Halo 4 forge- Where's the group object tool?

[sindronian]

As quoted from one of the developers from forge:

 

"Our main goal was to make forging faster (something along those lines)"

 

So, they gave us the following tools I am aware of:

 

1. Duplicate object (only one object at a time? lawlz)

 

2. Magnets (well I would hope so)

 

So even with these two new tools my forging experience is still slow and tedious as balls.

 

Why you may ask?

 

Let's say I want to identical bases on a map. Well I still have to make each one from scratch, what a waste of time. Wait what if...I could group objects together and perform actions on those groups as if they were one object? Ohhh that's recursion! Now you're probably asking: "Dude too hard, derp, the way the source code is, derp, impossible to do."

 

Well I am under the belief there is a really easy way to do this. I am ignorant I'll admit. I only have first year university programming experience which has granted me a minimal understanding in object oriented programming. Here is my solution anyway.

 

Step 1: Give each forge object a group name (such as alpha, bravo, charlie etc). Just like a team name.

 

Step 2: Have a list (some type that stores forge objects) that contains all groups (like alpha) which are non-empty lists of forge objects that need to be operated on (moved/duplicated). So whenever you need to move an object, duplicate it or rotate it look in this list.

 

Step 3: Look in the list and duplicate/rotate/move whatever

 

P.S Step 2 could be done an infinite number of ways, most of them easy. It would probably be different that my way but similar. Instead of always operating on one object they could operate on a list of objects that always contains one or more objects.

 

So what if...

 

Moving/duplicating/rotating 30 objects at once is really laggy?

 

When you move/duplicate/rotate the object (or group of objects) you can only see the outline of it which doesn't take a lot of resources. Only after you committed the change will the objects be fully drawn. Sure it may take a while to fully draw 30 objects with dynamic lighting but it will be faster that putting the entire base together by scratch again or even 3 times. There. Really dayum simple. Dayum. Why didn't they do this???

[skummgummigubbe]

well this feature have existed in all Farcry game in world creator

 

but it would be great because when you build a map and you see that one object is making the map go into the mountain and you have to move the map

but it take to much time to move one piece at the time so it would be nice to select 30 objects and move it 5 metres

 

but i think it will be laggy too much but maybe on Halo 5 when we are using the next gen xbox it will work

[sindronian]

well this feature have existed in all Farcry game in world creator

 

but it would be great because when you build a map and you see that one object is making the map go into the mountain and you have to move the map

but it take to much time to move one piece at the time so it would be nice to select 30 objects and move it 5 metres

 

but i think it will be laggy too much but maybe on Halo 5 when we are using the next gen xbox it will work

 

 

But I said if it's laggy just move a visual outline of all the objects and once you place them then they are fully drawn.

[skummgummigubbe]

But I said if it's laggy just move a visual outline of all the objects and once you place them then they are fully drawn.

 

well OFC but it is to late to put that feature in HALO 4 so in HALO 5 there will probably not lag with the new gen xbox

[sindronian]

well OFC but it is to late to put that feature in HALO 4 so in HALO 5 there will probably not lag with the new gen xbox

 

 

Yeah I know. Hopefully. I just hope the next gen xbox is a good console. I'm sure it will be powerful but I don't want it to be made for kinect.

[DoctorB77]

I hope that is in halo 5. We just need to make sure that a lot of people talk about this idea up until then and that 343i puts it in the game. As alumni said, it will most likely be possible with the new xbox

[sindronian]

I hope that is in halo 5. We just need to make sure that a lot of people talk about this idea up until then and that 343i puts it in the game. As alumni said, it will most likely be possible with the new xbox

 

There is no way they didn't think of it and if they somehow didn't then forge is in the wrong hands. IGN didn't even bother mentioning it in the review because it's pretty much the same. I don't mind as long as the campaign is good. I just wish for once a studio could make a campaign longer than 8-10 hours though.

[DoctorB77]

 

 

There is no way they didn't think of it and if they somehow didn't then forge is in the wrong hands.

 

That is good. That means they just had boundaries and will try to improve as much as possible. We have been given an amazing forge and it might just be the best available. We could just be thinking ahead of ourselves.

[Twinreaper]

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.