Twinreaper

I'd be willing to help out. Not sure what I could do but I am up for anything. Edit****!!!! I was doing wash and I came up with a real good first episode with all the dialog and shots planned out. I'm going to write a script for it up and send it to you. See what you think, and let me know.

^^ Completely true. If you go back and watch the 10 year VidOC released, you hear Marty and Joe talking about it. They state they needed to release another game before Reach that would not take long to put together, but at the same time, not make the community feel cheated. As Marty stated, the entire game used brand new assets and music...something they DIDN'T want to do, but alas...it ended up turning into a full fledged title by the end of production. If anything, this is the one good title I would desperatly like to see brought to the markeyplace. My son sold our H3 and ODST copies to get Black Ops....DOH!!!! and a half!

Lmao I'm a thumb sucker.....rofl The person above me has pretty pink panties on that compliment his arse nicely. (never where a short skirt when above me) The person below me has a grunt for a best friend.

Wow, only looking for one name. Go ahead keep making yourself looking like a jack-ass. Did you even bother to look over any of the sites I provided as examples of where I have been? Oh yeah that's right, your just mad cause someone spanked you. You couldn't even come up with valid arguments for anything I stated before. But that's ok kid, keep posting...it's funny as hell. Hey Spectral, Bubonic, Serene, Vore and G00n......wanna join the discussion?

Couldn't agree more with most of everything you posted up Bubonic. Good to see we still have the same standpoint. One thing that does bothe rme, is how quick people are to point to B-Net when they referrence the "community". The community of Halo players has thousands of outlets. Bungie is just simply one of them. Cheesey, if you are properly going to try to correct a truth that Bubonic provided, then you first need to look at a broad majority of all the Halo sites and their content. I've seen Bubonic around for a while, always glad to help and give proper truth feedback. Don't bash him cause you don't agree. Be a little mature than that. As for how people describe their wants.....it lacks. Bubonic, and a few others from what I have seen, are the only ones who put enough thought and explanation into what a game needs. most of what I see is simple stuff like, "just because" or "it'll make it better". Before adding silly suggestions, you need to have a good idea of what is broken exactly, why it is broken and how you can simply fix it without too much programming overhead. That aside, I don't really care to add anything outside what the developer already has in mind. If 343 was really that hard up for ideas or ways to improve the game, don't you think they would come out and ask for it? I'm fine with whatever they decided to do. I will adapt and move forward as I always have. But if I did have to request one thing for Halo 4.....it would be no remake maps and 100% raw brand spanking new map layouts and terrain. No regarbled crap from previous titles.

Ok, right off the bat you do know that the 360 is a gaming console right? It's library of code called xenonlib, contains full featured code of DX9 and DX10 as well as other proprietary dll functions. The 360 does not emulate anything. Every game made for the 360 uses the code library to create compatable assets. You simply can't just emulate anything of that magnitude. You call it a "keycode". Judging from the myriad of unused technical definitions on your end in reply to my post, you obviously have no clue as to how the Blam! file encryption or encodeing is handled at all. Halo 3 and Reach use an encryption scheme called "public and Private" keypair. This exclusive keypair is what enables them to create and sign maps that can be verified and loaded by Blam! Even using MegaloScript, they cannot stop the core function of Blam! from checking or refusing to load added maps or assets. On top of that, following the tech heirarchy of the engines, each tag is specifically encrypted on top of overall map encryption. Giving us dev tools that allow to do these things at home allows the community the ability to open, change and replace map files at will. There is reason why they don't give this to us....it's not just because they want to be dicks. And no, they can't just go and make a program that bypasses this stuff. These are hardcoded engine snippets. The only way to bypass it would be to release a seperate engine along side the retail one. Which at that point, divides the game into 2 player bases...the custom and console straight. You think they want to develop 2 different versions side by side? The short answer...no. Next point, stop referrencing the original Xbox and Halo 1. None of that matters in terms of the tech advances of the newer Blam! engines and consoles. Halo 1 and the original Xbox are universes apart in how they manage memory, handle graphics etc... Halo didn't even utilize 40% of what the Xbox was capable of when it was out. Memory issues were non-existant then. In Halo 2 however, the lag and frame rate was obvious when we used new items and new assets. halo 2 pushed the Xbox to it's close limit. If you were a modder of Halo titles, you should know this very well. I was a part of the modding community since it all started back in halo 1 when IronForge and Steelix were in the heyday. I stayed a part of the community but decided to specialize in Halo 2. I've done bsp conversions noone else could, created new tag assets, and helped various members throughout the gaming community. Go ahead and poke around Halomods, Remnantmods, rework3d, halomaps and Monstrmoose. Tons of people know of me and my work. I still do map making and other things for the H2MT at Monstrmoose for Halo 2 PC even now. As for your lame example of a ten year old sniper projectile swap...lame. Is that best you could do? And don't try to pass that off as a good example of why we have a Needle Rifle. Thats just BS. A better example of community modding that gave ideas to Bungie would be the SP map use in multiplayer. For the longest time we converted SP maps to be used as mp and made them into stand alone playgrounds. Also since Halo 2's end, we yearned for a chance to play from the vantage point of the marines and ODST...hence Halo 3 ODST. Those are good examples. I can post names of community members till the month ends, but I find it much more satisfying to have you go to some websites and look for me there. It's not worth my time to prove myself to a half assed douch like you who is still stuck comparing future and present Halo titles to Reach and upcoming Halo 4.

ODST was hands down one the greatest if not the greates campaign to date. The whole thing was picture perfect. Not one time did I fail to realize what was happening. Bungie did not make ODST for money, they wanted to show what happened between halo 2 and Halo 3, but from the perspective of earth's own ground forces while MC was away. Marty did a fantastic job with the music and the levels were awesome. And yes, without ODST we would not have the firefight we have now. More than likely we would have the firefight of then in Reach. A second ODST based on several pivotal moments throughout the Halo 2 and Halo 3 era would be awesome!!!

Well, you can forget about Halo 2 ever coming back to the 360 as it was. In order to have Halo 2 in its original form back on the 360, would require a reworked emulator. The emulator needed would have to be re-written and re-issued just to stay compliant with the most current "xenonlib" of 360 resources. The only sole reason Halo CE got a re-make is becuase it is the game that started it all. It was a milestone in FPS's that went down in history. The only thing that Halo 2 did that was really great, was jump start what we know know as Xbox Live. Other than that, it was the rushed half assed sequel of a great game. It's the truth. Giving Halo 2 a makeover would require a lot longer than it took to do Halo CE. Not only but that, but you also have to look at possible game engine compatablility issues. Blam! from CE was basic and simple. The 2nd generation of Blam! is much more sophisticated and poses a much more threat to compatability. Also, there really isn't much they could add into Halo 2 in terms of special extras like they did with halo 1. From the start halo 1's story was clouded in mystery. You didn't get anywhere near half the backdrop or intel on everything that you did in halo 2. Now don't get me wrong, I would not mind at all seeing Halo 2 running the newest shader template and particle physics, but it just isn't worth while enough for M$ to devote another 2 years + just to pull it off. But who knows....

Lets not forget that 343 worked with Bungie during the development of Halo Reach. This was stated many times over during various VidOCs and interviews. Hating on Reach or lack there of in Reach, is like trowing a pie in the faces of 343 as well. They are compentant folks and will carry on with Halo just as good as Bungie. Don't worry be happy!

Ok, since I am experienced Halo modder from the old school days of 2003 I'll chime in on this. First off to above poster a few lines, comparing Halo to Unreal is idiotic. They are 2 way completely different engines that use way off the chart different formats for handling content and format encryption. Plain and simple to the point, allowing us, the community to have in our hands not only the development tools for creating custom content, we would also be required to have several other parts of information and tools that can end up being completely disatrous for the entire community and live. Said content is as follows... 1. Pro dev tools. There is a reason we don't get them. They are unrestricted and proprietary. 2. Using dev tools to communicate with our consoles like the 360, would require us to have complete unlocked access to the nand, hypervisor and cpu/dvd keys or any other hardware specific encryption. 3. Said dev tools would also require us to have in our possession the same Public and Private key pair, that allow game files to be properly encrypted and run, the same exact way as our purchased store disc content. Now because we would have in our possession everything we need to make new map files or assets "legal" to the eys of tthe game engine and console, this also allows people to properly re-encrypt and replace core game files. It opens up too many cans of worms. Halo CE was a completely different beast from what you are asking. CE had knockoff tools that ressembled the pro ones, but lacked official support or any "real" non-watered down key features. Furthermore, just getting these tools would require roughly 9 months of standalone programming. In addition, these same tools would have to be made to use the current game used graphics code. In Halo 4's case it would more than likely be DX12 or higher. Now, a majority of the community is not going to have a PC that runs DX12 or a X64 OS with enough horsepower to turn the gears of the dev tools. No developer would want to restrict the creation of assets to a mere 10% of it's core gaming community. Crytek tried this with Crysis 2, and there was a huge backlash because there was no X86 or lower spec computer support. Lastly, lets be real honest. Most gamers think they can create, rig and animate game assets. Everyone thinks they are modding or asset creating gods. But in all honesty, most of the things I have seen or helped people with have all turned out horrible. I can count on one hand, how many actually decent rigged biped or vehicles I have seen in my near 10 years of modding Halo. Oh and I almost forgot......if you were to have custom content on the console, how do suppose you would go about making this content memory friendly? Didn't think about that did you? Every asset in a Halo game is usually located insode of one of the 2 or three resource" maps. This is donr so the game can flow at a smooth pace without having to constantly freeze up and load unload assets in the memory buffer. Adding completely new things to a game that utiizes this archetecture would be game suicide. Load times would be excrutiating. Think about all these things first hard, then reply with a few "how I am wrongs" And just for you Eos, here is the official pro /con on it.. Pros: - User created assets, maps, etc... - Replay value. Yes it can provide years of variable gameplay - Inspiration. Future titles could get ideas from what we have made. Cons: - Lack of sequel gaming due to re-making sequel assets. We see it CE with Reach stuff everyday. - All your hard work becomes property of Microsoft. No cred, no rights no nothing. - Spike in pirating of 3rd party development applications. 3dsmax and maya aint free you know? - Cheating. Show me once, where public use of pro dev tools hasn't lead to this. - Endless pages of utter crap to sort thru to find one or 2 good things to play. - Hardware capable of utilizing and running a server that collects, syncs and distributes stats standalone from Live and service record API's. I can go on but I'm getting sleepy....

I absolutely hate the thought of playing remake maps. But if I did want to see a new version of some old classics, my list would be broken down into 10 maps total..... Halo 1: Infinity, Gephyrophobia, Danger Canyon and Ratrace Halo 2: Colossus, Burial Mounds and Foundation Halo 3: Construct, High Ground and Narrows Although to be completely honest, I think Bungie had done the multiplayer maps correctly in the fact that they used great looking and well layed out pieces of sp maps for multiplayer. There are so many ares from all the previous Halo titles that would make better playing grounds than nay remake they could ever dish out. Hell, half of the greatest areas have either been done thru bsp conversions in Halo 2, or brand new bsp's in Halo 2 PC. If 343 wants to do something new but still re-makish for maps...go back and look thru every halo's SP maps and do one of them. It worked for Reach didn't it?

No problem. If you ever need to know anything about specific assett or engine mechanics, don't hesitate to ask. Hope to see you online soon man! And if your still over in Afghan, stay safe and thanks for doing what you do everyday in the name of the United States.

Yeah, the rate of fire is going to be a main sticking point. But from what I have uncovered about the tweaks...it is already written in stone, on how the scripts are handling the changes. The question remains...how much of it can they tweak without drastic adverse effects on the other data fields? I'm with you in hoping that they can and will reduce the rate of fire on the DMR. The pistol however, I dont mind. but they should have left that alone and just tweaked the damage levels of it. When comparing the way it fires to the H1 pistol, they are more similar at default.

First off bro, these guys don't get bloom. They actually still think that the blooming reticule on the screen is why the weapons fire the way they do. Dead wrong. You can find info on bloom directly from frankie over at Bungie.org. They did an interview with him on the Title Update and he tells you just what bloom is more or less. But anyway, I'll explain it all out for you. And yes, this information is rock solid and pulled directly out of Reach's tags and data fields.... Bloom: Bloom is a function of the HUD (heads up display). This feature is responsable for the conrracting and expanding of the aiming reticule. Bloom has been a feature of the HUD since Halo 3. The purpose of bloom, is to give players a real time indication of what area they can expect their shots to land. Bloom does not nor did it ever control where the wepaon fires. Bloom gets it's vector, or "blooming" from data in the [weap] tag. [Weap]: This is how "weapon" looks when browsing a tag layout in halo title. The weapon tag is where all wepaon functionality is stored. In the weapon tag, you can find data on what we call "attachments", "Firing effects", "projectile" used, "models, "fp_animations" and a lot more stuff. The particular fields in which bloom gets it's movment data from are the following fields in the weapon tag are..... (some are named differently actually) "fire recovery time"- the amount of time before a next shot can be fired "distribution angle" - the total amount of spread available for projectiles "error angle" - the amount of increased spread. usually a small number for "minimum", then usually the total angle for the "maximum" "distribution function" - controls if the projectile is normal, or fires in other patterns like "fan" The remaining factors that are given to the blooming reticule from the [proj] tag, or "projectile". Hopefully this isn't too technical and gives you a better understanding of what bloom is. Now in terms of new maps, yes Reach is getting new maps. CEA will not have any type of stand alone multiplayer experience outside of co-op campaign. This was done so that 343 did not end up dividing the player base up. The TU does make the DMR fire like the Battle Rifle, but the amount of power it has depends on if they tweaked the default damage responses. If you are talking about just basic removal of blooming reticule, then no. it still has the same amount of power behind every shot as it always did. The pistol yes, has been tweaked to deliver more damage per shot that it had before the TU.

Ugh, you guys still dont get the bloom thing do you? Take a look at an official interview with frankie. he addresses the bloom and what it is. He goes on to explain it the same way I have always explained it to you guys. The bloom is a reticule only visual and in no way is responsable for how the weapon fires. The TU that everyone is so fond of, is not only stopping the reticule from blooming, but it is also adjusting the "error cone" or firing radius of the weapon. It's been discovered, that the new script function they have released with the TU uses about 7 new scripted floats that override the original wepaon tag values. These 7 floats are what are making the wepaons act the way they are, not bloom. And since when does bloom have anything to do with recoil? Since when was recoil ever an issue in any Halo game ever?!? Reach is the first time ever, people even thought to bring this up. I still don't get what the major issue is though. I see a lot of people always quick to compare H2/H3 gameplay to Reachs', but you simply can't do that. No Halo title plays like the one before it. Everything about the gameplay mechanics, physics and handling is different. I get it, that a lot of people don't like the direction reach took, but it is no different than the way Halo 3 took a different path than H2, or the way halo 2 is completely worlds apart from H1. Everyone will always have a varying opinion when it comes to these types of things. And because opinions differ so much, that is why it is important from a developers aspect to not let peoples opinions dictate core functions of a game engine. Doing so would cause more outrage and varying opinions. In the end it would end up being an endless battle of back and forth and that battle would take massive amounts of time and money to fund. We got exacrtly the game we paid for with reach. Again, you say the beta, you played the beta, and you read about everything they were putting into the game before it came out. if just now, a year later you realize you made a bad purchase, that is on you, not the developer. And personally I dont like your default / purist addition in that post. you the hell are you to decide what is right and wrong? Little arogant there don't you think? Gamews mean different things to everyone, and yes those opinions should all be respected. But don't say things like "respect", then blatently catogorize people like "default" or "purist". It makes one group out to be superior to the other.

No, you are taking this the wrong way completely. What I was trying to say is, that you had a choice before you decided to play the game. You were well aware of what to expect in terms of game play and physics. Coming in here almost a year, or now a year later and complaining about things you don't like is a bit childish. If you really had a problem with these things before, why did everyone wait till now to speak up about in the masses like they are doing now? I am in no way calling Reach perfect. Every game has it's flaws and I can personally point out tons of flaws in the code and game assets. All I am trying to do is state a fact, the game was created to encapsulate everything Bungie ever wanted to throw into a Halo game. They didn't make it for us, it was more for them. Is that a bit selfish...yes. But I hardly expect someone else to come in a clean up a mess that someone else made. On a side note, everyone wants to keep barking at 343 to fix Reach. Do you realize what happens when 343 gets enough of these hate and fix it mails from the community? Eventually MS comes down and tells 343 to fix what is requested due to popular demand to keep the bucks flowing in. At that point, this takes away development resources from future titles. And on another side note, Reach or the game in general is not just another piece of software that can be fixed. You should research the particular version of the engine used in Reach as well as the MegaloScript handling before you label it as simple software that can be fixed. The reticule bloom fix alone requires an additional script of commands to change 7 float point values of a weapon just to achieve it. Allowing people to adjust it manually in-game for customs is out of the scope of MegaloScript. Most of the fixes this community has demanded would require core engine fixes. Do you really want to go and buy a new 1.5 game disc for another $59.99?

Unfortunatly it is a vast majority of the community experiencing these problems, and 343 themselves can do little about it. Much of the problem is derived from the vast amount of data that the 360 unit has to collect and forward on udp ports to the Live Reach servers for stats and what not. Since the beginning, there was lag in all matches, but not as noticeable. From what I have been able to review and look at, most of the problem is coming from the TU that has been released to the wild. First thing you have to understand is how the TU works. The TU is basically a set of commands being issued in the form a script from the MegaloScript portion of the Blam! engine. This additional set of scripts overrides cor tag values on weapons, attributes and many other things. This not only causes an abnormal spike in processing, but also an additional drain on bandwidth, since now there is additional items that need to be synced to all players. The only way to overcome any of these issues, would be for 343 to cut down the amount of insignificant data collected and displayed on ones service record, and or better write the code used to initialize the TU changes.

That is quite a good guess, but I am still not sure about it all. Once we actually get it next month, I plan on writing a map handler so I can start uncovering more in depth, tag and string ID value tables. Hopefully, I will be able to uncover enough about the tag encryption to do this. If they are using the same tag name encryption scheme they did with Reach.....then it will be a while before I can post any usefull data in terms of how different each mode is and why.

They do sound fantastic. It's hard to believe the drastic improvement. I am curious though if they just ran the original sounds from Halo CE and Reach thru a post processor, and tweaked some of the sound tag reverb settings. Or did they completely go back and create brand neew sounds for it. Still, very amazing stuff. If this is what they churned out for a simple re-make... imagine what Halo 4 is gonna sound like!!!

Hey Anteraan, if you knew anything about the tag structure of Reach, MegaloScript, or any other Halo title, you would know that that the game engine doesn't use a random generator, nor does random numbers have anything to do with bloom. Do you know what exactly bloom is? Or are you just spamming around trying to get your post count up? I know the mechanics of the game systems incorporated into Halo and the Blam! engines. As for your little poke at luck... Here are a few actual dictionary definitions of luck.... explain how they apply to to Halo after reading my explanation as to how they don't.... 1. events that are beyond control and seem subject to chance; fortune 2. an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that causes an event to result one way rather than another; "bad luck caused his downfall"; "we ran into each other by pure chance" 3. the state of happening by chance And chance.... 1. The unknown and unpredictable element in happenings that seems to have no assignable cause 2. A force assumed to cause events that cannot be foreseen or controlled; luck 3. An accidental or unpredictable event Chance nor Luck apply to Halo. Luck as stated and widely accepted, would suggest that during gameplay, noone has control of set variables or reactions to eachothers actions, but rather an outside unseen variable. This of coarse is not true, since I can show you many lines of extracted netcode data and show you all operations and variables. There are no magical generated ones. Chance also like luck, has no hand in any video game. There are no unpredictable events or elements. All of those things are hard coded into the game and or engine. Even a random number generator is not luck or chance. If you know the syntaxes being used, you can equate the same generation of numbers as the computer, AI etc... Just because most of the time, you fail to notice the miniscule amount of vector your shot is actually aimed at and lost the battle, does not constitute it being luck or chance in the opponents favor. You just simply didn't have the shot lined up as accuratly as the guy who gave you a new breathing hole. People just need to accept the fact that they are not perfect. Man is flawed and makes mistakes, it takes a true man to admit he made a mistake. Boys just cry about how it's unfair and how things should change to be in their favor. Thanks for reading folks. Enjoy the rest of your day! Reaper out!

I can give one good solid reason why all of the things in reach are good ideas....because Bungie said so. From the very start they made it very clear to everyone, that Reach was going to be a game THEY WANTED TO DO ALL THE THINGS THEY EVER WANTED TO ADD IN A HALO GAME! I'm sorry, but everyone had plenty of time to read up and learn the game. It's been over a year now, and still you expect someone else to fix up some things you knew from the start you didn't like or thought were bad? Do you same people go back to a car dealer a year later and demand they update your ride because you don't like certain things about the manufactured vehicle, like how long the gas peddle is? Or how hard the seats are? Simple answer to that is no. You deal with it. You do your research about it before you get to the lot and purchase it. Same principles apply to Reach. Do you ever really go to a game store and just pick a game up based on the cover art, then cry about how poor the game is after you play it? That's just crazy. You all read things, you all played the beta. Get over it and sit down.

Syndicate, bloom is not the real issue here. the issue is how they tied the blooming reticule adjustment into adjusting the firing spread of the dmr and other weapons. Bloom itself just shows you how much of a cool down period there is between shots before the system increases the radius of the weapons spread. All they did was make the firing radius and timing adjustable in an easy way that even the community could understand. It takes too much time to efficiently describe and corollate all the tag specific data and mechanics to properly explain the system ina way that a majority of players would accept. Just for ease of understanding, zero bloom just gives the DMR, Pistol etc, a more battle rifle firing effect. it adds nothing to skill, just allows you to pound the trigger without any negative side effects. Aiming is little issue, as the "hitboxes" for the heads is slightly greater than that of the previous titles. Having a firing radius that expands and contracts based on how you fire the weapon, makes it require more skill. There is no such thing as luck in a video game or life. Luck is term used to explain the end product of a certain chain of events that have played out without 100% knowledge of the observer or participant. True luck would imply that life or a game has no set variables or rules ruling actions and effects.

Seeing this post really made me miss the one thing that used to keep these awesome players around..... CLANS! It is the single most useful function that was ever added to a Halo game. It really helped make Halo 2 that much better. Let's face it, it's hard to keep your friends list from reaching it's max. Adding the clan feature back would help combat this and also keep like minded players like snipers, more organized and together. I completely agree. Hey 343, show some love for Snipers and Clans again!!!!