sentinel Beam (but those weapons are not planned to make an appearance in any of the aforementioned maps).

New UI
We're going to have our own UI – going beyond what was included in A50's “CMT Extras” menu - and this one is going to have some very useful features. The lack of version changer with OS has been a constant complaint, and so one of the UI's main features will be exposing OS' built-in version changer system as menu options. Now when you go to play MP, you will be asked which version you would like to play, and you can then access that server list for that version. We're also going to have our own Campaign UI so you can select if you want to play your existing campaign maps, or SPV3.

New OS Installer and Launcher
For a number of reasons, these maps are going to require OS. While some people had no problems installing and using OS, top many people did. So we're going to do a few things we hope to fix this.

The first thing is a new installer. The new installer will run before OS installs, and will check your Halo CE installation to make sure there is nothing that will interfere with OS's installation. It will also give you some options to get things like our new UI as well as get our maps. We hope to avoid the majority of OS installation problems for everyone with this pre-install app.

The second thing is what we're calling “CMT.exe”. CMT.exe is two things: one is a scanner to make sure nothing is going to stop your HCE from booting up with OS, and the other is a configuration utility. Currently, it is planned that CMT.exe will be able to modify your OS settings in a user-friendly interface without having to dig through XML configuration files. We know many people have problems with some of the more advanced graphic capabilities, so you can toggle different graphics options – if you're having performance issues, you'll be able to turn off graphical addons like phong shading, normal maps or motion blur before you launch the game.


(Speaking of performance issues, we are also overhauling our content to make sure it is optimized as much as we can. There's a few things in the A50 we released which are a bit embarrassing on our part that has hurt peoples performance, so you should all expect to see some significant boosts in performance from this as well.)

We think we can fix most of the issues people have with OS, and we're open to any further ideas to solve any problems you may have.

So (again)...

That pretty much sums what we've been up to up… but there is one more thing. And that one more thing is a new playable character.

For a long time, there was a partnership between CMT and Rob Opwalar's “Bridge: CE” project, in which the player took control of an ODST. While finishing his project was something we flirted with for a while as part of SPV3, we ultimately decided it wasn't the thing we wanted to invest our resources in (and so we're doing TSC:Evolved instead).

What we were left with from working on that project was a new playable character. The ODST features an all new health system, which significantly changes how you approach combat. While your "shields" are weaker, they recharge twice as fast. Powerups on the map change when the player is an ODST as well, as the over-shields and active camouflage are replaced with health packs and adrenaline boosters (which speed up the player's actions, slowing everything around them). We've lowered the speed, height, and the melee damage of the player. ODSTs can use cover much more effectively than a Spartan, and the reduced melee damage encourages players to keep their distance, forcing them to rely more on their guns and grenades. To make up for the loss in speed, we've given the ODST an ability which people have been trying to work into CE for a long time now: sprinting. For ODSTs, sprint replaces the VISR of the Spartan. While there is no FP animation for it (there are visual cues however), the player will be able to dash forward at double their regular speed by pressing the former flashlight button - at the cost of strafing and firing their weapon (which takes them out of sprint). We're also looking into giving the ODST different grenade types. We're not quite ready to talk about that yet, but we feel that since we are taking a significant departure from normal Halo with the ODST character, we should exploit it to its fullest.

As an ODST, you will still retain the rank and character of "Master Chief" and the story will not change. The ODST character will appear in cutscenes (where it looks super awesome), but that's it. ODST maps will be separate from Spartan maps – though we did want to implement the feature in one map with OS, it was just something to complex to do when the solution of having 2 maps is so simple. The new CMT UI will give the player the option of which character to play as when selecting the map.

So, that concludes what the B-Team has been up to, and what you can expect from CMT in the future. Hopefully we'll have another update soon talking about the changes in the weapon set and enemies, but that'll have to wait for another day.
Edited by Masters1337 on Aug 3, 2012 at 02:41 PM

Why the split? I imagine that makes this a lot more work for each member of the team.

Err, why is Gephyrophobia shrunk and stuck into grass where it does not belong? Lmao.

Imo, seems that your trying to do too much at once, much like what happened before CMT fell apart last time.

Masterz is currently trying to get SORRYSOLDOUT on the team.

@CMT: Take my money, all of it.

Forget money...everything i own