I was thinking about the title update today and what kind of stuff could be done with it. I started wondering if it was going to be possible to add new objects to the forge world pallet. If so, Forge world could receive a new breath of fresh air for forge artists and machinima creators alike. After thinking about it, I thought of a few things that I would LOVE to see be added to the forge pallet in the coming title update. I am trying to be realistic here, so don’t expect a “Give us a skybox editor” request or anything. Here are the things I came up with:
1. A green screen- A green screen in Reach could simply be a re-skinned wall. This would open the door for machinima creators to increase what they could do with the game. They could more easily create epic battle scenes and even superimpose a spartan into real life extremely easily. Sure, there are some places on some maps that you might be able to do this, but it is extremely limiting. I’d love to be able to make a set, add some green screens, and shoot a movie just like the pros are able to do. You would be doing a justice to those machinima creators that might have felt a bit cheated by the machinima options in reach. You could have 3 sizes of green screens: Small, medium, and large (Large being a re-skinned Coliseum wall). The small screen would allow us to put them anywhere in a scene to superimpose an image onto later, and the large one would let us build a giant green screen room that could house absolutely anything we can think of. We could build a building in forge, and then easily super-impose it into a film and create a city in the background all entirely made in forge and then edited into place using something like Sony Vegas. The possibilities are endless!! This is the #1 thing I’d love to see because it is both realistic and easy to make (Re-skinning a wall… hey, they did it with the gravity hammer / golf club)
2. Forklifts- When forklifts were unveiled to the world, the Halo community went crazy. It’s such a bad vehicle that it might just be the greatest vehicle of all time. Little did we know that we’d be so disappointed to find out that forklifts were not going to be in the Forgeworld pallet. Our dreams of a 10 man forklift race across forge world would never be fulfilled… until today! The forklifts are already in the game, so I don’t think that this would be too terribly difficult to add to the Forge World pallet. You’d be doing the forklift enthusiasts a favor.
3. More physics objects- This might be less realistic, but I’d love to see more physics objects in Forge World. I think that the only physics pieces we have are the golf balls, cones, and explosive barrels. I’d love to see some of Halo 3’s forge items make a return. I miss those games of Jenga terribly. Of course this is less realistic than the others because they would need to be built from scratch and then added into the game, but I thought it deserved mentioning.
So what do you people think about the additions that I listed and what kind of additions would you like to see?
Wow, these are some really good ideas… but the first one is a little far out there. I know it would be cool to see videos and such from machinima directors editing it, but you have to think about the other people who don’t know how to do that. It’ll basically be like a boring Halo: Reach Screen which isn’t all of that interesting. My personal opinion is to keep it to the original screen. In conclusion, the first one is an idea to think about, but I really think it would stay an idea. The last two are great ideas to put forth on to remaking into Halo: Reach Forge.
I just hope that they add a bigger forge pallet for some of the previous maps and listen to the community. If you noticed, the only maps to have the big forge pallet is tempest and forge world. Those are also the only maps to be on a Halo Array. If 343 continues to do this, (I hope) all of the maps in Halo Anniversary should have a big forge pallet.
> Wow, these are some really good ideas… but the first one is a little far out there. I know it would be cool to see videos and such from machinima directors editing it, but you have to think about the other people who don’t know how to do that. It’ll basically be like a boring Halo: Reach Screen which isn’t all of that interesting. My personal opinion is to keep it to the original screen. In conclusion, the first one is an idea to think about, but I really think it would stay an idea. The last two are great ideas to put forth on to remaking into Halo: Reach Forge.
I actually really want the green screen to be implemented. Sure, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know how to use it, it might seem useless and boring. From the perspective of someone who could use it though, it opens up a TON of possibilities to what can be done in a machinima. Picture this:
You take a film of a spartan running in the green room. Then you chroma key that character out so that you now have just the animated spartan running and no green screen. Now, you could copy that spartan and paste it into a scene 100 times and in essence have 100 spartan’s running across a battlefield. You could do the same with tanks or other vehicles. You could in essence make a huge battle scene easily just from the addition of a re-skinned wall. Pretty awesome!
Or…
You build a set and add a green screen where you want a television screen to go. You can now put an image on that screen and move the camera around, have things move in front of that image, and many other things extremely easily.
Again, you have to look at this from the perspective of a machinima maker. This would be a GREAT asset to the game and one that I would most likely use often. That, along with the fact that it is a very simple thing to add make this an awesome combo in my opinion. They take 3 wall sizes, re-skin them to be green, and import them into the game. Sure it’s a bit more complex than that, but I don’t think it would be THAT hard to accomplish. Especially considering the drastic things they have been hinting at changing with this update.