1st post... Avid gamer and Science teacher. I was cruising youtube and found some physics principals taught using halo ce. I have 26 pc's in my room and wanted to use ce to teach some basic stuff. I downloaded HALOBALL and the kids love it. Went over momentum and Newtons laws... Cool stuff. My question is this how hard is it to do a custom ui that would say..." Halo CLASSROOM EDITION... Educational Physics simulator ".. I think it would look so cool and it would kind of legitimize it if I had any admins or teachers say I am just playing games... Could I pay somebody to do it...? I have no idea what it involves hence the post.. Thanks...

Welcome to the forums :)
I have never actually done a UI, but there are a bunch of tuts for that.
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?search=custom+ui&B1=Search
http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?18957-The-Ultimate-Halo-CE-Tutorial-Index

Edited by Maniac1000 on Apr 3, 2012 at 10:59 PM

Also, it would be wise to make sure that the main character has no weapons if you plan on making your own map. I had gotten into trouble with that last year, 4 days before I had graduated from highSchool entirely, and I forewarn you as a teacher that you think of the consequences of using a shooter engine first :)

Four days before graduation, I had modeled an exact replica of my computer programming teachers' classroom. I never learned about the globals.globals tag back then, and because of that, I ended up portaying the idea "I have a gun in a school". I got off with a warning, luckily, since I had never been the kind of person to cause trouble on purpose, I just don't like getting into trouble xD

Wow strict much, but than again my school is hick school and everyone carries knives and chew in their pockets.

Welcome to the forum!

In my opinion I don't think it's too hard to create a custom ui.
However you do need HEK installed and have an image editor available for you.

I assume you want to change the "Halo" logo on the main screen after starting up Halo CE to Halo Classroom Edition.After installing HEK, You can find this bitmap somewhere in "tags\ui\shell\main_menu".
Extract the bitmap using Firescythe's batch bitmap extractor and use an image editing program that supports alpha channels (preferably photoshop) to edit your image to what you want. Save it as a tiff and compile it with tool. If you're new to HEK, it may take a while to get used to, but sometimes people are willing to take requests as well.

I may be able to do it for you, but I don't think you need to pay someone to do this.
Edited by XlzQwerty1 on Apr 3, 2012 at 11:27 PM

Thanks for the reply guys.. I really appreciate the help. I am trying to do what you said but I am having a problem with the image editing program. I don't have photoshop and I can't even open it with the roxio photo editor program that is on this computer. Thanks

I assume you are trying to open the actual .bitmap , these are halo compressed files and need to be extracted.
Use this tool to do that http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=2027

You should save as .tga if you want an alpha channel extracted.
You can then open the image in roxio ( i do not like that program) or gimp or w/e.

Most of what's needed has already been said. Still, welcome.

If you need any help around CE, I can help you personally. I can also model an enviroment for you to work with if you really wanted it. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to utilize this engine as an education tool, but now that I see it happening, I'd love to get involved in it.

You can PM me for contact information if you want my assistance.