Content: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Background: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Pattern: Blank Waves Notes Sharp Wood Rockface Leather Honey Vertical Triangles
Welcome to Xbox Chaos: Modding Evolved

Register now to gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to contribute to this site by submitting your own content or replying to existing content. You'll be able to customize your profile, receive reputation points as a reward for submitting content, while also communicating with other members via your own private inbox, plus much more! This message will be removed once you have signed in.

Sign In Sign Up
AMD

Multi
mapexpand

Started by AMD,

2 posts in this topic

Posted

File Name: mapexpand

File Submitter: AMD

File Submitted: 06 Oct 2012

File Updated: 06 Oct 2012

File Category: Programs

Virus Scan: Click Here

Injects free space into the metadata area of .map files. Useful for injecting tags or resizing chunks. Most research was done by me. Special thanks to Xerax, Dovahkiin, DeadCanadian, and Lord Zedd, along with anyone who helped develop Ascension or any previous editors.

Run it from the command line like this:


mapexpand <path to .map file> <number of 0x10000-byte pages to inject>

For example, to add 0x20000 bytes into forge_halo.map, run


mapexpand "forge_halo.map" 2

There are a few things that you need to be careful of though:

  • This only adds extra meta to the .map. You can't use this program to add models or textures - that's an entirely different process.
  • This program only works with the retail version of Reach for now. However, the method described in this blog post should work for Halo 3 as well, aside from differing header offsets.
  • You must patch your .xex with Zedd's blue flames patches. Using a .xex patched with Reachunlock or a similar program makes the game reject the map file for a currently-unknown reason.
  • Don't inject anything while Ascension or another editor is open. Injecting changes the map magic because it involves decreasing the virtual base address of the metadata.
  • Ascension can't handle patching between maps of different sizes. To create a patch which requires an expanded map file, you need to set an expanded .map as the original map and instruct users to use this program (perhaps through a .bat file or a similar script) before patching.
  • Finally, only inject the number of pages that you actually need. You can always add more later. Adding 50 MB to the file just because you think you might need it is stupid and will probably slow your Xbox down or make the game just crash.

See my blog post for more information.

Click here to download this file

HaloHackBoy, masterchafe, SnipeStyle and 2 others like this

Share this post

Link to post
Share on other sites

Posted

ascension can handle patching between different map sizes, just it does so very terribly and you end up with a 30mb patch.

now that this program is out we can make a blank .map with the extra pages for people to use though, so long as you say how many pages the original has. unlike when i had to give out that 30mb patch cause this program wasn't out

Share this post

Link to post
Share on other sites
Go To Topic Listing Halo Tools & Utilities