HALO EXPOSED - Hardly Lebel, Multiplayer Designer Starts a Blog

[stunt_man]

Hardy Lebel, one the Multiplayer Lead Designer for the original Halo now has a blog and has done two webcam ask-me-anything sessions.


He mainly worked on the first Halo game - he wasn't a fan of the way Halo 2 multiplayer was balanced and he only worked on singleplayer because of it. He's created some maps (ex: Rat Race) and had a hand in many others (ex: Hang 'Em High, Damnation, Boarding Action).


He recognizes H1's competitive merit as an "accident," but that its deep meta-game is undeniable. If you are unfamiliar with H1's multiplayer meta-game, the things he is referring to are:

• Static weapon timers. Weapons in CE multiplayer spawn at set intervals throughout a match. For example, if the overshield is set to spawn every 90 seconds, it will spawn at :90, :180, :270, etc. H1 is the only game to feature this functionality. [/*]
• The player spawning system. For in-depth information, please see this thread: http://gamebattles.majorleaguegaming...lained-7843178. For example, in Team Slayer, teamates will spawn at a spawn point near you, and if you aren't near a spawn point, they will spawn at a random spawn point - unless an enemy is blocking it. This means that if one team has map control, they can effectively trap the other team by forcing them to spawn in the same area of the map. However, the trapped team can still escape by all dying at once - because the first player that spawns could spawn behind the enemy team, and the rest of his dead teamates will spawn at points near him [/*]
• The weapon balance. He discusses how the weapons are balanced in H1 compared to some other games, including H2. He seems to value a perfectly-balanced matrix of weapons, but overall he respects the importance of the subjective feeling of the weapon for the player. This is in line with something that Jason Jones said about the H1 pistol: "I added code specifically, when the map was loaded, to change a single number on the pistol," which he did because he didn't feel comfortable with the way the pistol felt at the end of development (source: http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/8/4503...powered-pistol) [/*]

Hardy talks about a lot of other stuff ranging from cut content in Halo 1 (jetpacks!), last minute changes to some MP maps (Sidewinder teleporters were always supposed to be two-way - Gearbox got it right), his amazement at how far the H1 competitive scene has come (high-level tricks like nading weapons to you, manipulating the player and weapon spawn systems, etc) and a lot of general level design guidelines.


Here's Hardy Lebel's blog:


http://www.hardylebel.com/


Here are links to his webcam AMA's:


Part 1: http://youtu.be/xEhdyzjVVqk
Part 2: http://youtu.be/Knb-1uJJktA


Here's Missingno's Youtube channel (one of the only pros that makes videos about breaking down H1's gameplay, commentating on competitive matches, and all-around useful tips for some of the more popular maps):


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2y...kvCU0Zw3XKcPnA


The Team Beyond forum houses high-level discussion for all the Halo games - but it also seems to be the last place you'll find active competitive Halo 1 players from the OG Xbox version. Here's the link:


http://teambeyond.net/forum/






Why am I posting all this you ask? Because I'm fairly certain that 95% of the people who created/create MP maps for Custom Edition had/have no idea about what made the original maps so balanced. This is based off the fact that I've never seen it discussed in the community in the last decade, and also from personal experience ripping maps and finding haphazardly-placed player spawn points and weapon spawn times left at their default settings.


Hopefully you found this interesting - it's good to hear the dirty deets straight from the horse's mouth. And if you can get past some of the cringeworthy stuff he talks about during his AMA's, he seems very knowledgeable and passionate.

[n00b1n8R]

I didn't realise how high-level this game was from the start. :o

[Tnnaas]

This is actually really cool. I already watched both of Hardy's AMAs and am looking forward to the one next week, and I just started Missingno's commentary on maps.

[stunt_man]

I didn't realize how high-level this game was from the start. :o

Me neither. I just started browsing the Team Beyond forums around the Master Chief Collection launch, and I learned that the amount of things going on during a high-level match is dizzying. Unfortunately it seems like most H1 players are on PC - which was actually rather gimped during the porting process. Things like the pistol's stats, weapon spawn times, weapon pickup locations/orientations and even map geometry all received minor "adjustments" (read: oversights) which negatively impacted high-level play. So, the competitive community never jumped ship to PC, but rather stayed on Xbox - even to this day there are LAN tournaments for H1.

So now there are all these Halo PC kids (myself included) who honestly believed that the game had little competitive merit outside of scrim servers that have nades and powerups disabled -_-


Here's an interesting post from Ifafudafi about the pistol in the PC version:

for the curious:

When building a singleplayer map, tool specifically seeks out weapons/pistol/pistol.weapon, and weapons/pistol/bullet.damage_effect, and changes them before compiling them into the map.


pistol/bullet.damage_effect's damage modifier vs. elite energy shield is reduced from 1.0 to 0.8


pistol/pistol.weapon's error angle upper bound is reduced from 2.0 to 0.4 degrees (this is likely the magic jason jones change). So instead of starting at an 0.2 degree cone and ending at a 2.0 degree cone -- 10 times less accurate -- it merely goes from 0.2 to 0.4. Big change!


You can observe this in action by compiling a singleplayer map yourself with the stock HEK tags, which have the "old" values; looking at the memory while the map's running will reveal these tags to have the newer values, as will looking at them after extracting them from a built map with HEK+. (you can also verify this by just shooting walls with weapons/pistol/pistol.weapon and a clone .weapon located elsewhere)


Here's the fun part though: when building a multiplayer map, tool does nothing. Instead, when h1 xbox loads a multiplayer map, it will change the values as they're being loaded into memory. The kicker? Halo PC doesn't do this. (I've verified this on Custom Edition; I'm 95% sure regular HPC is also like this.) Halo PC multiplayer still uses the old Pistol max error of 2.0 degrees.


So, all along, PC MP players have been using the older, non-JJones-tampered version of the Pistol. Of course, pulling the trigger for every bullet (rather than holding it for automatic fire) completely bypasses the accuracy decrease, apparently by design according to this guy; so practically, the JJones change isn't as significant as it may seem.


Less known but arguably more significant is that plasma rifle/plasma rifle.weapon is also modified in the same way, having its error reduced from 0.5-5.0 degrees to 0.25-2.5 degrees; i.e., the HPC multiplayer PR is effectively half as accurate as its campaign & xbox MP counterpart

I made the same thread on halomaps, and needless to say it was immediately filled with shitposting aside from this gem.

[Btcc22]

Thanks for bringing attention to these videos. Great stuff.

I made the same thread on halomaps, and needless to say it was immediately filled with shitposting aside from this gem.

Wouldn't expect anything but.

[stunt_man]

For anyone that's interested, Hardy Lebel is doing another live AMA tonight. Check his site for details (see the OP). I'll post a link when it goes live at 6pm PST (9pm EST).


EDIT: Heres the link: https://plus.google.com/events/cn9pqaeoctmrts71a5aem1u0ghk
Here's Youtube in case you missed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbhAPBM7d8M

Guys if you have any lingering questions about anything related to map-making, this guy will likely answer it. He's very passionate and doesn't seem to keep many secrets about Halo's development.

You could probably even ask him to send us toolbeta.map :O






ALSO:


EDIT: I didn't test correctly and I have since edited this post to reflect the results of a proper comparison

Here's a video comparison that demonstrate how the pistol spread is identical across all versions of the game:




I decided to test Ifafudafi's theory about the pistol spread between all versions of CE. Not sure if this was the best way to test it, but here we go:

This is from OG Xbox:
^^I didn't test this properly. For all other versions I help the trigger, but in this version I didn't. Here's the pic anyway


This is from the Xbox 360 digital version:


This is from Halo MCC on Xbone:


This is from Halo PC (unaltered):


This is from Halo PC (with the tags altered according to Ifafudafi's theory):

^^This is indeed from the PC version - I'm working on restoring the OG versions of the maps, thats why the lip in the trench is visible and the AR is positioned like OG.

It appears that vanilla Halo PC's pistol spread is identical to the OG version and MCC. If I understood everything correctly, Ifafudafi may have been incorrect and MCC's pistol spread may be in line with the OG version after all.

Looks like we've been using a broken pistol for more than a decade, boys and girls.

^^Not true, bad testing. I'm working on a video comparison to clear up any confusion

For anyone working on a map with the stock tagset, here is the tag setting that is supposedly changed upon map compilation on the OG Xbox version (Jason Jones' last-minute adjustment). All you need to do is change the value manually before compiling your map and the spread is fixed:


Unaltered:


Altered:


Note that I only tested multiplayer. I posted this in the halomaps thread and am waiting for his response. I *may* have misunderstood but I don't think so.