Quote: --- Original message by: Advancebo
That is old.

Quote:
I managed to get in touch with Nick a few weeks ago because I had some free time and wanted to see if I could make some progress on a few things. I talked to him a bit about the status of the team since I've been away, as well as what the plans for the project were. I don't think that he's had the time to even look at the forums lately, so I'll update everyone that might happen to care about how things are looking at the moment.

1. No one has heard from Rec0 in going on two years now. He was creating our scripting system (which decompiles scripts into our custom c#-style format, as well as compiling to bungie's format.) There are two other people that knew anything about how Halo scripts were compiled/decompiled - ViperNeo and Kornman00. I personally haven't talked to Viper since before the last time I talked to Rec0. KM is in the military and I also haven't talked to him in ages, but I don't get the impression that he would want to take on this task.

2. Grenadiac, our math and 3d guru, isn't actively involved in the project anymore to my knowledge. The last time I saw him was on Xbox Live and we actually didn't even say two words to each other, much less discuss the project, so I'm going on the assumption that he doesn't have the time or the interest anymore. He was involved in things like the camera system (which is mostly complete, and is awesome, but has a few bugs that I lack the math knowledge to fix) as well as the selection widgets (think 3DS max when you rotate/move objects around) which are also mostly complete but again, need some tweaking that I just can't do.

3. ZeldaFreak - Nick said that ZF is still plugging away at a few things, but our source control server is down at the moment (until Nick can find time to fix it) so no one can sync up any changes. Therefore, I have no idea about what kind of progress he has made on anything. He was working on the Tag Editor last time I talked to him - which is in pretty great shape but still has some bugs and a few missing pieces that make it *not quite 100% usable*, though for many tags it works fine.

4. SwampFox - Designed our new pixel shader based rendering system (which is the sh*t) but I have no clue if he is still working on anything. I haven't talked to him in months. Rendering for Halo 1 is pretty much perfect (including even the plasma shaders) but some other aspects of the rendering engine still need some work (right now there is a bottleneck in the scene graph somewhere that is causing rendering to use a lot of CPU, which affects the framerate quite a bit).

5. Me - I have been away from the project for about a year now due to a new job, but things have recently calmed down a lot and I am wanting to make some progress. I have been responsible for alot of the UI related things as well as the general "flow" of the app (creating a new project, adding tags, decompiling map assets into tag files, tying everything together, etc). There is still a lot of work to be done in this area though.

SO,

Right now Prometheus can, with a little coaxing, decompile a stock set of tags from the Bungie maps included with Halo1 (xbox or PC), allow the user to create a new project, add any stock tags that you want, create new custom tags, compile a map, decompile and view scripts, view any tag/model/etc in the game, view complete scenarios, move objects in the scene and sync changes to the scenario tag, generate half-as* usable lightmaps as well as many other things.

Things that you *cannot* do at the moment:
1. Import models from 3DS or any other app. I have no idea who was even working on this, but it never got done(to my knowledge). I wanna say it may have been ViperNeo, who I haven't heard from in ages.
2. Create a new BSP. This would require the ability to import models from 3DS max. Also, ViperNeo was our resident BSP, and he disappeared off the face of the earth. I had talked to SwampFox a while back about what it would take to figure this out and get it working, and he didn't seem very optimistic about it.
3. Create new sounds. Progress was made on this I think, but it was low priority and never finished. I can't even remember who was working on it.
4. Import animations from 3DS max. You also can't view animations anymore (we had this feature in the past, but when we redesigned the rendering system, our old method of animating models was no longer compatible. Only Grenadiac knows enough about the animation format to update this, so in order for animations to be displayed properly, someone else is going to have to step up and do some research in this area).

As you can see, while Prometheus can do quite a few things (and a rediculous amount of man power has been put into this beast), it is still not even up to the abilities that the bungie editing kit for HaloCE provides. And this isn't even counting Halo 2 (which we do have limited support for in a lot of ways already - especially from a design perspective - but there are many technical hurdlesto overcome.)

My personal opinion (and Nick will probably ream me for saying this (IMG:style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)) is that our current team isn't capable of finishing Prometheus in the way that we would like to. I think with a lot of work and some feature cutting, we could release something comparable to the HEK within a reasonable amount of time, but if it doesn't give you anything particularly new (aside from a few organization benefits, which I do have to admit are nice), then what is the point really?

We have petitioned in the past on several occasions for help getting Prometheus finished, but I just don't think the Halo modding community has enough blood left for that. Because of the setbacks our team has suffered, I think a large amount of motivation just isn't there any more. I'd personally like to finish the project just because I like to finish what I start and I know that even if it didn't fully live up to our original vision there are still some people who would like to download a copy and play around with it, just to get some closure.

I think the best thing at this point would be to open source the project and see if that might motivate some people out there to pick it up and help finish it with us, or perhaps at the very least to provide some insight to some curious hackers and programmers out there about how some things inside Halo work as well as how professional applications are designed and structured. The only hurdle to that would be the fact that we use a commercial library for our UI for which we only have dev licenses for our small team. It would not be legal to distribute these libraries to just anyone, and it would be a *OMFGMASSIVE* task to try and modify Prometheus to compile without this. I suppose that it could be done with a dedicated enough team though.

Will it go Open Source? Who knows. Nick has never been interested in that, so I doubt that will change. I am going to try really hard over the next week to round up the remaining team members that we have and try to get a solid answer on the state of this project. I feel bad coming back and reading all of the posts from people who have really wanted to try this app out, and I apologize for letting things slip this far. It's kind of a slap in the face to people who have supported us, and unfortunately real life has gotten in the way of letting us give you guys what we promised in the first place. I'm gonna do what i can though to make sure that this project gets closure - whether that equates to a finished product, a working alpha for people play with, or a complete open source.

So, hopefully this bit of info will be enough to hold you guys over until we can figure out what is going on. Again, sorry for the lack of updates and even sorrier for Prometheus not being out for everyone to play around with already (IMG:style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif) I will post again with more info as soon as I have it.