WARNING: Wall of text ahead!
(For TL;DR, look in the third post)
After months of making threads of map creators, and reading comments and suggestions, i’ve come up with a way for map creating to be huge [I hope I have enough characters to write all this :)]. 2 map creators. I know what your thinking. “What the heck!? 2? id be suprised if it could handle 1!”. The purpose of this is the possibilities. I’ll start by talking about the 1st one.
Advanced Forge
First you choose to start a new map, or go over a premade one. If you start a new one, you can choose from 3 base maps: Outside, Inside, Outer Space. Each is empty. You can adjust length and width of your map from there. And you can color the wall and floor, if you want.
When you press X to open your objects list, you get 6 options:
Object Placement
Weather
Time of Day
Terrain
Texturizer
Text
Each one will have its own dynamic options.
Have any of you people on this forum ever played Tony Hawk’s Underground 2? It featured a skate park map generator that let you put down trees, water, bushes, sand, dirt, acid, lava, buildings, houses, and even street pieces. Now not that I know much, but I think that game’s map maker is kinda amateur-ish compared to what the 360 could probably do. What I think needs to happen is (do you remember THUG 2’s object list?) Halo Reaches object list needs to have a thumbnail image of the item your about to spawn before you spawn it.
Next, you need more items. Im talkin lights, buildings, elevators, security cameras, energy bridges, barriers, sandbags, openable doors, street peices, dead bodies. It needs to have every item from every map available on all maps. There would be premade buildings and houses that you could delete windows , doors, whole sides of the buildings, cut holes in the walls, ect. If you want, you can modify it, and make it bigger by addind walls or building sides… Now inside, it would be completely vaccant, like a big box. You put everything inside. Elevators, stairs, rooms, whatever you want And you can edit color and shave off peices of objects. Make orange windows, black walls, ect. There would be a tool for merging objects into each other. There would also be a forge glue tool, so you can stick objects to eachother. A snap tool so you can freeze objects into the air. An undo tool incase of mistake. A delete tool so with the push of a button, you can delete every weapon, or vehicle, or the whole map, ect. Even a coloring tool so you can color objects. You would also be able to shrink & enlarge certain items. You can cut holes in walls to make better scenery.
The funnest part is that you can fuse and color weapons too. Like fuse 2 E.Swords and color it red to make it look intimidating.
Now here is where terrain comes in. Have you seen or played Far Cry 2’s map editor? It let you put a circle over an area, hold the trigger, and dirt and sand would rise, or drop. Reach needs to do that with sand, dirt, grass, and snow. Put grass on dirt if you want. And there should also be a way to do this with flood terrain. The same applys with adding interactive terrain like water, lava, ice, acid, ect but you get a seperate window for that. And like in FC2, you can erode, and texturize terrain, but with this, you can color it too.
Weather is simple. You get 7 options (maybe more):
Blizzard
Sandstorm
Fog
Rain
Clouds
Lightning
Ash Rain (for burning effects)
Enable the ones you want, and you get a bar for each of them:
…l…
Something like that so you can control the power of it. Make a light snow, or a dangerous blizzard.
Time of day is also simple. You get the same kind of bar as the one above, but with a color selector, so you can choose the color of your sky. The other option is to choose how high the sun is, or moon is.
Texturizer is pretty much self-explanitory. You get a dynamic list of textures you can use to texturize each object. Everything from Mombossa Streets textures, to Sandbox textures. This is what pretty much will set the mood to each map.
And last but not least, there is Text. The easiest of the features. You get multiple fonts and colors. You get interactive fonts that will look like bullet holes, or blood, ect.
The best part is that it would still be Forge, so you can add stuff to premade maps. Imagine Headlong at night with fog…
That is the main concept of the Advanced Forge. Next concept.