Forge Planet on Xbox One?

Games Halo 5: Guardians
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This article was originally written on 343i.org by me, but I’m posting it here because no one is commenting or voting on it…

Forge Planet- just two words that keep ringing in my ears. The desert, the shore, the jungle, the caves, the meadows, the forerunner architecture, the tundra, the volcano, the mountain, the islands, the human colonies, the ocean, the crash-landed covenant ship… It is the most beautiful place in the universe, all thanks to the Cloud, Only possible on Xbox One.

Forge Planet on Halo 5? Is it possible with 8 GB RAM, 32 MB esRAM, 500 GB of storage, Blu-Ray discs, DirectX Tiled Resources and the power of the Cloud? You decide!

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I gotta say: love the idea, the sheer size of it and the scope is something so awesome I would love to say yes but given how many textures, the size of it, the environments listed I gotta go with no.

Best bet is probably Forge World 2.5, Everything from the old Forge World updated, plus all the areas from the Forge Maps in 4, Erosion, Impact, Ravine and Forge Island in one ridiculous map, plus texture packs for the forge pallet. Even better would be all the vehicles to be placed are all the ones that have appeared in every Halo

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Well, I can just tell you, with something like this, the power of the Cloud won’t be available because it should not be used.

The Cloud should be utilized for anything that does not take away from any offline play should it be removed i.e. Drivatars in Forza 5

Putting that aside, in my mind, whether it’s possible or not is irrelevant. The point is, what would making all the Forge maps into one big one in Halo 5 do for Forging? Besides being able to walk through it starry-eyed, what would it allow that the current system doesn’t?

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> whether it’s possible or not is irrelevant. The point is, what would making all the Forge maps into one big one in Halo 5 do for Forging? Besides being able to walk through it starry-eyed, what would it allow that the current system doesn’t?

Well I for one would like to see Race back as an actual game type and large, awesome race tracks.

Air Invasions (also another gametype I want back, but I’ll take Spartan vs Elite Dominion) from an outpost on the Pillar to Island.

Shared textures would allow a lot more space for Forge items in the budget, and perhaps even weather, time of day changes or literal Floodification of the area. Those texture packs I was talking about for the Forge items could actually be applied to the entire map, reloaded or changed as needed allowing themes such as “UNSC”, “Covenant”, “Forrunner”, “Flood”, “Nature”, “Neon”, “Wacky” and imagine if each of these came with a different skybox. But sense it’s all the same collision detection, barriers, etc just texture change it would be mutable. Modders will tell you that if you have the artistic skills (and game companies do) a retexture is the easiest thing to do. There’s videos on You Tube of people retexturing Reach even (which I won’t link due to Terms of Use.) If people on the 360, without a Dev kit, having to go without the source code can do that, then what excuse do a bunch of pros, with the Dev kit, Microsoft money behind them instead of against them, working with the source code, on the Xbone have?

Add in the fact that if you give the Forgers something they will make it worthwhile, and the outcry for a Forge World like map that happened shortly after 4’s launch, they could either try to make more smaller Forgeable spaces which people didn’t like, or go the huge honkin Forgeable space, which when they provided they saw a sizable jump in population.

You ask what a huge Forge area would give, and I ask why would you give an artist the smallest canvas possible?

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How about an actual proper map editor so we have the creative control to make our own maps to later Forge on and refine that way? :stuck_out_tongue:

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> Putting that aside, in my mind, whether it’s possible or not is irrelevant. The point is, what would making all the Forge maps into one big one in Halo 5 do for Forging?

More than likely it would make it a pain to do anything. Unless we could tell it which parts of the map to load once we were done, it would have to render the entire thing. Combine that with a good looking, multiple texture pack forge pallet that everyone wants, and throw splitscreen into the mix and you now have a recipe for horrific framerate lag.

The xbox one is powerful, yes, but that doesn’t make it magic.

> How about an actual proper map editor so we have the creative control to make our own maps to later Forge on and refine that way? :stuck_out_tongue:

Yup. This idea I like. Preferably an easy to use editor though. The nice thing about forge is anyone can do it. Most big map editors (Hammer or UDK for example) are incredibly complicated.

Here’s a post on Neogaf that goes a little farther into Lehnaru’s idea here.

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How bout something the size of as example, GTAV? Would that be too big or is that something proportional for the Xbox one to do everything listed in the OP’s post and maintain the lag problem?

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If what you say is manageable… a lot of processing power would be required to render all those polygons, textures, models etc… plus not to mention when gameplay is evolved… I would love it. But being realistic it is very unlikely… rather we should just be able to change ecosystem templates, weather, time of day, place more natural formations, or even environmental moulding? As well as building blocks have their own themed textures liked Covenant Empire, UNSC, Flood Infested, Forerunner… among others like where the piece, or pieces, are smart-timed to relate to the ecosystem, weather and time of day… thus creating a unique piece every time.

So for example;

  • A forger chooses the map, which is themed to have a snowy ecosystem, he set the time of day to dawn and added snowing.
  • Upon forging he places a ‘Wall Colosseum’ which is themed to be Forerunner in design.
    So the end result for the piece, is… a Forerunner Wall Colosseum that has snow built up around the base and top (depending on placement); the lighting creates shadows which engulfs the piece, and the faint light reflects off the foggy, snowing weather. Think This
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Here’s what i’ve always wanted in forge, which could probably work with your proposal.

A telepoter system which can be activated when the player is in Editor mode. Simply spawn a receiver node on any section of the map(s), and set the channel to Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and so on. Using the left and right arrows on the D-Pad, you can cycle through what channels you want, and by pressing ‘A’ to the applicable channel, your screen will flash, the familiar yellow rings will circle around you, and WHAM! You have just appeared on the relevant section of the map. Oh, and as a little add on, you can grab hold of players in your party, that are not in editor mode, and teleport them with you as well. How would this work? Simply go to Advanced settings on the receiver node>player count>Unlimited.

Where i got inspiration for this idea:

  1. It has an awesome in-universe connection to the campaign of Halo CE (Halo’s teleportation grid)

  2. It was really frustrating having to respawn to a different location to the area i was forging in, every time i died. Yes, i know i could delete all respawn points from the map, and replace them, but say i need them for experimental purposes, it would be a pain having to delete them all one by one. This way is just simply more convenient to move around the map more quickly, as opposed to spawning teleporter nodes on every angle of the map, or having to use aerial vehicles just to get from one point of the map, to the other.

  3. It would look extremely epic in machinima to be able to do this, for those who involve monitors in their script.

I don’t know how well received this is going to be, but for the moment, this is my fantasy. Once i learn how to actually forge good maps, i’d hopefully be able to take full advantage of this feature :slight_smile: