I expected very little, and this is even less than I expected. Too bad, but not terribly surprising. The forgeability of all of these maps is less than mind-blowing... it's nice that they have larger palettes (and structure objects), but nothing here approaches Forgeworld 2.0, or really even Tempest 2.0. Here's to hoping that they're planning something much more robust and amazing in Halo 4.
Until the day comes when u can forge landscape and environment, forging will be largely underestimated. I had a feeling they would incorporate trees into the natural objects. Because when I first saw the natural pieces, I was like... Just rocks!? Nothing very natural about that lolz
It gets better... If you delete every object on the map, there are three objects that remain. 1. a bridge, okay that is cool.. 2. These little red and blue colored things that sort of look like land minds, but are only markers. They look terrible, and you can only bury them under a rock. 3. (are you ready for this one?) After deleting the structures on the red and blue sides, you find the health packs that were attached to the wall. You delete the health packs. And what you have left, hanging in the air, unmovable, the frame that holds the health pack.
The "trees, dead" are a lighter color of green compared to the other trees so they don't fit in, as well.
How can you live in a world where there are unmovable medkit holders on a map?! A lot of maps have that.
First half of thread: Remainder of thread: Honestly what did you all expect? Trees have many polygons and making them dynamic like the ones on Forge World would cause enough lag to make them useless. Putting leaves on them would make every one of those problems worse, hence immovable dead trees.
Serious question: what is the difference between a built-in tree and a movable object tree? I honestly don't understand how Forgeworld can have fifty of one but the idea of creating a single instance of the other magically creates enormous lag.
I wondered the same thing. I also wondered why forge objects contribute to framerate problems and lag so much more than the natural scenery. I have no clue exactly what the difference is, but based on what I've seen of framerate problems ther is a big difference.
Forge is a map editor, not a map creator. That has been explicitly stated since the dawn of Forge. I'm not saying that they won't go that direction, but I highly doubt it. Custom maps take much more time to upload and download. Everyone who wants to play on it needs to have it downloaded. If someone joins in a party that doesn't have it, the pregame lobby is stuck until they leave; are booted; or the new person downloads it. And to top it off, unless 343i dedicated an absurd amount of server space, the fileshare system would be severely limited or it would be taken away all together. Forge, as is, is simple for filesharing; everything is stored as a tiny text file (~10kb), and is readily accessible to any player jumping into any game at any time. Plus there is a certain degree of creativity that is born through restrictions.
I would imagine that there are certain optimizations that come with terrain being hardcoded. I know for a fact that the lighting for natural terrain is "baked in", for example. A lot of maps have that, but none of the pre-CEA maps had those things floating in the bloody air. That's just inconsiderate.
Forge could emulate a map creator without actually being one, though. Having a palette of terrain objects, having a limited amount of object skins (or multiple re-skinned iterations of a canvas Forgeworld-style map), etc. I think there's a lot of ways they could push the basic premise if they're so inclined. Unfortunately, Bungie has always seemed to view forge as more of a way to slightly alter existing maps, or make very basic maps in places like the coliseum/quarry; they always seemed to underestimate the community's ambition. And judging by the forge options in Anniversary, I fear we're seeing the same thing from 343. We'll see what Halo 4 brings. To be fair, I am still impressed with a lot of what they (Bungie) did with Forgeworld, so maybe 343 has more in store for us that way, with less hindrances (e.g. framerate issues out the ass). Ironically, some people push through the intended skybox above Forgeworld specifically to avoid lighting effect differences. I wonder if they could give us an object setting in the next Forge to just turn light render off for that object, and see it in its natural state. Might help with framerate and would give you some really interesting aesthetic options, though if you use colored lights anywhere, it would have the potential to end up looking really weird. They could also have categories of objects that just skip lighting and always look the same - natural and terrain objects being the most likely contenders. If they gave us a few real trees, for instance, I don't really need dynamic lighting for them; I'm not likely to stick one in a cave. I'm also in the camp that thinks that reducing poly count and ditching the little white proximity-activated lights on objects would be a great idea. That's a prime example of how they underestimated our ambition. I don't want to build a simple map with one railing in it - I want a complicated masterpiece with 50 of them, but if I make that map, it is unplayable.
This is very very possible indeed, hopefully they'll deliver something like that. Am I missing the hilarity? It's not even an argument.
You make it sound like the limitations are a good thing, which they are not. What I want in Halo 4 regarding Forge is a combination of the Far Cry 2 map maker and Forge. Forge is great for doing simple stuff like relocating weapons, spawns and relatively small building blocks and a Far Cry 2 kind of map maker would give you the option to change the terrain, foliage, weather, time of day etc. This will of course increase the size of the map files, but I'm sure with enough optimization this would become less of a problem. It wasn't that big of a deal in Far Cry 2 multiplayer either.
For those without - dead tree is @ 5min: Halo CE Anniversary: Ridgeline/Timberland Forge Flythrough - YouTube