https://twitter.com/HaloCEmaps/status/1614852664570806275


https://twitter.com/HaloCEmaps/status/1614854187300552705


Dug up this old account to say goodbye to all the core-memories I made here.

It's been a pleasure.
- DEEhunter/DEElekgolo/Wunkolo

Saw this too. It was a good run. It's definitely gonna be sad to see this forum go. It was my 6th grade through 12th grade core memories. It was the main reason I wanted to do CE3. I'm happy to see it survived this long hopefully someone can backup all the posts so we can go back and see all these fun memories.

-SlowBullet

Damn you're that guy
modacity.avi and Anon_Hate.avi are masterpieces

This place was my introduction to the Halo CE community. So blame this place spawning such unbearable toxic guys like me.

I remember my first account here was around 2009 and my first post was around 2011 demanding people to give me tags that didn't even exist at that time and people didn't act kindly to it and I respond by being a notorious member and surpassed the ones who kept downing me.

Maybe being on here at such a young age was a bad idea, but I made many lifelong friends on this site and not only got to make a bunch of cool stuff with them, but get a headstart into hopefully making a true career out of games.

My favorite memory on this site is making my first post after lurking for a year about how cool it'd be to see a true pre release Halo mod based on Macworld, etc. Only to be bullied by other forum members to play Lumoria (no hard feelings to that mod, it's great). I'm now one of the people working on the Digsite project for MCC. Funny how that stuff works honestly.

Thanks for the memories Dennis! I still use this forum a lot whenever running into the most random of H1EK problems but I know that knowledge will live on through archives at least.

No!! Don't close on my birthday!

Another part of my childhood bites the dust. I understand it's had its time, but it hurts a little to have another reminder I'm getting older. I'll miss the memories I had browsing around the forums for new maps and Halo CE chronicles episodes.

It's hard to summarize nearly 20 years of history in one post like this. I don't mind being the sappy one to come out of the woodwork and try anyway:

Modding Halo in this community was one of the first major technical things I did. I learned all sorts of things here, and I know I'm not alone in that. So many old heads took the skills they learned here and turned them into a whole career.

It wasn't just technical skills either. We learned how to help each other and support each other as a community. We've made life-long friends here, some even closer than family. This place isn't just an invaluable repository of information for modding Halo. For a lot of us, it was one of our first digital homes.

There's a real feeling of loss with the forums closing. An end of an era for sure, but not the end of our community. Things have moved to a few major Discord servers, such as http://discord.reclaimers.net. Modding is still going strong, and a new generation of people are learning cool stuff and making friends.

To Dennis: I respect the hell out of you for keeping this place up as long as you did, and, frankly, putting up with us in general. You'll always be a legend in this community.

I was around 12 when I joined this site, along with the original Gearbox forums, the original Halomods, and Halomaps.co.uk. Sad to see them all go.

Donut's right, this place was a digital home to a lot of us, and it had an indescribable impact. This place and community were a catalyst to foster creative and technical passions that we're still pursuing to this day. I'll never forget the friends, the game nights and beta tests, or the innumerable conversations into the early-morning hours that grew from this community. I think it's hard to overstate, even if it sounds corny, that this place really did affect the trajectory of people's lives. I know it did for mine. It enriched my adolescence during a time when I really, really needed it. This place was lightning in a bottle for me.

I think about all the art that got made, mediocre and great - simply because people realized that it was within their power to do so after seeing others like themselves do it here - and it honestly gets me emotional. That's the legacy this place has in my heart; that it added something positive to people's lives, and to the world. Yes it's "just" a site centered on modding a military shooter. But beneath the surface was a group of people driven to create for the love of creating.

Dennis, I'll always be grateful for what you did for us, and I'll always remember that this place grew out of a desire to give your nephew and kids like 'em a place to find maps to play around in. I hope that you've found some peace knowing you did something really special for a lot of people. I hope you're doing well these days.

To me, Halomaps will never be dead, just missing in action.

o7

https://c20.reclaimers.net/ has been super valuable to me when making vkblam. I would inspire anyone here to commit their knowledge to the wiki or somewhere indexable so that it isn't all just lost when the forums go down. Just something to capture some of the information on this forum in an indexable way that isn't a discord server. 🙏

I have archived the entire Halomaps forum. I'm going to keep updating the archive until the forums close, then I'll post the download here: https://gist.github.com/Mimickal/3d3b3258c61ef2d4a86e4475b065787d

I essentially crawled the entire site and had it render out each page's HTML (sorry for slamming the server, Dennis). Obviously functions like search won't work with this raw dump, but things like topic and post IDs have been preserved, so somebody (probably me) could write a basic read-only backend for browsing the content more easily.

Halo Maps is responsible for my entire career path. Without this community, I'd have no idea what I'd be doing now. Halomaps provided me a hobby and a skill set to make it through university and ultimately halo maps helped land me a job in the game industry. I wouldn't have explored coding and 3D art, met all my university friends/connections, or even appreciate halo as much as I do without this place. Most importantly, I wouldn't have gotten to meet all of you guys who supported each other to create wonderful content. Or just added to drama haha .
Either way I'm happy to have lived thru all of this with you guys.

Dennis, if there is anyway you can keep the forums on a view-only state I believe that will help people who are still in the growing MCC Halo CE modding community. We love this forum and I think it can continue to be a place of knowledge and appreciation, even if its just as a stop for google search results. This forum does and can continue to help modders, even if it gathers dust.

I'd also like to say I respect the years of interesting experiences you strongly stood to witness and moderate Dennis. While at times a rough job, you truly did helped an entire community grow.

I'm happy to have known all of you. Good times and bad times, it has been more than well worth it.


wrist watch, with the map editor

<insert kirby occasionally posts>

I'm most surprised that Dennis hasn't said anything here on the forums, that people apparently had to go to other sites to learn, and he still hasn't responded to this thread.

Any clue if halomaps any got any GDPR compliant stuff implemented? In particular, the "what does this site know about you, data dump" part? Would probably be nice for archiving purposes.

For contacting me,
Google Chat (Was hangouts, and even earlier on, Google Talk): heath.caswell@gmail.com
Steam (Don't have it open as often as I should lol) https://steamcommunity.com/id/kirby_422/
Discord Kirby_422#9298

Will miss you all. Been chilling on these forums since April 2005.

Are there alternative forums out there?
Has anyone done any crawling and preservation of tutorials and help threads?

Discord: Monk#1732
Github: unmonk

Welcome home - for a little while.

I'll miss posting here a lot.

- - - -

With the way most of halomaps's discords are set up it's like the same 8 people are in charge of ALL of them it's why I never post anywhere or stay joined-up anymore. A forum is an excellent archive and it's sad to see one potentially go.

At least you'll have your freedom from the chore of keeping halomaps clean, Dennis :D

It was a great past ~12 years for me on the forums. I learned a lot from some of the best minds in the community, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to have worked along side of many of you.

I wish everyone here the best in your future endeavors.

Pepzee

It was a great run everyone! Thank you all for the fond memories!

GitHub: Nickzster
Discord: Nickster#5000

It was a real pleasure all these years, a part of my childhood is going away today. What a ride when you think about it!

Thank you for everything, to all of you, for all that you have brought to this community! I wish you all the best and all the happiness in the world! As we say in French "à jamais dans nos coeurs"

Tom,

I wasn't here for much of this forum's life-span, but quite an amount of useful tools such as Adjutant, Mo's Editing Kit Essentials, Reclaimer along with some tips and the one full-extraction of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary's audio were here for me to find & make what use out of them I could.

Cheers for the help, folks!

It's such a shame that the day finally came, especially considering discord groups are private and will always be inferior to just googling "[Error] site:halomaps.org" and getting a solution.

I wish I had my original account from way back in the day, this site along with Halo CE shaped who I am today on a level deeper than almost any other life event thanks to the people I met over the years and the things I learnt.

Thanks to Dennis for keeping it up this long, even if he gave up eventually. We will always remember you <3 (Especially through that one outdated UXB Internet pic from like 2005)

Just... Please, don't take the whole site down. This is a monument to all our sins, after all.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Discord: Hispa#2199 (Until I get banned again, if so just ask around for me)

Trying to think of something to write.. However, I feel all of the above posts is a good summary for me as well. While my mapmaking-career never amounted to much, I did make some great memories and friends. Have been thinking for a while to open up some of my old unfinished projects and maybe, just maybe, complete them. Maybe it is for the best that I never will get to it!

I was a great, and interesting, run!

I suppose it was only a matter of time. Halo Custom Edition is probably my favourite and most played game ever, so many great memories of all the maps and modes - more than I could fit in a single post - and it's all thanks to the community that was built in places such as this. A shame that these kind of forums have been disappearing for quite a while now, there's a real bit of magic to them that the other forms of social medias don't quite replicate.

To think that the knowledge, all the little inside jokes and drama will be gone...






Thanks for the good times, Dennis.

I'll never forget this place.

Thanks Dennis for changing my name years back to what it is now, seriously. Never thought it possible due to all other sites be like....No....

At least the site to download maps will still be up. (which I was currently doing before)

Damn- hearing the news about it kinda makes me sad

I may not have been here for long and with this account's purpose only to interact with other forum posts, it's still sad to see that a lot of this will be gone by then

Hope yall do well, and I want yall to know that the works you've done and the maps and mods made for this community had been a part of my childhood

Ah, damn. I knew it would come eventually but it still feels jarring. It's strange to think I spent a decent chunk of my childhood here, and then I find myself hanging around again after so many years; just in time to watch it disappear.

After spending way too much time on this stuff as a kid, it's probably been the main inspiration of my current career path in IT + hobby 3D stuff. I definitely wasted a ton of time here/on halo that I could have spent doing way more important things in my life, but at least I had fun and hopefully the foundations I learned here will keep me going in my field.
Best wishes to you Dennis, everyone I knew back in the day, and any newer people who've come here recently. Hope to see you all in the reclaimers Discord now that I've been invested in halo modding again recently.

Thanks to all of you guys for the memories, no matter how dumb it got here at points.

(also, thank you dennis for putting up with my dumb kid self.i just came across this screencap that someone took a long time ago of something i posted when I was like 12 and i am deeply sorry 😅. glad that account got purged though, i dont think i want to be graced with whatever awful posts my kid self left before then lol)

Man, it was a good run.
Ty everyone for the memories!

Well, had to happen eventually. The creativity and support in this community over the years has been beyond inspiring, and I'm grateful to have been a part of it. Though the activity here may now be a drop in the bucket of what it once was, it amazes me how many of us have been here for so long ans still return. It's incredible to see familiar names still out there creating content for this old game to this day, seeing your skills develop and improve. Even the trolls who got banned the instant they returned. Thank you Dennis for providing this platform for us, surely this community alone has had an enormous affect on many of our lives.

Halo Maps Forum members,

I celebrated my 69th birthday at the end of last month. So there, now you know how old I am. Many of you have asked over the years, and until now, I've declined to say. I tell you now because age is part of the reason I've decided to shut down the forum. I'm tired. When you catch up to me, you'll know what I mean. But most of all, the hardware running the web forum, while aging well - something I can't say about myself - is out of date and needs to be retired. The amount of effort it will take to upgrade is cumbersome and time-consuming. Did I mention that I'm tired?

The web forum may be going away, but I'm not. All the other Halo Maps websites, the Portal website, and of course, UXB Internet are still alive and active and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. I am not retiring, heading out of the pasture, or off to the old folks home. Not yet, anyway. But I am winding down. I decided to spend my time on something I have always wanted to do.

These past few years, living through the pandemic has given me time to reassess. To think more. To ascertain what I want. I was lucky. The pandemic didn't take any of my family, and working from home, getting vaccinated, and wearing a mask the few times I ventured out in public kept me safe, which was not so for some of you. I am sorry for your loss. While I didn't lose anyone in the family, nine people I knew, five of whom I called friends, are no longer with us. And I miss them. No matter how long you live, life is too short.

As strange as it may sound, I will miss you sociopathic reprobates arguing over game cannon, whose tags are better, or whether you can reliably sync AI bots in a multiplayer game (you can't). But you've grown up now, so I hope you will understand that the forum no longer serves the purpose it once did. And I wish to exert my limited energy on another pursuit that doesn't involve mediating or moderating 12 and 16-year-olds. Or anyone, for that matter. There's that tired thing again. It must be a theme.

If you've read this far and I've written this correctly, by now, you are asking yourself, what's this other thing? I have written two (unpublished) novels and am working on a third. This is a new departure for me, and I am learning as I go. They are both currently under revision, so it will be a while before they are available. I'm not at that point yet, but I will be looking for beta readers to offer feedback on the stories. If you are interested in being a beta reader, follow me on Twitter at @DennisMPowers. That is where I'll be making announcements.

Thanks for participating in the forum, and I'm glad some of you have good memories of your time here. I'm not as active online anymore. I still play video games – L4D2, Borderlands (2&3), Minecraft, and No Man's Sky. A lot of No Man's Sky. I promised I'd keep the file archive active and intend to keep my promise as long as possible.

It's not So long. I'm still here. But Thanks for all the Fish!

It's been a good run Dennis, hope to see what your future endeavors bring.

For the rest of you? We always knew this was going to happen eventually, but this place is/was a massive influence for all of us. A lot of us are still kicking around in places like Reclaimers or HaloMods.

Personally, I'm around on Discord and Twitter. Handle for the latter is @R93_Sniper (I don't have open requests for discord so no point)

See you guys around

Bump

Just wanted to start my last post here with that.


This place was and is truly special.

I'm glad to have found Halomaps, I remember having crazy games on Extinction and seeing crazy personalities on the forums. The memes are priceless. The memories are priceless.

But it's important to know if the things you're holding on to aren't actually the things holding you back. In that sense I have great respect for you Dennis that at your age you continue to have new pursuits.

Really proud to have had one release, even if it was a -blam!-ty tag. Much more important than that, however, is that I got to voice act in Takedown Extermination!


If people ever accuse me of being too harsh and critical of my students, I'm pointing my finger right here to show them where I learned it from.

I've only found a few snapshots of the forums, but only sharing one, this one is by far my favorite: https://live.staticflickr.com/8662/15788070717_634bdf7258_b.jpg


"Any time you've enjoyed wasting is not wasted time."

#LongLiveFRMT
rip xfire

Honestly you were never that bad. Just viewed as annoying by a couple few in the beginning and after catching a bad rep people assumed the worst. I remember working together with you a few times years ago and it was always a pleasure, sorry that the forums and community overall drove you and many others away over the years.

I joined this forum when i was 12. I spent so much time here or on skype with freinds. Im going to miss it because it was a big part of my life growing up. 15 years later, its been a good run. Thanks dennis for all the years of putting up with us no matter how annoying we would get at times (the wrisTWATch debacle comes to mind)

This place was a jumpoff point for so many people, a lot of whom im glad to still call freinds and hang out with on the regular.

Halomods has a discord that ill reccomend, its the most populated if anyone from here still wants to lurk and see whats going on, reclaimers is also an option. Strangely a lot of people post on twitter too.

Either way. I geuss this will be my last post here

Thanks for everything Dennis. This place was where so many of us grew up, and you provided a stable, reliable place to learn, discuss, and figure out how to interact with other people online. Certainly many of us needed that practice! Your contributions to this community can never be overstated.

Good luck with your novels, and thanks again for all the memories!

-Siliconmaster/Br0nto

Halo Custom Edition is and will always be the best Halo game. Maybe one day MCC will allow mod maps in the custom game browser and introduce auto-map-downloading so we can relive that experience. That would be cool.

seeyaround

It's sad to see the forums go. I've lurked here since the mid-late 2000s and can't express enough how much I appreciate all the work & effort people put into the modding done here. I learned a lot and had a lot of problems solved/issues avoided thanks to the strong community that was going here.

Also wow, a lot of people coming back from the dead in this thread. Never thought I'd see some of these names again. I doubt many of the oldies in here even know me, but I've been around here the whole while and man if any of you are reading this just know I, and anyone else from back then who didn't have a name for themselves in the era, greatly appreciate & respect all the real foundational modding work that was done before we ended up picking up modding ourselves instead of just playing them.


First of all, obligatory "Nice."
Onto the meat, I can't thank you enough for all the work you've put into the site as a whole. Way back in the day of unstable download standards this site was my saving grace of being able to play custom content for Halo CE, as I lived in a region where my internet was not stable enough for most things & could barely play Halo CE online, as most websites/hosts of the era would frequently fail downloads because they themselves were not stable either. Halomaps was always here, and was always reliable for being able to complete downloads of maps. The era of waiting three hours for an h3_rippedbsp_v1-beta2-test7.rar file is long gone but the memories will never fade.