Like in the e3 demo

Would it be possible to update the mod to give the warthogs headlights the dynamic shadow casting lights? They look really good

the game looks so good, holyyy

Ahh yeah that makes sense. I'm super happy with the current form of the mod it runs more then well enough on my steam deck which is my only PC. This is hands down my favorite mod you definitely made the right choice on performance

I know you said the preformance can be really heavy and you had to lower some areas for sake of it would any plans to release side version of this mod for us users with beefier pcs to mess around on?

It was really bad relative to how soft and diffused the shadows looked. The light needed to be a certain size to cover enough of the bridge to actually cast a coeherent shadow, but the size was so big that the shadows were too low res to really capture any fine detail from objects aside from the bridge, and if i wanted to reduce the light size, i needed to add a lot more to compensate for the lack of coverage, which in turn tanked performance without looking that good, so i just decided to place non-shadow casting lights to at the very least bring out the texture detail which only works with dynamic lighting

and how bad was the bridge with shadows fps wise. i wanna see that

how did you recover and get this fixed? have any plans to ever retouch it?

Flickering shadows are because of object culling, and the bridge doesnt have shadows anymore because of i changed the light to one that isnt shadow casting, because of performance. This is the main problem of the mod aside from the shadow quality, the game can only handle so many shadows before the performance goes to shit. It is never going to be close to how stencil shadows look, but this is the closest it can get

Okay so, from what I can tell the mod is working fine, but... I've noticed that (I played this when it first released) that areas that had shadows are missing like the bridge for starters in metropolis, and I noticed that the shows seem to either work or not work, and they flicker and disappear. Maybe that's why I don't see the Shadow quality in HALO 2 like it should be.

At this point there is nothing that can be done for performance aside from removing more shadow casting lights, which will completely change the look of the mod. The shadows are simply not optimized at all relative to their quality, mainly because they were never meant to be used this much outside of very select moments during the game

Looks awesome, but that frame rate drop makes it a bit of a chore to play. I assume it'll improve as the mod is improved upon?

Thank you for telling me.

Are you talking about the shader file?? It its not in MCC itself, its in the Halo 2 Editing kit folder. The file is only for the lighting process in the mod tools

After installing it, I noticed it didn't feel like it was originally, so I followed the instructions, but I gotta be honest I'm a bit confused, I'm not seeing those path names in MCC. Which part of HALO 2 are they meant to be in?

Le hello people. I updated the mod, and it should work now. No big changes to the mod itself tho, its just a compatibility update

thank you whoever found the fix!!

yeah the mod mostly works if you just update the version number. All the issues it currently has seem to be the known issues

@RevivedBirch5 Thanks for the easy fix. Worked just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgoSTC6pzNY
heres the tutorial

Posting a workaround from halofan2221 I found on another mod:

"I saw a fix for mods not showing up just go to the where your steam apps is located enter it find workshop then content. From here locate the workshop mods for halo mcc mine is labeled 976730 not sure if its the same for everyone. Now find the mod that is not working and open the mod info.json then edit the Max App Version to 3495 instead of 3385 then boom mods should work no problem."

The 976730 folder also contained MCC mods on my PC and this mod was in a folder named 3276750116.

aww :(

The mod is broken for now because of some update that dropped. It wont be fixed for a while because of what i explained in an earlier comment, sorry

how do i get this to work im starting the campaign missions but the mod isnt working

Is it easy? Yes. Is it fast? Nope, specially now that im in college. We're gonna have to wait for some vacations so i can get some work done

Well that is seriously unfortunate if you don't have the files yet, is it easy to rebuild? I hope it is possible to remake it's a great mod, I am surprised 343/Halo studios just randomly put out an update that would do this... it broke many mods not just this one apparently

The mod no longer shows up on the mod list. Your hard work is much appreciated. Thank you for making the mod possible in the first place!

But whatever. That option appears in a "list" that is at the top of the light properties window when you open a lighting tag in Assembly, and no we cant increase the resolution of the shadow map. In the shader file used there is a line that has "shadow map resolution" but it doesnt do anything

Fuck, if its broken i would have to redo the entire mod again because i lost the original files.

how do you enable the option you are referring to below "light framerate killer" ? and also can there be an option to increase the shadowmap resolution significantly? cheers for the mod, it's great

mod is broken as far as i can tell from feb 28 2025 update for anti cheat, i just played the mod like 2 days ago and it was working great too

Nah it sadly doesnt. Workshop mods are invididual "packages" and you cant mix them

this is amazing. Does it work with other mods like Halo 2 uncut?

yeah from what i understand leaked demo is a different engine and we've already got the remake that is 99.9 percent accurate and runs on the final halo 2 engine. Strong doubt we see much or any mods from leaked demo

this mod makes my cock rock solid

Thank you so much, this was driving me crazy.

there is an extra option called "light framerate killer" that both extends the range at which the lights fade out (although it isnt by much) and how many lights can be on a scene

I'm trying to add lighting to my own mod and I was wondering, how did you get the lights to not flicker and fade at such a close distance? I've set all light settings to "fade very far" but it doesn't seem to do anything.

Im excited!
Until then keep doing what you're doing

If the engine is the same as the retail xbox version, i would like to think that yes, it may be possible. Maybe someone that knows its way around modding the og xbox version of Halo 2 can do it

With the new 2004 e3 demo leak do you think its possible to mod it?
it seemed it had some broken stencil shadows

it is possible, yes. The problem is that to be honest i dont know how to achieve that look. I want to think that the guy who made the lighting in the Demo (which is the same one that made the shader that i used here) made some additional tweaks to the shader to achieve that specific look

Is it possible to implement soft shadows(unpixelated but less accurate) like in the digsite demo?

Thank you for your answer

Not in the game, no, and its not in the shaders folder. That path is from the editing kit folder, and the full path should be something like steam/steamapps/common/H2EK/tags/rasterizer/pixel_shaders_dx9

May I ask if the path to tags/ladders/pixel_shaderDX9 is in the game folder?

Sadly its impossible to have proper stencil shadows in retail Halo 2. The stencil buffer (which is what gives the stencil shadows its name) was completely eliminated from the engine, and there is no way of adding it back without having access to the engine source code. Even the E3 demo that was relased a few weeks ago doesnt have stencil shadows, they are all shadow maps, just like this mod. I would also love to use proper stencil shadows, dont get me wrong, its just that its impossible

I agree with the commend below mine, there should be Doom 3 style shadows.

would be much better if the shadows in all levels were pitch black. the ambient lighting is so bright that it looks identical to vanilla in many places

This is a really good idea but sadly its way too buggy. Aside from issues posted, the sky also disappears randomly and there are crashes.