Twinreaper

As I am sure a lot of people have seen from my ranting in the shoutbox, I have very mixed emotions regarding Halo 4. So rather than spam the shoutbox and hash it out with other members, I felt it best to list my quarrles with it here, with comparative items to show why my opinion is such.... 1. For once, for the love of god, can we have a campaign or story that does not almost mimic every other Halo title?!? We start off on a ship, fight our way through the ship and crash land on a planet (Halo CE, Halo 2 - crashing, Halo 3 - ship crashing) To top it off, we are greated with a lame Halo CE / Halo 3 style vehicle run on the 3rd level. I almost felt as if I was playing the last level. No originality or great story direction. 2. Gameplay. The player controls and physics constraining the character felt as if I was playing a completely different game. The turning and general movements feel clunky, and at times it feels like a struggle to move your character towards the goal. The radar is useless and enemies appear to sometimes just come out of nowhere. With previous Halo games, the radar worked...period. And the Ai, seems to have been beefed up heavily even while playing on easy missions. For example I decided to play a level on Easy, and the ammo on weapons were gone in a blink of the eye. The plasma Pistol in particular gets about half the shots off as the previous versions, and gets worse on harder difficulties. Aiming is clunky and unsteady, and just god awefull. The melee system no longer will boost you a bit if your close enough to normally hit someone. I attacked an Elite head on and hit the button a second too soon and nothing happened...complete miss. In previous Halo titles, you had a bit of magnetism to aid you in melee'ing someone in the form a quick little boost. nothing here. 3. Graphics. Forget those nice shiny polished pre-baked cinemarics we got early on, or the carefully published gameplay. Every single texture I have encountered has no real detail map applied, and further the LOD is horrid. Yes they look nice from far away, but when I get up close, it shouldn't look like looking through a dirty smudged Coke bottle. The shaders they employ are lacking any real HD textures. I wouldn't be suprised to find not one single 2048x2048 or 1024x1024 texture in the entire game. Most of them look like poorly made 512 textures with even ****tier mipmaps. Even MC's visor lacks any real luster. it almost reminds me of a poorly spray lackered plastic turd. It's shiny and plastic looking and at times during the game, it almost looks as if it doesn't belong there. Even the bump maps blow. When we see chief after he crashes on the planet and you see his hand next to the assault rifle....the bumpy textured hand/suit mesh thing, doesn't even stand out. it looks flat and lifeless. it should be emplying a high hes bump map to bring those etches in the mesh to life. Don't even get me started on the material effects.... 4. Environments. The Forerunner stuff looks good, but at times it looks very plain and lifeless. I can only take flat angled pillars with basic grey/white for sooo long. it almost reminds me of Halo 2 cut and paste levels like Sentinel Walls. The outdoor environments are almost completely devoid of secondary objects like decorators and grass, trees, or any other item. The water is just plain ******. Run through the water, and there is almost no splash or ripple. I took a hog thru one early on, and I was Wad-da-faq just happened?!? Before we used to get a nice splash and water spread that came up as a material effect applied to the shader for it. Nope...gone. The skiyboxes are ok, but not as great as I expected. For instance the interior of the world. I expected to see something much better than orange and faded lines. very boring and poorly done. For that matter...did you actually look at the Capital ships during that segment. Seriously...go back and zoom in on them when they slipspace in.....they look like complete ****! Way to go on the active scenery guys! 5. vehicles. banshee?!?! What the ****?!?!?! Why on earth would the controls of the banshee not be the same as the player would have them without the vehicle In all other Halo titles, the controls never changed when you got inside one. I play with Legacy Inverted, and because they are not inverted when i get inside a banshe...I can never ever use a banshee. The Warthog. it looks like a Tonka truck with rollbars. it's big, clunky and sounds like a dying deisel generator. it sounds horrible and handles even worse. It hss almost no stopping power. It took me 4 direct hits head on as fast as it would go, to kill one grunt. The turret was nerfed greatly as well. They said before it was going to be unlimited use.....but oh yeah...it overheats still....thanks for lying and thanks for diminishing the value of having a warthog in your arsenal. If you dont believe me, perhaps you need to go back through and play Halo 2 and 3.... 6. Sound. Every single sound reverbs horribly and almost sounds as if they are coming from a muffled megaphone. Seriously guys, you spent how long on this, and yet the sounds are worse than an old Betamax recorded video. every weapon sound does not fit the game. Halo is a fantasy/alien shooter and yet everytime I hear a weapon fire, I think I'm playing something else. there is a reason why Bungie never made any drastic weapon sound changes..BECAUSE THEY WERE PERFECT THE WAY THEY WERE! The ambient music for normal play is blahhh...and the overture music for certain sequences seems forced and does not fit the moment. A few times I'm playing and it's frantic as hell...but it's soft mellow music playing?!? What?!? 7. Servers and stats. It was broken before we played. First thing they post up at launch is "we are having problems yadda yadda. **** should not be broken 1 minute after launch. Bungie never had any network issues for any Halo title a minute after launch, and certaintly not stat resseting. For a company as large as Microsoft to **** up that abd on an important title like this..makes me doubt MS and 343i's commitment to quality products. No dedicated servers?!? yet again we revert back to the failed newtrok model of client hosting being passed off. How and when is this even a good idea? Halo should never be left to client hosting. By doing so, you completely say "**** you" to the customer by basically saying that Live is useless since their service and hardware is doing nothing but initially pairing you up and checking map checksums. Everything else, gets passed off to a player. So why am I paying money for Live, if I or another player is hosting a match?!? Seriously...give me a good thought out explanation someone... Overall I cannot understand why people will jump up to defend this game against my opinion. Everything I point out can be compared to Halo 2/3/Reach, and you can clearly see where my points are valid. I could understand if I was pulling this out of my ass, but the proof is in the game. And before soemone goes and tells me my TV is screwy...I just bought a brand new Samsung 55" HDLCD. and have played Halo 4 on a total of 3 different HD LCD TV's and I have seent he same thing over and over again. It's not my TV's and it's not my eyes or ears...the game graphically and audibly took about 3 steps back. You would think that a developer would be able to produce a much better product in 4 years than what we have. And don't give me a load of **** about how they wanted to go ina different direction. Their intention ewas to make a good Halo game, not reinvent the wheel. They specifically stated that they wanted to take the game back to the core of what made Halo, Halo. All I got for my $60 + dollars was something that is NOT Halo and is almost a complete waste of my time. End rant!

Yes, the Map Pass is a one time enter code that will link the map releases to your GT/Console. When they become available you still download them via the Marketplace, only you get them free...well not free.....you payed for them in some form. But from what i know, Map Pass holders get them before everyone else. possibly a week or 2 in advance.

Is it just me, or did everyone just randomly forget that this is the Halo 2 forum. Spike grenades were in halo 3.....lmao

If your looking for help, I am all you will need. I am the greatest campaign player ever!!!! Well maybe not...but I am damn good at combating AI..more so than most people I know. Hit me up when I'm on and I will help you out.

Let's clear a few things up first. Your University Object oriented programming coarse doesn't equate to anything when it comes to understanding how the Blam!engine is layed out and how the tag relationships work. Yes basic Object orientation can be applied, but not as simply as you think, nor is it fundamentally sound or appropriate for all instances where objects can or should be grouped. Comparing the Blam! Forge mode to Farcry, which by the way is developed and published ona superior engine (Cryengine), is not a good comparison. Forge was never meant to be this great universal tool to allow avid wanna-be map makers (immitation SDK users) to create limitless things. Forge is simply a "memory based" editor for the scenario_file located inside a .map file. It's sole purpose is to allow you to assign certain objects to a certain coordinate or to change basic scenario file related floats for these items. Furthermore, the reason you have a limit to what you can use is two fold. 1. It prevents players from havign too many renderable objects on screen at one time, which can cause overloading or crashing of the map. 2. You are generally limited to a set amount of "chunks" pre-compiled into the map called "placements". These placements can be added to by means of modding, but was not meant to be expanded upon. Your Alpha, Bravo thing...wrong. They already have a dedicated group indentifier like that applied to the teleporters and other netgame flag items inside the globals tag. Second, they cannot just simply go into the [bloc], [scen] or [mach] tags and just add in an Enum32 field to apply a "group" identifier string. Adding any chunk to the tag will not only shift the tags meta data and raw data fields, but also force the developers to rewrite how the fields are decoded and interpreted by offset addresses. Remember, anytime you change something outside a float, the map would have to be re-compiled to ensure a proper offset listing for the engine to refer to for all tags and referrences. This is why we are not given the option to expand upon the palettes or other certain data fields within the Forge environment. Soem thigns we want or may need in the future, have to have a memory friendly, and RAM friendly way of doing it. And compiling maps will never happen so long as the Xbox remains a single process execution provider.

People who actually use the term N00b or Newb to describe someone who may or may not have mroe skill in certain situations or maps....is just lame. Just because someone is not "as" good as the next person does not make them a n00b. A true n00b or new player, would be just that. Please guys....

I hate to be the **** on this one, but you should have used common sense first and foremost. Despite what any hourly low wage glorified receptionist tells you.....you should have known better as a non-licenced authorized cleared entity to play it early. It's your fault you were stupid enough to not realize that you made a poor decision. Furthermore...you purposely went in looking to buy it early and now you want to cry foul because you think the blame is not to be layed on you at all?

Half pf you folks that say you never encounterss an aimbot wouldnt know if one was stansing right next to you. The whole purpose of an aimbot is to.go undetected. Even at an MLG problevel, if someone inba match has a higher accuracy than 70% for shots and a nearly.double digit heqdshot count.....it aint legit.

Just felt like posting up a nice little song by my favorite band of all time :The Birthday Massacre. This little gem comes from their new album "Hide and Seek". Pleased to enjoy...

You could say the same for Halo. every game featured a Covie vs Humananity approach adn they changed things up just as little as CoD did. CoD is not really a fantasy game as they tend to take a more "realistic" approach. You cannot deny that the CoD games have great storylines attached to them. MW beign a great example. The way they tied all 3 together with #3 was just fantastic. CoD is going to be around for quite some time. Do I see aliens gettign invloved....no. We have plenty of great human conflict here on our planet that could keep the CoD franchise spinning for decades to come. the only question to really ask is, "How will they adapt the multiplayer to meet the future needs of the newest generation of FPS gamers?"

More than likely you did not encounter an aimbot, but rather a modified set of maps. Aimbots require a modded console with a sideloading piece of code as you all know. The secondary method to cheating and giving the appearance of an aimbot, is to modify global and weapon data inside the map iteself. Since Reach depends on dedicated hosting being passed off to a player, it is possible to have a large group of friends each containing the same modified map. hence, when you go into play, and one of those chaps has a modified map, anyone with the shared modified data, will be prevy to it's effects, or anyone who is designated as such. To explain further...here you go. Map: Sword base. Mod: In the weapon tags, each weapon is modified to have an absolute magnatism range of the whole length of map. Anywhere the player looks towards an enemy, no matter how far away, the reticule will move in and seek that player. Next, they modify the magnetism ranges in the globals.global tag, to have an instant magnetic effect...in other words, it doesn't gravitate towards the player...it directly snaps to them. Next, they modify the firing error angles (bloom) to be an absolute of zero, and do this again in the globals.globals tag. This gives a player the presence of an aimbot, but is simply a map modification, nothing more. The effects are that of an aimbot but better since the player does not have a sideloading code that has to "seek" anything. Furthermore, because of the way the game is different than any other, you can actually specify in the globals, whom the effects pertain to based on team designation. So even if you had the map mod....you would have to be part of their team, to get the effects. Unfortunatly, Live only seeks out map size and not individual tag checking. Changing values in a mpa in what we call "float" fields, does not increase or decrease the map size. Live servers only check overall map size and map signature (check-sum) before declaring a legit map or not. In the end, I am sorry that my overly smart modding companions have caused such trouble in the game for you. not all us modders do this kind of thing, as generally we do it for research and to see how things work. I guess it is only a matter of time before ******-bags such as this ruins everyone fun....

Unfortunatly, bipeds are not anywhere near as easy to spawn as standard objects. In order to spawn dead bodies, you would have to spawn a character, either player or AI, and have a script force death on them in order to get them to be ragdoll items in the map. neither of which are included nor very easy to get working with the current Blam! engine or previous ones. It is quite possible that with halo 5, being on a new console and a completely new coded engine with much more capability...that we may see this in future Halo titles. I like the creative possabilities your idea seems to lean towards. For something like this, keep hounding them and spamming their main site with this type of idea...and I am sure they will see and read what people think about it, and hopefully conscider it. Good job mate!

Bashfull, you can keep the respect and words in general for someone who cares. I called Kayla out because she like the rest of the ignorant community has no mind or opinion of their own. every single response I usually see is a lemming cookie cutter post that mimics another, or is based on what some no-name member posted. People around here need to wake up and get their own sense of gaming know-how. Stop imitating people just because your too lazy to do your own research or form your own opinion. I'm sure Kayla is a wonderful young lady in the physical real world...but this is not that. This is a forum which divides us amongst the world over, and in no way provides us any real friendship. For the record, let her and anyone else who feels slighted by me, take me on one on one. I doubt very much she needs an advocate here to defend and help her. If she has a problem with me, she'll let me know. You guys wanna know how Twin really feels?!? I don't think anyone does.......

Lol, yeah objects don't have a "light" built in so to speak. Basically the shadows are standard shadows and shadering based on the skybox...which is already pre-built with various positions, lighting, etc.. already created. Many people seem to think that this new feature actually goes thru and re-lightmaps the entire map....which is false. it doesn't, which is why we can't create pitch dark rooms.

I'm I think, the third oldest member here, coming in at 34. The other two oldest would be Absolute Dog, who is about 79, and Spectral Jester whom I believe is 70? Just kidding guys, but yeah welcome man. Good to have some older guys on here. I smell a dad's or old guys gaming club forming here...

Actually calling it true "dynamic lighting" is not accurate. From what i have seen, I believe that every forge object has pre-rendered shadow occlusion built into the way the model is handled. This is why we need to wait until the map is reloaded with an updated light tag, in order to see our shadows. If it were true "dynamic lighting, we would see the shadows instantly. I may be wrong about this, but I cannot see how they would possibly change the core engine settings to be able to do this, all the while still having tag relationships and dependency's for [ligh] and [lens] tags for handling shadow casting. Guess we will have to wait to see. But then again, I now recall what they said about pitch dark rooms. If the lightmapping was re-mapping everything, then you would be able to make dark rooms. but since they specifically stated you can't....that means the lightmapping is not new or creating a new lightmap for the maps. It is simply just rendering shadows already baked in, based on sun direction and origin and when you place the object down.

Yes the likely hood of super-bouncing being in a remastered version is almost zero. To enlighten a few people, super-bouncing was an error with physics and collision detection during certain areas (portals) or a map structure. The game basically failed to detect that had hit the ground, and instead placed your collision position inside the floor. The resulting reaction from the engine was to force the player in the opposite direction to release the player from the ground, or whatever object he/she had been detected inside of. When the game is remastered, certain aspects will fail to work as we saw in CEA. where some glitches did not operate the same way. Since they would be remastering it to work with a newer engine that the Blam! v2 variant, it is only logical that the Havok code processing the collision and physics detection would be updated for maximum compatibility, rending certain glitches like super-bouncing, or ramming a player through a barrier useless.

Not sure if anyone else got his yet, but apparently they just started emailing the Didacts sysmbol out and at the bottom right of the image there is a symbol. If you click it you are taken to a cropped puzzle piece of a larger picture. Here is a link for the one i got.. http://download.halowaypoint.com/content/waypoint/assets/images/000000sec3op36516/c6a150bd-ebb5-4f6c-93cb-1c5ebe53bd1d.jpg?uid=15972079&tid=