Twinreaper

No need to sort him out. is own failed post shows how little he understands in terms of statistical matchmaking data that is collected and interpreted by the various Live API's. I on the otherhand know exactly how it works and how it used in matchmaking. I didn't get the "tech guru" tag for nothin folks. Just keep that in mind when you want to challenge my posts...(all eyes pointing at you HeroDanny)

Unreal fails graphically and does not have a wide range of options in terms of tag creation. The editing and developing of assets on the Unreal engine is mostly command line and script/xml. Besides which, it would not make much sense using a 3rd party engine on a 1st party title. As I have posted before about this....it would much more sense to allow PC users to create and share maps that are compiled to be compatable between a PC and console version. Halo is really the only FPS franchise that has yet to realize the brilliance and need to release a PC and console version of there titles simultaniously.

It'll do you just fine? Shouldn't you want anything "doing" you, to be more than fine?!? Sorry...I couldn't resist the late night dead tired pervert post. Love yah Mystie!!!!

Please refer to my thread here, as to why these things wont happen on halo for consoles... http://www.343industries.org/forum/topic/5025-building-your-own-stuff/

Creating anything from scratch is complicated. even getting simple non-static scenery or objects require a working knowledge of nodes, markers, parent/sibling relations and much more. Vehicles themselves are the most complicated item to create besides a complete fluid biped. Vehicles require permutations for every damage possible as well as many other tag relationships. A console based editing system is not capable of nor is resource friendly enough to compensate the amount of data needed to create, rig and compile a vehicle let alone a simple weapon in terms of Halo. Someone eralier today asked me a simple question. Why is it that Pariah, an Xbox 1 game, allowed players to create terrain from within the game itself? The answer is pretty obvious but i will elaborate, which will also help you to understand why these things are not going to happen on a console, especially for Halo. Pariah used a modified version of the Unreal Engine, and a modified version of havok 5.12 I believe. The format used by Pariah for the map editor was left open ended...meaning that the compiled dtat file for the map itself was not locked to a format due to having it compiled. This map thus allowed the user, to alter geometry by in real time simply updating vetices and faces on the fly. The collision for this was altered open ended as well, as the game updated collision edges, faces and vertices in conjuction with the mesh. Now simple number writing of this type on an engine like Unreal's Quake, is simple enough and resource friendly enough to allow a wide margin of other things to be done at the same time, hence why the game had similar properties to Forge. But because of hardware restraints...mostly memory, the palette and editing was severly limited and only able to be done on a pre-set single map....again, similar to forge. Halo uses the Blam! engine. This particular engine uses a format called a BSP (Binary Space partition). A BSP is a closed compiled format that is created as a result of "Tool", compressing and changing the proprietary ".ass" file format. All collision and mesh data is compiled into a single BSp and as such, because a compressed locked file format once it is compiled. Because of the way BSP's and the .map structure is written, a map handler is required to decompress, interpret and list .map file data into a readbale usable "meta table" or "Tag list". This is one reason as to why there can be no open ended geometry editing in Halo. The second problem in editing terrain in Halo, comes in the form of lighting. All BSP's, usually before they can be loaded, must go thru a rasterizing process, to display lighting on terrain and other world objects. This lighting process is done after a terrain in an editopr has been processed into a BSP standalone, and is then loaded by Toola gain, and lit properly. The lighting process alone for world geometry or BSp is heavy, and usually requires at least 2 gig or more RAM alone just to house temporary lighting data. The particular lighting used in Reach's Blam! variant uses per-pixel lighting for objects that don't reside by nature, inside the BSP. That is to say that the per-pixel lighting is used by objects like bipeds, crates, scenery, etc... This is why we see realtime shadows on most or all objects in the game. Creating a standalone editing tool for a console is not only extremely resource hungry, but requires an advanced user knowledge that almost 80% of the general community would not be easily trained to know. To break it down simply, here is a list of things a console editor would need... 1. A working console environment compiled version of a. Sapien (object, spawn, scenery, etc placing application) b. Guerilla (tag editing tool) c. Tool.exe (tag compiling command line) 2. 4 to 6 gig of available physical RAM 3. Standalone or console compiled 3d application (similar to Tiger/Destiny or 3dsMax) 4. A standard keyboard and mouse fro hotkey use and to be able to use all commands or functions of said previous program. Now for Sapien alone, at least 2 gig's of RAM would have to be dedicated to load and display properly, all the map's contents as defines by the "scenario" file, which for those who don't know.... is the core of the map file. It has the complete library of the map files properties and every object that is used by that map file. Guerilla, can create blank tags and edit the compiled tags of anything used in the game. Tool itself is the most taxing of the applications. As it has the job of compiling and interchanging formats between raw and closed files. We have all used a 3d app at one time or another, like 3DSMax or Blender. Those programs alone are not free, and must be purchased or licensed. Even if it were possible to get those or a proprietary 3d app loaded and compiled into a console environment, the performance and functions of the app would be very limited. I do realize that getting a keyboard and mouse for the Xbox is simple, but using the applications for creating anything in Halo takes a lot of work. Even creating something as miniscule as a hill or cave, can easily turn into a broken, non-compiling bsp or worse...a 2 to three hour venture. The main question one needs to ask himself is this... |Is it worth to compromise and stifle creative design by using a console for Halo edtiting, or is better to release a HEK on a PC platform, to allow complete and total creative freedom"? In my eyes, the answer is simple.....PC. For anyone interested in learning more about what it really takes to create things for Halo, you should all try ouot the HEK's for halo 2 and Halo 1. Once you have, only then will you begin to realize how much dedication and work is invloved in doing such a thing. Editing a map to be 343i or even Bungie quality will take months or even years of editing. Hell, even making a half-assed friends only fun map can take weeks to a moth. I hope I was able to help some of you understand why things are the way they are. Thanks for reading.

The thing to remember is that every AA in Reach has for the most part, and is at its core, a mobile reusable "EQUIPMENT" item from Halo 3. AA's tbough a great addition would fit into the newer Halo sequels but I will agree thay should not be there unless they could improve them or tie them into the story line. Reach has a great blam engine variant powering it and the core basics will definatly be a step in the right direction towards Halo 4. I agree with your way of thinking....which doesnt happen much. lol

Teamspeak is back up and running. I have yet to re-install the PC Halo 1 servers, as they did not generate traffic at all. For now, the Teamspeak is the only thing I am continuing to run atm. I will be adding soon, the ability to allow people to store and access fan fic and any other type of work they wish to store without the typical hosting issues. The ftp directory will be by request only, and user ID's will be handed out in private. I will post something more on this when i get a chance.

I'm glad to see people still have a sense of humor. And I agree with Dog red, that avtar is creepy awesome! Dont ever change it!

I was hoping we could both find some common ground. I like you restrain, you show a good understanding of the MLG side of gameplay and do respect and acknowlegde us casual gamers. very few of you around I tip my hat to you. I look forward to futher debates about these things. And btw, welcome to the site bro! You should introduce yourself to the gang in the Introductions thread if you havent already.

It's also good for Reach system Link if anyone wants to try and get machinima with large groups.

In light of recent posts, I would say we got off to the wrong start. Now, being "adult" as Dog put it, I can man up and honestly say I did not give you a fair chance at all. In no way can I explain or say at all that my comments were warranted or acceptable. All I can do at this point is say that I am truly sorry for attacking you, and that I was wrong. I don't want you to have a bad impression of this place or it's members. Your ideas and opinions are always and very welcome here. Again, I am sorry for the past interactions we had and would very much like to be friends and move forward. I tend to get into certain "bi-polar" type moods and I tend to type and post recently before I think. It's a problem I know, but I guess it's part of my chaotic charm. So...WELCOME TO THE 343I forums man! I hope your stay here is a good one. If you ever need anything in reguards to the mechanics or general game specific game data, I am your man and I am here to help! BTW, when can we expect to see some fanfic stuff of yours? I am always interested to see what kinda stuff you guys come up with. i don't have a fan fic bone in my body so i kinda live thru guys for that.

Actually playing as a grunt is quite satisfying. We did mods for this a long way back for Halo 2...and it was fun as hell. It was a pain getting used to not being able to croutch or really jump, and the slow moving made it real hard to navigate and play against the AI...but multiplayer games with this was awesome! I would love to see playable characters in either multiplayer or campaign and that allow the complete range.

You really do fail to realize how the commendation level and statistic data or your kill/death ratio plays in matchmaking player lobbies. Commendations are not used as a whole. The system does not take into account an overview of commendation complettion. What the system does is, depending on the selection of mapos and gametypes, selects appropriate individual commendations, and compares theirs with yours to give you a good matchup. It also factors in directly, your kill/death ratio. This is a very close basis for getting you a good opponent or evenly skilled team. Now yes with every matchmaking system their are flaws, but this is by far the best system they have employed by far. You don't need source code to figure this stuff out. All it takes is the patience and ability to write map handlers, and interupt and capture packet data that is trasmitted during gameplay. Of coarse the real work comes in, when you have to decompress and interpret the captured data. But for those of us who have been modding and programming apps for handling Halo assets since it's inception, it is quite common and not at all as difficult as it may seem. Kornman is a great example of this. Halo 3, I hate to say it, did not show a player his or her "True Skill". Halo 3 also used an exp based system, this system just wasn't tied into the actual level as deeply as it is in Reach. Also keep in mind, that in halo 3, you did not get extra EXP for playstyles, certain kill types, etc. As far as the competetive side goes, you can keep your trash talking crap at home. Now, I don't play for straight competetive games, I play for fun. I don't find it fun having 12 to 20 year old boys calling out a mid-aged guy and ragging on his mom. That's just immature and shows a low understanding of social and competetive graces. There's nothing wrong with saying people suck or taunting oponents, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere. And to be quite honest, I will never undertsand bragging about how well you can use your thumbs to win at games. I do take issue with your comparison to CoD as far as gameplay feel goes. The feel of the Reach gameplay has not changed at all. The CoD feel you describe, is your inability to accept or adapt to AA's, in particular sprint, and the fact that you have no "BR" style weapon to pickup. Hence the addition to "Zero bloom" playlists they gave us with the TU. The physics handling may be an updated Havok version, but is not at all different from previous Halo titles. The core values used in the tagset are nearly identical to previously Halo 3 and Halo 2 ones. And no casual gamers are not put first. You really do need to read up on how a developer gauges their total range of acceptable compromises when it comes to developing a full title and pleasing a general audience. I do understand that their are extreme gamers out their and yes by all means I think they should be compensated as well as every other group. but the plain fact is, that their has to be a conditional development time frame. if 343i were to go and try to completely compensate everyone, it would increase the development time 4 fold, and noone in the end would win. Every single "genre" of player at that point besides the "extreme" would complain about how long it's taking to release a game. The only feasable way to accomodate this problem would be to release a series of updates or patches that address slowly, the issues that could not be hammered out in pre-production. but this of coarse alone would require time and resources not available in the general scope of the team. The only way it could be done, would be to charge "MLG Types" a premium fee, to include a special team that focuses purely on inproving and adding to the competetive aspect only of the game. Would you be ok with paying your standard Live fee, and an additionl $50 or $60 a month to have your game updated a few times a year to include more competetive aspects?

It's a memoery exception as I suspected. The paging operation is the "Page File System", which is the OS's way of extending RAm by using space on the HDD to store re-occuring called data. the best I can come up with fro this, is that you may have a few bad sectors on your HDD, or the game install has been slightly corrupted. Either way, I recommend running a disk checking utility for errors and re-installing the game.

Mawell, your an idiot. Nuff said. All the competative Rank systems that were deployed in all titles failed miserably. I can point out at least 7 to 8 flaws in either the calcuations, agorithyms or data handling that prove this. Besides arguing that the game needs a "true skill" rank system, why don't you all start by realizing what it is you truly want. all you want at a basic core, is to go around and show people how much time and pointless hours of gameplay you put into a game, just to show off a high level number that has no real world value or concept. And lets put this baby to rest why we are at it...the Halo 3 rank System was the worst of the bunch! Care to prove me wrong...go decompile, reverse, rebuild and test the API and netcode in a controlled environment and tell me how well it turns out. You don't need a "true skill" system to show who is the better player ina game. All one has to do is find the people who play the most, and stack up the k/d, score, assist etc stats and whoever has the best ratio is clearly the best overall player. You don't need a silly number to prove it. Achieving a high skill number cna be done by anyone with a certain amount of time put in. So how does that sound at all like a "True Skill" measure? What's next....they need to put a date stamp on the moment you reach it so you can brag you were the first, and everyone that follows is 2nd, 3rd, best etc.... Furthermore, the Reach stat system that was put in place, is by far the most comprehensive means of measuring up a player against another. The commendations they put out for you, can show you more about a players style and past gaming than any of the other ones. Instead of matchmaking like halo 3, where you got paired with people of like level numbers...which mean nothing because it doesn't factor in time spent or k/d.....in Reach when you get paired up, the system looks at population k/d and commendation levels, along with deaths, assists etc... and actually pairs you up better against players who's surface skill level closely matches your own based off of said prior stats.

It's just a left over string from development that wasn't meant to be in the shipped game. Hence why hitting the button doesnt do anything and why the game doesn't load the script again once it fails. Hope that helps you a little.

Ahhhh you may have fallen prey to a small bug in the update then. best advice is to call Microsoft ASAP and report it. Bugs such as these only surface with a handfull of thousands around the world. Looks like you are just one of the small statics that get to enjoy a bug here and there. But please do contact them about it.

To start off, I need to know if these maps were purchased on a different Xbox console or gamertag. If it was a console different from the one you have now, there is your problem. When you download certain types of content to a console, it is provisioned for that console only. That is why when switching consoles it is important to log into xbox.com and trnasfer content licenses to the new console. If the maps were downloaded on a different gamertag this will also cause issues. Gamertags are like consoles, in that the content can only be played when using that specific gamertag or if the gamertag is in lobby/party with other gamerstags. If non of these issues are specific to your problem, unfortunatly the only thing I can think of additional s that you may have replaced the HDD or have a corrupted data file or two on the HDD, resulting in the game not properly recognizing the content. I would suggest contacting Microsoft directly if none of the things I described applies to you. they will be able to resolve it for you with much higher success than I could.

Sounds like a memory exception error to ke. If you can, locate the log for the game and or post up anything you receive a critical warnjng for in the "event viewer" . if ur unsure how to locate any of these, let me know and i can guide you thru it. Also please list up a quick pc spec list so i can see what kind if rig u are runnjng with.

I wouldnt get your hopes up for an holiday 2012 release too much. Factor in the supposed xbox relaunch and the development time for it. We may see a hold off until January or later for Halo 4. It all comes down to how much compromise they are willing to make with quality vs release date.

For me Forge was a quick ideal attempt to introduce a wider population of players to the whole developer "sandbox" toolset we real map makers use. Forge itself for me is a novelty that has lost its charm. The amount of really good download worthy maps that have come from forge....I can count on one hand. If 343 really wants to up the anty for H4 and truly compete with the other fps franchises...they need to develope a side by side PC port and distribute an HEK with it. Then give real home developers the chance to create maps and and introduce cross platform acceptable map formats so PC creaters can properly share maps witb console owners. In short...Forge can bite the big bullet in my opinion.

Well according to one of the novels....the exact one eludes me atm. The Covenant is still around it is just fractured. All the Arbiter did was split the sides between a "new" covenant and the covenant that was. It will be interesting to see if we get paired up with the elite side covenant during Halo 4. Seeing how the heirarchy of the covenant and the prophets work...it stands to reason that 3 new prophets will emerge and begin again the quest for the great journey. Remember...there are still a few rings we have yet to visit and not to mention there are still 5 more out there either non operational or destroyed. The original Hallo array was constructed using a total of 12rings.

It's the battery compartment. The controllers all suffer from this at one point or another. There is no sure fire way to tell if you get a lemon one, that fails to hold the battery pack in place after a short time. I do have a method to help you, but before you do it, know that I, in no way shape or form take responsability for damage resulting. Ok, so take off the battery pack, and use a small metal object like tweezers or small hex driver, and lift or pull out the metal connectors slightly. This will allow the battery pack to connect to the contacters tighter and result in the controller not turning off as much. Also, you may want to purchase a special hex driver form e-bay and dissasemble and clean the controller at least every 3 months.

The Xbox 360 alone would not be capable of pulling off the tasks of editing terrain, or even maps and tags in general by itself. Unfortunatly the hardware would not be able to handle the requirements to run the virtualizations or the developer tools. Those items would have to be specifically for the PC, and use a migration style connection protocol to allow the uploading of maps. But given the hackability of Microsoft products already and the mods of the console itself, it would be a huge security issue to allow users direct access to uplaoding maps to the HDD. The best we could hope for, would be allowing the end user to upload any custom created map to a special "Marketplace" style Halo section, so you can browse available maps. Also on top of that, when the user uploads a map, it could be placed in the users download que automatically.

It is with a heavy heart, that tonight I turn of the server powering the Teamspeak and PC servers for halo. After many months of using a server application called "Apache" for my needs, I am no longer satisfied with the producable results, nor the extensability of it's remote customization or remote publishing services. Just getting PHP alone working is a nightmare. I will be formatting my server and re-doing it with Microsoft Home Server in the coming days. Until this server is back up and running in a manner in which I am happy with, there will be no Teamspeak of PC services. Sorry in adnvance guys.