I'm going to not clog up this forum by putting all my problems/ questions in a single thread, so please don't let it die. If it does, I'll just re-post everything individually. lol

I was wondering how exactly that zoom effect is achieved. When you zoom with any weapon, like pistol, sniper, or rocket launcher, towards the outside of the screen, things are blurred inwards. Is this a screen effect or something? I think that this effect can be achieved in regular game play, outside of zoom, but I don't know what it is/ how it's done.
I thought I saw it in the final cut-scene as the camera zooms in on chief's longsword (or maybe the camera was actually zooming, and the same effect is used outside of first person. It's just a general zoom effect). In any case, I want to script it to happen.

Also, i want to know if the following things are possible, to what degree, and, if you can, how...

<<<Can you and how do you...>>>

1: have a water shader...with a scrolling animation. Not a waterfall exactly. But when you look at it, it looks like you're moving and looking at regular water. (has waves and a reflection cube-map, etc.)
If it can't be done in the shader, I suppose I'll have to animate the actual polygons to move.

2: Change all scenery of one type to be a different type. For example, say i have a whole bunch of blue landing beacons, and I want to change them all to red landing beacons.

3: move and rotate scenery with scripts. I know you can scale objects.

4: Change the lightmap and sky used on a bsp with scripts. (I know that in the bsp tag, under "clusters", there are fields for sky, fog, background sound, sound environment, weather, and "transition structure bsp". (whatever that is). I know you can set the sky and fog to -1 to have none at all. With fog, you can apply different fogs to different clusters in sapien, then in the tag, clusters will have different numbers for the fog, such as -32768 and -32767, but i don't know what these numbers mean or where they come from.

Of course, it's probably too much trouble anyway, and I should use a different bsp all together.

5: have a grav lift (such as the one in a50, Truth and reconciliation) turn on and off. (have the particle effects and shaders that make it become visible and not visible)

6: Make anything other then bipeds have distortion (use the active camo shader)
(I'm aiming for a slipspace rupture in the end)

More to come.

<<<<<<Other questions>>>>

1: What are "functions" (like in weapon tags), what do (or can), they do, and how?

2: How do you add lens flares to a bsp (I'm guessing markers?), and what is an example of this in a map? Is this feature only for suns (or only meant for suns)?

3: I know you can make lightmaps using 3ds max to render them with better quality. I've seen a script and program that automatically imports scenery to their correct positions and makes the lightmap. It says to use a plain white shader for everything.

I was wondering if there's anyway to use the alpha of the bitmaps for things, like scenery, so that light goes through some parts, but not others. For instance, in a tree's leaves, it would use the bitmap to go through the leaves, even if they aren't indevidual polys.
(see scenery/trees/tree_leafy/bitmaps/tree_leafy_leaves). Goes through white parts, hits black parts.

4: Does anyone know a good program to make or edit music/ sound effects?

5: Does anyone have a complete covenant cruiser? The one on a50 has no top. (import the model) I'm also looking for covenant wreckage shaders (like the like the sparking metal mesh you see when halo 2's ghost is damaged and the outer purple layer comes off)

6: When port forwarding, should I use the IP adress of this computer or the one that the router is set up with or both? Same for xbox connect.


More questions to come. Thank you for answering anything, or just giving any input!
Edited by Vick Jr on Feb 4, 2009 at 07:03 PM

Answers in bold.

I was wondering how exactly that zoom effect is achieved. When you zoom with any weapon, like pistol, sniper, or rocket launcher, towards the outside of the screen, things are blurred inwards. Is this a screen effect or something? I think that this effect can be achieved in regular game play, outside of zoom, but I don't know what it is/ how it's done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBUlsaHsRTA&fmt=18

Just experiment with the numbers to get the desired effect.

keep the value at 40% to 40% or so and the time 99999999999999999..... it's very interesting to play like that =P