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New Death Island Mod

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 10:52 am
by dalecooper
Help yourselves, gents:

http://www.bob-planet.net/snowisland.zip

Unzip the map file and replace your existing one. Features:

- complete reskin and new ambient sounds for the map (borrowed from other maps, not my handiwork) to make the island a winter wonderland... in the alternate universe where "wonderland" means rock-strewn, bitter cold, place where a lot of people die

- Halo 2-esque battle rifle with zoom

- high-caliber, low ROF pistol (no zoom, reduced accuracy, more dmg)

- Banshee upgraded to "Hornet", featuring machine guns and a three-rocket spread fire in place of the fuel rod

- Ghost upgraded to "Gnat", with flying, revamped physics more conducive to flying, faster airspeed, and machine guns

- Gun turrets now fire homing rockets to be effective anti-aircraft weapons

- Both bases outfitted with gun turrets borrowed from the warthog

- Rocket hogs can be driven from both seats, and the turret can be fired from the driver's seat

- Rocket hogs and tanks feature snow camo to help protect them from aerial attacks (doesn't really work, but what the hey)

That's all I can remember. Please leave feedback - good points, bad points, whatever. This is version 1.0 and I will almost certainly be revamping it pending feedback from playtesting. (There's one potential issue right off the bat - some vehicle objects were moved up to the bases via Sparkedit that I didn't mean to move, but they don't show up in my game and I can't determine what they are due to a Sparkedit bug. They might only show up in Rally or something.)

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 12:18 pm
by dalecooper
Image

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 12:24 pm
by Colin Campbell
http://www.bob-planet.net/snowisland.jpg

Thats the address to the pic, copy and paste into your address bar.

Looks great *downloads*

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 12:48 pm
by SirLuke
FINALLY! A BR! TIME TO DL!

That snow camo is real nice. It really works pretty well; at first glance you wouldn't notice anything.

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 12:53 pm
by WaLKa
if your color blind ;) nice mod!

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 12:55 pm
by SirLuke
I said FIRST GLANCE. There are alot of people who just kind of scan the ground for one or two seconds, then just concentrate on flight.

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 12:58 pm
by WaLKa
wow, calm down, don't wanna pop a blood vessel ;)

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 1:09 pm
by SirLuke
Ooohh... vein-y.... OW!!

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 1:12 pm
by dalecooper
SirLuke wrote: That snow camo is real nice. It really works pretty well; at first glance you wouldn't notice anything.
It works best if you don't move the vehicle around much, and sit in dark little nooks where you can kind of blend in. The shadows underneath the vehicle make it easy to spot if you're just flying along the beachfront and a banshee is overhead. (and believe me, you do *not* want to be gallivanting about in a warthog with three homing rockets following you.)

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 1:39 pm
by WaLKa
i think that sounds like a fun way to spend the afternoon ;oP

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 2:04 pm
by dalecooper
By the way, I'm already up to Snow Island 1.01. The zip file out there now is a slightly upgraded version. No significant changes, just weapon tweaks (banshee and ghost MGs are less accurate and slightly less damaging; tank cannon is more accurate; pistol is slightly more accurate and damaging; AR is slightly less accurate; rockets are a bit faster). All of this is based on playtesting, and I'd love to hear any feedback you guys have from playing on the map, as well.

The only major change I have planned for the mod right now is, as soon as I can find it in the meta, I want to increase the effective range of the missile turrets. They'd be a lot more useful if the rockets would lock on a target that was farther away.

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003 7:54 pm
by Overseer
I liked the total incorporation of colors. The Gnat idea is nice. Needs to have gray Hornets/Gnats though.

Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 5:23 am
by dalecooper
Overseer wrote:I liked the total incorporation of colors. The Gnat idea is nice. Needs to have gray Hornets/Gnats though.
What I was thinking of doing was a grey bmp with a sky blue underbelly - traditional camo for air vehicles against surface-to-air attacks. But I still haven't been able to get anyone to tell me how to insert new textures without overwriting existing ones - and swapping out the entire bitmaps.map file is a giant pain.

Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 10:13 am
by Lebowski
you can make a ppf for the bitmaps file...

Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 10:32 am
by dalecooper
Lebowski wrote:you can make a ppf for the bitmaps file...
That still makes a permanent change to the bitmaps file itself, one which applies across all maps; therefore the user is required to restore his old bitmaps.map if he wants to see standard textures in other maps. Am I understanding that correctly? What I would like to have is a mod that applies only within itself - in other words, if you play a different map, or restore the standard map file, the custom textures don't show up.

Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 10:56 am
by Lebowski
I don't know of any other way. But if you use HHHT (Helpful Halo Hacking Tool) there is a dandy revert map button. It does all the work for ya.

Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 3:08 pm
by Master Chief 1128
Hey mod creator, how'd you get the 'hog's LAAG gun to where it is in your mod? I am gussing by the looks of it (could still see parts of the instrument panel :wink:) that you just used some kind of invisibility thing. But when I walked around where the rest of the 'hog should've been, there wasn't a "Press E To Enter The BLANK Seat of Warthog" message, only "Press E To Enter The Gunner Seat of the Warthog". So how'd you do this? If you have time, could you give me step-by-step instructions for this? If so, that'd be awesome. Thanks, and your mod rocks!

Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2003 8:09 am
by dalecooper
Master Chief 1128 wrote:Hey mod creator, how'd you get the 'hog's LAAG gun to where it is in your mod? I am gussing by the looks of it (could still see parts of the instrument panel :wink:) that you just used some kind of invisibility thing. But when I walked around where the rest of the 'hog should've been, there wasn't a "Press E To Enter The BLANK Seat of Warthog" message, only "Press E To Enter The Gunner Seat of the Warthog". So how'd you do this? If you have time, could you give me step-by-step instructions for this? If so, that'd be awesome. Thanks, and your mod rocks!
Thanks! As far as how I did it, check out the thread "Turrets - not the covie ones". It's not step-by-step, but it covers the basics. If you need to know anything more specific, let me know.

Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2003 10:57 pm
by The Gimpy Llama
I too would like to know how you make a 'hog turret. I checked the "turret - not the covie ones" but I couldnt find much helpful information on making the 'hog invisible, apart from your post with the snow mod. I have everything working (no collision with main hog, gun on ground, cant drive) except for the fact that the hog is still visible. I tried tooling around with different bitmaps, but im left with a yellowish color on the hog. I am thinking this has to do with the shaders, which I didnt change (because i dont know how to). Any help would be appreciated. :D

Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 11:01 am
by dalecooper
I'll tell you what: since there seems to be some interest in this, I'll post full details tomorrow. Can't do it today - I don't have access to the pc with my map files and such on it.