A study of the CMT (school project)

[SirBobbington]

First off, I'd just like to say hello to everybody here. I've been in the CE community since may '04 and the Halo community since December '01, but I was never particularly active on the old GBX forums. I thought I registered here, but apparently I was incorrect in that assumption.

So, straight to the point: I was suckered into taking a course in Advanced Project Management at my university, and I've just been hit with a term paper to complete. I considered writing on the psychology of project management, but I decided to take a whack at something I know and love: Halo CE.

There have been a very large number of projects undertaken in this little old community, but I think that the CMT team most warrants a case study. Several characteristics stand out about the CMT project, however:

1. Success. Probably the most important, the CMT was formed to create a campaign mod (released), began work on several multiplayer maps (most were released), and finally attempted a complete overhaul of the campaign mode, which was completed to an impressive degree.

2. Failure. The final project was abandoned literally halfway through, when the team realized that they had to do things like eat, walk the dog, take the girlfriend out on a date, and stop developing for a game that was released 6 1/2 years ago.

3. Scope. The most important part of any project is knowing where the finish line is. As the members of CMT delved deeper and deeper into the game, the scope of their project underwent a series of dramatic transformations. What started as another mediocre mod transformed into a pretty decent mod, then into an impressive experiment into what Halo CE could potentially become.

4. Challenges. Despite many hardships (mostly including leakers and the lack of any sort of funding or ability to physically meet to coordinate efforts), the CMT team survived more than three years... with better results than many multi-million dollar IT projects.

I am going to start my research through the various CE forums that were once active, but if anybody has any extra information (or if any CMT members read this and would be interested in conducting an online interview), I would be eternally grateful! :D I was once able to keep up with the progression of the project, but the forces of Real Life got in the way quite frequently.

And, in the spirit of things, who's up for a game for old time's sake?

[DEElekgolo]

You're doing a school report on CMT?

[Rentafence]

This is fucking bullshit and you know it.

[Kornman00]

Why not? No matter if it was a non-profit, game mod based project, it still appealed to many, many people and quite a lot was produced in the the time the team was together. This isn't a paper he's doing for a class in HS. It's a term paper at a university where the class is specialized in Adv. Project Management.

[Amit]

I also think it's not too bad of an idea. Think about how any good project gets started and finished. The final product is the direct result of whatever was put into it by the team members. Now that's easier said than done. A whole bunch of stuff goes on in between that has either a positive or negative impact on how good the finished product is, and ultimately, how successful the team is. Such things could be: how well the project was managed by the project lead, individually by each member, and how the team interacted with each other to pull the mod together.

[seanthelawn]

Yeah I gotta admit that I really don't see this being a bad idea. You could find tons to write about just searching through old threads on Halomaps/Modacity etc.

[Timo]

Here's the old forums: http://www.modacity.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?21-Custom-Map-Team - could be some more hidden ones lying around as well.

[L0d3x]

I was in CMT for a short time near the end and I wouldn't mind helping you out with my (albeit limited) experiences within the team.

[Arteen]

If you have any questions I can probably answer some of them. It's worth noting that for the most part, the team just made stuff and tried to fit it together, rather than have a plan from the start. We were all doing this for fun, of course. Having fun ourselves was priority over releasing something that was fun for everyone. That was the basic design philosophy. We just ended up going to far with the experimentation (and gradually lost members/free time/motivation) that we really weren't in a position to turn all of our work into a polished, well-designed, finished product without a costly massive overhaul of the mod.

We decided to just polish up what we had and release it, but we just didn't have the motivation to see even that through. I remember Duce and I trying to convince Masters into overhauling Spv2 into a focused, deliberately-designed 'SPv3', but he didn't want to put in the effort or scrap so much of our Spv2 stuff. And Duce and I were always more interested in the multiplayer side of things, which is why the current 'CMT' (Counterfeit Map Team as Masters would call it) exists as a multiplayer mapping team again. Masters had long since stopped caring for CE multiplayer, and I know we had more than a handful of unreleased multiplayer maps that we never got around to finishing, to my disappointment.

[Skarma]

While browsing the Wiki, I found a page of some minor info on CMT: http://wiki.modacity.net/wiki/CMT
I don't know how helpful this is, but it shows some of their accomplishments and some bumps in the road they had. Sounds like this Masterz guy wasn't a very good team leader to me, but I wouldn't know I am just basing my opinion off of his banned Modacity status and the bad things said about him on the Wiki and some of the posts I have read of his. Seems as though he has let his emotions effect productivity at times.

[Limited]

Good idea, you might as well play to your advantage (knowledge of teams in Halo). The only thing you'll need to be very careful about chatting on about Halo's development process, you will need to only state the initial objective ("deliberate and spread out texturing objectives throughout the team) or something, but don't go any further. University requires things to be completely explicit. Adding grey areas that the teacher doesnt understand could confuse him.

Nothing wrong with talking about Halo in a paper, I spoke about Halo and the modding abilities in my University major project (most important project you'll ever do in academic life).

[Cortexian]

It's to bad I was never able to get a file backup from Haloimpulse, there was tons of information there but I was never given file or database access... cmt.haloimpulse.com had a decent amount of information.

[Amit]

Some interesting stuff from the h2vista.net archive could be added to the wiki. Specifically stuff about the members and who the originals were. Well that's what the wiki is for isn't it?

[SirBobbington]

Thanks for all of the support! I've been going through some of the old forums, and I think the main thing that I won't be able to find online is the details of the inner workings of the team. For the most part:

How did the team communicate? Were there any set times for meetings?
How were deadlines agreed upon/met (if there were any)?
Were goals set for the project in regards to what the mod would ultimately contain?
How were roles decided upon within the team?
Were there any quality standards dictating what content would/would not be incorporated into the mod? If so, who was the authority over those standards?
What measures were put in place to prevent/discourage leaks? Why did those measures fail?

Again, thanks for all the support! If you want to talk via AIM/MSN, just shoot me a PM.

[p0lar_bear]

I saw CMT from post-coag to the release of SPV1, so I can give a little insight.


How did the team communicate? Were there any set times for meetings?
Team communication was done via forum posts mainly. Sometimes the team was called together when everyone was on AIM to discuss things that needed attention, though in this case it was mostly for beta testing.


How were deadlines agreed upon/met (if there were any)?
This, I'm not too sure of. The only deadline I ever remember was SPV1's release day, other than that, it was usually a matter of "when it's done".


Were goals set for the project in regards to what the mod would ultimately contain?
As Arteen said, there was no lolhueg picture we were going for. During the Halo 2 era, it was mainly getting Halo 2 content working in game. Then when Halo 3 was announced and Bungie was showing content bit by bit for it, we started incorporating Halo 3-inspired content, with plenty of artistic liberties taken since we didn't know how things worked (see: the spiker and laser in snow grove).


How were roles decided upon within the team?
Pretty much whatever someone was capable of doing, and what needed to be done.


Were there any quality standards dictating what content would/would not be incorporated into the mod? If so, who was the authority over those standards?
Again, as Arteen said, it was pretty much someone thinking of something cool to try and us trying it. If it broke the game and was a bitch and a half to research and fix, we scrapped it. As the leader, Masterz generally gave a final say on what stayed and what went.


What measures were put in place to prevent/discourage leaks? Why did those measures fail?
Not much aside from nearly everyone on the team knowing and trusting each other. Our maps were protected via HEK's encryption plugin to prevent ripping from them, that's about it.

[Zeph]

Thanks for all of the support! I've been going through some of the old forums, and I think the main thing that I won't be able to find online is the details of the inner workings of the team. For the most part:

How did the team communicate? Were there any set times for meetings?

The old 'original' team communicated via AIM primarily. People lived across 8 hours of time zones, so it was pretty much a 'hey if you see so-and-so on, tell him this' most of the time.


How were deadlines agreed upon/met (if there were any)?
Masters pretty much arbitrarily decided [that] without consulting any of the artists in regards to the first singleplayer overhaul. He also decided to ignore those deadlines and screwed with the tagset everyone was happy with last moment causing a total shitfest emergency as he decided to do all that on his computer that BSOD'd every fifteenish minutes. So instead of going with my plan of distributing the cache files in a highly compressed format (7zip over winrar) to save bandwidth and time he slapped them together in a rar package the moment he got the file built and tested to see if it exceptioned upon load to be uploaded to a single ftp to be downloaded. Yeah, he didn't test the changes he made before releasing.

The distribution plan I had made accounted for a petabyte of bandwidth in 24 hours seeded by the team members in the 5 hours before the links to mirrors would have been posted. Priority would have been to upload the campaign to sites like megaupload, filefront, etc. That would have been about 10,000 downloads in the 7zip format where we didn't have to foot the bill. No harm done by Master's last minute tinkering, only some random guy graciously giving us hosting got charged 500 bucks for bandwidth overage before his host locked his ftp up so it wouldn't go higher.

I dont really care to go into the details of the team nearly breaking up and forcing Masters to stop the project two days before launch.


Were goals set for the project in regards to what the mod would ultimately contain?
Well, it was a campaign mod. The goal was to mod the entire campaign.

How were roles decided upon within the team?
The CE community was closed source at the time and thus very elitist. It was mainly all based on who was friends with who, what a person could contribute without conflicting with Masters, and so forth. I might be sounding really demeaning to the guy, but it was literally someone made something, passed it off to Masters, and then that was the last they touched it. He couldn't do any of the art stuff himself, so he used possession of the source tagset as power to his position.

Were there any quality standards dictating what content would/would not be incorporated into the mod? If so, who was the authority over those standards?
Not really. Of course artists were picky over how their work looked, but Masters took what he could.

What measures were put in place to prevent/discourage leaks? Why did those measures fail?
It was mainly people who could contribute who got access to the built cache files. The general consensus of people working on a project of that magnitude in a closed source community is to take screenshots, show off how awesome you are for having it, and not letting anyone else be that awesome.

Again, thanks for all the support! If you want to talk via AIM/MSN, just shoot me a PM.
You'll only find the PR side of the team by looking at publically posted controlled information. Find an old member for the intimate details on how it worked.

[Sel]

Masters is great. We've had our disagreements of course, but he was a fine leader.
^^

[ZeRk`]

^^

Yeah okay =DG= Selentic.

:)

[Higuy]

Masterz was nice, but as far as organization goes, there really wasn't much as far as I experienced. Quite frankly, it was one of the reasons I quit after only being on the team for a week or so.

[Arteen]

He couldn't do any of the art stuff himself, so he used possession of the source tagset as power to his position.
That was one of the things I liked about CMT. I never had to touch the tagset. As long as my stuff all had the right names and were in the right folders, Masters could fit it into the tagset with no trouble.

[supersniper]

http://cmt.h2vista.net/
http://www.moddb.com/mods/custom-mapping-team/
http://halocmt.blogspot.com/
http://wn.com/CMT_SP-V2/
http://www.cmtmaps.net/

[ODX]

Something I will always find to be amazing about CMT is how they're the only ones to have a completely custom made tagset; no one else has made one. You could sort of say Sigma [sort-of] did, but most weapons were untextured.

[Phopojijo]

I helped a little bit with modelling of a few Bipeds... ... one was a Brute biped from scratch, with a Biped Modelling Tutorial video, which was re-modeled by someone else {though it made it into a few test builds as a placeholder}... I had the armor baked into the skeleton and based the arms and legs on hexagonal cylinders rather than octagonal... I figured it would save polygons... though it ended up costing me extra polygons and quality later on.

The rest of the biped work I did was cutting down on polycounts from other peoples' bipeds. There was one Spartan model that kept coming back to me like 3 times because I kept dropping the polycount without removing much detail... then the modeller would add some more detail to it (including some of the stuff I removed because it wouldn't be visible from any reasonable distance) and Masters would ask me to drop the polycount again.

Unfortunately my school work (at the time... was doing a Bachelor of Science in Physics...) prevented me from helping much more than on a per-task basis... though apparently the tutorial helped people out quite a bit. People who make bipeds for the first time have a nasty tendency to try to add more and more detail before the model's silhouette (topology) is right... ... so instead of adding detail to a pixel-perfect 400-triangle model... they're trying to create a pixel-perfect 400-triangle model out of 3000-5000 triangles.

I still have Masters on my AOLIM list... so if I see him on I might ask him for some memoirs.

[Hydrogen32]

*quote*the CMT team survived more than three years... with better results than many multi-million dollar IT projects.*/quote*
and its still not dead ^_^ trust me i would know

[Con]

I'd say CMT (Custom Map Team) is dead. CMT (Community Map Team) now exists. Something that helped it last a while was the cycle of new members.

[Lightning]

Something I will always find to be amazing about CMT is how they're the only ones to have a completely custom made tagset; no one else has made one. You could sort of say Sigma [sort-of] did, but most weapons were untextured.

H2CE

[supersniper]

H2CE (http://web.archive.org/web/20051219062843/halo2ce.epgservers.com/index/) ??

[Arteen]

H2CE
I wouldn't say H2CE was completely custom. It still had lots of unambiguously stock content. Much more than compared to CMT's tagset.

[Warsaw]

However, I will say that playing an H2CE map felt much more polished and refined than playing a CMT map.

[n00b1n8R]

However, I will say that playing an H2CE map felt much more polished and refined than playing a CMT map.
lol?

[Warsaw]

It was a more polished experience. Animations of CMT weapons were always wonky, baked on bumpmaps look like ass especially up close, and then the sounds were horrible and lagged what was actually on the screen. Let's not even get started on the terrible choice of bipeds and bad skins to accompany them. I never had fun playing on a CMT map with custom weapons, but H2CE maps were actually improved upon by the custom weapons.

[n00b1n8R]

I never payed much attention to the animations so I can't comment but I felt the H2CE (we're talking the ones from like ~2006 erra right?) looked like ass and tried to use gimmicks that never worked in the HCE engine (grav-lifts, lunging swords, etc).

[Warsaw]

Whatever their final year was, I don't know. I think it was 2006. The H2CE grav/air-lifts worked fine in Halo unless you had a shitty connection. The Sword never worked right in Halo, ever, for anybody and they knew that; it was there for the lulz, as was the dual SMG on Zanzibar. The ghost boosting worked fine. They did have a couple of gimmicks (gravity cannon anyone? Spray can?), but at least the weapons worked properly. For example, I can own up on Zanzi or Bloodgulch with their battle rifle, but the CMT battle rifle's behaviour is just so off-canter that I can't hit shit with it...and I'm no scrub at Halo CE, you can just ask Teek.

[Arteen]

I always found CMT's tags to be much better than H2CE's stuff, and I'm not saying that because I was in CMT. Even back with in Coag, they looked better and felt better to use.

[Warsaw]

Must be just personal preference, then. I could never get lead distances right with reliability playing using CMT tags, but I could with H2CE's. :shrug:

[n00b1n8R]

Whatever their final year was, I don't know. I think it was 2006. The H2CE grav/air-lifts worked fine in Halo unless you had a shitty connection. The Sword never worked right in Halo, ever, for anybody and they knew that; it was there for the lulz, as was the dual SMG on Zanzibar.
gvdf5n-zI14

[STLRamsFan]

I always preferred CMT's stuff over H2CE's. The version with the one kill sniper shots were the last straw for me (I mean seriously?), after that little issue and playing Coag, I could never go back to H2CE. Liked their maps (Zanzi was an excellent recreation and was pretty fun to play in classic mode) but the mod itself left more to be desired in my opinion. Although what did happen to their unreleased maps.... Thought they were "almost complete" as Nitro used to often say. :\

[sevlag]

but in terms of date, didn't H2CE's first tag set PRE-DATE any actual tags from H2 that were public?

TBH i prefer H2CE because it was alot more fun for me personally, the only CMT map i enjoyed playing was snow grove on CTF back when they had the old ban free up in 07

[ODX]

CMT's content was just more complete looking than H2CE's. Weapons were well modeled, skinned, and animated. Bipeds and levels looked like they all belonged together giving the game a completely new feel than what anyone else has done. I guess this is mainly due in part to having Dano do almost all textures, and Lag do [just about] all animations, but the rest of the gang was able to have stunning content alongside the rest and everything just looked near-perfect next to each other.

[Warsaw]

but in terms of date, didn't H2CE's first tag set PRE-DATE any actual tags from H2 that were public?

TBH i prefer H2CE because it was alot more fun for me personally, the only CMT map i enjoyed playing was snow grove on CTF back when they had the old ban free up in 07

Yes it did. And then the team also stated that they didn't want to turn Halo 1 into Halo 2 completely, they just wanted to inject some Halo 2 elements into Halo.

Also, Rams, what one hit sniper are you talking about? I don't recall anything like that at all.

Coag had some pretty horrible animations, especially on the battle rifle.

[Lateksi]

I liked H2CE more, because the weapons worked just like they should (except the one shot kill sniper rifle). I liked some CMT maps like Fragment and the looks of CMT's stuff were always more polished than H2CE's. The weapons didn't quite behave as I wanted and it was never fun to use them IMHO.

[p0lar_bear]

Yes it did. And then the team also stated that they didn't want to turn Halo 1 into Halo 2 completely, they just wanted to inject some Halo 2 elements into Halo.

Also, Rams, what one hit sniper are you talking about? I don't recall anything like that at all.

Coag had some pretty horrible animations, especially on the battle rifle.

One iteration of the maps with Halo 2 content had a sniper that killed in one shot anywhere. Because Halo 2 lacked a health meter and they didn't know any better, they apparently assumed that there was no health and reduced it to 1 or something in the biped.

[supersniper]

can you even compare h2ce with cmt? i mean look at the the time discrepancies first, then look at the tools available during which each team was around. and then on top of that h2ce was solely set on halo 2 for custom edition while cmt was originally on that as well (coagulation map team) then transformed into (custom map team) so i mean in the beginning they were the same and if you compare h2_ coagulation with h2ce's maps, h2ce's maps were far superior.

[ODX]

Coag had some pretty horrible animations, especially on the battle rifle.There were barely any animators, it was still very new to the community back then I believe so of course stuff won't look very pretty. Now a days it's pretty popular though and I see new animators all the time.

[sevlag]

can you even compare h2ce with cmt? i mean look at the the time discrepancies first, then look at the tools available during which each team was around. and then on top of that h2ce was solely set on halo 2 for custom edition while cmt was originally on that as well (coagulation map team) then transformed into (custom map team) so i mean in the beginning they were the same and if you compare h2_ coagulation with h2ce's maps, h2ce's maps were far superior.yep...its like comparing 360 graphics to the graphics of the atari 2600

[p0lar_bear]

can you even compare h2ce with cmt? i mean look at the the time discrepancies first, then look at the tools available during which each team was around. and then on top of that h2ce was solely set on halo 2 for custom edition while cmt was originally on that as well (coagulation map team) then transformed into (custom map team) so i mean in the beginning they were the same and if you compare h2_ coagulation with h2ce's maps, h2ce's maps were far superior.

Even during the time both teams were active at once, it's still comparing Granny Smith apples to McIntosh apples. They both set out to do something and ultimately accomplished the goal they set out to do. Neither had any true quality control, and as such, each had their own set of quirks.

[Warsaw]

There were barely any animators, it was still very new to the community back then I believe so of course stuff won't look very pretty. Now a days it's pretty popular though and I see new animators all the time.

Same shitty fire animation was present in the SPv1 pack and the SPv2 betas. It was NEVER fixed, even after they got good animators.

@p0lar: word. Also, now I remember that one-hit sniper thing. They did fix it, though. I couldn't help but laugh at scrubs on New Mombasa and Zanzibar whenever I got my hands on the Beam Rifle or Sniper Rifle during that time period.

[supersniper]

gives me an idea... i should make an app that displays your "Health" after you shields are down so people know exctly how much "time" they have till they die...