Well, glad you can finally join us.
I'm late? You're late, what took
you so long, gosh? :|
It's here, the SDK you've (all?) been waiting for. I don't know about you, but I'm just fucking ecstatic. Not only does it close a chapter in my books but it just makes me happy to think that someone out there who is as big as a fan of Bungie and their work's will put this collection of tools and source to use and do more new things with an engine which will never be laid to rest. I'm kind of at writing these (basically) PR posts about the projects I work on, but I've filled the hat of every other role a project like this required. Researcher, disassembler, hacker, programmer, debugger,
h2v crasher, tester, designer, etc etc. Though I've had some help with getting this SDK to where it is today. Just would like to stop and give thanks to all those pawns in the chess board that is this Halo Community (in ABC order):
- jcap (aka Icon Dude)
- Mike D. (aka xbox7887)
- MonoxideC (aka "Drape Master J")
- p0lar_bear
- rec0 (aka Rosco)
- ShadowSpartan (aka sarcastic bitch)
- Shaun W. (aka bitterbanana)
- TheGhost
So, lets talk about whats actually in the SDK shall we? I would like to first note the "improved" HEK tools. I didn't give them a stupid name this time around (looking at you "a hobo" and "kornman00"). Instead they're name as "OS_" plus the original tool name (ie, OS_tool). What can you expect out of this "improved" HEK?
- These tools don't clutter your root directory with report files such as "tag_dump.txt". Instead such files are stuffed into a sub-directory (relative to the tool itself) called "OpenSauce\Reports". However, "debug.txt" still appears in the root directory.
- Use a different globals tag! No longer will you have to backup your globals tag and blah blah blah blah! I know, annoying. Real annoying. Now when your scenario tag makes use of the new "project_yellow" tag you can specify a globals override. Then when either you're bootin' up the new OS_sapien or using OS_tool's new build-cache-file-ex command, the engine will use that globals override tag instead.
- Increased max block element counts. So blocks can now contain more elements than before. Just which blocks have been touched up?
- model->shader references
- model_animation->sound references
- model_animation->animations
- model_collision->damage regions
- scenario->structure bsp (4x more. yay.)
- Also, there is a new never-before unhidden field in the scenario. Can you find it ;)?
- Some ground work has been made for things like multiple lightmaps per bsp, along with some fields which a possible future automated tool can use to generate data for new Main Menu maps for custom mods.
- Some gound work on a new shader_postprocess_collection tag. I'm sure FireScythe knows where I was going with this one ;)
- tool's new build-cache-file-ex command. Allows you to build cache files that can use the new memory upgrades and/or use new data file sets (based on the original bitmaps/sounds). You must use this command if you wish to use your scenario's globals override. build-cache-file will build a cache without any explicit changes. However do note that any custom tag definitions will still be included.
- tool's help command. Use this for more information on the new OS tool commands.
There is also a new utility called OpenSauceIDE. This tool is based off a generic Blam! library I've been writing since 2005 (on its third and last iteration). This is the tool you use to create new tag groups for use in your projects. I was hoping to include a few more utilities in the IDE, but some of them aren't quite ready for public consumption. However, if and when they do get included, they'll make tag management much, much better.
Then there is the actual source code version of the SDK, which is known as Yelo (the vcproj named Halo1_CE). This is where you'll probably find yourself digging around in the most. I took these past few months to dig around and try to find meaningful fields in the game state object data which can provide for some interesting mods. I've also got the code in there to upgrade the game's tag memory, cache limits, and new data file usage. Theres much more to be mentioned, but you'll just have to dig into the source yourself to figure it all out. A couple of notes however:
- While Battery's features have been included, only a few HUD options were implemented as some others interfered with the hud-chat logging.
- I had to remove a majority of the code (both old and new to OS2) related to server management. Not entirely something I wanted to do, but so goes paving the future of HaloCE stats with Synapse.
- There are quite a few things which I never was able to finish implementing in time for this release. Some of them I didn't include the source to (namely recorded animations) others didn't have much source to begin with so are still hanging around in the code.
There are two utilities which are included for you Xbox developers. You can thank xbox7887 for them. They were supposed to be included in the initial release, but some bad timings happened. I can't comment too much on them, I only didn't do too much work or coding on them, mostly just coached xbox7887 on their development.
Pictures:
NOTE:
This is a Release Canidate. I'm doing a two week trial period to let people find any bugs or conditions which I wasn't able to catch or check for. After those two weeks are up I'll fix any unsolved problems and may include a few more things for end-users to poke at.
