Halo: CE Mod Tools Feedback

[Postums]

Welcome to the dedicated feedback thread for Halo: CE's Mod Tools.

The purpose of this thread is to gather suggestions or dedicated feedback relating only to Halo: CE's Mod Tools. When posting, please include as much detail as possible to include:

• FEEDBACK: please be as detailed as possible.
  
• ADDITIONAL INFO: If you have a screenshot, game clip, or other supporting material, please provide the link in your post.

We will regularly go through this thread and collect feedback from tool users to help inform areas of improvements to the tool sets. Thank you for your time and feedback!

[vengefulviper]

FEEDBACK: Liking the mod tools so far, though I haven't had the time to "dive deep". My only suggestion so far is to enable modded maps (or other such mods) to show up in the menu without replacement.
ADDITIONAL INFO: N/A

Thank you for your time.

[Connor Dawn]

Feedback:

Amazing so far, loving the flexibility aswell as quality of life improvements made to the original HEK. Runs like a dream, and easy to understand.

However, my feedback/gripes with it would be mostly on the UI side. I would like to request if possible, some UI tweaks to fonts, colours, aswell as white space to make things slightly more modern, aswell as readable. Right now, it's somewhat difficult to read certain fields on dropdown menus, as the spacing seems to be messed up, causing the next option to overflow onto the current one, so a quarter of the text is cut off. I would also heavily suggest a dark/night mode, that makes use of darker colours to be easier on the eyes (especially for us night owls) and could be helpful for people with light sensitive headaches, and overall reduce strain on the eyes, aswell as making it somewhat easier to read text, as if it's a brighter colour than it's darker background it then creates contrast, making it standout more and easier to read/see.

Just my thoughts, y'all are doing great

[Arkies]

My only issue thus far is the UI, night mode would help out a lot. Modders have sensitive eyes.

[wwm0nkey]

It would be nice to set default folders honestly for other tags and there could be some UI improvements (agree a night mode would be rad). Other than that, in-game wise we just need to be able to SEE the maps in the game and no longer need to replace them.

[elchoel]

Thank you for taking the time to spruce up and re-release the Halo modding tools. I haven't had time to fiddle with UE5 because I'm too busy refreshing my Halo 1 skillset.

Feedback: [High Priority: Unfinished Feature] It does not seem possible to create Recorded Animations in any official release of the Halo tools, new or old. In the new release of Sapien, you can posses a unit by switching the camera mode, clicking on it, and then selection "Attach Camera to Unit", which activates the unit/vehicle/biped, but no inputs ever makes it to the possessed unit -- it cannot be controlled and so no animation can be recorded.

Feedback: [Medium Priority: Input issue] In Sapien, controller input has no deadzone. No controller's control stick is perfectly driftless. Every game or program that uses controller input has to be aware of and compensate for the fact that control sticks have a small amount of drift. If you enable controller input in Sapien, the camera will always drift because Sapien does not seem to have any sort of drift compensation or deadzone. I suspect that an end user can band-aid this issue by using an external program to modify the controller input and add your own deadzones, like reWASD.

Feedback: [Low Priority: New Engine Features] I suspect it is outside of the scope of the project to add any new features to the engine, but I thought'd I just throw it out there anyway.

-Halo 1 does not support burst fire weapons in a meaningful way. It can be faked by overheating a weapon and having it 'spew', but that is inconsistent and always on a 1 frame delay. It can also be faked by spawning projectiles in effect tags, but then those projectiles are very disconnected from the user's hud. It'd be pretty sweet to have a refire delay and refire count value in a weapon tag, which would remove the need for faking it.
-Melee Lunge flag and value in tag? Nah. Too out there. It'd be pretty sick though.
-Bump maps on weapons/bipeds/vehicles?

These might all be moot if 343 is planning on Halo 2's tools getting the same treatment that Halo 1's did.

Feedback: [Low Priority: New Meta Features] Right now, the modding community can only load maps via replacement of files. It'd be swell if there was a way to load map files that were not replacements from in MCC. Even if there was just a console command, like map_name <name of map>, this would be great. Hell, we could probably use that to load our own menu map that could then load all the maps for a given mod!

[Yote]

Feedback:
I love the new features so far. However I have encountered what I think is a bug,

"debug_unit_animations true" is a command that would output when a unit was looking for an animation that was not present in the animations tag. In the new tools when using this command it will always return false and does not work correctly. Linked is a screenshot of the command output working in the original Sapien.

Additional Info:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/651811137985183765/864878480658792509/missing.PNG

So far I haven't encountered any other bugs and the tools work great and are much more stable then the previous tools.

Thank you all for all of the hard work.

[Sean]

Glad I found this thread, I've really enjoyed the tools and new changes so far.

FEEDBACK:

I do think that while a good precedent has been set I would like to see the tools continue to evolve, especially if it wants to become the go to for many CE modders considering we've had over 15+ years of community fixes and enhancements in Custom Edition. I feel these tools need to exceed what the community has already been able to do in this regard, and admittedly it's close to that but not quite there yet.

One thing that I'd like to see the most is Open Sauce features, originally made by kornman himself. Some features from this, like gravity manipulation, were already brought over. While I understand if many of these features can't 1:1 be brought over due to code or licenses I'd like to see the ideas introduced at least live on. Particularly the shader extensions, having normal maps and better specular support on all objects was a huge game changer visually and there were many projects (mine included) still supporting these features before these tools dropped.

Even if these features are essentially remade and not backwards compatible, they're things I would still really appreciate to see and would add a lot to this suite for people.

ADDITIONAL INFO:
Even though you already have the man himself, here's a link to the documentation to browse through how much this added to the game. https://github.com/yumiris/OpenSauce/wiki

[Connor Dawn]

Originally posted by Yewlyn:

Yeah OpenSauce features would be fantastic, like object data editing with scripts, shaders, actor transforms, etc.

I have some feedback regarding the tools. Upon saving a scenario and then loading it, the new halo_tag_test tool will load checkpoints from previous versions of the scenario, leading to issues. The halo_tag_test tool will also crash when pressing the esc key while in the menu sometimes.

You can delete checkpoints/saves in your documents folder

[[GFR] YOUR THERAPIST]

according to https://c20.reclaimers.net/h1/engine/build-types/ there are various build flavors used internally:

release
profile
play
test
debug

According to https://c20.reclaimers.net/h1/engine/developer-console/#debugfunctions-temporary-hud , there are some commands inaccessible to certain build flavors. I assume the tags build is the Test flavor, and some commands are still inaccessible.

This following command, for example:

temporary_hud [boolean])
Renders a debug HUD with basic weapon information in text and line-drawn circular reticules representing the current error angle (yellow) and autoaim angle (blue, or red if autoaim active). Works in debug builds only.

seems like it would be extremely useful for sandbox work.

That said, I never thought I'd see an internal flavor just handed out like this. Tell Kornman00 he's doing God's work.

Official documentation, a list of keyboard shortcuts or a way to access a debug menu (assuming it's available in H1) would be nice. Though, for now, c20 is doing a pretty good job of documenting as much as it can.

The ability to launch into a local multiplayer game would be chill too, but I understand that's outside of the current scope.

[Photolysis]

There are a couple of problems with the current build of the mod tools:

(Closed tickets #90654 & #89273)

1) A bug with Radiosity as part of Tool / Sapien where the second BSP in "Halo" will not accept changing lighting. Even using the original files provided with no changes just recalculating the light maps triggers the bug:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Chelan_1>tool lightmaps levels\a30\a30 a30_b 0 0.001
i'm going to render debug lightmaps for a30_b of levels\a30\a30, and i'll stop when red+blue+green = 0.001000. Hit control-c now if this isn't right.
recompiling scripts after scenarios were merged.
start levels\a30\a30_b
EXCEPTION halt in e:\jenkins\workspace\mcch1codebuild\mcc\main\h1\code\h1a2\sources\structures\radiosity\intermediate_radiosity.c,#887: !point_is_coplanar || realcmp(transformed_point.z, 0.f)

If you run Radiosity in Sapien it will crash the application.


2) It is impossible to add a new human weapon to CE campaign maps when compiled as remastered. This looks like something is hard coded and throws an exception causing an Unreal Engine crash.

This works if maps are compiled as "classic" but this results in a dark and low resolution HUD.

Example repo:

Add the shotgun to "The Silent Cartographer". This can be placed in Sapien, the marine variants can be added with the shotgun and so on. Compile the map as "remastered".

Pick up the shotgun or set it as the secondary weapon in the player starting profile and switch to it so the shotgun is the active weapon. This instantly crashes the game.

Strangely this only applies to human weapons, as the MP Fuel rod can be added fine, and the Needler can be added fine to "Pillar of Autumn".

Adding any other form of data seems to work fine - adding power ups, vehicles, new bipeds, new actor variants, all works fine. Except adding a new human weapon.




Feature requests:

When running the game with anti cheat disabled, please allow access to debug mode and dev commands.

Any official documentation on creating tags and so on.

Providing the tag files is very welcome, but if 343i would consider making source files like the original BSPs / models / etc available as optional downloads? There are ways of extracting these using 3rd party tools but an official repository of these files to allow for a fuller understanding and easier editing would be great.

I would like to start working on an implementation of Firefight for CE, however there is no script to enable skulls. Would it be possible to look at adding this functionality? I understand this might not be possible if it's using some weird hack to override the original engine functionality.

Is there any way of adding Saber engine assets? For example, if I add the Ghost to a map, is there any chance of a tool being added so the remastered graphics can have this data added?

Please tweak the engine so it can load custom maps from the menu without needing to override existing maps.


Thanks guys

[Billy]

FEEDBACK: I know it's been requested to death already but I really feel like the best next step for modding tools is to make custom maps accessible in the menu w/o replacing existing maps. Possibly a filter setting to boot w/ the custom games browser similar to the original Custom Edition browser to hide/unhide custom made maps.

It's amazing with the amount of effort you put into this series up to a decade in its lifespan, managing to properly port these games onto PC alongside fixing previous port errors is something other companies rarely do, and I thank you for putting the effort in. I look forward to the next updates and hope for the addition of Combat Evolved in the custom games browser.

[Krevil]

Feedback:

Tools come with very little information on usage, even just including the original HEK guide would be an improvement.

Tagtest often provides inaccurate results from how tags will perform in a cache build, such as scripts failing to compile or having errors and shaders causing crashes. It also suffers from the menu not scaling correctly and video options being limited in support.

Tool regularly outputs undescriptive warnings and errors when a command fails to execute, making debugging difficult. When building a model, it would be useful if shaders and bitmaps were also optionally rebuilt without having to manually delete previous tags.

Currently, the only way to obtain the data files such as models and animations for existing maps is to use third party tools to extract them. If possible, it would be appreciated if there was an official way to obtain these files for modification, for example model files for levels so that modders could add new areas to old locations without having to go through the process of manually rebuilding the level from extracted tag data files.

Additional info:
Invader[github.com] is a community-made toolkit which I have found has many improvements over the official toolset. When looking for improvements that can be made, specifically to Tool, there are numerous that can be found here.

[Photolysis]

Also just to officially report the bug/issue I touched on in my other post:

Bug: Compiling a map as "classic" results in a dark / low resolution HUD, which does not match either existing or legacy HUD.

Steps to repo: Compile a map with the "classic" keyword instead of "remastered" and load the map. The HUD will be much darker and low resolution. This repos 100%, and can be easily reproduced by recompiling a map with no other changes made.

Example:

https://imgur.com/a/CFFGMgX

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Chelan_1>tool build-cache-file levels\ff_rockslide\ff_rockslide classic

https://i.imgur.com/AVMZTAI.jpeg


C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Chelan_1>tool build-cache-file levels\ff_rockslide\ff_rockslide remastered

https://i.imgur.com/0d7e3j9.jpeg


Note: compiling as a classic map fixes an issue with not being add new human weapons to a campaign map without the game crashing when picking up / switching to them!



Feature request / note / random comment: Is it possible to get tool to produce compressed output? This results in a map with 1 BSP removed being almost 4x the original a30.map size!



Edit: Additional bug 2, I've noticed sometimes when playing with anti cheat enabled sometimes controller vibration will stop working entire.

No idea how to repo this, but throwing it out there. When this happens seems like the executable has to be restarted.

[crow#8279]

TLDR:

CHANGE LIMITS
1) Increased particle amount from particle\particle_system. For particles, even just the "existing amount" would be cool, without touching the rendered amount. So long as the particles can actually exist, the particle size cutoff can handle the rest to carefully cull out the unused particles without flickering issues caused by sparks which you can't see anyway because they are too far.
2) Increased rendered amount of detail_object_collection
3) Increasing the amount of lens flares (or lights? I don't know which one is limited here) and transparent_shaders allowed... which is already high but more is better
4) lens flares beyond the max draw distance shoulnd't count towards the limit
5) Color fields (change color for particles\decals\objects\lights\lens flares\reflection colors) seemingly work via a "multiply" function.
Would it be possible to multiply the individual channels by numbers higher than 1? This way the ending result wouldn't be always darker than the original bitmap, allowing some more juggling which for effects in particular would basically cover for the lack of gradient bitmaps used to recolor particles in later halo games
_____
NEW FEATURES
6) Soft particles
7) Normal maps on shader_model
8) Particle from particle systems could use borrowing some fields from the particle tag (being able to orient them along their direction instead of being limited to screen-facing particles, being able to choose if they are lit or unlit instead of having the engine choosing on its own depending on the blending mode, having a "minimum size cutoff" kind of field)
9) Some HUD bitmaps (weapon pickup icons, gametype icons, objective markers) use some hardcoded pixel-to-screen-size conversion. Exposing this value to the user, instead of being hardcoded, would allow the usage of high-res assets without everything becoming BIG.
____
BUG FIXING
10) Fixing some broken bitmap type (monochrome, palettized bump maps), which were broken in the original tools and I believe are still broken now
11) The "ready" function type on weapons was broken in the original tools, I believe it's still broken now
12) Alpha\multiply-add blending mode on decals was broken in the original tools, I believe it's still broken now
13) Some documentation over the most obscure fields (rotational particle systems? Zsprite? Blend color as HSV? Wut?) would be cool
14) Projectiles "initial" and "final" velocity only allows for decreasing speed on projectiles. Would it be possible to allow for projectiles to have increasing speed too, like the rockets you shoot from the sabre in long night of solace?
15) Projectile field "detonate X seconds after first impact" was never implemented as far as I'm aware, so I'm not sure if changing this would count as a "bug fix" or as a "new feature".... but it would be cool to have it

EXTENDED:
First of all, thanks for these tools. They are awesome, and much needed love for the Halo PC modding community. Restoring so many broken features -shader transparent generic, bumped shader glass, normal maps on shader environment, manual lightmap tweaking in Sapien- is refreshing.
Thanks for the passion shown for the modding community, your work is really really appreciated.

However, the unofficial patch Open Sauce for the old Custom Edition release offers some features that still makes it difficult for me to move my work on the new tools, mainly because of how generally useful they are.
Some of these are simple number increases in particles (250-ish is very very very low), some of these are plain additions over the standard tags (soft particles, normal maps) which I recognize would be very unlikely to be done but still would be cool to have.
There are some other things which would be entirely new to the scope of what OS used to be, but would still be cool to have.

The more of those features are added to the modding tools, the more pizza I'm sending to whoever is responsible for this. No joking.

[Shrek The Third]

Oh yea this is feedback time.


MCC has a universal pause menu that isn't conducive to the Custom Edition mod I'm working on. This means my mod will be limited to Custom Edition for the time being until we can port all the cool ♥♥♥♥ we've developed into the MCC Environment.

I want to know if we are able to use custom ui widgets in the future? My mod relies on custom ui widgets to do, among other things, generate save slots and prompt dynamic conversations.

Are there plans to allow or develop in-built memory access for lua so modders can go manic with power, making CE do things it was originally never design to do?