Hey, I'm a little bit interested in modding the Halo Single Player levels, such as to include the Rocket Hog and the two multiplayer only weapons.
I'm not thinking to do this so much as to program Flood and Covenant to use these weapons, I'm just thinking of simple things like replacing one of the many assault rifles you stumble opon lying on the ground with a flamethrower or something. Something about burning up Flood with a flamethrower seems to make me interested.
But I guess a big part of this will be involved with if the levels are hardcoded into the exe or if they are located in the maps folder. If they are located in the maps folder, I think doing such an editing job should be fairly easy, if not...
Everything in the level is contained in the .map file for that level, with the exception of the bitmaps and sounds, which are in a different .map file for HPC.
Within the map file are object references called "tags". One tag in particular is called a "scnr" tag, and it contains the spawn locations for all of the models, weapons, ai, etc. There are other references to objects as well in the tag index.
Basically, what people do with the xbox version now is swap tag references. So, for instance, you could change the reference to an assault rifle with a flamethrower. The catch is that the weapon must already be in the .map file. You will see all over these forums that people discuss "PPF" files. These are like small batch files that modders create to swap tag references with a utility instead of by hand.
Iron_Forge has already begun some of the modding for HaloPC using this technique. The HaloPC .map files have been modified (of course) from the Xbox version of .map files. However, the techniques for swapping tags are exactly the same, but the offsets to a particular tag in the .map file are different.
You should check out his site - it discusses this technique in much more detail, and as more people become interested in modding HaloPC, the tools for modding existing maps will become more advanced.
You can find a link to his site on our links page.
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