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Ifafudafi
August 24th, 2010, 02:25 AM
Dennis is slow so you guys get it first. Enjoy.


Another Stupid Campaign Mod
Release 2: a30 (Halo)
By Ifafudafi

(a10 can be found at http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=5436 )

---

NEW IN THIS RELEASE

-Three new weapons: The Battle Rifle, a long-range, single-shot marksman's weapon; the
Plasma Beam, a rapid-fire, shield-pounding headshot machine; and the Impaler, a fusion of
the Needler and the old Covenant Carbine (I swear I came up with this first)

-MC and the FP arms now use CMT's excellent models.

-Assault Rifle has a new firing sound, brought to you by Halo Reach. Its base accuracy
has also been decreased slightly, as it was a little too effective at longer ranges.

-Plasma Pistol's charged shot homes in a little easier. The original intent was to make
sure Jackals don't hit you every single time, but that inaccuracy carried over to the
player a little too easily. You still can't hit a moving Elite without considerable lead,
of course, but you shouldn't be missing easy shots.

-Grenade weight restored to default values. The extra weight you saw in a10 was left over
from when I (like everybody else) was trying to replicate H2.

-Plasma Burst no longer has a charged shot. It was designed to be a long-range backup if
you didn't have a long range weapon handy, but that tread on those weapons' ground too
much. It's now exclusively a mid to close range weapon.

-Various tweaks and optimizations in particle effects.

---

INSTALLATION

To install, simply place the a30.map file inside your Halo Custom Edition\maps folder
(Default directory will be C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Halo Custom Edition\maps). To
uninstall, remove a30.map.

To play, you need to either utilize the ui.map file included in the a10 release or the in
-game console.

To use the console, head to your Halo custom Edition folder. You should see a file called
haloce.exe. Make a shortcut to this wherever you want (likely, there's already a shortcut
in the start menu and on the desktop.) Right-click on the shortcut you want to use, and
select Properties. Cilck on the "Shortcut" tab inside the properties window. Under the
"Target" field, move the cursor to the far right, add a space, and then type in "-
console". Press OK, and use the Shortcut. Press the tilde key (~). you should see a
small pink prompt in the bottom left corner. Type in "map_name a10" to load the map.

---

NOTES

Unless you have another HCE campaign mod, the game will not continue after finishing the
level; you'll either have to type "quit" into the console or press Alt+F4 to exit. This
is just the way Halo is set up; I can't do anything about it. If you know where and when
the level ends, you can quit back to the main menu before the cutscene triggers to avoid
this.

This release is protected, and every individual map release will also be protected;
however, the last release of b40 will include all maps and will be unprotected. This is
to ensure that the final product is as polished and balanced as possible, so that you
won't have to be overwriting and replacing tags as they're updated. If you encounter a
bug, or if a weapon seems too weak or too powerful in comparison to the rest, please post
in the thread at either Halomaps or Modacity so I can fix this for the next map release.

Things I already know about:

-The SMG's sound will cut out and occasionally do weird things. This is just the way Halo
CE handles looping sounds; there's nothing I can really do about it.

-The pickup icons for the Pistol and the Battle Rifle reference CMT's silenced and BRG
variants for the same reasons cited previously.

-The Plasma Burst and Beam do not have unique models. I can't model to save my life, so
I'm stuck recoloring existing models. If you or somebody you know is willing to model,
skin, rig, and/or animate new weapons from scratch, please let me know.

-The Battle Rifle's animations are placeholder. I'll be using teh lag's set as soon as
he's done with them, so bear with me for now; anything nasty (the reload doesn't complete
at the same time as the animation, the melee sucks, etc.) can be attributed to that.

---

THANKS TO

Bungie/Gearbox - For the obligatory.
CMT - The SMG & Impaler's model, skin, and animations, the Elite & MC models and skins,
the Jackal shield skins, the Plasma Pistol's animations, the Plasma Rifle's skin, and a
couple of sprites.
CtrlAltDestroy - The SMG's sound (ripped from Halo 3).
Gamma927 - The Pistol's animations.
Flibitijibibo & Inferno - The new Plasma sounds.
ICEE - The Battle Rifle's animations.
F.E.A.R. - The base for the blood decals.
You - For downloading and supporting this mod.

---

Enjoy, and tell your friends! With more interest comes quicker releases and fewer bugs;
help make ASCM as good as it can possibly get.

No more regular videos now that I'm pumping out maps, but check back every now and then,
as I do plan to get one or two more done before the mod's finished. Also watch the
threads at Halomaps ( http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=32513 ) and
Modacity ( http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?21879 ) for more information and
updates.

http://a.imageshack.us/img713/8747/91433291.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img710/8260/55292525.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img832/5816/23851793.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img682/8674/68016902.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img683/8596/93106542.jpg

More screens:
http://a.imageshack.us/img824/2176/69616341.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img818/338/90180792.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img52/9104/24530816.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img138/1860/47836594.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img828/9303/95976536.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img201/7151/88246698.jpg
http://a.imageshack.us/img163/5548/31354864.jpg

I've compressed the hell out of this, shaving about 100MB off. Might take a while to extract.

Filefront (http://www.filefront.com/17230293/a30.zip/)
Halomaps link coming soon

assassinchief107
August 24th, 2010, 03:43 AM
The things that piss me off:
1- HELL WITH CMT ICONS! It doesn't matter if it's 'cool', the ones on A10 were alooooot better. Try adding "Burst" underneath the Burst's icon. And same to the plasma beam.
2-Battle Rifle is flying off in 3rd person, which includes marines.
3-Why classic Warthog??

Cagerrin
August 24th, 2010, 04:15 AM
Yeah, CMT icons are bad, text-only pickups are far more helpful.

Am I blind, or has a gross crime been committed by excluding the sniper rifle? I hope it's not the second one.

Pooky
August 24th, 2010, 05:43 AM
Awesome! Glad to see virtually all the criticism (including mine) being taken into account. I'll definitely be back later with more things to complain about :)

EagerYoungSpaceCadet
August 24th, 2010, 03:00 PM
Very good, I was looking forward to this! :neckbeard: But I have 2 complaints "bad" comments:


The Impaler is just too powerful against Elites. Any player accurate enough can get an easy 7-hit kill on Elites.
I don't like the sound of the Plasma Beam. That is the only reason I am not using that gun. For me, it sounds like... dod gammit I will have to be creative here. A loud, piercing sound that sounds like an incredibly volume gained bird chirp in the beginning of the shot which melted all my earwax, followed by a longer, annoying sound of a tense, thick spring being hit with a mallet, and it cuts out very often... Don't get me wrong, it's a great gun, call me lazy but I'm not sure it is worth muting the sound, or at least turning the volume down...



These are not complaints, but neither praises, it's just something I had to comment:




The Assault Rifle is a scary beast. You expect it to play the original brrprrdrrrtrrr sound, and then you fire and jump off your seat because of the badassness of it!
Marines say: "Look, a Mark V!" Master Chief's model in this mod is a Mark VI.


And PRAISES :D




Makes my teeth rot by playing.
Not too daunting for my GPU.
New weapons, balancing the arsenal, while making it look cool
Makes my teeth rot by playing.

Inferno
August 24th, 2010, 03:12 PM
Iffy. Fix your BR scope shader. It looks way to bright in those screenshots. Love the reticule though.

assassinchief107
August 24th, 2010, 04:38 PM
Also, here are some things that you should keep:
1-The classic Sniper Rifle, it's awesome.
2-The Battle Rifle, it kicks ass.

ICEE
August 24th, 2010, 05:06 PM
I really like your custom covie weapons. Plasma burst is awesome, and plasma beam is awesome on the other end of the spectrum of awesome. I found myself using these together mosrt

The sounds are epic too

Ifafudafi
August 24th, 2010, 06:46 PM
Ifafudafi loves feedback. Feedback -> better mod.


1- HELL WITH CMT ICONS! It doesn't matter if it's 'cool', the ones on A10 were alooooot better. Try adding "Burst" underneath the Burst's icon. And same to the plasma beam. I can't. My software is quite literally unable to create those images because it can't do all the fancy stuff with alpha channels that Halo requires. I'm sure I can find somebody who can do that, though; I'm just trying to both mantain a relatively stable release schedule and get higher priority stuff (particle sets, weapon balance, etc.) done first.
2-Battle Rifle is flying off in 3rd person, which includes marines. Placeholder placeholders are placeholder. I'm waiting on teh lag to finish his stuff, but that wouldn't have happened any time soon, so I decided to go ahead and get a30 out for you guys' sake.

3-Why classic Warthog?? Because it's awesome.


Yeah, CMT icons are bad, text-only pickups are far more helpful. Icons are a little more conducive to good gameplay. You can immediately see what weapon you're hovering over, rather than having to spend an extra second reading the text. Again, I'll see if I can get someone to make a custom set by a50.

Am I blind, or has a gross crime been committed by excluding the sniper rifle? I hope it's not the second one. It's the second one, and here's why: In vanilla Halo, the only long-range weapon in the entire game was the Sniper Rifle. This no longer being the case in my mod, I can have a slightly weaker weapon (the BR, in this case) fufill a similar role while saving the SR for its big feature in a50. Pacing, dear boy.





The Impaler is just too powerful against Elites. Any player accurate enough can get an easy 7-hit kill on Elites. This was a slight concern of mine, but I was waiting until I got some feedback before I changed anything. If other people agree, I'll probably quicken the detonation timer so that missing a shot means you'll have to start over entirely.
I don't like the sound of the Plasma Beam. You wouldn't believe the trouble I had trying to get this dickweed working. Flib and I spent hours tweaking and changing it, and then right when we thought we had it working Halo's stupid 22kHz requirement messed everything up again. I'll definitely be spending some time trying to improve it before a50.

Marines say: "Look, a Mark V!" Master Chief's model in this mod is a Mark VI. See the other thread for my views on the CMT model. It's just a trivial thing I wouldn't be able to deal with anyway.



Iffy. Fix your BR scope shader. It looks way to bright in those screenshots. Agreed. Admittedly, I really went against my better instincts and rushed the BR out so I could get this map out as quickly as possible. After I finish with the new weapons that'll be in a50, the BR will be my first stop for improvements.

Pooky
August 24th, 2010, 08:23 PM
Okay, so I just finished a run through on Normal.

Made me happy:

The BR. Oh god, this weapon was fun to use. I literally took out every single enemy in the cliff edge section without being seen. Ammo felt a bit too scarce though, I kept running out early on even though I rarely ever missed a shot.

The AR sounds. Changing the sounds made this weapon dramatically more satisfying to use. I kept it in my back pocket pretty much the entire time.

Made me sad:

I didn't notice any new effects for the Warthog, or any of the human weapons (besides the new ones).

A lot of the firing sounds for the human weapons were way too quiet. The SMG and Warthog turret in particular need a volume increase. Not saying to go overboard, but the Warthog chaingun going off right next to my head should at least be louder than a Grunt squeaking in the distance. Guns are loud, there's a reason people wear ear protection.

Don't the plasma beam and Impaler overlap eachother in function a lot? I only used these weapons briefly, so I may have a change of heart when I try them on Legendary, but it seems a bit silly for the Covenant to have two mid range, semi auto, scoped headshot weapons.

Suggestions:

Make the plasma burst fully automatic. The ROF is fine, but I don't see much point in making people click repeatedly to use this weapon now that there's no charge function.

Do some effects for the human weapons too! The old school effects on these weapons seem pretty out of place compared to the fancy, high res effects on the Covenant weapons.



Also, why the hell are some Jackals on my team, and some Marines on the Covenant team?

assassinchief107
August 24th, 2010, 11:16 PM
Yes, the Classic Warthog IS awesome, but it's the other vehicles that will make me sad face.(Ghost, Wraith and Banshee)

EagerYoungSpaceCadet
August 25th, 2010, 04:47 AM
Also, why the hell are some Jackals on my team, and some Marines on the Covenant team?

Yeah, I saw the WTFJackals too

1621

Mistakes happen to everyone. I, for example, when I pour some juice in a glass, sometimes put the cap in the glass and drink from the bottle... :slap:

Also, the Needler reload animation when the gun is empty is messed up, the needles come sticking out of the gun too late.

Also, has the melee been tweaked? It seems weaker than before. Maybe it's just me, but still...

And something strange: take a Plasma Beam, zoom in and walk backwards, you'll see the muzzle glow of the Plasma Rifle (2 blue glows floating in the air) :iiam:

Hr3shy
August 25th, 2010, 10:51 AM
looks great man! you got my download, i thought i was gonna have to play spv2 d40 then i saw this. hurray for sp mods that dont suck.

Syuusuke
August 25th, 2010, 12:35 PM
That didn't happen to me, then again I may have been trigger happy and killed them before I noticed...

How do you change difficulty to legendary btw? I'm pretty sure game_set_difficulty legendary didn't work for me. Was it 'insane' or 'brutal' or something else.

EagerYoungSpaceCadet
August 25th, 2010, 01:06 PM
No, it won't work. game_set_difficulty impossible probably will.

Or get a new ui.map file that supports SP, that way your difficulty records get saved (btw I have all of them on a10 and only need legendary on a30).

Pooky
August 25th, 2010, 07:52 PM
One thing I forgot to mention before, the Marines are way too weak. They were never the most durable or reliable of allies in the past, but now that the Covenant are so much more powerful the Marines have become truly pathetic. I had a ridiculously hard time keeping them alive on Normal.

They were dead within 5 seconds on Legendary.

EagerYoungSpaceCadet
August 26th, 2010, 11:43 AM
Maybe that's because they get headshotted too easily. There were no Covie headshot weapons in standard Halo, so Marines lasted longer. Make the Jackals headshot less with these Plasma Beams, it would also add some reality as it is hard to aim with one arm holding a giant plasma shield...!

assassinchief107
August 26th, 2010, 07:29 PM
Also, I meant something else about the burst and beam icons. I meant that you should use the normal PP icon but add 'Burst' onto the bottom right of the icon! Same to the beam and spread.

Pooky
August 27th, 2010, 06:22 AM
Maybe that's because they get headshotted too easily. There were no Covie headshot weapons in standard Halo, so Marines lasted longer

That's precisely what I meant. That, and the fact that Elite shields now recharge almost instantly after you bring them down.

EagerYoungSpaceCadet
August 27th, 2010, 07:59 AM
Its like Halo 2 Mythic

It just needs Jackal snipers:ohdear:

assassinchief107
August 27th, 2010, 07:10 PM
I just realized that there's a friendly Jackal in most of the encounters. But some marines attacked me, although, I never betrayed one.

Amit
September 2nd, 2010, 01:13 AM
I just realized that there's a friendly Jackal in most of the encounters. But some marines attacked me, although, I never betrayed one.

LOL, looks like actor variants got switched or something. Or maybe just the Bipeds?

EagerYoungSpaceCadet
September 4th, 2010, 01:12 PM
There's another thing I found out:

The Grunts holding Plasma Bursts tend to go nuts when you hide from them. They don't stop shooting, and they occasionally kill Elites, how many times I've heard a high pitched "Sorry" or "Wasn't me" followed by "They got Elite! RUUN!"

They also tend to shoot from a very far range, considering that it's a lot more inaccurate then the Plasma Pistol it's pointless...