Open Sauce Ideas thread

glow tags dont work on fp weapons? fuck

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Originally Posted by p0lar_bear

What about an expansion on these ideas and ask if it's possible for more optional FP anims?

Animations like holster (played when weapon is put away), stealth-melee (special animation played when the melee attack that's thrown will be instant kill, like a Spy backstab), light-on/off, fall-damage, melee combo animations (a la E3 Halo 2, named melee-1/2/3), and such. And these special case animations would inhibit any player actions until they finish; doesn't make sense to be firing off a weapon when the MC's hands are yanked off-screen to support his weight when he fell. And if these animations do not exist in the tag, they aren't called and things continue as normal (if there's no stealth-melee or melee combo animations, the normal melee attack is played in all circumstances)

Also, would it be too much to ask for FP animation permutation support and the ability to use glow tags on FP weapons?

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Seconded. So many possibilities for FP animations that have gone untouched. E3 2003 Halo 2 melee was bad ass

*WHACK* *SMACK*

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Originally Posted by p0lar_bear

What about an expansion on these ideas and ask if it's possible for more optional FP anims?

Animations like holster (played when weapon is put away), stealth-melee (special animation played when the melee attack that's thrown will be instant kill, like a Spy backstab), light-on/off, fall-damage, melee combo animations (a la E3 Halo 2, named melee-1/2/3), and such. And these special case animations would inhibit any player actions until they finish; doesn't make sense to be firing off a weapon when the MC's hands are yanked off-screen to support his weight when he fell. And if these animations do not exist in the tag, they aren't called and things continue as normal (if there's no stealth-melee or melee combo animations, the normal melee attack is played in all circumstances)

Also, would it be too much to ask for FP animation permutation support and the ability to use glow tags on FP weapons?

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Some of p0lar's ideas were shown in the betas of Halo 1, it'd be cool to see them return to the game.

I have a few suggestions for you, Kornman. This is going to be lengthy, but I have explanations.

For starters, please implement the feature to have more than 16 BSPs or a way to have animated lightmaps or improved dynamic lighting. This is because I am working on a map (Blood Creek RC3) and it uses a highly complex day-night system that involves a lot of bipeds and BSP's. If we could instead, have animated lightmaps for ONE BSP, this would cut down the filesize exponentially, or at best, the support for up to 128 BSPs (theoretical) or even more like 256. I know I sound like a crazed man begging for drugs asking for this, but please, for the sake of Blood Creek and other maps that wish to use dynamic time, consider this idea.

Also, syncing BSPs and, in general, client with server, would be greatly appreciated. If we synched BSPs, Devices, and other objects as a whole, there would be no need for the syncbips so commonly used in Blood Creek release candidates I've released and the one I'm working on now. The less "stuff" we get on the map, the smoother it runs. Syncbips are no exception. I am using syncbips to sync devices and the day-night system right now and it's uber-combersome and sloppy. To do away withy it would be a dream come true.

Also, another idea involves sound. First off, please fix the bug with OGGVorbis, where sounds that are of inappropriate length will crash the engine with an Exception. I am forced to use XBOX ADPCM for my bird sounds and other nature sounds, and it's taking up additional space that shouldn't be necessarily taken up by this sort of thing, not to mention the reduction in overall sound quality.

Second, about the sound engine itself. I am an in-training Pro-Audio Engineer (and have been for as long as you've been working on the CE engine itself trying to improve it for us). I understand the way sound works and how it has an effect on the environment and aesthetic nature of things for the end-user.

Please, make the engine allow sounds to not have cut-and-dry minimum and maximum distances, but instead, incorporate dynamic volume attenuation. What I mean is, imagine hearing a gunshot up close. It's deafening and loud andwith very little "roll-off" or reverb to the listener. The further away from the source of the sound, the more echoey it should sound with reverb to it that matches the environment. Also, it should dull the further away you get from the source because the waves have room to spread out. Also, a "dopper effect" on passing objects would be nice.

Think of the potentials for realism, Kornman. You have birds in a forest with real-time shadows and day-night lighting. You hear a Black Capped Chicketty in the distance, followed by a Redwing Black Bird up close, followed by a Robin or two at intermediate distances. The trees would provide acoustic noise cancellation as well as sound deadening, which would dynamically change the overall reverb settings of the sound environment. A lot of "hard surfaces" would produce more reverb in an otherwise quiet environment, whereas "soft" surfaces would produce deadening to the sound. These "densities" of surfaces could be determined in the physics section of a tag for an object, such as the material effects in a shader determines how an object sounds when walked upon.

Imagine the beautiful works of art that could come out of this in the realm of Machinima, Kornman. I, myself, am with a team putting together a nice movie, and I would love to see stuff like this implemented into the game's engine so we can use it in our movies and maps.

I know I'm asking for a lot, but I have high expectations for the future of CE gaming. People say it's a dead engine, or dying at best. I don't believe it. I feel as though we can breathe life back into this baby with some new content-generating content.


You're the man to do it. Good luck and thank you for reading (and possibly considering) my ideas.

Sincerely,

~Rambo

I like rambo's ideas ^.

more then 16 bsps would be a VERY large map. And very wasteful if the only difference is the light map. Animated light maps would be much better. Even something to scale the light map away from the direction of light sources would be enough. Good thing we already have animated skys.

I also like the sounds ideas. Halos sound engine was supposedly really good for its time. But you mentioned a way to choose the way sound works with certain parts of the map. In one area the surfaces might be hard while in another they might be soft. Don't sound environments sort of act like what your talking about? In any given portal area you can choose the way sound behaves. I don't know how much effect they have though. i can't hear any difference between a "sewer pipe" sound environment and a 'stadium'. Maybe we would only need to improove the functionality of sound envronments.

That's not what I was saying. What I meant was this.

Imagine someone's in the bathroom and they slam the toilet seat down. You're outside of the "cluster portal". You still hear the echo from within the bathroom after the guy finished doing what he had to do and heard the echo BECAUSE the environment in there was "hard", as in it had hard surfaces. You were in a carpeted room, like a sound booth, listening from a distance. All hypothetical, I know, but the idea is this.

Cluster portals only create reverb while you're in them. However, actual sound reverb settings will have an effect on the entire environment.

hink about it.

Some chick is walking across marble tile. When her footsteps hit the hard marble, do they not make a different sound than when she walks on carpet? Halo does support this function. Why can't it support individualized reverb settings via EAX and a little "shader magic"?

*sigh*, for the last time, I'm not IMPLEMENTING the ideas discussed here. I just said that I would look into ways to go about ideas and how feesible they are. I've already set a deadline for OS. No new features than what I already had planned are being added.

I'm not fucking with the game's rendering code. If you want dynamic lightmaps, move on to some next-gen engine, not one which is eight years old.

The same goes for the sound system.

Ideas like the ones stated above should be for games which actually have source which you can modify. If I had the Halo 1 source it would be a different case. However, I don't, so I'm not even going to consider such changes like totally redefining the lightmap system. Redefining systems require reverse engineering of both the data structures (don't even get me started on adding new fields to those structures) and code which uses it. To top things off, the game code is compiled for release and optimization thus making the assembly not so easily manipulated.
You're wanting to turn the Halo engine into something that isn't The Halo Engine. I've said it time and time before: OS should only be used to EXTEND the features already present without breaking compatibility.
Not breaking compatibility is part of the reason why I made the standard license for OS's source code GPL. This way changes that people make will be open to the public not only for their education but also to make sure that there aren't multiple versions of OS floating around which cause the game to crash when used on someone else's OS developed scenario. Of course you won't be able to squash all instances of this, but such issues will be a lot smaller than if people were just free to roam.

Then can you at least add support for more than sixteen BSPs per scenario, or is that not possible either?

If anything, the max I can raise it to is about 32 I believe. The max bsp count is tied to a static bitvector which I forget if it consumes only 16 or 32bits.

Well then, could you please try and raise it to 32? I know I'm asking for a lot, but I'd like my map, Blood Creek RC3, to be the best it can be, even if it's a very large map.