Halo Maps Forum

Greetings kind and loving halomaps community!
I've been lurking around here for a few months now with no shortage of ideas, but haven't really gotten into the swing of things enough to start barfing out a bunch of content. I'm not particularly new to modding Halo combat evolved, as I know my way around tags and values perfectly well considering I did a lot of work with them while modding Halo for mac. CE is the same basic concept just with a lot of different tools. I've practiced working with Sapien and Guerilla and seem to have gotten somewhat used to them, but I have a series of questions that I'd need answered before I can start making pretty things. If any of you kind fellows could specifically answer my questions or link me to any helpful tutorials I would greatly appreciate it.

1) Tool - While watching multiple tutorials using tool I can copy their command lines exactly (save for individual files and such,) but no tags or maps show up in any of my folders. This could be my fault, however, considering I can't ACTUALLY see my own scenario files in their respective folders unless I want to access them through sapien.

2) Singleplayer maps - I'm hoping to have my first project to be a dynamic singleplayer map but can't find a decent tutorial that explains all the junk you have to get into to have one function properly. I assume this will have a lot to do with scripting and I can always go to the scripting thread to learn how to do all that. However, my current problem involves sapien and some other things. I'm using the stock sapien that comes with the typical HEK, but this thing refuses to open singleplayer maps. Either that or it just takes an ungodly long time and I haven't been patient enough to let it open before I manually quit the application. Second, when creating my first batch of singleplayer maps, I'm wanting to combine a bunch of stock assets before I attempt to model on my own. What I mean by this is that I have looked over all the original Halo BSP models and noticed that most of them end/begin with a door or a hallway before they open up to a new BSP. Let's take the triangular door in the silent cartographer that leads from the island to the lower levels. If I wanted that door to magically open up into one of the c10 bsp's (which use the same door model,) would I have to somehow model them side-by-side in 3Dsmax, somehow? Mainly I just want to know how to correctly place multiple BSPs in a singleplayer map and learn how to trigger a BSP switch.

3) Animations - While I don't plan on creating full blown custom first person animations just yet, I feel like I'd rather start on making some simple third person animations that I can use in cutscenes throughout a single player mission.

These are all the questions that I can remember right now but I'll be sure to get back here if I need help with anything. If someone can direct me to any tutorials or answer my questions directly I'd appreciate the help.