A lot of people are aware that the ammount of budget you recieve to make a forge map in Reach isn’t fantastic. You can often find yourself very quickly depleted of most of your budget, and compared to other in-game editors such as Far Cry 2’s 10000$ really doesn’t stretch very far. This thread is about a possible way to make more effective use of the budget in Halo 4.
My idea is to add blocks to the inventory with only one or two sides or faces of the block rendered, the other sides would be invisible. Players could shoot through them and stand on them but not see them. The reason for this is these “partially rendered blocks” would be available for a reduced cost. They would be suited for floors, walls and distant structures but not floating or overhanging platforms, the idea bieng that any side the player wouldn’t see wouldn’t get rendered in order to save space. As well as reducing budget cost, this would also reduce frame rate lag, and the invisible platforms create new custom game potential.
The same trick is used in most maps and games, for example if you manage to get underneath the terrain of forge world you would see it is invisible underneath, to save time and disk space.
TL;DR Add blocks with certain faces un-rendered (invisible) to the inventory, available for reduced buget cost.
> 343 is going to explode soon with all these new, great ideas coming in from the community. XD
No they wont, because yes there are a lot of ideas coming from the community, they’re not going to use all of them, they’re just going to listen to some of the ideas, and keep them in mind and research some of the ones they like.
So are you saying to pretty much have 2d objects? If you are then Yes it would mean less has to be rendered however it would make forge tricky as it would take a lot of effort to place them at the right hight even with cords
> So are you saying to pretty much have 2d objects? If you are then Yes it would mean less has to be rendered however it would make forge tricky as it would take a lot of effort to place them at the right hight even with cords
I guess technically it would be 2d yes (the ones with only one face rendered anyway) however when placed appropriatly (shouldn’t be too hard just use rotation snap and ensure no gaps are between the blocks) there will be no way of telling the block will be 2d at all because you could only see the front face, thus it would appear 3d.
> I find myself having more problems with the item limit…
I’ve made a seperate thread about this issue. But as far as I’m concerned, the item limit needs to be completely removed. It serves no purpose whatsoever. Instead the budget shold be correctly distributed amongst items, so that any combination of items which spends the entire budget is managable. The only reason the item limit is needed in Reach is because the items are poorly priced, a 1X1 block flat is the same price as a 5X5 block flat when it should theoretically be 25 times cheaper (I know in reality it wouldn’t be exact but there should still be a difference). I hope to God that in Halo 4 the items are appropriatly priced and the item limit and inventory limit are both removed.
/rant
I also came up with this idea recently! where the game does render want you are looking at but games like minecraft show the map render while playing on it. (which looks untidy). Maybe add a render to things that are a foot away from your view. Even with the maxed out wall mod it lagged like hell. You can tell that bungie tried to prevent this by adding an entity limit as well as class limit and budget.
I love you for this. Brilliant idea. Personally I want to see the limit removed. I understand why they have it there but I think it should be up to us to work out the problems caused by too many pieces on our own. The limit can really limit creativity.
Well I guess the budget is limited by the amount of polygons(and other stuff) the engine is capable of drawing at once. With the advances that has happened lately the forge budget could easily be expanded, if 343 creates a simple map(like Fondry) with very little on the screen at once, would allow for more objects on the screen at once, before frame rate is noticeable impacted.
improve reach engine (which i think they are using a massively improved one for halo 4) to take on more polygonies thingies, that rendering only half the block the topic mentioned and the ability to fuse items together to create custom items so that it takes less memory stuff to render it or something cuz the object’s itself doesn’t matter, those gigantic walls cost only 10$ and there are like 100 of em while other stuff like decorative that are way smaller cost more then 10$.
> 3 things I think should happen to improve it.
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> improve reach engine (which i think they are using a massively improved one for halo 4) to take on more polygonies thingies, that rendering only half the block the topic mentioned and the ability to fuse items together to create custom items so that it takes less memory stuff to render it or something cuz the object’s itself doesn’t matter, those gigantic walls cost only 10$ and there are like 100 of em while other stuff like decorative that are way smaller cost more then 10$.
I think decorations cost so much because they have lights which turn on when a person gets near, meaning not only do they need to add the lighting to the map, but the items need proximity sensors too. Frankly this is entirely unnecessary. Removing the lights and having more reasonably priced decorations seems the most logical solution IMO.
