HaloMods "Classic" Read-only Archive

It has been a while since I've come to check up on this community, or what's left of it I should say. It is utterly retarded to see the new people around here and the way it works now. You should not be so private with the knowledge and programs. I have heard it's because "People will mod on live" Old news, people have, and still mod Halo 2 online. Whatever damage could be caused, could also be fixed by Microsoft. I have been here a LONG time; I learned what HEX was here, people were kind enough to walk me through things I wanted to learn. After I got descent at it, I was sure to contribute and return to the community that taught me. I have seen this place in its prime, and I have seen this place's end. Nothing will ever be accomplished with the way things are now. Delete this topic, move it, whatever. I will never return to this wasteland of shattered ego's and broken ideas.

-343GuiltySparkIVIX / Wooden Dragon

Dude I agree, I originally joined in march 2004, and well. Things have changed drastically. People really need to start open sourcing there projects and let everyone help. The community would advance further and faster at that. Look at the Unreal and Source communities.

T1xAnton wrote:Dude I agree. I originally joined in march 2004, and well, things have changed drastically. People really need to start open sourcing their projects and let everyone help. The community would advance further and faster at that. Look at the Unreal and Source communities.

ftfy

I wouldn't trust most of the "coders" around here with "helping" my project(s) if my life depended on it. I've seen the internals of people's work before, 90% of the people around here are just hack jobs. Sorry, but open-sourcing things isn't the answer to everything, people need to actually learn how to do this stuff for themselves so not everything is just a HMT clone-hack. I rarely see modders in general (coders\tag editors\etc) actually know or understand what they're talking about.

Those communities are MUCH larger. Why? Because the engines in those communities have more than one game using them, and most of them come with an actual SDK to extend the engine...the actual developers gave them that and actually support their modifications. With Halo, things had to be done from scratch.

I agree with you GuiltySpark.

As example, when i came here in 2004 for halo 2 modding, 1st i didn't know english, it took me one year to read and write basicaly.
2nd i had not fucking idea of what was a mapfile, of what was a tag, of what was meta, of what was reflexive, chunk, byte, short, enum float, bitmask etc

NO IDEA

No one explained this, when coders posted apps they didn't explained anything, ANYTHING

Right.

So don't come tell us we need to learn, it's allright to learn how maps works, i learned it myself since entity came out when i understood what the chunk cloner was, and i started doing plugins, of you know how i learned, by myself again.
When i wanted to know how to calculate the offset of a raw data with the magic etc etc
I got the answer 3 months later, by someone on aim.

The problem is to explain something like meta reflexive chunk and type of values that could be explained in a few text lines but no i asked to a lot of people that created apps no one took time to reply...

Don't say we need to learn if you don't teach basics things.

To learn how mapfile works, the best way is to play around with mapfiles, now i build tags, i fix tags because apps don't work perfect, and i find solutions to the bugs generated the apps.

And that's 3 years of modding, experience and self learning by testing testing and testing.

Most of people that come here are 12 years old maybe?

They'd never learn this, because you have first have the time for, then want to do it and have the curiosity to mess around on the app to understand what you can do.

Its pretty much what you said i know.

But because we have to do things from scratch to mod and the amount of time you spend creating apps doesn't mean that we have to understand how the app was coded, that would be a waste of time for modders.

There is a big difference between creating apps and modding, as you spend a lot of time making apps we spend a lot of time testing the engine or making plugins for some of the modders.

So what modders give back is mods and research, but now per example for halo 3 we see a new plugin format which is coder-friendly, how do you want modders to make plugins?


I don't know what you are waiting from modders if you don't give em tools, we come to mod we enjoy to mod and that's the main motivation research is necessary when the modder wants to be able to create new tags but if he doesn't have tools he won't give a fuck.

We perfectly know that modding is impossible without apps, but you can't force modder to learn how to code then understand your code and then make them understand the mapfile, that's 5 years of experience probably, besides some doesn't have the time to learn that too.

Instead they would like to have apps, and they'd be thankful and they'd give back feedback on apps and make plugins or more researchs.

Feedback on apps, i think that's a big problem when it comes to improve the apps, it was never done enough for halo 2, modders find bugs on apps because they use it more or in a different way then coders as they don't really have time to mod.


Well it seems that when you are starting to have half of the community repeating the same thing, that apps should be released because there's not much then there's a problem.

You know i used Shade45's apps, Engineer, i found some values for scnr and update a plugin for some placement reflexives.


But why would i complete plugins if i can't mod?
Besides i need to test values, and no one would like to test it for me, so yeah how the hell you want me to help and deserve an app if things works that way?

Yes you are going to say "get a devkit" sorry but i don't have 600$ right now i have things more important to pay like studies, besides i live in europe its pretty hard to find one here and maybe that devkits are ntsc and wouldn't work on my tv btw it cost more to import from another country so...

Well that's pretty much for mapfiles, i have no clue on completing plugins for h3 if i don't have a dev, and i wouldn't even be sure that i'd get a modified xex and all the apps i need.


So the thing that remains is con resining, there's still some stuff to research but yeah no one wants to test, and i have stuff to test, bu eh, no one wants to test it will never come out then :/


Really all you guys show is that you want credit, if you want people to learn give em tools they'll learn with experience.

It tooks me 3 years, now i have the knowledge to do new stuff on halo 2, but what happens, no one makes apps for halo 2 modding anymore.

and that's because as no one helped me to learn how maps work and apps work it took me too much time and now there's no one making apps for h2 as i said.

And same thing is gonna happen for halo 3 because yes you can teach people how maps works but they wouldn't like to learn it if they can't mod.

After all the best teaching is not theory, but testing the theory on real conditions and see the result, that's the best way to teach
Just like for physics, theory is broing but mixing two chemicals liquids and see the reaction is much more fun and by explaining at the same time what is happening the puppil will memorize much better then with only theory.

That's all i got to say.

neodos wrote:I agree with you GuiltySpark.

As example, when i came here in 2004 for halo 2 modding, 1st i didn't know english, it took me one year to read and write basicaly.
2nd i had not *** idea of what was a mapfile, of what was a tag, of what was meta, of what was reflexive, chunk, byte, short, enum float, bitmask etc

NO IDEA

No one explained this, when coders posted apps they didn't explained anything, ANYTHING

I stopped reading right here.

Apparently you didn't take the time to look around on the forums to find tutorials and just expected everything to be hand fed to you.

Tutorials in question: One, Two and Three.

All posted in the start of 2004. Hell, HMT even came with a tutorial in the rar, and that went up a month after those tutorials by Gren did . I'm pretty sure I_F had posted some learning material sometime that year too. I won't get into how badly that stuff is out of date and otherwise wrong in some aspects, because at the time...we had nothing else to base the research off of (ie, a released editing kit). Point is, someone did explain it. Don't assume that since you didn't know, that no one went out of their way to explain it.

You want to try to argue that you couldn't find those because they were in english? Not anyones fault expect your own.

No but you could have a bit more respect and read the rest of the post, besides that's not for halo 2.
And yes that is useful it's on "others downloads" wtf?

I was talking about basic things like what is a float an int a byte etc

For a person that start you are talking jibbrish when you see this:

http://forums.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=3797

It explains the order of incomprehensible words for someone who starts, the is not definitions for the terms...

There is no definition for the terms itself only the relation between these that's what i meant.

That should be stickied on each tutorials thread for halo 1 2 and 3 then if you want people to learn.

Read the rest of my post above it explains the problem in my point of view in depth.

neodos wrote: I was talking about basic things like what is a float an int a byte etc

That's exactly the point. Many people just copy off the white papers or other sources without even knowing every aspect of it.

Don't you ever wonder about the things like..."How did they know how to calculate the map magic? Why is it called magic or where did they get the idea of a map header in the first place?"

If you want to be a good modder, you should know EVERY aspect....and that of course includes the basic knowledge on how a map file is build or what the idea of the different elements were. Hell, even with the basic things like float, int, byte you should be utterly familiar with before you start even calling yourself a modder.

I didn't read the rest of your post because you didn't take the time to Search and thus didn't care to waste my time reading complaints or comments on stuff that could have easily been answered had you taken your time to research things without expecting them to be hand fed to you. "Here comes the airplane *whoooooosh*...."

neodos wrote: I was talking about basic things like what is a float an int a byte etc

Those things aren't limited to halo. A google search can easily provide you details into those data types. People need to learn how to use the web, not just hex editors :-/

I'm not a big fan of the secrecy myself. Modded maps and gametypes can't do any harm, but if a forge resigner could also help with the map signing process, that would be bad.

What annoys me the most is how most threads in the "Modding Discussion" forum are instantly locked, and the OP told to "Post in the sticky". What's the point of having a forum if all you're going to be using is a sticky?

There are no tools to release. All of the tools made will only work on dev kits and then there are the CON tools that aren't being released for whatever reason the creator feels. It is up to them.

Anyways, the reason most people don't learn the map structure and all of the things like how plugins work is because there is no incentive for the "new wave." When people first come here, they are told that there is no possible way they can .map mod Halo 3 unless they buy a dev kit, and even then they will have to do some more research to make or acquire the necessary tools. Most people just give up there. They don't think ~$800 dollars for a dev kit is worth it. So they move on to the next best alternative, CON modding.

People don't release their tools because there will be "live modding", because there never will be on Halo 3. Bungie made sure of that. They don't release the tools because of the immaturity of the users and that they don't have the ability to do that. They can't control themselves. A perfect example would be the Kim screenshot that was modded a couple days ago. The only possible tools that can be released and be useful to the few people with CON resigners would be CON tools and those can't be used for cheating in Halo 3.

uralllame wrote: What annoys me the most is how most threads in the "Modding Discussion" forum are instantly locked, and the OP told to "Post in the sticky". What's the point of having a forum if all you're going to be using is a sticky?

They aren't told to post in the sticky, they're told to read the sticky as the questions to suggestions could easily be handled by reading the sticky

unknownv2 wrote:There are no tools to release. All of the tools made will only work on dev kits and then there are the CON tools that aren't being released for whatever reason the creator feels. It is up to them.

Anyways, the reason most people don't learn the map structure and all of the things like how plugins work is because there is no incentive for the "new wave." When people first come here, they are told that there is no possible way they can .map mod Halo 3 unless they buy a dev kit, and even then they will have to do some more research to make or acquire the necessary tools. Most people just give up there. They don't think ~$800 dollars for a dev kit is worth it. So they move on to the next best alternative, CON modding.

People don't release their tools because there will be "live modding", because there never will be on Halo 3. Bungie made sure of that. They don't release the tools because of the immaturity of the users and that they don't have the ability to do that. They can't control themselves. A perfect example would be the Kim screenshot that was modded a couple days ago. The only possible tools that can be released and be useful to the few people with CON resigners would be CON tools and those can't be used for cheating in Halo 3.

What ?
I hope you know that the CON files dont just have todo with Halo 3 ?
If this tools come into wrong hands Xbox Live will nolonger be safe.
Every game could be cheated and nothing were be safe.
I understand Anthony and the other guys with such a resigner, and we just have to wait until XBox Modding will be Noob Firendly.
Just wait a few months, and stop crying

neodos wrote:Don't say we need to learn if you don't teach basics things.

It's not their job to "Teach" us. We need to learn on our own. You can't be told what to do and how to do it with everything. The people here like Kornman and others DO have lives, and they do not want to be here everyday, telling everyone what to do, and how to do it. As he said use the "Search" button. I know I don't know much about programming and other things discussed on the site (Although I'm learning.), at least I understand that the world does not revolve around me and what I aspire to learn.

You have no idea, how was halomods 2 years ago and how it's now.

These guys have years of experience, they are a few when you have hundred of modders that want to mod halo 3, halomods was supposed to be a modding community meaning that modding is easy accessible to everyone if they want to learn, but right now its the opposite.

And i do have a live like many other modders i wouldn't like to have to take 5 years to learn programming reverse engeeniering and all that stuff to be bale to mod halo 3 a few years later...

I remember when halo 1 modding was cool.

I remember when people did stuff other than bitch about other people not given them whatever they want.

CON tools will cause Live problems, far outside of Halo 3. Yeah, people mod on Live. Guess what, we ban those people. Point invalidated.
Other tools only work with use on devkits, and are useless to 99% of people. You don't need them, you can't do anything with them. You just use this as a point to push your own illogical agenda. Point invalidated. You people bitch and moan about Engineer and Johnson being useless to you because you can't test values, yet you want more tools you can't use? That's stupid. What the fuck do you expect them to do for you? Bust their asses so you can test values? They have no obligation to help your arrogant, selfish self.

I'm not reading all the retarded posts in this thread. The two issues are summed up right there. You can't have a CON resigner and other tools are useless to you. Get over it. Go bitch at the Xbox modders for not getting you a modification to run unsigned code. Get your whining out of here.

This topic has no purpose. It is not about modding, it is about complaining about the community and the people in it. If you have a problem with someone, take it to them. This board is for questions about modding. The creator is gone, it is only starting arguments. Above all, this should not be here for the simple fact that it will accomplish nothing other than a fight, and you know it damn well.