See the shorter 5-minute video of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U34tqeJSGxo

See an 11 minute video of me trying to beat the Silent Cartographer in it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_XqjQryzcM

Note: These videos contain swearing (5-minute video has one bad word in it, 11-minute video contains a lot of swear words), because I am a potty mouth, so I can't make them links because of the forum rules (Sorry!).

Weapons aren't synced yet, just the bipeds. Bipeds are also slightly warpy, but their animations work. Oh, and my keyboard is loud. You will notice that.

You can easily tell that I'm actually hitting the bipeds because you can hear a beeping sound when I damage a biped.

Multiplayer pretty much screws up AI teams, even more so on dedicated servers. Vehicular AI like the covenant turret will spawn on their own team, and will attack all non-vehiclular AI bipeds. Also, all encounters spawn on team index 0 (can be overridden by editing the AI encounter except on the dedicated server - it's always 0 regardless of map data as far as I can see). Map scripts also don't sync very well, only the results of scripts, so this is not very good for complex singleplayer maps. It may be better for Firefight, though.

Yes, these videos feature it running on the Mac version of Halo, but the Halo dedicated server and SAPP runs on Windows, and I'm making a Windows version simultaneously, before anyone says "zomg another tool that only works on mac sooo useless!" and here's a screenshot:



Notice the HAC2 Widescreen fix. I say this because some extensions don't play nice with HAC2, like Open Sauce.


Link to relevant Open Carnage topic:

http://opencarnage.net/index.php?/topic/5231-syncing-biped-location/


I don't have anything released. I've only started working on it, and I'm not testing it right now (I've only tested it with 2 people and I have a lot of work to do with it right now), so it's nowhere near completion.


Edited by 002 on Jul 24, 2015 at 11:49 PM

I'm surprised nobody has posted anything yet :I

Because most of us are waiting for obvious signs of failure before bragging about how syncing AI isnt possible in halo CE.

So how does that program recognize AI motion ?
And so far, for weapon syncing, you could edit the pattern of the AI so that they always use the same pattern before shooting, the same burst length and same error per unit type.

I'm hyped and I hope your work will be successful, it would be a huge benefit to be able to synch AIs properly into Custom Edition :)

but i hope, someday be able to play coop in CE
Edited by Kinnet on Jul 26, 2015 at 08:35 AM

...did you guys even watch those videos?

We did naht.

What exactly is SAPP? Maybe it'll help bringing Warzone maps to H:CE, can't wait to see how this matures :)
Edited by Idaho on Jul 26, 2015 at 04:26 PM

There isn't any hope (that I know of) to have vanilla Halo CE to sync AI. This uses external modification for it to work:

- Clients require a .dll that you place in the CONTROLS folder, similar to HAC2. Note that this means it's automatically incompatible with SAPP Anticheat and likely will not run at all.

- Servers require a .dll that's placed in the correct My Games folder, or wherever the -path variable is set to. It also requires a lua script that loads this dll file as well as communicate with it.


I did actually beat the Silent Cartographer with a friend of mine using an earlier version that didn't sync animations (just location and rotation). Scripts obviously don't sync, but the results of scripts do (non-AI controlled vehicles like Pelicans sync). I picked the Silent Cartographer because it's the simplest level in the game with the least cutscenes. There are the least amount of cutscenes, and two can be skipped entirely (the map room cutscene can be skipped if are fast enough to get through the door before it closes by using a warthog or cheating and modifying your speed with the 's' command, and the Shafted cutscene can be skipped if you don't go to the shaft through the main entrance).

I don't have a ballpark figure for when I'm releasing this or even having public testing, unlike Sparky, who said he planned on syncing AI probably later this month, so I'm not sure if I'll be the first to do this lol.


Edited by 002 on Jul 26, 2015 at 04:38 PM

To show the AIs location and their projectiles, sure, there is things you can do with stock CE. Animations, not so much; you'd have to have each bone as their own object, that ends up being too much network traffic for many AI.

You can choose to either attach-detach vehicles to the AI (which is annoying for a large scale map, like actual SP maps)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7B1pCGqago


Or, the next option, is to use projectiles rather than vehicles, that the AI tags spawn, while having

(set allow_client_side_weapon_projectiles false)

to force the host to tell the clients where all projectiles are.
Its important to not really have overlap on the projectiles existence, and try to manage the total AI in general, since too many projectile creation/deletion effects will eventually bog clients down, starting with making them unable to move.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoMDCw6fFDA

I don't do anything nearly that complex for syncing animations, haha, though it is a bit bandwidth heavy if a lot of objects are doing a lot of things, especially for servers.

Also, I sync location much faster than stock Halo syncs locations (stock Halo only syncs around 2 times a second from my experience).


Edited by 002 on Jul 26, 2015 at 05:57 PM

Its not complex doing it with tags. But yes, yours would be a lot less data to transfer to show the animations as well, since you would just need to check whether its already sent out a packet since this animation started playing, and if it hasn't, what animation index, and what the current frame is. The clients would then just have to start that animation on that frame, and wouldn't need updates on that animation, compared to doing things in the engine using parts, where every update, its sending the entire location of every bit.

But, I don't actually care about the visuals, so for me, whether it shows the animations or not is fairly irrelevant.

Any news on that matter?

Although this would be amazing if it could be achieved, I severely doubt it will.
I think halo ce engine is probably too outdated for this. (But that won't stop people from trying.)

Did halo 3 have syncing ai either? Or was it all client-side?


There will never be co-op sp...

Man, I would be so happy if you get this to work, I would really love to see a co-op version of the campaign, even if it's downgraded

Yes, Halo 3 had online co-op. Up to 4 players.

MC, Arby and two other random elites.

Well the campaign synced, but it was more like game state syncing than actually syncing the ai only.

lets move to cryengine.

I've been working on optimizing the netcode. I'm mainly concerned because map makers will probably want to go overboard with AI and have hundreds and hundreds of AI encounters.




Probably not anytime soon. Co-op campaign would require a LOT more than just AI. Globals can be synced easily - I wrote a SAPP script that retrieves global values by name. Doors and elevators can also be synced, too. The main issue is scripts, which... yeah... I'm not going to bother with co-op right now.
Edited by 002 on Aug 17, 2015 at 11:04 PM

What changes in the map would need to be made for this to work? Or would this just magically work with all maps that have AI?

Right now, it requires an asymmetrical system where the clients have a version of map without the AI, relying on the server to spawn the bipeds for the server, though this may change in the future where I just delete all of the AI encounters upon loading the map. For this more convenient method, it will mean that it won't work on protected maps.

Getting b30.map to work also required importing some multiplayer assets, as well as replace the singleplayer globals tag with the multiplayer one, all done through Eschaton.

Edited by 002 on Aug 18, 2015 at 02:35 PM

Blam enjin best enjin

It would be pretty amazing if you got this to work completely. Good to see the community's still gaining some new members after all this time. (Unless, of course, you're an older member on a newer account.)

I was a part of other Halo communities all this time. I never really had much interest in Halo Maps until very recently. I've released many working tools, such as Flare, a gametype editor that lets you create gametypes with settings that Halo doesn't normally support (e.g. endless CTF, 7 warthogs on red team [the map must support it], etc.). I also made Deathstar Deprotector, though someone uploaded it the Windows version here and tried to take credit, also ripping off my forum post but not including the source code portion of it - so insulting!

Edited by 002 on Aug 22, 2015 at 04:12 PM

Oh you made deathstar? Thanx it was super helpful to me!

And just ignore ppl stealing credit and whatnot.

Ayy fam can you reupload the video? I'm curious how you pulled it off

Hope he posts it. This was my dream as teenager lol