Ok... Thanks for the information... what brought that up?

Any approxamite idea as to when they would be released? A week, 2 weeks, 5 minutes? (sorry, I promised I wouldn't bug you anymore)
Edited by flyingpenguin117 on Dec 13, 2010 at 06:31 PM

Nagging will result in the burning of babies by demonic assault rifles.

Map-related, Ender's working out some exception error kinks. No dates from me, ask him.
Edited by TiamatColdsnap on Dec 20, 2010 at 12:04 AM

You don't like any of us, do you?

He likes Ender. lol not sure about anyone else though :P

I don't think he likes anyone...

That last one was just... wrong...

So, why are you even here?
Edited by flyingpenguin117 on Dec 20, 2010 at 06:33 PM

Lol Tiamat is teh cryptic

You should see some of the f'ed up conversation's we've had over xfire...

Anyways, I wish I could give you guys a date, I wanted it out by christmas but it looks like I'm going to have to beg you guys to be patient with me haha I've implemented some more new content and ran into a nasty exception so atm I am working it out but I've set my new goal to have it out in January. I don't want to be too hasty and look over bugs and imbalances in the gameplay.

Sorry guys, but its for the greater good!

Is this the same exception you were working on two days ago, with the fog pits that were *supposed* to kill you, or has yet another of our favorite things in the world metaphorically reared its ugly metaphorical head? And speaking of xfire, you should get on it.

It was that PH3N0M, as well as halo disliking the amount of vehicles I was "script-spawning". I have written a new script for the pits now that hopefully won't cause an exception.

So it's fixed for now and all that's left to do is last minute populating and weapon balancing before we have a major beta test. I have also implemented a health regeneration similar to Halo Reach's health system. Your health slowly regenerates but only when your shields are fully charged.

I will not be around for Christmas eve or day so I will have a build for us to beta after christmas.
Merry Christmas everybody!

I think you can drop some of the spawn scripting by inserting the weapons and vehicles as defaults in the globals.

Is the beta going to be realsed to everyone?

Tragically, no. It would be awesome if he did, though. I really want to try that carrier... Oh well. Have to wait.
Edited by flyingpenguin117 on Dec 29, 2010 at 10:41 PM

Is the beta ready yet?

He said "after Christmas". Tommorow is "after Christmas". So is next week, or next year. I'm fairly sure that when he gets it together, we'll be the first ones to know about it.

Yeah I wanted to release by Christmas but it wasn't in the cards. Contamination and Paradox are both complete and ready for release but Genocide has been taken back to the drawing board because it's exception was unfixable. I tried everything I could but theres something wrong with it's bsp and I can't figure it out. I posted on this website looking for help but no one was able to give me even a push in the right direction so I have scrapped Genocide's bsp and I am currently modeling a new one. It will be the same basic principle but I'm not making it with a heightmap this time. I had around 120, 000 verts in the original bsp and I'm thinking the engine just couldnt handle it due to the immense size. So I've redesigned the layout to be long and skinny and have better chokepoints so there will be more action. So technically the bsp is much smaller, but you won't be able to notice it and there will be more combat.

I don't know what killed my original bsp, all I know is that as soon as I added the covenant ship to the bsp and the grav lift base tool wouldn't compile it into a structure_bsp tag. I had to move the bsp to the origin in 3ds max as well as give it terrain portals. Then it compiled fine, but exceptions immediately upon loading it ingame.

Lucky me.

In the end, this redesign will be a better bsp anyways as the original was created around 4 years ago, before extinction was released. This new redesign utilizes all of my new found modeling skills and is overall better in design than the original ever was.

I will have rendarz for all you nice people later today when it's textured.
Hang tight guys 2/3 are completed. Could have been worse, atleast only one map is PMSing, could have been all of them....
Edited by DA_Ender on Dec 29, 2010 at 02:14 PM

RENDARZ FTW! <3 spelling bad for the lulzorz

Can't wait!

RENDARZ OR GTFO

Original BSP ...exceptioning POS:





New bsp:

20 minutes into modeling the new bsp:


4 hours of work later:





Red Teams cave's first room:


Cave's second room:

The flag is inside that structure. It is the generator for the atmospheric mac station. Both teams have identical cave systems, same as the old version of genocide's bsp. They are the same model only more polished.

Uncampable underground hangar caves from genocide's old bsp are also included:


Let me know what you think and if you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them :D

The new one looks pretty good. The old one looked like that all-to-used design of a single curved canyon. Looks a little easy to snipe from across the map, though, depending on its overall size. Which one do you like better, all exceptions aside?

If your asking Ender (who i believe is busy populating the map) he prefers the new one (atleast that what i'v gathered from my chats with him on xfire :P). I could be wrong here, but i don't think i am.

Good thing about handing out really old POS builds, if you get anything corrupted, you can ask for a copy back =p.

Amazingcuziam is right personally I perfer the design of the new bsp. You won't be able to snipe across the map, as the uber rifles that can shoot 5 km and kill in a single shot from extinction are gone

It seemed like a good idea at the time to make them that powerful to give the guy on foot a chance to live a little longer but it was too much so and the sniper dominate the map. I've reduced the power the anti-armor rifles by 75%. You will start off without a sniper of any kind and you will have to put the effort in to go and get a sniper rifle. There are spots I have pre-setup for sniping that give a little cover but dont give you the dominant position on the map. While I am doing my best to reduce "cliff camping", one can only do so much without taking power away from the average player who is following the design of the map and using the delegated spots. Basically the cliffs are so high up that if you fly all the way up there and get a good camping spot, your bullet won't travel far enough to hit anything but aircraft that dare fly up close to you.

Now as for the actual terrain modeling, I majorly perfer this map. The original bsp was so vast and empty looking because of its poor design and it took a long time to travel even in a jet to the other side of the map, as you can see from the top view render in my last post, it was a map that started as a box and then was extruded downwards to create the illusion of cliffs (basic noob heightmap).
I made the new one by plane and vertex modeling and then mirroring and attaching to get the symmetrical look. While it was more work cause I had to go along and create the skybox face by face, the end result is far more realistic looking cliffs in half the amount of polygons :D. Halo's engine has a much easier time with the new bsp.

Wall o' text^

Any thoughts anybody?

I hadn't had the chance to play the old one, but the new one is pretty nice, I only have a little bit of crit. The bases are a bit hard to find and to get into. I also don't see where you're going to put the MAC cannons/covie turrets, cause if you put them on the hills at each end of the map they'll probably just constantly kill each other and everything else. Also, I don't think the bridge in the middle looks very forerunner-like; personally I liked the one in extinction better. Other than that, the map (Genocide) is shaping up to be very, VERY epic. The orbital MAC station looks great, only thing that I think could be improved would be to add a few small but somewhat powerful gauss turrets for point defense. Hopefully that would help control the middle of the map from above and make the station something worth fighting for control of, while not totally dominating gameplay.

The bases will have blinking lights to make it a little easier. The mass driver cannons/covenant gun towers are for base defense only and will be on the big landing pads underneath the Genocide ship and flagship. The bridge doesnt look forunner because this map and Contamination both take place on Reach. The atmospheric mac station's exterior parts are linked by teleporters to be a sniping point to fight the traveling of aircraft thru the middle of the map but the sniping points are acessible by both teams so there will be close range onfoot battles fought to secure the mac station sniper point.

Oh, I forgot about those platfrom thingies....probably makes sense to put the turrets there then. But I thought you were going to nerf the sniper so that it wouldn't have enough range to make camping a viable option... And wouldn't that mean you wouldn't be able to hit anything even remotely near the ground with the sniper from the MAC station? Honestly I'd actually prefer it if there was NO sniper rifle in the map at all, cause dogfighting, even if you lose, is a lot more fun than suddenly getting sniped out of your vehicle with no warning and no chance to avoid it.

If you get lag spikes, an issue to consider is scripting the beam emitters. The projectile has a HUGE model, and its an effect that you fire off 10-15 locations (?) each with a lense flare (in the video) which is asking alot of the engine, without adding allot of visual value. Other than that, I might actually play this one, good job so far.

Any news/updates, Ender?

I'm afraid all I have is bad news...

Genocide is exceptioning, again
The cause is the vehicle palette. For some reason, if I have vehicles added to the sapien/guerilla palette that aren't in the globals (only allows 6), the map crashes instant upon loading in Halo.

So this means that the other 20 vehicles that are to be script-spawned cause the game to crash. It's only this map that does it. The exact same 26 vehicles in contamination and it works completely fine, the map is ready for release.

Stupid genocide refuses to work =\ dispite the new bsp being smaller and far less polygons.
The exception, just like the old bsp was doing doesn't show up in the debug.txt on my pc or any of my beta testers pc's.

I'm stumped. If anybody has any ideas or would be willing to help me with this I would really appreciate it cause I'm out of ideas. The map is FAR too large for only 6 different types of vehicles :( especially when I put the effort into all 26. I WANTS THEM ALL! DAM U HALO

actually the issue is scripting them in :( the scripts are crashing the map and he can't figure out why :(

completely remove the scripts & the extra vehicles. Compile.
if you dont get the error, just re-write the script & add the vehicles in.

& i mean RE-WRITE not just copy & paste. Iv had this problem before, except halo exceptioned on map load, not game load. :/
even if its exactly the same script. For some reason it would work if you didnt copy & paste. Not a clue why. But whatever..

It has absolutely nothing to do with the script. There is no scripts added to this map yet. The scripts are already written and work. But before I started populating I loaded up the palettes with everything I would need. The vehicles were simply added to the palette and it crashes unless theres only the six that are in the globals added to the palette. This applies even if all the other palettes (scenery, devices, ect) are empty as well. It's just the vehicles and only with this map.

Makes no sense.
Edited by DA_Ender on Jan 12, 2011 at 02:55 AM

Tool Pro, but Dennis says it has malware. Theres also the CMT HEK, but they have no intentions to release it.

Thats what I heard. Thats why they can use the oversized bipeds in their maps, but you can't. Thats how A30 was so damn long. Took me two days to finish it.

The map is FAR too large for only 16 players.

No offence but it's my opinion.