While the release of CE’s mod tools and the upcoming tools for Reach, 2, and 3 are an undisputable beacon of hope for content creators in the Halo Community, as they enable user generated content to be developed for The MCC and increase the seemingly strict limits of Halo CEs engine, they show great potential. Unfortunately, there are a number of rather glaring issues that detrimentally affect their accessibility, usage, and reliability resulting in modders once again resorting to other tools like Reclaimer and/or Assembly. Having considerable time to use and test these new tools I have written this thread specifically to address major issues I have encountered while creating content for CE. Some may be reparable, others not.
Disclaimer: Allow me to clarify that the individual programs themselves, Guerilla, Sapien and of course “Tool” work just as intended with few problems or organization issues (barring from problems from their original counterparts and some inconveniences but they usually, not always, have workarounds, like loading a different scenario in the same Sapien window or having both Guerilla and Sapien open at once through Steam.) of note as of the time of writing. The actual problems come from other sources which I shall address in the list below. Also, I’m still quite the amateur at any form of modding and game design, so expect errors or misunderstandings in logic. This list may be updated and edited as time progresses.
1. Absence of concise, user-friendly tutorial(s).
-
Despite including the original HEK tutorial map and scenario filesin the data folder, it completely lacks the HEK tutorial or any actual tutorial at all. A series of text documents or even a slideshow or PDF document going through a step-by-step process of the basics of map creation, such as modeling, texturing, and shading as well as constructing it using tool before loading it into Guerilla and Sapien should be included at the very least if not the original tutorial. More advanced tutorials could come afterwards such as AI actor creation and scripting (like interactions and such like entering a vehicle or pressing a button etc.), dialogue, vehicle collision models, configuring gravity, devices like doors and switches or teleporters, skyboxes (like changing them in loading zones or cutscenes as seen in the Maw), trigger volumes, bump-mapping, scenery and animations, recorded animations, or effects, etc. Really there’s a lot that could be taught to new users, too much for me to list, especially if they’re ambitious enough to make their own campaign missions with new sandbox elements as seen in mods like Lumoria and Spv3.2. Lacking or missing source files, and assets, resulting in the need to extract and import/export data from tags which may not always be possible as some are sometimes missing.
-
Easily the most glaring issue regarding the tools isn’t even the tools themselves, but the assets you edit and/or create with them. Want to edit the magnum textures and its animations? How about make a map using existing textures and shaders? Why not edit the trigger volumes or Pelican drop offs/pickups and cutscenes? Good luck finding a tool capable of extracting them from their tagged file format that isn’t 10+ years old, if what you’re looking for is even present in the files. Even creating entirely new recorded animations or regular, custom and first-person animations are difficult without any supporting editing or extraction tools, even without existing ones as templates. Nor is string creation or editing possible without community made tools like SLEU from halomaps.org. It would be much appreciated if such tools, or the source files, missing tags, etc. were provided by default which directly leads to the next issue.3. Reliance on 3rd Party programs and tools.
-
Perhaps the original sin of Halo Custom Edition, is its complete reliance on 3rd party tools for model, texture, animation and really any sort of asset creation and editing. As mentioned prior users can’t even edit strings without the use of community made tools, create textures without outside imaging programs such as dare I say; MS Paint and GIMP, or create models and animations without 3DS Max that is too expensive for the common user or Blender which incompatible without community made import scripts, which even then rarely work and often break. Having official tools for these listed purposes and others I may have not been able to mention, would be imperative for new and inexperienced modders who may get overwhelmed by other programs and applications.4. Standalone can’t actually be used for testing content.
-
Easily the greatest flaw with these Mod Tools, as when launching standalone you are unable to test multiplayer content or even see custom maps in the selection menu. Well then, you’d at least be able to test assets in the Campaign levels, right? Nope, custom levels don’t appear in their selection either, and if you edit existing missions, it won’t even matter because you can’t get past the shield test on the Pillar of Autumn as the prompt to continue the test isn’t bonded and can’t be fixed in the controls menu so you can’t progress through the Campaign. Admittedly there are likely work arounds to these problems I’m not aware of, but as of now they force me to constantly compile .map files in order to test things directly in MCC which defeats the entire purpose of standalone, either that or I have no clue how to use it (which is frankly quite likely.) I either don’t know how this functions (which is very likely, and this section could be entirely pointless, but I’ve been going at it for months now) or it just doesn’t work at all.5.Accessibility
-
Lastly, the tools are only available via Steam, and the way a user gets access to these tools is rather out of the way and requires you to do some searching for either the Steam article containing the link or searching through tools in the library. It’s quite obscure and should be more in plain view for users to see, and certainly should be available by other means rather than just Steam, perhaps visible on the MCC Microsoft store (as well as Steam’s) page as a downloadable content for all users to see? The mod tools could probably have their own workshop as well for users to upload resources, tags, and assets for others to use such as materials, textures or decals, vehicles, weapons, scenery, or bipeds and actors.However, there is more I could have missed, and much for the community to discuss! Please feel free to use this thread to voice your own concerns and suggestions. Every voice counts! I’ll be sure to keep this updated and add, remove, or edit entries when, or if, the circumstances change.