Allow me to introduce you to Hyperion.

The story is fairly simple, at least on the surface. You are an ODST stationed on the UNSC colony world Hyperion. The Covenant war is in full swing, and you've been assigned to Capital City in anticipation of the inevitable day when the aliens discover the planet and raise hell.

Sure enough, the Covenant attack, and it has fallen to you and your comrades to defend the city from the onslaught of Covenant that seek to destroy it. However, strangely, the Covenant have decided to spare the city from destruction instead of burning it to the ground as they usually do. Comm chatter has revealed that the aliens are looking for something - an artifact of some kind - but what?

Okay, now back to reality.

My name is Stewart, I'm a Halo fan fiction author and an aspiring film maker, and I've got some great story & gameplay ideas for an expansive, super-massive single player mission set in a metropolis, with a mysterious Forerunner complex hidden underneath the city to boot.

The problem is that I don't know the first thing about making a custom map.

Rather than spend years learning how to mod for Custom Edition and perfecting my craft, I hope to instead lure a few of you experienced modders to my insane little project so that you may lend your considerable talents to my idea. This would be an Open Sauce project from the ground up because I'd want to take advantage of everything that is possible, or even theoretically possible, within the Halo engine; the map would NOT necessarily be backwards compatible for users without Open Sauce.

First, we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room. This is going to be a big project. It's going to take time and a metric ton of work. I'd make it myself except that I'd have no clue what I was doing, and it's probably better to have experienced, respected modders on the project anyway. I want people who are in it for the long haul. This thing might take several years depending on how ambitious we decide to go.

The whole goal of this project is to take Halo where it's never gone before and revolutionize the Custom Edition landscape. It's incredibly ambitious. I don't know if we can achieve everything I want to achieve, but I certainly want to try, if only to achieve as much as we can.

Now we need to work out the feasibility of a few core aspects of the project. Even if you're not interested in working on the project, I would greatly appreciate feedback on these forthcoming points. Get ready, because this is a long list.

*How refined can custom cutscenes get? I know they're possible, but how far can they be pushed? Custom animations? Cool camera angles? (By the way, don't worry about voice work. As an aspiring film maker, that's one thing I could at least do by myself.) There wouldn't be too many of these - maybe just one for the beginning and one for the conclusion. (Although probably a couple more than that.) Actually, there's another question. Is it possible to trigger cutscenes within a level, or is that only something you know how to do at the beginning and/or end of a level?

*How big can a map get? How detailed can that big map get? I've got fanciful visions of a full-sized metropolis with fully-explorable buildings as well as interactive elements like turnstiles, elevators, escalators, etc... The whole point is for this thing to feel like a real city. I want it to live and breathe. Restaurants. Shops. Parking garages. Rooftops. As much interactive stuff as possible, including (if possible) doors, physics objects, radios, even soda machines. You could walk, drive, or fly through the city and it would work all three ways. I want the whole thing to feel open-world and non-linear. The story will be uncovered as you go, in bits and pieces, which leads me to my next point...

*Terminals. Can they be done? How would they be done? This is how I'd want to convey the majority of my story, so this is SUPER IMPORTANT to get sussed out. I would want terminals similar to those in Marathon, so it doesn't have to be FMV or anything crazy like that. (Just out of curiosity, could that be done?)

*How many new gameplay mechanics can be implemented? True dual-wielding? Boarding? New enemies like Brutes and Skirmishers? Are armor abilities too much of a pipe dream? (Actually, I don't even know that I'd want those. Equipment would maybe be a better idea.) Are there any outstanding ideas for new gameplay mechanics that you'd like to see in a Halo map? They don't have to be from prior Halo games.

*Custom weapons and vehicles. How many can you have with Open Sauce? Again, I've got really fanciful visions here - stuff like trucks, sports cars, motorcycles, speeders, and multiple variations of each, available in excess on the streets of the city. There'd be new military vehicles, including possibly a jet pack of some kind and a Batmobile and/or Batpod type of thing, as well as new Covie digs. On the weapons side of things, it's important to keep a good balance so as not to destroy gameplay. I'd want some Halo weapons like the Battle Rifle and the Beam Rifle, but we don't need to go crazy with it. It's not necessary to update what works. For example, there'll be no DMR because we're absolutely keeping the Halo 1 Pistol. Gimmick weapons would be awesome though, like lead pipes, civilian guns, and funny stuff like watermelons and TVs. (To chuck at your enemies.) Is it possible to destroy a weapon? Like, throw a watermelon and have it blow up upon impact? Because that would be AWESOME.

*How can enemy encounters be managed in a huge level like this? Would they have to be mostly confined to indoor locations? Can AI even be instructed to stay within a certain space? This is important because it would dictate how I tell my story and how the terminals are spaced out across the level. My chief concern is that the ability to fly around the city would make it difficult to keep encounters balanced and confined to a specific area. I'd hate to sacrifice my grand ideas to fly around the city, but if I had to for the sake of enemy encounters, I would do it. One possible solution is to only provide flying craft after you've reached a certain area on the map, and then you could keep the player's path fairly linear and guided until that objective has been reached. Actually, that gave me the idea to basically re-create the Halo 2 E3 2003 demo as the big opening chapter to the level - not necessarily a carbon copy, but the same basic thing. (A UNSC bunker filled with injured soldiers who face a flood of Covenant forces coming straight for them and THAT MASSIVE AWESOME CANNON THING THAT THE LONGSWORDS DESTROY.)

*For the underground Forerunner station, is it possible to have a gate that could only be opened upon completion of certain tasks, like the killing of a certain group (or groups) of enemies? Or is it even possible to have a gate? One idea is to have it open only upon hitting a series of switches, which would be spaced out across a large area, but I don't know if that's possible either.

*The Forerunner installation wouldn't have to be as large as the city. Actually, from a story perspective, probably only one tenth of the level takes place there anyway. It's the big finale; that doesn't mean it's an entire half of the map from a gameplay perspective.

*Are boss fights possible within Halo 1? That is to say, enemies that can only be killed through a specific means, like Tartarus in Halo 2?

*How difficult is it to script events? Especially triggered scripted events. If we went through with doing the Halo 2 E3 2003 thing, for example, I'd probably invent some way for the player to call in the Longswords with a radio or something, instead of it just happening on its own. That would give the player a clear goal to accomplish - fight the aliens because you have to acquire the radio in order to call in the Longswords and dust the anti-aircraft cannon. This is another important issue that would determine how I decided to craft the story.

*Can you implement checkpoints and saved games with Open Sauce? I just realized the whole replayability thing would be totally shot down without them.

*Just how laggy would this thing be online with multiple players? How about on a LAN? Or even solo?

I'm fully okay with ripping content from Halo games for this project, as I believe it would save a buttload of time, but if the majority feel that it's unethical or cheating, then that's cool too and we could make everything from scratch or use preexisting tags.

*exhale*

I'm fully aware that my dream project would probably take years and is probably not feasible and is probably a massive pipe dream. But I figure it's best to start big, then work your way through the technical stuff and figure out what you actually CAN do, and what you actually WANT to put your efforts into. You're the technical guys here. You're the ones who have to tell me when an idea is too crazy or requires too much of a time investment. I'm not insane enough to believe that we can really cram EVERYTHING on that list into a single map, but I want to find out exactly how much we CAN get in there and then do that.

Basically, this would be THE map. That's the whole point of Hyperion. I want people to play this map as if it were its own game, with its own unique flavor and massive amounts of replayability. It'd be like GTA meets Halo, in the sense that you'd be essentially free to do whatever you please. You can obey the commands given to you within the story or just explore the city or go kill aliens without a second thought or... you see what I mean? The idea is to cram the map full of as much content as you can so that the player has options, while still keeping enemy encounters balanced and the story coherent.

So... if you're still with me, please give me your feedback. And sign up, if you're interested in embarking on this crazy, crazy journey with me.

POSITIONS CURRENTLY NEEDED (this will be updated as we go):
Everything. I don't know, really. Like I said, I don't know how to make maps. You guys have gotta help me out here! What do I need? Uh, okay, I know I'd need a BSP guy, and someone for skins, probably multiple people, and some guys for new models, animations, AI, coding new features... we basically need the same team as you'd need for a total conversion mod, except that we will be re-using as much Bungie-crafted stuff as possible to save time.
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 17, 2011 at 09:47 AM
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 17, 2011 at 10:06 AM

You should send in this idea to 343. I highly doubt any of your ideas are possible with Halo CE, and it's illegal to use any other engine with Halo assets. I'm not a serious tech guy though, so somebody like teh lag should give an opinion on it.

It is quite a pipe dream, isn't it? Like I said, though, a lot of what I'm trying to do right now is determine exactly how much of what I've proposed is possible in the engine. Once I've accomplished that, and acquired a team, I'll start to actually lock down specific features and design the map in explicit detail.

It's all ideas at this point. I'll modify those ideas based on what the engine is capable of.

Alot of what you said is possible, though hard to do, and your idea would have to be down-scaled some (even for alot of other engines too I think). To be fair, I didn't read it all, but it sounded neat and like an idea I had a long time ago (kind of).

Recorded animation, what ever camera angle you want, custom animations, any sound, any effect, and anytime you want to preform the command (cinematic_start)

Need a many many BSPs. idk the limit for BSPs, but as long as you have a good number of them, you should be able to add a huge ass amount of detail.

Do you mean texture cameras, or just recorded videos on screens? Using animated textures and sequenced bitmaps, you can get videos playing on the texture, but its far to much :effort: for most people.

Dual weilding looses your ammo, OS has a block for it but it doesn't seem to be setup. OS allows multi-team vehicles where you can make a boarding seat that triggers everything, or you can do many overkill alternitives for non-OS. AA with OS is very easy, you can control camo amounts on units, change a players speed for sprint, preform math on your current velocity to make you drift up for jetpack, etc. Flashlight can be set to these things, and SP has action_tests for a few things like zoom.

just opened OS_guerilla, hit new for a while on the vehicle palete. 100 unique types of vehicles. But I believe that is also the limit of as many vehicles you can place. Child scenarios should be able to increase this more, but you still can only have somewhere around 100 units spawned at once; this is shared between bipeds and vehicles.

just keep their move area to what ever size you want.

(sleep_until (= (ai_living_count <ai>) 0) 1) (device_set_position <device> <real>)
or, for a large amount of switches
(sleep_until (and (device_group_get <device_group>) (device_group_get <device_group>) (device_group_get <device_group>)) 1) (device_set_position <device> <real>)
put as many device groups for your switches as you want to have on to trigger it.

why is this in the questions? its a statement lol.

when ever your at that spesific kill method, place (object_cannot_take_damage <object_list>) on the AI, and then (sleep_until <condition> 1) (unit_kill <unit>)

(sleep_until <condition> 1) the radio, if you use a objects_attach then objects_detach, you could use one default set of enterance animations for the called in thing, its just that if some buildings are larger than some, they will fly through them from certain angles if you dont take that into account in your enterance animation. Or, you can do it by location with (volume_test_objects <trigger_volume> (players)) to insure they aren't calling planes into buildings and such.

(game_save_totally_unsafe), and if you want multiple save files, (core_save_name <string>)

Online, your gonna have EXTREME problems. For the enemies to sync, your gonna want to cap the total AI around 30 for the whole map. And you wouldn't be able to have multiple BSPs, so you would have to go as LQ as possible on the BSP for a whole city.

Solo, as long as you portaled it well, and used many BSPs, it should be fine.

For the multiplayer part, if it's gonna be a huge level, it's gonna be extremely laggy. and for AI, AI don't sync on multiplayer, not even on LAN so the best bet for this is Single Player.

LOL Funny..


Hence Halo: Aero with CryEngine 3... yes it is legal.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Community/Developer/Rules
Edited by iHalo on Aug 17, 2011 at 03:30 PM

Last time I checked you broke those rules by using ripped asset's.


Edited by Higuy on Aug 17, 2011 at 04:58 PM

And yet my entire post was valid whether any of it was right or wrong, so "LOL Funny" is a rather immature comment.

It sounds possible enough to make an open world map. As far as I can tell, any model or region can support up to 32 textures, and by the looks of it, 3DS max can have up to 24 material balls to apply textures from(each multi/sub-object can PROBABLY only support up to 32 textures in blam!).

If every building and piece of scenery in the map were it's own region(objects using *like* textures can share a material ball(which you can attach so that not every object is it's own separate object....)), using their own collection of textures that they share: It seems possible to add as much complexity in textures that you want.

And splitting the BSP into multiple regions makes it a hell of a lot easier to texture if the BSP is huge...
Edited by OrangeJuice on Aug 17, 2011 at 05:32 PM

I recommend going to the Fallout GECK for an Open-World mod. CE isn't really made for spontaneous and multifaceted objectives like an Open-World does in ONE map. However, nothing is stopping you from breaking it up into multiple maps.

Well, it's open world in the sense that you'll get to freely explore the city and complete the linear story sections in an order of your choosing. However, the story sections - the majority of the enemy encounters - would be constructed in a similar fashion to most campaign encounters, e.g. they would have a linear path (with some alternate paths available to the player in select encounters) and scripted elements. In other words, they won't be very dynamic.

The open world portion of the map would be more of a sandbox thing - explore buildings, acquire swag, fight random squads of Covenant. That's where most of the zany/gimmicky stuff like watermelon tossing would take place.

Could one code 'key items' as in RPG games? Is it possible to do that? Or would that be too complex? The idea would be to force the player to acquire these key items in order to advance to certain areas of the city and to the Forerunner installation. Alternatively, could multiple switches for the Forerunner gate be spaced across the ENTIRE CITY, forcing the player to complete certain key encounters to activate the switches needed to unlock the gate?

How feasible would swimming be, or barring that, an underwater vehicle?

Also, does anyone know how to get in touch with the guys in CMT?
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 17, 2011 at 06:43 PM
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 17, 2011 at 06:47 PM
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 17, 2011 at 06:49 PM

The scripted stuff is completley feasible. The swimming/underwater vehicle isn't. You can make a floating vehicle though.

Also, if your going to do any open world type stuff in this game, I suggest not getting to crazy. Your going to have to span this out over multiple levels and many BSPs. It IS overly ambitious and very hard to make what your asking for. Alot of time is going to be needed to make it, a couple years even if you had a dedicated mapping team at your disposal.

It took Lumoria (an hour long campaign mission) about 1 year to finish.

The success of Lumoria is actually what inspired my idea. The time investment kind of comes with the territory; I'm willing to see it through.

Why couldn't the level be constructed as a single map? With multiple BSPs, what's the issue?

There is a fine line of how much tag space you can really throw at one map. There is a total of 24M you can use in an entire map, and that includes everything from .weapons you use to the sbsp files.

If you go over that limit, the map file will compile, BUT exception ingame. You can break everything up into multiple levels; the player playing though will need all the levels for it to truly be a open world map.

~~

CMT is looking for single player stuff too, but apparently there set on using something else at the moment. There also not looking for a big workload like this I don't think either.

You should talk to "The Cereal Killer" or my pal L0d3x. Both of them have had idea's like in the past and I think know how to get it working correctly. The Cereal Killer is actually working on something thats a bit open world, its called Red Skulls.

Edited by Higuy on Aug 17, 2011 at 08:08 PM

you can either do it by them holding an item, or if they approach where this key item is stored then destroy the physical display and set a global variable that shows that they have the key. And I already showed you what you needed to do so that multiple switches would control one gate.

Swimming would have to consider how you want it. You can make it so when your in water, it forces you into a vehicle that cannot go under water to act like swimming, you can set it up so that you float in water, you can set it up so that the jump button makes you float in water and make it so they die if they sink to far or stay under to long, etc. Since I can make waters that cannot go in water, if I did the opposite and set that on the sky, it should work (or, just a volume trigger that if they get that high, force them back under)

And you get in touch with anyone in CMT by PMing the person you wish to talk to, talking to them on the forums, etc. I feel so forgotten


Anyways, there usually is a way to do anything to an extent. Weather its worth the effort or looks very good, is yet to be seen. But for the most part, things can be done.

Thanks! I appreciate your input!

I would like to reiterate that we'd probably end up abandoning a lot of the proposed features and concentrating on the stuff that works. It's better to start big and form a focus after we've tested various iterations of the crazier ideas.

My main interest in talking to CMT is to ask for permission to use various tags they've developed - weapons, Brutes, etc... I imagine they're all too busy to directly participate in the project.

Would you be interested in a project like this?
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 17, 2011 at 10:34 PM

SPv2 beta maps are all open source, you can take from them. Credit the team to be polite and such, aswell lag as directly released some updated tags here over time, search through his posts to see what all there is (I think its mostly just his elite stuff, idk what else there is)

I'm far to busy with my everything. If you post any questions on the forums though, I'll probably get around to answering them sometime.

I would be interested in this.
it's and amazing idea, though like previously said, most of it would be hard to do and wouuld take a while, but it souunds like a very interesting idea. The OP was very nice.
Get an xfire and add me.

Scomm279 Screen Name is TauSigmaNova(Dark Fury)

lol iHalo rips? maybe, but he accomplished a bajillion times more then some of us.
And i cant even confirm if he did...
So what MS is saying is that I can make a halo game, i just cant infringe trademarks and I cant sell it and they can steal my game? sounds good!

Since posting the original thread, I've settled on a solid core concept for the mission design.

Essentially, you must complete multiple separate "story missions" in various locations in order to modify Covenant transponders that are trying to access the Forerunner facility. (Example locations include a city park, a zoo, a power relay station, and a police station.)

Between "story missions", you will be able to mess around in the "hub" city, which can afford you advantages like hidden weapon caches and vehicles you can't find elsewhere. (As well as story details you can't find elsewhere either.) While messing around in the "hub" of the city is mostly an option rather than a requirement, it will comprise the main "selling point" of the map since that's where you'll be able to do the open-world sandbox stuff. (Chucking watermelons at enemies, driving sports cars, exploring buildings, playing with oversized soccer balls, etc...)

Keep in mind that, ideally, this entire thing will be contained within A SINGLE MAP. (Although it'll have to have a buttload of BSPs.)

Also, to converse development time, we will be re-using tags that I think are of a high enough quality to work well on the map. (Certain bipeds, weapons, vehicles, and possibly BSPs if we can get permission from the original authors will be incorporated.)
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 20, 2011 at 04:10 AM
Edited by evilpineapples on Aug 20, 2011 at 04:37 AM