What do you mean they are not good ? Did you actualy even bothered watching one of them? You should realy give it a try.

A) Post the debug.txt

B) Check to see if you're running the programs as the Admin (Windows Vista/7 only)

C) Use a better translator instead of Google.

Look dude, nobody can help you if they don't even know what you are saying. Type with better spelling and grammar.

that is caused when you use the old hek+ extractor or you are missing tags or have computer with more than one core.
Edited by milkkookie on Jun 15, 2011 at 10:41 AM

Guys, I think he's trying to open the actual .map files with Sapien and Guerilla. (Honestly it's not that hard to figure out what he's saying...)

My confused friend, if you want to edit maps that come with the game you will need to use a tool called the "HEK+" to extract their files - otherwise the normal HEK tools can't open them. In Halo CE, editing is done primarily through files called "tags" - small bits of data contained in files that represent a weapon, a bullet, a vehicle, etc - as opposed to editing a whole map at a time as you might be used to from modding PC/Trial/other Halo games. Guerilla and Sapien work by creating and editing tags, not maps. Then, the program "tool.exe" compiles tags together into a map file.

What you've asked help in doing involves a large portion of the process of map creation and then some more, so prepare yourself as this is not the simplest thing in the world (though compared to most other things in CE this is an absolute breeze).

There are several versions of the "HEK+" floating around. I'm somewhat out-of-the-loop when it comes to it so I'm not sure which version is the most recent, but a quick search on the Halomaps file archive brings up this: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=1542

With this, you can open up maps and pick individual tags to extract so you can edit them with Sapien and Guerilla. However, especially if you are not very familiar with the HEK I strongly suggest you make sure that in its tag extraction settings you have it set to not overwrite existing tags - this can cause huge problems that are frustrating or impossible to fix if you don't know what you are doing.

To take your case of Bloodgulch as an example, you would probably want to extract the "levels" and go from there. If all goes well, the HEK+ will create a "levels\test\bloodgulch" folder in your "tags" folder, and in it should be "bloodgulch.scenario", "bloogulch.scenario_structure_bsp", and so on. You can open the .scenario with Sapien.

If Sapien immediately crashes, you're probably missing some tags that the Bloodgulch map requires. To see which ones, open the file "debug.txt" in your Halo CE directory and scroll to the bottom. There will probably be some relatively meaningless garbage, followed by something that looks like this:



Under the "need to get the following tags" section, there will be a list of all the tags you need to open the level. Go back to the HEK+ and extract those, and continue doing this (re-opening in Sapien, re-opening debug.txt, and extracting the tags you need) until Sapien finally opens. However, if there is something else at the end of debug.txt, post it here so we can help you fix it; sometimes the HEK+ extracts things incorrectly causing horrible problems, while other times peoples' computers cause horrible problems.

Once you get the map open you can do whatever you want to it. If you want to do something like change how a weapon or vehicle works, you can open its tag in Guerilla, which is more of a data editor compared to Sapien, which is more of a level editor.

Once you've made all the changes you want, you can turn Bloodgulch back into a map using Tool.exe. However, I will warn you that you should probably rename your Bloodgulch.scenario to something else, since CE does not (as far as I know) let you play games when people have different versions of maps.

To use tool you open up the Windows command-line prompt in your Halo CE directory. You then type "Tool", followed by the appropriate command for Tool to execute. (The HEK tutorial gives an overview of these, I think). To make a .map file, the command is "build-cache-file". For the purpose of example I will assume your "Bloodgulch.scenario" was renamed to "Customgulch.scenario". To compile using Tool, you would thus enter the following command:

(Note how you leave off the .scenario in the file-name for the tool command: if you include it, bad things can happen).

Tool will wait for a while, do some things, and then spit out a fairly long message. If it looks something like this:

...then you're good to go and can play your map in-game. If your map doesn't show up or tool spits out some horrible error message, post the output of Tool so we can help you fix it.

I know this is a lot to take in, but editing maps that already exist in the game in CE is a somewhat complicated task, and you don't seem to have much (any) experience with the HEK at all. If you have trouble or questions about this please ask (but please do so coherently - though I think I understood what your problem was it is kind of annoying to read posts that aren't well-typed).


Edited by teh lag on Jun 15, 2011 at 03:43 PM

Why do I have a feeling that was tl;dr for him?

Because 90% of the internet are filled with illiterate people :|