Modding Tag Injection Announcement - Part 2

[Lord Zedd 1,771]

If you attended the Reach Modding Gamenight tonight, you probably noticed that we suddenly whipped out Longswords while playing Green World and surprised everyone. So it is time for me to come clean.

So on March 30th I began attempted to get something from shared.map to show up in forge_halo. After a few hours I managed to add the appropriate mode meta, but got a glitchy mess.


After finding something I forgot to copy over (Fixup Reflexives in the ZONE chunk), I got one step further and managed to get half the model to load.


I found that the model would show properly in Adjutant, but I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working right ingame.


And for anyone following in the Assembly chat on Skype, that was the last you heard of it. I had half a Longsword and was completely stumped. The discussion went on in another chat however.

That following night I decided that I was going to base an April Fool's joke around it.
I also figured out what was wrong; a dataref tucked away at the bottom of ZONE, which holds extra information about the raw asset. Sure enough, copying the correct data over fixed the model ingame.


The next logical step was to add the main textures over, using the same process as the model. A few hours later and...



From here, everyone in the chat planned out the prank.
When the idea first came up the plan was to post a few fakes mixed in with a legit pic, then fully announce everything at the end of the day.
We eventually settled on all fake pics and an overall fake post, simply closing the thread at the end of the day and treat everything as a joke. The twist, being, however, that the Longswords photoshopped in were cut out of pictures of them already on Forge world.


For the payoff, it was decided that we do it during a gamenight. The gamenight would have certainly come much, much sooner than the 2 weeks it became, but there were schedule issues and it got set back as an unfortunate result. Over the course of the past 2 weeks I made it into a vehicle and running effects, which were later improved by deadcanadian. We chose the best course of action was to patch the Lonsword into Green World to conceal it the best we could. The patch was finalized Wednesday Night and was uploaded to the site along with the other patch choices on Thursday.


What remained was an anxious and neverous wait until this very moment. We had to cross our fingers that nobody would snoop and spoil the surprise, and apparently nobody did. So thanks for that.


-

So here we are now, taking another step into bringing life back into Halo Modding.
And in case you were wondering: Yes, we hope to add Tag Injection to Assembly's ever-expanding list of features in the near future. Until then, however, a tutorial will be written in the coming days for those who with to go about it themselves.

It feels great to finally let this announcement out legitimately, and I deeply apologize if keeping this secret until now has for any reason offended you.

[civil210 10]

Funny story, when I was making that invasion map I went to place a hill marker, and all of a sudden a longsword appeared. Someone told me to keep it a secret, so I played along. 

Edited April 14, 2013 by civil210

[vonkova 66]

Funny story, when I was making that invasion map I went to place a hill marker, and all of a sudden a longsword appeared. Someone told me to keep it a secret, so I played along. 

Its a good thing you kept it quiet, This way it didn't spoil the event for us

[D3FEKT 25]

Its a good thing you kept it quiet, This way it didn't spoil the event for us

yeah it was the biggest surprise when we started shooting em lol.

[JJIJR 666]

I wouldn't really call it tag injection since it's only redirecting data from the shared.map. But still this is amazing.

[misterbanshee 51]

what !!!! wth I knew it was possible some how

[Roscoe 9]

Congrats, I can already see the future of Halo after looking at this. It takes time to do big steps, but there will always be a forward pace into Halo Modding.

[thecumking 19]

so it can be possible to get a pelican on the map

[JJIJR 666]

so it can be possible to get a pelican on the map

nope. there is no pelican in shared.map. The ones in campaign and firefight are in campaign.map, and the one in spire is local. Same with the Sabre in countdown.

[misterbanshee 51]

so we can only inject crap from shared.map will it even be possible to be able to get stuff from one map to another like it was in 2 ? or is shared .map only way

[thecumking 19]

but there is a pelican on spire (hint its a mp map) 

never mind dident see that its local 

maybe one day

[AMD 885]

so we can only inject crap from shared.map will it even be possible to be able to get stuff from one map to another like it was in 2 ? or is shared .map only way

 

It'll be possible eventually, yes.

[Eaton 1]

Now that is something I have been waiting to see for a long time!

Assembly is starting to turn into a fantastic app. Keep up the good work, guys. Stuff like this is what will spur some awesome mods.

[leor 1]

This is seriously way too awesome, What are the shared map tags? Scarabs? Pelicans? 

Also I have to ask, what about halo 3? Same thing can be applied to both games?

[JJIJR 666]

This is seriously way too awesome, What are the shared map tags? Scarabs? Pelicans?

Also I have to ask, what about halo 3? Same thing can be applied to both games?

you can check for yourself using AMD's how to extract raw pages tut. But no there is no scarab or pelican. They have to be in the shared.map the scarab is campaign.map and read above for the pelican. And for now halo 3 is left out since map expand doesn't work for its maps.

[misterbanshee 51]

hopefully soon or later we will get full injection for h3 and other halos like getting stuff from sp maps into mp maps

[thecumking 19]

getting halo 3 flood tag into halo odst's firefight 

[misterbanshee 51]

no that is going to be scary lol fire fith with flood cant wait to we get scarabs into sandtrap rofls

[deadcanadian 271]

And for now halo 3 is left out since map expand doesn't work for its maps.

map expand works for all supported games in assembly.

[JJIJR 666]

map expand works for all supported games in assembly.

really? didn't know that. It's under halo reach modding programs so i just assumed...

[The404Spartan 165]

no that is going to be scary lol fire fith with flood cant wait to we get scarabs into sandtrap rofls

Oh my gosh

[deadcanadian 271]

really? didn't know that. It's under halo reach modding programs so i just assumed...

that one is reach only, but if you got the new one from the assembly source code

[misterbanshee 51]

is there a new asm? I have one at some one gave me back a little while ago stinks we can only tag inject for reach im hopeing some time sooner or later we can get full injection for h3 and reach

[DevUltra 21]

This was asked during the game night and never got more than a "we don't know"

 

Would changing the map header to campaign do anything to solve the problem with campaign.map?

[thecumking 19]

the mp maps probably load little stuff from the campaign.map. 

i also though bake in halo 2 the shard.map had campaign stuff in them.