Zteam Update, yes we are still alive! [28.8k warning]

[ShadowSpartan]

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since Zteam gave an update of our progress. As ChokingVictim said in another topic, the single player part of the mod hasn’t been touched in a while but that is due to us working on stuff to improve the mod, mainly programs. This brings me to a big announcement about the Zteam mod.

ChokingVictim and myself have been researching bitmaps.map and sounds.map, which we managed to map out in less than a day. After that I began to work on some code to allow for us to compile our own bitmaps.map and sounds.map. I added the code into Orion, Zteam’s program that can open any Halo map type and extract various items from them. Orion was programmed by myself, with ChokingVictim and CtrlAltDestroy helping with the research. It includes almost every program that has been created for the Zteam mod.





Going back to the bitmaps.map and sounds.map compilation. Whenever we release our campaign mod, we will also release a bitmaps.map and sounds.map that will be required to play the maps. This will decrease the file sizes of the map files drastically as well as still allow the stock maps to run. All you will need to do is replace your current bitmaps.map and sounds.map, and every map file will still work correctly.

To demonstrate the power of bitmap/sound cache compilation, take a multiplayer map of ours for example, Foundation:
Internal bitmaps/sounds: 112mb
External bitmaps/sounds: 28mb

Note: Post will be updated shortly, CAD is writing up his part as we speak

[CtrlAltDestroy]

Of course, we do not want to limit ourselves to just Halo: Custom Edition. Because of this, Zteam has expanded its frontiers, namely to Halo 2 for the Xbox and Vista. We have already made progress within this area; some minor, and some borderlining breakthrough. At the top of the list is animation extraction/injection. Spearheaded by the research done by Choking Victim and programming done by myself, animation extraction was completed in a matter of two or so months.


rawr


dedicated to: masterz (it's a real anim that shipped with h2, btw)

And the tool itself:

to be released: when pigs fly


With extraction complete, injection was (relatively) easy to complete. Animation injection was done in around a week and a half with programming done by myself.


the animation itself


generates the raw data from an animation created in 3ds max


injects the raw into a halo 2 xbox map


the injected animation, in halo 2 xbox

Because animation raw is practically identical between halo 2 vista and halo 2 xbox, generating h2v animation tags isn't too far down the road.



** More updates to be coming shortly...

[n00b1n8R]

What's the point of posting the tools if your never going to release it?

[ShadowSpartan]

What's the point of posting the tools if your never going to release it?

To show you what we have been up to, and what we are capable of doing now as a result of these tools being created.

[CtrlAltDestroy]

To be fair, I was poking fun at how "exclusive" and closed-source the halo community is, however hypocritical that may seem. Documentation/tools on halo 2 animation injection will be released down the line, but to be honest, the extraction utilities we have will most likely stay with us. As for bitmap/sound compilation tools, we'll see...

[Hotrod]

Well, I'm glad to see that this is coming along well, it looks very promising. Does this mean that you'll be able to take all the animations from Halo 2, and put them into Halo CE?

[Zeph]

Lol, closed source exclusivity continued. Sucky H2V will stay the same.

[Anton]

I love the h2x extraction/injection btw. I'm REALLY looking forward to that. Keep up the work guys.

[Rosco]

Reminds me of the AK reload on CoD, because of the way he throws the mag away.

Of course other games do that, but CoD's been an addiction lately

[supersniper]

Crap by keeping it exclusive you not helping the community.
But it looks fantastic.