Sola Scriptura is finished.

Download and Screenshots Here

I will try to keep that page up to date with mirrors.

Feel free to ask any questions that are not addresed in the read me.

Thank you.

This is the final.
No future changes will be made.

And that's kinda funny because someone said it was little too dark in places.

I guess that's good, it means I hit the average.

Nice shots man...what engine is Halo made with?

... The Halo Engine.

Is that really the best Halo can manage... Horrible really. The textures are dull, bland, the lighting could be majorly better, it looks flat-shaded all over (Each poly shaded a single lightness)... Looks worse than Oni even (An earlier Bungie game). I don't know if it's the engine or your map though.

That kicks ***. Looks fun, too.

It's either your eyes or your monitor, I'm not sure which, though.

I must agree, it looks very overlit, and the lighting he did add seems to have no cause or effect what so ever. I expected far greater out of a user made level, as well as the engine. Keep trying though, your archi is pretty top notch. You just need to work a whole lot on atmousphere and lighting. The level is interesting as far as layout goes, but otherwise, it's quite bland.

JediKirby

It looks Haloish, but it's lacking something that makes it stand out. You have too many wide open areas, which will really kill gameplay given the weapons at your disposal. You need obstacles or some bends in the hallways... something to break it up; otherwise you'll create a spawn-campfest.

That looks like the first level in SP.

Then I'm guessing engine. Nothing wrong with my eyes or monitor. Nearly monotone textures, very limited lighting, sharp-edged where there is any (can practically count the polies...), dull coloring, very obvious tiling of textures... yeah, I just don't see anything great in it. Heh, the best looking parts of the whole things are the player model and the light coronas.

If the level is supposed to bear something of a resemblance to the Human ships from Halo, it's pretty much spot on, with the exceptions of lighting and the placement of objects. The Pillar of Autumn looked just about that spartan, but there was still enough there to make it appear interesting. You have the spartaness (is that a word?) but not the objects or the lighting judging by the screens.

I REALLY BADLY want to try my idea for a level again, but I find using gMax to be such a pain in the ***. Bungie uses 3DSM for their levels, yes, but Gearbox shot themselves in the foot when they released editing tools that needed that program. It's not an easy program to use for making levels. Maybe over my break between semesters.

By the way, does anyone know how to more or less decompile one of the Halo maps and get it into gMax or 3DSM? I'm not interested in splicing or changing things in them, I just want to have a look at their sizes and how they were built. It'd give me a better idea of what I'd be in for.

Oh, good grief. There's nothing wrong with Halo's engine. For one thing those JPEG's are very highly compressed, and for another thing I doubt djwguitarman had Halo's graphics settings maxed (or he's using a Geforce 4 MX or something, which makes Halo look terrible) when he took those screenshots, because my textures don't look nearly that blurry. Here are some screenshots that I took from Halo, JPEG compression at 1, all game settings maxed. Oh, and saying that Oni looks better than Halo is just funny.

As for the level.. it looks just like the interior of The Pillar of Autumn. :p

Thank you, Ryan. Finally, someone will tell these people that Halo doesn't look like that on proper settings!

Halo was made for the Xbox, and therefore looks best on the Xbox. Judging your opinion on some pictures of someone's 2nd level on extremely low settings on a PC is just stupid.

Gearbox also did a ****ty job porting Halo, and therefor the system repuirements are about 10x more than what it says on the box... you need a high-end (GeForce FX 5900 SE, my card) graphics card to run it at its full potential.

GeForce FX 5200 barely runs Halo on the lowest settings. With my 1.8gHz and 512mb mem.

Half-Life 2 runs better.

Well, umm, as for lighting, it's 100% shader lighting and there are no lights other than the ones you can see. There is no lighting that does not come from a visible source.
It's compiled with the highest quaity lighting possible.
I don't know how bungie set up their lighting so I did my best to recreate it.

I'm running at 1024*768 with all the settings maxed.

As for the textures, they are Bungie's textures not mine.
They are tiled because if they weren't, it wouldn't look anything like the SP level.


Yeah, I really hate max. but it is quite easy to buildin GTKradiant and convert to max.
As for shooting their foot, what did you expect them to do, build their own editor?

As for decompliling, you can view the levels in haloPC with sparkedit (just google it). But there is no way to cleanly decompile them.
Here is a link to the HEK(halo editing kit) tutorial.
it gives a good overview of what is needed to make a map.


Not sure where your getting that. where are the wide open areas?

My 9800 runs Halo just fine. I keep all the settings maxed, and most of time run 1024*768 but it occasional dips so I take it down to 800*600 from time to time.
Here is some usefull info on Halo's preformance.Gearbox did the best they could but microsquish had alterior motives for Halo and pretty much screwed GB.
So, yeah, of course HL2 runs better.

As Zell said, Halo was made for the xbox, as for it looking better on there, I can't comment because I've never had oportunity to play it on a TV big enough to see anything.


What sharp edges are you takling about?

GTKRadient... something else to download tonight while I'm in class... And yes, I would have expeted them to either make their own editor, or at least find a way to make maps in a program that's both free, and far easier to use.

I have a 9600XT in my computer, and Halo runs beautifully. All settings maxed out. 1024x768.

Well, I think the PC version actually looks better than the Xbox version, thanks to higher resolutions and better framerates. Besides performance, I've never noticed any other graphical differences between the Xbox and PC versions (as long as your running on a PC that can display the game equivalent to the Xbox version), and naturally my PC gets more than twice the performance of an Xbox.

Different video cards may display some graphical errors on the PC version of Halo, so I do kind of get what you mean by saying that the game looks best on the Xbox. It's the easiest way to get the game to look the way it was meant to. However, given the right PC and video card, I think the PC version looks far better, the main difference being resolution. Even on a 50" HDTV, running Halo using 480p, the game is only running at a resolution of 704 x 480. That's the best you'll get out of Halo on a regular Xbox. The Xbox "supports" 1080i, but not many games actually let you use it because the system isn't powerful enough to render the game at that resolution while maintaining a decent framerate. 1080i is 1,920 x 1,080, which can only be attained while keeping a decent framerate by high-end PC's. In fact, my PC's video card supports up to 2048 x 1536, but games usually only support up to 1600 x 1200 even on a PC.

I could run Halo pretty good with all settings maxed back when I was using an ATI Radeon 9600 XT. However, there were occasional low drops in framerate. Now that I've upgraded to an ATI Radeon X800 XT, however, the game runs perfectly even at a resolution of 1600 x 1200, all settings maxed, and I get consistently high framerates.

Anyway.. the point is that Halo, PC or Xbox, can look better than that (to everyone that was putting down the engine). I don't know if it's your images or what, but...

Oh, yeah, I tried to download your level, djwguitarman.. It downloaded the file (9.75MB), but I couldn't get WinZip to open the RAR.

You have to use Winrar


lol, then you expected WAY too much.
They used the tools Bungie gave them and then gave those tools to us.

The community made an exporter for Gmax called CHIMP.
It doesn't export animations and is somewhat timeconsuming but for levels and static scenery it works just fine.

nope

xbox supports 480i 480p 720p 1080i depending on the game i've only seen one that supports 1080i and i forgot which one it is

Oh, okay - I'll download it.

Yeah, it is 1080i. Sorry about that. Both 1080i and 1080p have the same resolutions, though. The difference is one is interlaced and one progressive, which is what the "p" and "i" stand for.

I heard The Matrix supports 1080i, but I'm not sure since I don't have it. There was also some game called Dragon Warrior that was supposed to support it.. I know Halo doesn't, though.

http://www.hdtvpub.com/games/xbox/microsoft-xbox.cfm

list of what games support anything higher than 480i

lol - Syberia supports it. I'm not surprised, since the only 3D things in the game are the character models..

there's a link in that to a more updated list which shows MX Unleashed on the 1080i list