HaloMods "Classic" Read-only Archive

Description
Nothing conditions the throwing arm and sharpens the reflexes like a good game of dodgeball. In order to keep the troops on their toes during training, the ball kills on impact.

Mod Attributes:

* [ Yes ] Gametypes Fixed
* [ Forthcoming ] Team Spawns Fixed
* [ No ] BSP Conversion
* [ Hell yes ] Weapons Balanced
* [ Yes ] Custom Sounds
* [ Not really ] Custom Models
* [ Yes ] Machines Added
* [ Yes ] System Linkable


The skin for the ball is a failure. If you'd like to skin the ball for this map, please PM me. Also see below.[/color]

Images:


The blinder engulfs an opponent in a ball of plasma, rendering him blind for 5 seconds.





Nice minimal HUD:


No weapons. Just balls. A hero will emerge on any given Sunday from this parking garage. The ball has the same physics as a grenade, so those of you who are skilled at sticking people should have a field day. If you're not so hot at throwing stickies, this game will make you much better! Collision below the knees does not seem to register. Aim for the upper torso for best results. To encourage a close-quarters game of accuracy, you can only hold one ball at a time. So make sure you are within your realistic hitting range before you toss, or you're hosed.

For defensive purposes, you start with two blinder balls. Conserve them for moments when someone is bearing down on you and there isn't a ball nearby. They do no damage, but if you stick an opponent with one, he will be blinded for 5 seconds. They travel 50% faster than the dodgeball, so you don't have to lead as much. Aim for the head/upper torso with these as well. If you stick someone at the waist, he'll be able to see through the flicker. It's also less effective from behind or from the side.

Be sure to set weapons to Map Default. If you don't like the blinders (they may induce lag), turn starting grenades off in your gametype.

All gametypes are fixed. Have you ever played CTF in a little open room? Try it. KOTH is a fun one, too.

The HUD is nice and minimal. A "1" means you have a ball, and "0" means you don't. Note that you'll automatically switch back to your blinders after you throw a dodgeball, if you still have any. Switch between blinders and ball with the black button, same as it ever was.

The only way to kill someone is with a dodgeball, with one exception: Melee with the bomb, skull and flag can be deadly, but only if you are airborne and you melee someone's head as you come down (this was a necessary consequence of eliminating cheap melee kills with the default "weapon"). The melee force for these objects has also been increased, so you can shove people aside if necessary. You can give people some serious air if you aim up while flag meleeing.

Bugs/Features/Things that suck:
-The dodgeball skin! Yuck. I hate the soccer ball skin. I had no success skinning it though. If you think you can do a decent job skinning the soccer ball in a way that looks good and doesn't lag or freeze the game, please PM me. I'll be happy to put a good skin in the map and give you credit if it passes my rigorous QA . I believe the ball size is 1/16 the regular soccer ball size, which makes the model look nice and round. For the plasma grenade model, I think it's 4X.

- Sounds were injected in WMA format instead of Xbox ADPCM. WMA is an inferior format for dynamic action but is vastly easier to export/manipulate/import. I should make a tutorial about that. Anyway, it's a tad bootleg sometimes on quick sequential ball bounces. But I got that dodgeball sound, and I didn't even have to go on a homicidal rage in the process.

- The Territories gametype is busted. Luckily, no one plays that gametype. It wouldn't work well on such a small map anyway.

- Flag sounds are slightly funky. No big deal.

- Other weapons do not work on this map. I've done odd things to the biped health, and some guns freeze the game entirely, possibly due to corrupted sounds. So it's dodgeball only. If people really like this map and want to play regular games on it, hassle me and I'll see what I can do. I'd be surprised if that happens though.

- A ball in motion will kill you, even if it has already bounced. I know that's not consistent with the rules. Luckily, the balls are rather "deflated," and collision below the knees doesn't matter. I could change this, but it would make the physics unrealistic and crappy looking.

- The ball has health, and your default weapon melee does enough damage to kill it. I intended for people to be able to swat the ball safely away, but in practice this is all but impossible.

Feedback is welcome.

Credits/Programs:
Soldier of Light and SnakeJKnight for [jmad] tutorials
DarkMetal for sound injection tutorial
xlRainlx for the Underbrush mod. The bouncy fuel grenades are what first triggered my interest in a dodgeball mod.
JacksonCougAr for his custom bump mapping tutorial, even though my skin ultimately failed

Halo2ST by TfAv1228
Entity 1.6 and 1.39 by Brok3n Halo. Indispensable.
Yelo by xbox7887 et al. Another godsend.
Model Resizer by r4ndom
Phmo Scaler by XZodia

Wow, that actually looks pretty cool. Nice job!

Wait, I thought that he said the freezing issues were fixed and that the red one is the only one that froze. I must edit my comment.

There is no freezing that I know of, after quite a bit of testing. Why would I release a mod that freezes? With my snazzy red textured ball, the game freezes. That's why it's not in the game, and we have the plain soccer ball skin. It's a drawback, sure, but it doesn't kill the mod by any means.

Edit:

And no I haven't played this one yet, the freezing issue is big for me.

Please don't give people the impression that my mod freezes if you have no indication that it does, aside from a potential ambiguity in my post. I would not presume to waste people's time with a map that doesn't load.

I will double check the patch just to be sure. ScottyGee, if you try it yourself and indeed it loads properly, please edit your comment. It's the kiss of death for the mod.

Edit 2: I downloaded, patched, and tested. No problems. It flexes its badass mojo with the greatest of ease.

good concept but like the others have stated, if the freezing issues were fixed it would be better.

There are no freezing issues. He just stated that above.

Damn Poopface, this is awesome.

This sounds quite neat. I wish that I could try it out. Anyways, good job and nice imagination.

Wow man, I love you. You have the most awesome/creative mods ever
I downloaded all three, and I'm gonna play them tomorrow.
Please, keep your mods coming. :p

I guess I read your post wrong. ;P Thankfully I have the power of awesome to remove that.

I swear I read the post many times over and came to that conclusion. Ahh well, my apologies

hehe, this mod is awesome great job poopface : P

Cool idea, good job.

awesome mod.. love it, only thing i don't get is why is it soccer balls o.O

Maybe if you read it.. ;/

He couldn't skin them because it looked bad.

Nice job 10/10 but does nyone want to play it with me on xbc or xbl

IT would be nice for a skin, it seems kinda plain but not bad 7/10

Did you try to swap the shader that the model of the soccerball uses? Try swapping it to a weapon shader (a cloned one) and changing all the bitmaps linked to it to cloned custom ones. Nice mod btw too.

Insane mod! Best I've played all year

Why didn't you play this mod with me? I would have liked to see the blinders and I didn't know the starting weapon you have can deflect balls!

Poopface = Successful Modder

BioBlade wrote:awesome mod.. love it, only thing i don't get is why is it soccer balls o.O

Yea, If i could get the map on my Box, I would (Could I FTP an unchipped Xbox?) It looks fun. My only problem is why are the dodgeballs soccer balls? They should be red (is that what you mean by the 'snazzy' red ones?) But other than that, it looks like a nice mod.

Me and Captain worked on trying to get the skin for a dodgeball but nothing seemed to work. I'm not sure if he got it working now but it is a long discussion and problem to work out.

I've tried many different tricks and workarounds but can't get a bump map to show up on the ball, so it looks wrongfully smooth. Even more surprisingly, no one else has been able to figure it out.

My closest attempt was an enlarged plasma grenade. The model has too few vertices and looks rather pointy for a ball, but I did get the bump map to show. It looked pretty darned good. The only problem is that it froze the game when only a few balls were on the screen at once. It's possible that I did something wrong when killing the LODs for the model and bitmap. I'll try the Machinima Companion in a subsequent attempt.



The soccer ball shows no textures but has a nice round model. The black pentagons on the default soccer ball skin imply a ball rather well, despite being two dimensional. Rocky also made a good ball model and injected it, but it wouldn't accept textures either.

I hate the soccer ball skin, but of all the crappy things I could get working, it was the least bad.

I have a couple of alternate ideas still, and I'm really hoping to sort this out before I release the dodgeball map pack I'm working on. Real life events (darn those things) have put my modding career on hiatus for awhile though.