Spartan AI in Halo 3 mod tools?

[BlondeLombax]

I've seen videos that have Spartan NPCs added through the mod tools, both friendly and hostile. The only Spartan I can find in the tags is the Chief, and he doesn't have any AI to speak of. How can I accomplish this? I want to push the limits of my own knowledge of the mod tools.

[Nathan]

I haven't tried this, but from my knowledge you could try making a new AI .character file (maybe make a copy of the marine-- no, Elite? - use it as your base, then in the top fields add the chief biped as its unit, then just edit the character behaviours as you see fit for a Spartan.

(Personally, I'd make all new bipeds, models, style and character files, though always just from copies of other ones so that I don't have to start fresh, but use their stats as base ones to tweak [so copy of chief model, biped, maybe render_models scenery etc files], always making sure they refer to each other in their fields and not the original ones, but this could allow you to individually tweak that spartan AI without also affecting your og chief or marine or elite etc files. In essence, copy the homework of existing AI stuff, look at what they need inside their files to function, and make sure your Spartan files then have those fields and values filled at least in that ballpark to function--

-- I'd say just make a copy of the entire Chief folder inside characters, renaming it to what you want, add an ai folder there, copy the style and character files from a marine or Elite, then edit those to be consistent with the chief files there, rest is footnotes, editing it to be unique for your purposes.)

And then when editing a scenarion in Sapien, edit types, add the biped and character file into it so that you can place it there.

[Nathan]

I ended up doing something similar, mainly just making a separate Elite ally version that I added to a few missions, with its own slightly tweaked style, character, biped & model files (making sure the new versions cross-referenced each other, and then editing types in Sapien for a map, plucking it down, giving it tasks, goals etc like any other AI), and it worked fine, so it should work just fine for a spartan as well.

[InsanityGamer]

If you want custom animations, tool lets you extract things to blender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpD-0HKn2-g&list=LL&index=1