So you are all probably wondering how this all works. Basically, an invisible vehicle spawns a scenery object. The rest is lua magic that only wizard giraffe understands. Everything is done through chat commands like "/spawn tower" but that can be simplifier by using program called AutoHotkey which will enter commands instantly when you press hotkeys. Since there is 512 vehicle limit in Halo, you can have that many forge objects in the map (unless you also have actual vehicles which would reduce that number). Right now there are 36 different objects that can be spawned and of course there will be more. You can suggest or make your own objects that you want to be spawnable in the map.

There are some things I need help with:
1. Water. Vehicles don't have any material effects on water but weapon projectiles do.
2. Shaders. Mine aren't all that great.
3. Flickering. Some people have flickering problems with this BSP and I can't really fix that because I don't have that myself.

I will probably post more stuff in here later on.

Credits(so far):
aLTis - project lead, shaders, sky, object porting
giraffe - sapp lua scripts that make all this work
(SBB)Mike - porting the bsp
Nickster5000 - paying for the server
Edited by altis94 on Jul 21, 2015 at 01:42 PM

Said it before and I'll say it again. Incredible work.

Beautiful !!!

http://youtu.be/hu0-fgFw8uM CE3 Demo

u r a god.

Looks great! Hope it's done soon.

How. How is this engine still able to do so much year after year...

Impressed beyond all belief.

Fun thing is Forge World is one of the easiest maps to port because it has no structures in the BSP.

This always questioned me to, that's a huge reason I helped form CE3.

I can't even... How is this even possible? I would love to find out once its released, it just boggles my mind how it could even be done.

:-) looks good, add some reflection to the cliffs

That's really amazing, but the important question is: Can you place weapon/vehicle/player spawns?

(and flag/skull/hill things?)
Edited by n00b1n8R on Jul 13, 2015 at 04:57 AM

looks amazing, are these screenshots downsampled? cuz if not they should be :P

Keewl.

Looking awesome, arguably the most impressive project that came out of CE3 this year. Great work.

Before you point it out, I quit my own Forge World because when I previewed Altis' Forge World a few weeks/months back, I figured he'd gotten so much furher ahead than I could have at that point.

Erm can I ask how you fixed those weird Composite textures?

You can just blend the maps together until you have one single blend map and maybe even discard some.

I'm not sure what you mean by "blend the maps" could you elaborate a little more?

It took a bit of photoshop editing. You pretty much have to choose what aet of detail maps you're going to use for entire sections of the map. For example, I typically stuck with the Red channel as the alpha map because it allowed me to blend grass and cliffs together, as opposed to blending grass and some rock together. Priorities, see?

To make the colors match properly I created a modified version of the diffuse overlay bitmap by using the different channel masks to blend green, brown and whatever else in the diffuse map. Otherwise you'd get grayish grass, or greenish rock and you don't want that.

Another way which involves more work is to isolate sections of the map as their own material ID and use the same groundmap as the rest of the area, but just use different detail maps that blend accordingly, that is to say that the detail maps should still blend together.

Basically, to get a good looking series of blended areas you can't just toss stuff in there, it takes some solid manipulation of the source bitmaps because Halo can't use them all as they are.

Layer the blend maps on top of eachother and set them to "add" as blendmlde in PS

Nope, not yet. But you can just add player spawns with sapp locations and spawn vehicles with sapp too.


http://puu.sh/iY4jU/3a2f39c3f8.jpg
http://puu.sh/iY4Ko/846227bb15.jpg

Edit. Updated OP.
Edited by altis94 on Jul 13, 2015 at 05:33 PM

Dat resolution. What are you using to get such high quality?

dat 4K tho

Seriously though, the pixel bump only does justice to the work you've put in. Amazing Job

*EDIT* oops, i mean 8K
Edited by greyhamism on Jul 13, 2015 at 07:12 PM

GeDoSaTo. Pictures were taken on 7680x4320 resolution.

Depending on what card you're running, most people tend to use GeDoSaTo (AMD) or Built-In NVidia features to run halo at significantly higher resolutions. Given the games age, it doesn't take that much grunt to run either

So what's the polycount with HAC2? I want more info on the extra rendering goodies it provides. A certain map of mine might go well over 32k triangles.

HAC2 can render up to 32k tris and Forge is exactly 32k.
Edited by altis94 on Jul 13, 2015 at 07:30 PM

I realize this is a rather arduous task, but what kind of release date are we looking at? Or is it still to early?

Not yet meaning "not yet but we know how we will" or "not yet but we're still looking into if it's possible"?

Both. Weapon/vehicle/player spawns will be easy. The netgame flags is what I'm unsure about.

Great job guys hell this is just outstanding work!
little note cliffs need a little fixing..

There might be a public beta once everything is stable enough. No idea when it will be finished though.

Could you be more specific?

Well the cliffs needs shadows on the bump maps like in reach. I think that's what he means. Do it altis

It's entirely feasible to create a 32k bsp without the assistance of hac2 however for a multiplayer map I wouldn't recommend stepping over that threshold.

Tool stop's dead at anything over 42,000 triangles (for me) I presume this is solely due to the hard coded bsp collision rendering limit, though I am confident that you should be able to overstep this bottleneck if you invest in render only meshes and bsp objects converted into scenery w/collision.