Halo 3 Mod Tools Feedback

[Postums]

Welcome to the dedicated feedback thread for Halo 3's Mod Tools.

The purpose of this thread is to gather suggestions or dedicated feedback relating only to Halo 3'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!

[George Glass]

Bluebeak eredeti hozzászólása:

George Glass eredeti hozzászólása:

What about updating it to be more like forge. So in that way it could really benefit many modders.

Sapien's already extremely like Forge. It's to the point where I think Bungie took Sapien and just stripped it back to make Forge. Like you can even spawn yourself wherever you want in the level and stuff has physics when you spawn it.

Well there should be an object menu where all the object tags are and with some objects scripted so you won't have the hard work of scripting them.

[Missi]

Attempting to use the "Show Bitmaps" button in a bitmap tag with its "Usage" set to Water Array will crash Guerilla. This happened with rasterizer\water\wave_test1\wave_test1_displ_water.bitmap which is used by levels\dlc\docks\shaders\water\dock_water_2.shader_water

[yoosuf77]

There needs to be 3 new tools/features added to Halo editing Kits and MCC that would make modding much easier and more fun.

- There needs to be a tag extractor for H1, H2, H3 and future halo maps for people that want to mess with/use other people's content derived from custom Halo maps. For example, I want to be able to extract weapon and character tags from Ruby's Rebalanced H3 campaign, because I want to place them in my own custom maps and play around with them. The first Halo Editing Kit had a tag extractor for this specific purpose, so the new editing kits should also have one. If you do consider making a tag extractor for the modding community, don't add a protector option for tag files (a protection method for your tag files with a purpose to prevent your tag files from being "stolen"). Adding this will ruin modding for everyone trying to have fun playing with other people's creations. Back then in the good 'ol Halo Custom Edition days, there were many toxic people in the modding community who abused this "protective" feature making the modding community playground way less fun such as Zteam. HEK added this feature and it sapped the modding community playground for everyone, hence why people made numerous deprotector programs to combat this meaningless feature. Skyrim has a massive modding community and that community has no issues with modding protection, nor do modding programs have a "protective" feature. If someone truly wants to "protect" their creations, they can simply make their own custom directory within a tag directory and route all dependent tag files within that custom directory with custom named folders. That in itself will make it harder for someone to claim someone else content as their own.

- There needs to be a developer mode for MCC, aside from Anti-Cheat disabled mode. This developer mode should have a command console ready for offline (disabled for multiplayer) use for testing and simply having fun. A command console is already included in Sapien, but it shouldn't just be restricted for scenario testing. Users should be able to use a command console within their custom Halo maps in-game like in Halo Custom Edition. So have 3 modes upon start up for MCC, standard with Anti-Cheat, Anti-cheat disabled (offline for multiplayer) or Anti-cheat disabled Dev mode (offline multiplayer).

- Now support for modding is up, there needs to be a browser for custom made Halo maps within MCC. Otherwise people will wind up replacing stock maps just to play modded custom maps.

- There needs to be audio within Sapien game editor. If anyone doesn't want audio they can switch it off within Sapien. Adding audio within Sapien will make it easier for people trying to add audio scenery.

[Missi]

Guerilla's refresh option in the right-click menu only works if nothing is selected in the folder list.

[PorygonSeizure]

In saipien, where you open an Objective, then click on another Objective, the second Objective doesn't open and all the screens start flickering. You have to click on something else in the Hierarchy first, the click the second Objective.

[Little7om]

First of all, I would like to say thank you to the team at 343 Industries for releasing these tools and for hosting this thread, it's comforting knowing you are taking the initiative for taking in feedback, especially for something as technical and relatively niche as mod tools. Here is a current list, in no particular order, of things I think will improve the tools:

• A tool.exe command similar to extract-import-info for .model_animation_graph tags so we can extract the .jma files from the tags included in the Halo 3 Editing Kit without relying on legacy Xbox 360 .map files to extract animations from that aren't 100% compatible with MCC armatures right out of the box.
  
• Complete descriptions for tool.exe commands and their parameters, as most commands are entirely undocumented and modders have to guess things like if the command looks for local or absolute paths, certain files or file types, or what the command is even used for.
  
• export-bitmap-tga and export-bitmap-dds commands for me seem to always output invalid/broken image files. I have not tried export-bitmap-pfm since I do not know what a .pfm file is.
  
• A way in Guerilla to view, edit, add, and delete sequences/indexes in .bitmap tags. For example, in hud_reticles.bitmap, having the ability when viewing the image, to see where the areas for each reticle are defined, what index those areas are assigned to, and the ability to add new areas/indexes for new custom-made reticles.
  
• A way in Guerilla to properly view and modify strings contained within a .multilingual_unicode_string_list tag.
  
• A way to view and modify font packages so modders can more easily add custom weapon icons to HUD messages.
  
• A way in Guerilla to make tags refer to different .multilingual_unicode_string_list tags. For example, custom weapons using a custom HUD messages tag so the vanilla tag does not have to be modified for custom swap, pickup, etc. messages.

[Missi]

It appears that sky lights exported from FBX have their direction zeroed out on conversion to JMS with fbx-to-jmi in tool

[Bluebeak]

Structure Painter is extremely buggy often the window for it disappears if minimize/closed and gets lost in a far corner. It should be included with the "reset window prefs" button

[Missi]

In Sapien you can select something in the Hierarchy View while a level is loading, leading to a crash.

Also came across this error when trying to create a water shader. Currently not able to make custom water shaders due to missing files.

tags: MISSING tag shaders\water_templates\_0_0_2_1_0_0_0_0.render_method_template (referenced from levels\multi\real_halo_level\shaders\water\river_water.shader_water)
shaders: render_method (levels\multi\real_halo_level\shaders\water\river_water) postprocess - template (shaders\water_templates\_0_0_2_1_0_0_0_0) needed to be generated
tags: MISSING tag shaders\water_hlsl.hlsl_include (referenced from code)
: pixel shader entry point (5) doesn't exist - shader probably failed to compile

[Snackie]

Sapien is missing some .scenario files. Avalanche, Powerhouse are 2 of them. DLC maps are not present like Rat's Nest, Orbital, Long Shore.

Add tutorials from the help option. All it says is About Sapien and first time modders have to look up Youtube Tutorials to know what they are doing.

[Lychy]

SomehowLucky eredeti hozzászólása:

Sapien is missing some .scenario files. Avalanche, Powerhouse are 2 of them. DLC maps are not present like Rat's Nest, Orbital, Long Shore.

Add tutorials from the help option. All it says is About Sapien and first time modders have to look up Youtube Tutorials to know what they are doing.

They are all in the levels\dlc folder, Avalanche is sidewinder, the last 3 are armory spacecamp and docks respectively. Powerhouse is a halo reach map

[PunkGalFury]

SomehowLucky eredeti hozzászólása:

Sapien is missing some .scenario files. Avalanche, Powerhouse are 2 of them. DLC maps are not present like Rat's Nest, Orbital, Long Shore.

Add tutorials from the help option. All it says is About Sapien and first time modders have to look up Youtube Tutorials to know what they are doing.

Some of the maps that don't have .scenario files were from halo online, including a port of reach's powerhouse into halo 3's engine, alongside exclusive halo online maps yet to be released like Diamondback (avalanche remake).

[Demoxicini]

add a XMA encoding support for halo 3. probably the cause of no sound in sapien maybe

[Missi]

Spotlights exported from FBX became more broken with the hotfix. Originally they were rotated 90 on the X axis, now they're rotated -90 on the X axis but also 45 degrees on the Z axis.

In Blender:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j6v7y9gu09wx43d/blender_wVe0OYXyNN.png?dl=0

In Sapien post-compile:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ct0uxohnddxrxov/sapien_4wRX9FxBQ9.png?dl=0

[Missi]

There also seems to be light bleeding through my geometry that wasn't present in the last release.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ug7n8efkvzsrqus/sapien_Hv4W1FSqzr.png?dl=0

Nvm, this was an error on my part; object was an instance. My bad!