HaloMods "Classic" Read-only Archive

Hi everyone!

I've been working on this movie for the last couple of days and have overcome most of my problems (custom animation, custom map features, etc) but have come across another problem.

This new problem seems like it should have an easy fix, but I can't figure it. Basically, I need to know how to inject a new Master Chief skin for use in my custom map.

I tried converting my map into a regular Halo map, opening it in HMT, and inject the texture that way, but when I opened the bitmap folder and tried to select Cyborg (or any bitmap for that matter) HMT crashed.

So then I tried saving my skin as a tif and running Tool bitmaps, which seemed to work (it created a bitmap tag, which, when opened in guerilla, did contain the new skin). I then rebuilt my map file, hoping that the new skin would be included , but it wasn't. (Note: I did this for both the cyborg and the cyborg multipurpose.bitmap tags).

I'm not sure what to do here.

From what I can gather, when you use HMT to inject a texture, it injects it into the bitmaps.map file, thus making it a globally applied texture. So I figured if I could just inject my texture into any Halo CE map, it would alter the bitmaps.map file and I'd be covered on my custom map (that's how it seems to work with regular Halo maps anyhow). Only problem is no matter what map I try (blood gultch, beaver creek you name it) whenever I attempt to load a bitmap in HMT, the program crashes.

How can I fix this problem, and reskin the MC in Halo CE?

Thansk for the help!

I think I figured it out!

ok, so I was just thinking that if I need to inject the skin into the bitmap.map file, why not swap bitmap.map files? I mean, throw the CE bitmap.map into the Halo map directory, run HMT, injecct the new skin, switch the bitmap.map files again, and run my map! It should work right?

I'm gonna go try it out.

Well, that one didn't work, but I was on the right track. See, the game kinda rejected the artificially injected bitmap file, so I was back to square one, but I still knew the crux of the problem lay with the bitmaps.map file.

I did a little thinking, and decided I should check out the bitmap that was actually built into the cache file. I assumed that since all the tutorials and messages I'd seen here and other places suggest that simply by running tools bitmaps on your skin, you'd be set, tool would look to tags\characters\cyborg\bitmaps for the cyborg skin when it builds the final map. To check and see if this was correct, I built my map and opened it in HEK plus. I extracted the cyborg.bitmap tag and opened it in guerilla only to find that it had been built with the default skin, not my custom skin.

After a bit of frustration I realized "tool is just a tool, I am a man; I can out-think tool." So, I took the bitmaps.map file out of the halo ce maps directory and plunked in down on my desktop. I then ran tool once more to build my map, and voila, the new texture was included. The sum bitch tool was looking to the bitmaps.map file for the cyborg skin rather than to the tags\characters\cyborg\bitmaps directory.

In any case, I've figured that problem out sorta (I'm sure there's got to be a better way to do it that doesn't included moving the bitmaps.map file every time I want to build a new map) so you all can look forward to my awesome movie in the coming days.

Thanks for the help everyone, have a good night!