Nothing like a bit of competition to spur you on...

[Rob Oplawar]

A bit of a misleading title here. What I really mean to say is,

I'm interested in seeing what other custom SP maps exist for Halo CE. I'm not talking about mp maps with scripts and AI, I mean real campaign maps. I can only think of 2 off the top of my head.
The first one is Polar's BioHalo. I understand this was more of a self-tutorial project instead of a big map project with a purpose (correct me if I'm wrong, Polar)
The second one I can't quite recall the title, but it was decent. Had quite a few scripting problems and the BSP wasn't all that hot, but it was decent, I spose.

No offense to you Polar, cause I think BioHalo is great- in fact, it's what made me want to do an SP mod in the first place, but I digress- but I don't really consider either map to be competition for Bridge CE, because of BioHalo's short simplicity and the other map's, well, general lack of polish and storyline. Damn I wish I could remember what that map was called. edit: OH YEAH it was called 'The Rush'.

ANYWAY, I seem to be rambling a bit, so I'll get straight to the point. Who knows of any real, good, custom single player maps for Halo CE? I'd really like to know what's out there, and what may be in production, just to know what my map can be directly compared to. Just a bit of competition, to help myself work harder.


On a side note, there was a point when I had no idea what anything was, when I was just getting into the game, no pun intended, when I heard about Vertigo City, and for a while I thought that was gonna be my competition. Secretly I was thinking "yes, awesome, no matter how bad my map is it's gonna be awesome in comparison to this!" lol


Edit: oh yeah I just remembered another one- the solo Danger Canyon mod. But I'm not sure how much that counts as custom...

Edit edit: oh yeah oh yeah, I just remembered the SP map listing on Halomaps. I'm currently browsing through that, but it'll take me a while to download and play through each one, so if you've played any of them speak up and tell me what you thought of it.

Oh and another thing I guess, tell me what you liked and didn't like about each level, so I can see if I can polish my map to better suit what people enjoy in a mod.

[Zeph]

desertplat was the first true single player map for CE. It doesn't have any of the hard coded support for a SP level, but it was properly extracted from a CE map, recompiled through the terribly-beta tag converter, and populated again in Sapien. As for true and good single player maps, you wont find many and off the top of my head biohalo is pretty much it. I had a few in the works for that old campaign of mine where I had a spartan team inserted into the far side of covenant space, but not being able to get the monitor animation graphs to convert ultimately killed Project Euclid. I actually thought of trying to revive it here recently, butCE is soo old and I could just as easily turn it into a new IP and stick it into something like Cryengine2 or Torque.

[Rob Oplawar]

Oh hai Zeph, good to see you weren't killed by a terrorist janitor after all.

You mean to tell me that the SP modding for Halo CE is that devoid of life? I've come this far on BCE and by golly I'm gonna see it through, but I'm wishing more and more that I had got into Half Life a lot sooner, because then I could be doing a source mod.
But then again, the fewer SP maps are out there, the more Scythopolis will stand out.

[Zeph]

There are a good number of SP maps out there. The number of them that properly set up AI, rig meaningful cutscenes, and are more that random AI dropped in a map is very small. Dont regret not getting into Source. It has its merits, but Halo's engine is much more appealing.

And yeah, that guy freaks me out. At least he understands that without a supervisor, he can just sit in his car and smoke half the time and still get payed for it. With his schedule, he takes about five or six hours to vacuum, mop, and housekeep two floors of a ~30'x75'ish building.

[p0lar_bear]

The first one is Polar's BioHalo. I understand this was more of a self-tutorial project instead of a big map project with a purpose (correct me if I'm wrong, Polar)You are right. BioHalo v1.1a was the start of something bigger; you may recall my idea for a survival-horror campaign featuring the Flood being on Earth. However, due to lack of interest from my team (only one other person still kept in touch, but not for long) and lack of time on my end, I canceled the damn thing instead of carrying it around with me.

Nobody from my rep buddy circle really mods CE anymore, or less than they used to, myself included. The new generation of players are more interested in playing than modding, and a majority of them are too immature and impatient to sit down and read a tutorial (hence all the shitty map requests that we've been plagued with). That said, there are very few quality CUSTOM SP maps out.


No offense to you Polar,
WHAT FUCK YOU YOU SACK OF CRAP I AM TOTALLY OFFENDED <:mad:> Kidding! Kidding!

[Tweek]

i made an SP map once. never REALLY finished it, but it was totally fucking awesome.

i gave it to cmt, because i cba finising it.

maybe if i can find it somewhere, ill release it.
(solosolo anyone?)

[Rob Oplawar]

oh snap, tweek made a solo map? now I would consider that competition. Do show!

[Tweek]

it's way old though.
i even released the bsp models.

[MNC]

Well, solo dangercanyon was sort of a way to find my limit to solo modding... Trying all kind of things, pushing it all into one map... etc. Too bad I had to use the dangercanyon bsp. I'm working on a new bsp and a new solo map though, which I'm hoping will work out properly.

[odseraphim]

I'm planning on releasing a Metroid CE SP Map, but I don't know how I want to go about it. Chances are, it's going to have Samus in one of the Campaign levels from Halo 1, and that's about it.

And it will have the morphball, as a weapon vehicle, not a maneuverability vehicle (as in, you can't bombjump with it).

[Reaper Man]

i made an SP map once. never REALLY finished it, but it was totally fucking awesome.

i gave it to cmt, because i cba finising it.

maybe if i can find it somewhere, ill release it.
(solosolo anyone?)
It was a pain if you died in that map, spawn at the beginning of the map which wasn't being drawn any more. >_<

[Apoc4lypse]

I think ce still has alot of potential, when it comes to Single player maps, we could potentially make the game have a completely different campaign and our only limit would be figuring out the recorded animations, which I'm sure have some way of being broken or figured out...

The reason we don't have any real amazing single player maps is that most of the ones that were finished only had small teams of 2-3 people or so. I think its because its going to be hard to get a storyline down where the whole team will agree with it, everyone has so many ideas story wise, and stuff they'd like to see them selves that its hard for them to commit to someone else's single player ideas, thats just my opinion though.

Bridge CE I would say is the most successful SP bsp currently in the works, and if it is finished to how Rob envisions, it would be the best, and I also think it would spark some more projects like it...

Another reason for so few sp maps is they are a hard item to work on over the interwebz, you can't really talk to people in person or show them concepts in real time or explain stuff how you could if you were next to the person, then because there single player, there harder to test, plus harder to enjoy the finished product with your team when theres no such thing as online co-op or co-op on the pc...

I think Bridge will make it, Rob's been working on it for like a year now, and he doesn't sound like giving up at all to me lol, hes focused, (unlike me he keeps having to nag me to work on it with him.) ;)

[PenGuin1362]

campaign maps just take such a long time and the majority of the community doesn't know jack about AI and AI scripts. i had something in the works where you play as the Spartan III's in the spi armor on the random missions then went on, ending with the shield planet but i never really got enough motivation to do, or support with stuff other then modeling >_<

[fatso784]

I worked on an sp level this past summer. After I made the fina boss, I just got bored of it and never polished the geometry or added objectives. Helluva lotta fun to play, though. I still got an old video of it, uploaded it to mythica.

http://useruploads.mythica.org/view/contactpreview.wmv.html

[Lateksi]

I remember a singleplayer map what was pretty basic box including flood and "skyscrapers". The bad thing was that you had to kill all the little infection forms to continue the "story". Infection forms were sometimes going out of the playable art of the map so it was really hard to play it without using devmode... It all happened in the one level, box level -.- It featured recorded stuff what looked pretty cool, I think. Elites with swords, and flying banshee and everything...

I will tell you where to get the map or it's name once I'm home and can find it out.

[MNC]

I'm pretty sure you mean BioHalo.

[fatso784]

I smell the stench of a n00b....

[Pooky]

I smell the stench of a n00b....

No offense intended, but my irony meter just cracked :(

[Kalub]

Gah, hate to say it, but IAWTP^

[nooBBooze]

Whatever happened to XCE... D_:

[Hotrod]

One of my favorite custom SP maps is cleanup. If you don't know what it is, it's a level where you play as the covenant and you fight the flood and the humans. There were some new weapons and vehicles in the map, but it was mostly all Halo 2 stuff (Energy Sword, Specter, Carbine). It wasn't too short either, no offense polar, but Biohalo was pretty short. I liked the new scenario of the map and the fact that it was long. However, I didn't like it that there was one part that you have to run through because it's too hard to fight everybody that's there.

[Rob Oplawar]

Well in the length department, I wouldn't worry too much- BCE is going to be pretty long.

And fatso I just watched the vid- looks like most of your encounters didn't have any move or firing positions, but it looks like the map had potential. It's a shame you got bored and never finished it.

[supersniper]

I found a Single Player map on at the halomods website.

Here is the forum page http://forums.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=55125
I don't know how it is but after reading some posts I think you play as Captain Keyes and fight off some new enemy called a Daleck. It is not on halomaps. I haven't downloaded it yet but if anyone wants to try it out go ahead.

[Masterz1337]

desertplat was the first true single player map for CE. It doesn't have any of the hard coded support for a SP level, but it was properly extracted from a CE map, recompiled through the terribly-beta tag converter, and populated again in Sapien. As for true and good single player maps, you wont find many and off the top of my head biohalo is pretty much it. I had a few in the works for that old campaign of mine where I had a spartan team inserted into the far side of covenant space, but not being able to get the monitor animation graphs to convert ultimately killed Project Euclid. I actually thought of trying to revive it here recently, butCE is soo old and I could just as easily turn it into a new IP and stick it into something like Cryengine2 or Torque.
You coulda just manualy fixed the monitor animations :-\.

[fatso784]

Well in the length department, I wouldn't worry too much- BCE is going to be pretty long.

And fatso I just watched the vid- looks like most of your encounters didn't have any move or firing positions, but it looks like the map had potential. It's a shame you got bored and never finished it.

Yeah I rushed it.. random encounter here, not-gonna-fix-dat-texture-error-there. Lightmaps became too time consuming. Maybe I'll get inspired by a new custom sp map and pick up the project again, but for now - I'm playin Halo 3.

[Lateksi]

I'm pretty sure you mean BioHalo.
But wasn't BioHalo a more round map? It was all inside a "forerunner thingy" lol and in center were hunters. I'm just too lazy to check it out. :eyesroll:

[nooBBooze]

XCE WAS a sp mod right? :(
EDIT: nvm...just saw Neuros thread. :( once again

also,

I found a Single Player map on at the halomods website.

Here is the forum page http://forums.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=55125
I don't know how it is but after reading some posts I think you play as Captain Keyes and fight off some new enemy called a Daleck. It is not on halomaps. I haven't downloaded it yet but if anyone wants to try it out go ahead.
idk but this map kinda sucks. its not really sp, more like mp with bots. i like the idea of a bunch of marines marching through the library but thats pretty much the only good thing about the map. daleks=crappy sentinel replacements with no collision model. im pretty sure you can do better than that rob :P

[Zeph]

I think ce still has alot of potential, when it comes to Single player maps, we could potentially make the game have a completely different campaign and our only limit would be figuring out the recorded animations, which I'm sure have some way of being broken or figured out...

The reason we don't have any real amazing single player maps is that most of the ones that were finished only had small teams of 2-3 people or so. I think its because its going to be hard to get a storyline down where the whole team will agree with it, everyone has so many ideas story wise, and stuff they'd like to see them selves that its hard for them to commit to someone else's single player ideas, thats just my opinion though.

Bridge CE I would say is the most successful SP bsp currently in the works, and if it is finished to how Rob envisions, it would be the best, and I also think it would spark some more projects like it...

Another reason for so few sp maps is they are a hard item to work on over the interwebz, you can't really talk to people in person or show them concepts in real time or explain stuff how you could if you were next to the person, then because there single player, there harder to test, plus harder to enjoy the finished product with your team when theres no such thing as online co-op or co-op on the pc...

I think Bridge will make it, Rob's been working on it for like a year now, and he doesn't sound like giving up at all to me lol, hes focused, (unlike me he keeps having to nag me to work on it with him.) ;)

Recorded animations have been figured out. You essentially start a record command, take control of an in-game character/vehicle, walk/drive/fly it around, and put in an end command. It's all fine and dandy and we understand the exported form of them. However, the code of Halo 1 Sapien that has the user take control of the character/vehicle is missing so you can start the process but not move on to get it done. You could write it out by hand, but it would take an obscene amount of time.

And no, there have been plenty of good single player campaigns in the workds. Problems with tag extraction and hopes of Halo 2 Vista being a plausible solution led them to hold off for that. Bridge is pretty much the only one to find its way back into CE instead of another engine such as Source, Torque, and Unreal. As for communicating ideas with others across the internet, it's not a problem at all. Anything approaching the basics of a professional design process would work. There's this thing called a "lead". That person is in charge of whatever and people should listen and do what that person says. Otherwise, you have too many chiefs and not enough injuns. And if you need to be next to someone to explain something instead of being able to do there in text or voice form, you just need to take more time to develop your ideas. You should always be able to produce a writeup or be able to talk about a piece of work or idea before you try to present it.

I've found them to not be any harder to test than a multiplayer map. Checking the quality of the bsp is the same, instead of checking for weapon and gameplay balance you just make sure there's an enjoyable linear flow, and other than that you've just got to make sure each character has an actor variant that's working. Honestly, you can do all of that in Sapien by placing an AI on the same team as the player and telling it where to go.


You coulda just manualy fixed the monitor animations :-\.
This was before we understood why they were fucked :p.

[Lateksi]

Offtopic again...
Never mind - I checked the BioHalo and the other map was called Colossus. You were right, I was confused.

[Siliconmaster]

I personally love SP maps, and I check out any that appear on halomaps. It got to the point that I was incredibly amused by a few maps called "The_Floods" or something to that affect. The bsps weren't exactly genius work, but playing through them was fun the first time, and they even had a small warthog run.

Can't wait for Bridge CE. If I can be entertained by an educated noob map, I'll find your map to be endless fun.

[Apoc4lypse]

what zeph said

Yeah, thats what I meant when I said we aren't able to make recorded animations, we can't move the stuff. Although recording might work its useless unless we can move stuff around.

As for the rest I guess your right, but I was talking more smaller scale, majority of the modders aren't very good at coming up with good solid ideas for single player campaigns and explaining it over the internet apposed to being in person which is why most ideas never get support.

How ever you are right there are the few outstanding and un-outstanding people around here who are able to do it. Wave of Lag did an amazing job with Evolution, but I honestly don't know where its going because I was dropped from the team and haven't seen any news on it.

Your more in the loop then me, so you would obviously know more about the outstanding mods in progress then I would ;)

[supersniper]

What do you guys think about the Madness series in SP maps?

[SnaFuBAR]

i think they looked like garbage and were very poorly thought out.

[Rob Oplawar]

Yeah, I was so unimpressed with the screenshots I saw and somewhat put off by the complete lack of punctuation and grammar in the descriptions that I haven't touched them yet.

A reminder to everybody everywhere: proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation are absolutely vital to your credibility.

[Jay2645]

And that's why I always try to use them. (Firefox's spell checker FTW!)
Anyway, I began work on a SP map, it's barely a couple planes in Max at the moment. I'm trying to get some special scripting done, where you use a lightsab sword to deflect bullets with the flashlight. I'm working on a Force choking system as well.

Meh, back to finishing Tatooine my desert planet.

[Tweek]

epic post.
needs2b archived for great justice.