Today I am showcasing / releasing a .map I finished a while ago for MCC. 

What it pretty much is, it's a Cutscene BSP (from 130_epilogue.map) ported over into an Multiplayer Map, everything functions normally.

It's extremely good for a 1v1 map, it plays like a smaller & flatter Heretic map. 

Download includes pre-made Map-Variants for game-types too!

Download

Showcase + Tut

Enjoy, here's my discord for questions 

Cserleo#0183

Firstly I'd just like to thank you guys for the hard work you do in tinkering around with the code and figuring out all the ways to fix Halo 4's broken custom games. In doing so you actually bring a viable amount of fun to the game that should have been there from the start. So again, thank-you and I'm glad there is such a dedicated crowd to modding for the fun of the game.

I know that vanila Halo 4 in my eyes will remain untouched come the release of Halo: MCC... unless of course I am able to play the wonderful creations from you fine gents that make this game so enjoyable. Am I going to possibly enjoy some awesome custom nights with friends or will halo 4 on the XOne remain sad and shattered?

If only there was a way to mod halo 2 in MCC... wishful thinking </3

Download link (including description of changes): https://www.nexusmods.com/halothemasterchiefcollection/mods/368

1) Open the zip file and copy .map files into the halo 2 maps folder of your Halo The Master Chief Collection installation (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\halo2\h2_maps_win64_dx11).

2) Play "Halo: MCC Anti-Cheat Disabled (Mods and Limited...)" and enjoy!

I noticed with the MCC PC H3 Flight they store the temporary theater files on an AppData folder. I am interested in parsing the film files to see if I can get timeseries coordinate data for the players/action/events. I'm not sure if this is possible, though. Is there any pre-existing documentation on these files I can look at? Does anyone have any experiencing working with these BLF files outside of injecting images into them? Thanks.

Offset 1E2F5D0 no longer exists in the new MCC-WindowsNoEditor.pak, so the old tutorials for enabling Forge don't work. If you try restoring a backup of your old MCC-WindowsNoEditor.pak from December, the same old edits now have no effect.

Your going to need Assembly

if you do not have Assembly, you may need to head Here and download the latest Dev version of Assembly .

You Will also need to compile it, and there is a great video for that right Here

First Step.

Head into steam , click library, and find Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Right Click it.  Then click Properties , this will bring up a window and inside this window will be a set of tabs

You want to click Local Files , Then Browse Local Files.

Second Step.

Inside the folder we just opened will be a bunch of files and folder, you want to find and enter the folder called haloreach, and then inside that folder, enter the maps folder.

This folder contains all of Halo Reach's Maps. For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to find "cex_beaver_creek.map" inside this folder, right click and copy it and paste it to the desktop.

At this time i would advise you to create a folder inside this map folder called Backup, and copy all the maps inside the maps folder and place them inside the Backup folder for safe keeping.

Third Step.

Now we want to open Assembly. Once you have opened Assembly , on the left side of the window you will see "Open Content File" click that and find cex_beaver_creek.map you placed on your desktop and open it.

once you have opened the map , on the left side of the program window you will see the words Header, Tags, Strings, and Scripts. Click Tags.

Fourth Step.

We need to find the Weapon tag which looks like "weap" . you will find it near the bottom of the tag list as you scroll down.

Once you have found the "weap" tag, double click it and open it. You will now have another list show up. This list is all of the weapons avaliable in the beaver creek map we've opened and you can pick and weapon inside here that you like but for this tutorial I would suggest you Find the one labeled "objects\weapons\rifle\sniper_rifle\sniper_rifle" and click it.

Fifth Step.

At the top of the main window in the Search Bar, type in "Initial Projectile" Next to this you'll find two boxes, one with the letters "proj" and the other with "objects\weapons\rifle\sniper_rifle\projectiles\sniper_rifle_bullet" . Click the second box labled "objects\weapons\rifle\sniper_rifle\projectiles\sniper_rifle_bullet" to open a dropdown menu and find "objects\weapons\support_high\plasma_launcher\plasma_launcher_grenade" and click it.

Thats It! You're finished ! click Save at the bottom of the main menu and then go back to your maps folder inside haloreach, and delete the map "cex_beaver_creek" and replace it with the file on your desktop. To use your mod, you will have to launch Halo MCC With Anti-Cheat Disabled, and you will have to open it in a custom game and it will actually be called "Battle Canyon" but go ahead and load up the map and give it a shot.

Possibly having a chance of it from behind when shields are down, would be cool. 

Is it possible at the current Dev state? 

Thanks.

In Eldewrito, I was able to freely edit all this stuff in Assembly without issues; I could edit the Overshield and Active Camo into whatever I wanted just as if it were a custom powerup. I could change the default player traits and then they would just work without having to load a custom gametype. However, in Reach PC these changes are entirely ignored and the game just loads the vanilla player traits and powerup functionality regardless.

Anyone know how to bypass this limitation? My first thought was maybe the game loads a .wezr from the shared or campaign maps instead, but they don't appear to contain any tags.

EDIT: I'm guessing Megalo is overriding whatever trait profiles are in the map tags when the game loads?

Like Marshall, zealot, etc.

I wouldn’t mind just swapping out another wave-enemy type if it could be as simple as adding the armor elements.

Can it be done in this early at all?  Any help much appreciated.

I think it has something to do with squads, but how the heck do you use the templates?

edit: Here's the source code of a tool that can read and compile Halo 2 .map files that I found.

Thanks.

You Will also need to compile it, and there is a great video for that right Here

Once you have Assembly we can get started.

First Step.

Head into steam , click library, and find Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Right Click it.  Then click Properties , this will bring up a window and inside this window will be a set of tabs

You want to click Local Files , Then Browse Local Files.

Second Step.

Inside the folder we just opened will be a bunch of files and folder, you want to find and enter the folder called haloreach, and then inside that folder, enter the maps folder.

This folder contains all of Halo Reach's Maps. For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to find "cex_beaver_creek.map" inside this folder, right click and copy it and paste it to the desktop.

At this time i would advise you to create a folder inside this map folder called Backup, and copy all the maps inside the maps folder and place them inside the Backup folder for safe keeping.

Third Step.

Now we want to open Assembly. Once you have opened Assembly , on the left side of the window you will see "Open Content File" click that and find cex_beaver_creek.map you placed on your desktop and open it.

once you have opened the map , on the left side of the program window you will see the words Header, Tags, Strings, and Scripts. Click Tags.

Fourth Step.

First off dont panic, this may look like a lot of nonsense to someone who is knew to this but it is actually very simply. we are now looking at all the Tags that the map Beaver Creek is composed of.

Still, on the left side of the program window you will see a big list of tags. We need to find the Weapon tag which looks like "weap" . you will find it near the bottom of the tag list as you scroll down.

Once you have found the "weap" tag, double click it and open it. You will now have another list show up. This list is all of the weapons avaliable in the beaver creek map we've opened and you can pick and weapon inside here that you like but for this tutorial I would suggest you Find the one labeled "objects\weapons\rifle\dmr\dmr" and click it.

Fifth Step.

Once you have opened this file you will see in the main window, A LOT of words, numbers and input boxes. For now, at the top of the window in the Search Bar, type in "Barrels"

This will bring us too a section of this weapon that deals with part of how the gun fires. There is a lot of neat stuff in here but for now find " Rounds Per Second min" and change the value in the box next to it, to 10. Then directly underneath it, find "Rounds Per Second max" and change the value in the box to 10 also. Continuing down the list further is a box labeled "Fire Recovery Time" find it and change the value in this box to 0 . Fire Recovery Time deals with how long inbetween shots the player can pull the trigger again. so by changing this value to 0 we have told it that there is no recovery time and we can fire the weapon right away again after firing .

Sixth Step.

Navigate back up to the Search Bar and type in " Bloom Rate of Decay" , once you have found the box, change the value to 10. Bloom Rate of Decay, deals with the way the reticle changes as you fire the weapon. The lower this value is, the slower the reticle will shrink back to normal when we fire the dmr in game, the Higher the value, the faster the reticle will shrink back to normal. By changing the value to 10, we have effectivly made that shrinking return to normal almost immediatly.

Final Step.

At the bottom of the main window you will see Save, Poke, Reload, Revisions, And Options. Click Save. A small window will show up that says "the metadata has been saved to the original file"

your now done with this mod. so go back to your maps folder inside haloreach, and delete the map "cex_beaver_creek" and replace it with the file on your desktop. Thats It Your Done!

To use your mod, you will have to launch Halo MCC With Anti-Cheat Disabled, and you will have to open it in a custom game and it will actually be called "Battle Canyon" but go ahead and load up the map and give it a shot.

In Reach, this is clearly not the case, as projectiles for the DMR, Magnum, Needle Rifle, etc. don't have this box checked. I have spent a bunch of time comparing to projectiles like the Plasma Rifle and Spiker and not noticed any difference that will make a DMR or Needler Rifle into projectile weapons.

EDIT: So it seems I was mistaken, and at least in custom games, projectiles like that of the Needle Rifle, DMR, and Magnum are actually NOT HITSCAN as everyone seems to think. By simply lowering the projectile speeds to something under 100u/s, it becomes blatantly obvious they are not instant and will drop if gravity is a non-zero value, so it all works as expected. I tested online, and hits on other players do in fact register when the projectile model appears to be hitting them, and not instantly.

So my working theory is that these projectiles are never actually hitscan in the vanilla game; they're just so fast that there is no perceptible travel time. By default they are set to 3000 units per second velocity, which is equivalent to about 6,000 meters, or 20,000 feet per second. In other words; about 7 times faster than a real rifle bullet; unless you find a spot on the map where you can see players 2 miles away, you're not going to notice any travel time.

Alternatively, maybe the game automatically converts projectiles to hitscan when the speed is above a certain point. It would take more testing to find out what that cutoff point is, but as long as it's above the speeds I want to use, it's not a big concern to me.

Time to mod the living hell out of it.

Before we get started, make sure to make a backup of your game files, for steam users you will find them under:

'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\haloreach\maps'

 Assembly: https://www.nexusmods.com/halothemasterchiefcollection/mods/1

Only download assembly precompiled from the above link

Modding MCC is actually rather straight forward if we are just talking about map files, its business as usual if you have experience modding previous titles both on console and PC; Simply navigate to the map file in assembly and open it up. You can poke, save & of course extract and inject tags between maps! 

If you are looking for tutorials there are plenty of them here on the websites, I will admit most of them are quite old now but their ideas still apply and there is much to be learnt from reading them. Check out the various tutorial sections. 

One thing to remember is that the Halo games are very similar when it comes to their tag systems, most methods / ideas can be applied to multiple games so dont be afraid to explore and adapt old information that you find kicking around.

I've never modded halo before, what should I do?

Experiment of course! Each of the levels that you play in game are stored in .map files. You can use a program like assembly to open these files and tinker around with its inner workings.

When you open a map you will be greeted by a screen that looks like this:

 Looks pretty scary right? Wrong! Welcome to tag modding!

Every single thing that you see in game has something called a "tag", on the left hand side of the screen you will see the various "classes" of tags that comprise the map.

Take a look at the [bipd]Biped class, its where all the various bipeds that are used for players and AI etc are stored. If you have a campaign map open, you can open the spartans biped tag to see some infomation.

For multiplayer open the spartans_mp biped tag, or if you are playing as an elite... I think you get the idea.

Now take a look at the new screen that has opened up, we call this the meta editor. To make a long story very short its just a very fancy looking hex editor that makes your life easy when it comes to finding and editing tags. You can scroll down using the scroll bar on the side, but far more efficient to search for what you are looking for. Press Ctrl+F to open up the search bar and you can then type in the name of what you are looking for. Lets look for "jump":

 You can click on the drop down box to choose from the various found items, it will take you straight to them.

 Neato. We can see the jump velocity and that it is stored in the tag as a single-precision floating-point value.

Let's do something silly like change it to 5. You can then press save and start the map in MCC... or if you already have the game running and open on that exact map you can do something called "poking"; poking lets you make changes in real time so there is no need to save and reload the map. (Please note that having a map open in MCC means you will not be able to save to it, so return back to the lobby before you save any changes.)

 Poked changes only exist while the map is running. After you end the game the changes are lost. Note: poking can cause crashes but it depends.

 That's it! Your first ever MCC mod done. Why not explore the [weap]weapons tag class and see what you can cook up? Perhaps some vehicles? There is too much to cover in a single post so carefully explore around the various tags, see what interests you and play around for a while. When you feel ready take a look at some of the tutorials that are kicking around and have a go at them, build your knowledge and it will be second nature to you.

You wont be creating AI, forging in campaign or doing complex things just yet. Learn how the system works first.

(Feel free to download patches for these though, nothing wrong with that)

I hope this helped you out if you are new around here or to modding in general.

Not many people have stuck around to mod reach over the years but perhaps that will change now.

Go make some cool stuff!

You can also refer to zedd's older posts, ignore anything console related. I dont feel like rewriting it all. 

has anyone found a solution?

1) If I modify tags on a map and I host a custom lobby for some friends, will it be everyone who gets affected by the modified values or just me?

2) Does everyone need to launch the game with EAC disabled or just me?

Sorry if they're stupid questions but I couldn't find answers anywhere else.