LoL. Not one original forge piece in that video. And the map looked like it was it first thing he ever made.
But atleast the map looked visually much better compared to Reach. I honestly don't care if most of the pieces are reskins; as long as the objects all match together well, I'll be happy.
[speculation][whine] Not sure if this has been brought up before, but one thing I'm worried about with the forge pallette they are giving us: The pieces have too much detail. I mean sure it's nice that not everything is completely gray, but with too many different colors and patterns on one piece, it's going to make a lot of sloppy looking maps when different pieces are merged together. I feel like in a way we'll be restriced in how we use the objects if we want to have a clean map. Everything will have to be at a 90 degree angle to look decent. Any creative/nontraditional peice usage will have too many different patterns going on at once. Take H3's Sandbox for example. Even though the peices were very simple in texture, we were still able to make some fantastic looking maps. [/speculation][/whine]
Fair point as that is, my main concern on this front is still framerate. Object textures is a really tricky one from 343's perspective. Too busy and you get the "hard to work with" complaint, too simple and multi-purpose and it ends up getting called bland. It really is a fine line to tread, and even if they arguably hit it bang on there will be people in either camp who are unhappy.
This is definitely a concern of mine, too. High-contrast stripes of color or black-against-white pretty much mean the piece is only useful at the intended 90 degree angles, or if you hide the pattern and expose only the white parts. Either way, it's troubling. Reach forge had lots of problematic textures but the majority of all objects was just gray with a little texture mapping; that made filling in small gaps or using pieces in weird ways a little easier. We shall see, though. I won't judge until I've seen all the objects - right now I still feel like I've only viewed about a quarter of them. This is another reason why I'd love to have some kind of re-skinning options. If you could have some 4x4 blocks with an awesome detailed texture and others with little texture but just some weird covie purple color, I'd be pleased as punch. The latter could be used for floors and all-purpose filler, and the former would be your walls. Or even if the only option was to re-skin the entire object set at once, at least I could make two very different kinds of maps - not just due to colors and textures, but because a simpler texture and solid color means I can use the same piece in different ways... Oh well, perhaps in Halo 5. But you're correct that framerate still has to be the #1 concern for forgers. It takes priority over everything else.
Those islands in the distance on Ravine, really remind me of Halo 1 : The Silent Cartographer, we have an good forging space, but i wish we could go there.. Memories. Thats just me probally. And about the re-skinned forge pieces, i know, maybe dissapointing for a few, but just to remind you, "Ravine" is in the object list too, if you tap that, you will get the maps unique pieces, wich are quite alot. Well, thats my opinion, but Impact also had alot of new pieces too.
Oh not at all. I wish we could go everywhere! As huge as Forge World was I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I could get outside the invisible walls and make something playable out there (eventually gave up, just too much work). I haven't seen much of those categories at all - have they shown more than I have seen? I saw a couple objects (like the tunnel pieces on the asteroid map) but I am assuming they'll be more fully-formed - buildings and corridors and such, not the more basically functional blocks and walls. Which means they'll be of pretty limited use, even if there's a lot of them (which there may not be). But we will see. I really hope you're right, but my hunches about forge have been right for months now so I'm sadly not too optimistic.
You know, if I can load my maps to 10k without framerate even being a remote possibility, I don't even care about these textures at all. I will find a way to make my maps look good. Please have fixed FR 343...please.
^this... I would even be happy with the same skinned objects from Forgeworld, as long as they fixed all FR issues and Z fighting
i agree about the framerate fix. if that is not fixed, we will all be really pissed off. i have to assume that it is fixed... it just would not make sense to not address that flaw. also, considering the overall smaller size of the forge spaces in comparison to forge world's extremo gigantor size, we can hope that the smaller size will have a positive effect on framerate
I'm hoping that was their mentality behind the substantially smaller spaces. If so I'll be so happy. I dunno how they could overlook it, given that they put so much focus onto this lightmapping system they would have to encountered it in testing.
the map they made was dense enough, i'm sure they would encounter some problems with a sniper on 4v4 if that was reach.
yea it seems like such an obvious fix. i may have to jump on the rage train and ride away to rageland if they did not address it.
There's been a surprising lack of 343 talking about it. On the other hand, this game is not made for forgers primarily (or even close to it) and even if it was, they sell games by marketing the cool new features, not by talking a lot about annoying bugs that they fixed. So I guess it's not really surprising after all. I would so love to have a framerate counter built into Halo so we could actually test our own maps with something other than eyeballs.
Yeah but not even a throwaway comment in HaloGaf? Seems suspicious to me. Maybe they just plain don't know if they fixed it fully and they really won't know until we get our hands on it.