Twinreaper

As far as I know, the server listing and Live interactive license service for H2V is still down.

Irrelevant. Skill or play ability has NOTHING to do with the problem he is describing. To add to it real quick, by quitting your not messing anyone up. To assume you are negatively effecting the team you left, one would have to assume that YOU would be a major contributer to the match, and that the rest of your teammates suck. Secondly, who cares? Not since Halo 2 have I actually EVER played any type of team match where the team actually functioned as a team or communicated in any real way. Team play now or days is nothing more than a bunch of glorified Lone Wolves who happen to have the same team color and affiliation. There is a reason why we have playlists and why they exist. It is for the sole reason to allow players to choose the game mode or set of match types they WANT to play. Having a game mode such as Breakout being listed inside a secondary playlist when it has it's own playlist is really redundant. You can argue that maybe people just want to play a mix bag of game modes without having to lobby hop, but let's be honest....lobby hopping takes no more real time, than sitting through the wait time for a match to start or line-up all the participants. I have not played Halo 5, but I can tell you that ever since Halo Reach, the playlist quality and variance has gotten very very poor for Halo. So much, that I think playlist quality has directly contributed to the lack of population for the game and or franchise in the last 5 years.

Can I also assume that when you go to areas of a mission that don't require you to kill anything, that you close your eyes? You don't need to concentrate or look for anything. washed out, poor resolution and horrible quality textures are noticeable regardless of what is going on.

Please explain how armor effects death, or kill please? The hitoxes for both collision and physics detection are not altered by what armor you wear. Nor does wearing or displaying a specific armor piece make you more visible. Before ANYONE starts talking about spawns and or the spawn placements/zones/respawn zones, first perhaps create an ACTUAL map with real spawns, and not the Forge wanna be system. Grenades, or any other projectiles DO NOT effect the weight or probability of a spawn that is selected for you. Only other players positions effect where you spawn, and judging from the amount of spawn complaints, I can only surmise that the spawn zones and respawn locations are inherently flawed and or not properly weighted. 343i and Microsoft have inflated the numbers to go as high as $400 M in sales. The actual sales of the game CANNOT be calculated unless every single retailer in the world has properly reported how many units they have sold. The sales Microsoft can accurately track, are those that come direct from digital download/store purchases and the actual units sold from supply to retailer. More so, yes they may have sold $400 million to retailers around the world, but how many of those units were actual bought? The answer is likely half, as many retail outlets and game news outlets have all agreed that Halo 5 is the WORST selling game in the franchise. To add to this real quick, let's also look at cost for the titles. Halo has had a multitude of price gaps and price points ranging from title to title. Calling a game a success on the sole $$$ factor is NOT how you determine success. Success in terms of gaming because of pricing and content can only really be defined and reported by actual UNITS SOLD AT RETAIL and POPULATION. Also to add to the content discussion....REQ packs are NOT content. Content in the scheme of things refers to NEW items or additional aquired/purchased/usable items that are NOT usually used or available in the game as a whole. Aquiring a silly card that allows you to spawn a vehicle that is NOT new, or NOT LOCKED or otherwise NOT A NEW ITEM...is NOT content. A good example of actual content, would be Foundation from Halo 2. You had to beat the game in order to play on it and unlock it. It offered a NEW map to play on. All req packs do is allow you to spawn items that should be usable from the start. Halo needs to go back to it's pure Halo CE - 3 roots. Seeing as how the latest 2 titles taughting all sorts of innovation and features has NOT worked at all, ranging from actual gameplay to networking.......it is clear that the "NEW" plan and thought of keeping Halo fresh by emulating other franchises is NOT working in Microsoft's favor. At the end of the day, comparing Halo 4 and 5 to Halo 3 and Reach, 4 and 5 fall massively short in content and population. The reason i don't compare them to CE -3 is because of market saturation and comparative titles. Halo needs to change, but not in the direction that everyone has been talking about. It's funny how all of us who had been saying from the beginning, that halo needs to be more like the old titles...are being proved right. Ads I said, the new plan and mechanic innovations are NOT selling and have made the last 2 games horrible.

^^ Actually Co-OP relies on a host, not a server. The server may make the initial connection and negotiate network protocols, but hosting is handed off to the person who either initiated the campaign, or the player with the best connection stability. As for excuses for no splitscreen, quit buying into the hype surrounding 60fps gaming and the excuses handed out by 343. it all comes down to poor engine architecture and a lack of ability to produce or drive positive results in development.

For the record, servers are worldwide and NOT country specific or isolated. Azure and the Live platform run via cloud based serving and are run from Microsoft server farms worldwide. Yes you will always connect to the closest server but after that hosting is passed off to a host. P2P is to blame as well as the netcoding which has plagued Halo since 2005.

LOD's would be to blame for this, not Dynamic Resolution. 60 fps also has nothing to do with performance or quality of textures. Blam! loads textures into memory and the performance cost is extremely low on the engine side. Unless they actually used each texture bitmap at a 32-bit true color which is the most intensive for Blam to run, it all comes down to the graphical layer of the engine and the mip maps quality used. The lighting is also extremely poor for a next gen engine. I wasn't expecting a whole lot since 343 hasn't bothered to really do a complete re-write of the Blam! engine like Bungie did back for Halo 3. Lighting also has a lot to do with how textures are displayed and the shader usage is just as important. Again, since we are really only in the 2nd year of actual next gen console development support, I didn't expect a major leap forward like everyone was. Creating a massive environment with truly stunning effects/textures takes a lot of time and trial and error and a whole lot of time developing things more efficient and finding new ways to enhance and break ground. I wouldn't honestly expect to see anything 1/100th next gen in scale until Halo 6. On a side note, Halo 4 and 5 do not use really bitmap that ranges over 1024x1024 in resolution. Most bitmaps are 1024x512, 512x512 or 1024x1024. In terms of bitmap quality, this is exactly the type of bitmap quality used in Crysis 1. Other games for the past 5 years have had better texture compression and usage. CoD regularly uses 1024 and 2048 quality textures.

You really need to recruit a few people that know the Halo shader and texture tags/system to improve the bsp environments you recreated. Not sure how much original content you are using versus ripped textures and shader simulation though. For a rough start it's looking good though.

I don't see what other games has to do with Halo. I never said other engine's and other franchises can't add new things to a game. The engine layout and development pipeline for more powerful and much better architecture there of, allow many games to add content. Halo is NOT one of them. I could write a novel on how the engine works and showcase thousands of evident proof, but it wouldn't be enough to show people how it can't be done, at least with the last version of Blam! that was used with Halo 4. As I have said before, we don't know how the newest engine works. It could have been reworked to allow one form of it, but all other engine version previous to 5 have not been able to do it. Again, unless XB1 modding takes off and we finally obtain a way of looking at the map files, I cannot and will not say it 100% impossible with engines after Halo 4's. I will not do your research for you. You can cry about wanting proof all you want, but in the end you are the one with the burden of proving something. Name one item that was added to a Halo game post release that wasn't a map item, or an already present item in the game data that simply unlocked. Can't name one? Yeah, that's cause it can't and wasn't possible to do.

I strongly disagree with you Azzy and agree 1000% with the OP. I spent an hour combing through the whole under 10 ACTUAL stock maps....and they are severly dissapointing. Anytime a game depends on a stock map with Forge variants, it just screams "creative nightmare". All of the maps except one, Plaza, looks and reminds me of maps from Reach. In fact I'll go on to speculate that the design team simply kmported the best sections of previous maps and mashed them together and used simple texture reassignment to create the H5 ones. One cannot simply look at maps aside previous titles and logically or realistically state that the maps are unique and new. Since Halo Reach, we have seen a heavy reliance on Forge by both developers and players alike in an attempt to extend the multiplayer map replay value. The amount of artistic, fresh, new designs for ACTUAL maps has declined significantly over the past 5 years. As to who's fault it is that mal design has declined is anyones guess. But the truth is right in front of us. Map design has gotten lax and it is only the older gamers who really take notice of recycled portions of maps in every sequel. I certaintly wouldnt expect an untrained eye or evwn a mid 20 something gamer to be able to pick out a large section of Icefields, or Colossus from anything released post Halo 3. Fact is, most people pay attention to the textures or fancy decals used in the bsp and not the actual geometry for what it is. And by the way, the textudes are low res compared to what other companies are using and the shader usage is very poor. I seriously can't say it is better than Reach, and the raytracing/radiosity/lightmapping is the worst I've seen since Halo 3.

But we still lack any method of compiling raw or not, animations, bipeds, regions, permutations, machines, etc... I'm all for extending features of the game, but without custom tag work it's pointless. I'm tired of recreatiing physics and collisions models by hand, using hundreds of custom cubes or reusing animations that semi fit a new weapon.

Certain things sync yes, but not all. Since OS style scripting support has never been tried on H2V it' hard to tell what exact items or limits it will have. Aside from boring gametypes made popular with Halo 3, the major focus of a good add-on would be a Firefight style map. But for that to happen we need the tools to actually make bipeds and enable the single_player engine in multiplayer without additional apps running it like Ambiguous. Kantanamo, it's been a while broski. Whether or not this is going to be good has yet to be seen. I'm more interested in furthing tag delepoment rather than server scripting to support gametypes I care nothing about. The action starts with maps and content, not gametypes.

No, dreaming is neither logical or realistic in relationship to the way the engine and the devs lay out Halo.

Just so you know, scripts don't sync across clients. Scripts have to be continous so they are constantly active and applied. Unless your talking about server side python or lua scripting...in which case again it's pointless as people don't generally like to create maps that rely on gameplay via server scripting to enhance it. As I stated previously, I have been patient for 7+ years and there is absolutely nothing that can be added or tried that already hasn't been done to expand or improve H2V. Which is why the biggest advocates, the H2MT the team I still Co-Lead is all but abandoned and disbanded.

Ok first off, learn to use Google Translate, it will greatly help in allowing others to understand you. As for your question, you are wondering why the AI team mates die like a normal character and not simply go down and revive back up like in Halo 3 or Reach? I don't understand what you mean by "It's not credible". It's a fricken game dude. It doesn't matter how your teammates, AI or not, respawn. How about we just go ultra credible and realistic and have them just die permanently and NOT come back to help you? That would be realistic...unless your Jesus. This little item shouldn't even be on the Top 1,000,000 problems with Halo 5. This is simply a matter of personal taste and not a bug, glitch or development/canon issue.

@Backdraft The main reason for your rubberbanding in matchmaking is because of how 343 specifically initiates connections between clients. On the particular cloud Azure model being utilized, any player who has excess bandwidth to spare (not sure of the array variables they use to calculate this) is forced to utilize that bandwidth to help other players. I am unsure of how much is used to load balance the quality and quantity of connections to average everyone out...but obviously it is flawed. Im curious as to why this problem is specific to a majority of TWC customers. Logically I would have to assume it is an ISP issue despite what tbeir customer service reps will say.

Network coding or "netcode" as the kids like to state, is the network model built upon P2P framework. I can see how I should have correctly stated netcoding as to not confuse most people. 343 is NOT responsible for the hardware configurations that Microsoft employs. Contrary to popular belief, VIP or not, the Live service utilizes cloud (Azure) platform framework, this is much different than our typical server farm. Even with billions of dollars of revenue, it is much much harder to find and cultivate a solution to a problem such as this. As I tried to state earlier about traffic redirects, what I meant by that is, typically when an outbound packet is sent from your device, it hits the closest ISP server and then get's redirected along the way to say anywhere from 3-15 other servers for checking and verification before your browser or whatever else, ends at the site or data is received. Yes typically is only a 5ms at best operation, but with enough load on the end server or servers, it can turn 5ms into 3-10 seconds of data lag itself. Also since Azure is cloud based, this makes data and information sent between clients more task intensive because of the way cloud data is handled with Azure. There is roughly by itself anywhere from 30-50 servers that each have, receive and send different parts of the data your specific console/GT has. Same goes for your specific account data. Your GT details are split up between many servers and are all heavily encrypted. With networking in general and the Azure model platform (which i was against for year) being used to handle Halo, it was a failure from the beginning. Most of the blame does go to the engine architects as well as the network abstract layer designers for failing to meet or exceed the needed requirements to ensure smooth gameplay. At the end of the day I can't really say I blame the developer either, I blame the community of gamers more. We all keep wanting more before the basics are handled properly. We can blame 343 all we want, but it is soley Microsoft who provides the servers, the protocols and the final say in how the Live Service is implemented and handled. I'm curious about your refund. I expect that since you were issued a refund, you will NOT be able to continue playing Halo 5?

The entire point of my post was that there are over a thousand issues offhand that 343 needs to eliminate and look into, before moving onto other solutions. Home networks was just an example of it. On the service host/software end, there is literally millions of possible issues causing this problem. It's not as easy as waving a wand or clicking the mouse to fix them. Want a more stable networking game experience? Learn to code, then talk about how unexceptable or troublesome these things are. Sorry they can't work as fast as you would like them too.

They were already in the game Red. Biped armor permutations can be locked and or assigned usage based on the scenario specifically. If you like, I can rip the entire biped model with all the armor perms including flair decals to prove the point.

You can believe all you want. it has nothing to do with this being a new age or whatever mythical theoretical technology reason you want to believe in. Blam! and Halo map files are compiled with specific data. Unless you really want to go on believe that they added a few extra slots in the vehicle and weapon palettes in the scenario files that lead to data not added yet. Just like how new maps are added via additional slots inside the mainmenu.map file, adding vehicles and weapons would be done the same way. To date, there has never been ANYTHING added to the game that wasn't already there, aside from new maps themselves. 343 Industries isn't likely to ever add this in. I admit it would be a neat feature to expand the game or games in the future, but at present I don't see them taking the time to do this and take time away from planning additional games or supporting 3rd party devs in terms of additional Halo material.

Wow we really hit rock bottom. We gave MoM to Caboose! LMFAO Joking aside, I'm proud of you Caboose! Welcome to the club. A well deserved title to a well deserved and awesome member. Enjoy your month of pink my friend!!!

You do know that vehicles and weapons CAN'T be added to the game AFTER even as DLC right? The only way it can work given the history about how Blam! handles tags and DLC data, would be map specific items. So for instance, they would have to create and release a new set of scenarios with links to the new vehicles and weapons, or keep them specific and compiled to the new maps they are made for. But again, who knows? Since XB1 modding hasn't happened yet, I can't pull the map files and begin to see how the new files work at all. But again, speaking from history with the Halo engine, I don't see it happening.

OMG I have 1,000,0000,000 Upload an 5,000,000 download why cant i haz no lag?!?! This is what you all sound like to me. All kidding and mocking aside, lag has very little to do with what "theoretical" speeds you all have or are falsely reported by sites that range your speeds. Speed tests don't actively test every port nor do they count for multiple ports of packet data being sent or received in anywhere near the quantities that are coming and going through Live. Secondly, software is not very reliable either. To get an almost exact look at what speeds you ARE getting, you need to look at your router statistics and isolate traffic and bandwidth usage. Thirdly, lag can be generated from any number of sources. Right now while I'm typing this I can think of many reasons such as... 1. Server usage and or traffic. 2. Service interruptions from 2nd and 3rd redirect communications lines. 3. Heavy usage in your area from OTHER people. 4. In house usage from multiple devices. (Yes your silly tablets and phones are bandwidth guzzlers even when NOT in use.) 5. Server downtime and other Live servers are making up for traffic by redirecting to other servers. 6. Too many incoming requests for servers to keep up with. 7. Firewall settings suck. Look into how to properly set up your home network to allow bandwidth heavy items have priority. 8. Port forwarding and triggering needs to be done. Again, see #7 There are literally a dozen more scenarios I could rattle off with little to no trouble. Spend any amount of time doing Network Administration or Network model coding and you can see how there are literally more problems than any one person or team can account for or solve easily. We see this with every game launch since gaming has become more connected, even stretching back to the hay day of Halo 2. Lag is annoying yes, but no amount of crying about it or shouting at 343 Industries is going to fix it. Lag will never go away and it will always exist. Welcome to online gaming.

Not that I'm against any type of H2V being brought back from the dead or being revitalized....unfortunately it just won't happen. For about 5 years now the team from Monstrmoose and H2MT have made attempts to open and expand upon H2V and the content potential it has. sadly, due to the fact that a LOT of the original game has been stripped in terms of what can be done to modify and enhance it, it never gained traction. Going into my 7th year of map making and tag recreation, the H2V community is down to about 100 people, most being of hispanic world geography. What I have learned about Halo in general on the PC, is that people are dumb. People tend to play the same re garbled crap over and over and seem to not really be interested in custom content, at least not to the extent that Halo CE produced. Generally speaking, the game is dead and no one really cares about it anymore. I'm not trying to be negative or dismay any attempt you make, but it is a sad reality. This isn't just some guess work or some other "out of my arse" speaking either. This is coming from me...the Co-Leader of the H2MT and the only group to ever be officially endorsed by Microsoft for 3rd party Halo 2 content. I wish there was a way to bring this game to what potential it had, but it's been far too long and with Microsoft now never seeming to be interested in fixing the server listing issue the game has had for a month now, I don't see any point in continuing to work on it. Like me, you would be better off spending time crafting and holding out content for another PC Halo if and when it ever comes.