INVASION After a lengthy period of experimentation with Dominion, I have figured out how to create Invasion in Halo 4. A proof-of-concept can be found on my File Share -- a map variant, game variant, and a Film showing a basic test. The game leverages Dominion, with specially-constructed maps. Progressive spawning currently relies on Teleporter Hubs, but I am researching Respawn Zone configurations that might allow for more natural spawning that still follows the proper order. Special thanks go to: Certain Affinity, whose videos helped me grasp the gametype and inspired a few of my more clever discoveries; and Psychosis687, a good friend and test subject. What follows is an explanation of how Invasion works in Halo 4, a list of pitfalls, and in my next post, I shall add a more detailed tutorial for constructing Invasion maps. Now, I'm not knowledgeable about Invasion, so I'm posting this here and on a few other communities. I look forward to seeing what the more dedicated Invasion Forgers can do with this. Features - Outside of a few small edge-cases, only Attackers can capture bases - Defenders can interrupt a base capture after it has been initiated - A two-round Dominion game will swap sides properly How It Works (a summarized "how-to") Spoiler The game relies on two tricks: "preassigned bases" and mislabeled barricades. Let's start with the first one. A "preassigned base" is a base that has had a team set on it in Forge. At the start of a Dominion round, these bases are off: they do not have capture/fortify/resupply cycles, they do not award points, and they do not convert the teams on DOM_RES_ZONEs. At the same time, however, they are technically owned, so the team that owns them cannot capture them and turn them on. Once a preassigned base is captured, it stops being a preassigned base, meaning that the preassigned owner can now re-capture it. So in this case, we use bases that have been preassigned to the Defenders. This leads to the problem of Defenders re-capturing the bases once the Attackers have taken them. There is no perfect solution to this problem, but there is a really good one: barricades. If you apply DOM_FORTIFY to a Dominion Barricade, then it will deploy when a base is fortified. If you apply DOM_DECOR to a Dominion Barricade, then it will deploy when a base is captured. So what we do is, we wall off most of a Defender DOM_BASE, so that it can only be approached from one direction. We then place DOM_DECOR Barricades linked to that base, so that all access is blocked on capture. Walling off a base is tricky because a DOM_BASE's Shape does not determine where you can activate the base from. DOM_BASEs have a hardcoded spherical capture volume with a radius of 1.3 world units, meaning that the walls around a base need to be that thick. I recommend building a box about that size around the DOM_BASE, and putting some dummy decoration on the front of the base so that people know where to activate it from. Potential Problems When Building Your Own Map Spoiler DOM_UPGRADE can be used to spawn items in when a base is fortified. However, it does not delay the spawning of an object, so Placed-at-Start objects will spawn at the start of the round. Furthermore, if an object is not placed at start and is set to never respawn, DOM_UPGRADE will not force it to spawn. This label is therefore next to useless in an Invasion-like setup, unless you want your subsequent Phases to be accessible at the 3-minute mark regardless of which Phases have actually been completed. DOM_SHIELD is much better, but has its own fatal flaw. DOM_SHIELD will delay the spawning of an object. A placed-at-start DOM_SHIELD Structure piece spawns when the base is fortified. A not-placed-at-start DOM_SHIELD Structure piece with a respawn time of 30 seconds spawns 30 seconds after fortification. However, if a player or active Dominion Turret is too close to the DOM_SHIELD, then it will fail to spawn. The object will only spawn about <Respawn Time> seconds after the obstruction is removed. So for things like Man Cannons, be sure to set their Respawn Time to 1. If a base is not carefully constructed, then players can get trapped inside when it is captured. You cannot reliably solve this problem with Teleporters due to the two issues listed above -- a DOM_UPGRADE Teleporter can block access to the DOM_BASE too early, and a DOM_SHIELD Teleporter won't appear when it's needed. Omnipresent Soft Kill Boundaries are the only fix. Of course, you could always just make the front of the base be close enough to the barricades to guarantee that players are pushed out as the barricades deploy. A Defender may be able to trigger a re-capture at the last second, as the bases fold up. This will mess up the score for the game as a whole, but not for the round. Defenders still can't win the round, because the round should end when the last base is captured for the first time, and only the Attackers can do that. (Your gametype should only award Capture Points, and have a Score to Win tailored to the number of bases on your map.) (The absolute worst-case scenario is if a Defender and an Attacker both get stuck inside, and work together to break the game. If they take turns re-capping the base, they can halt progress to further Phases (no fortification) and win the game early. Soft Kill Boundaries should prevent this, by killing them before they get to screw around for too long.) If a Defender interrupts a base capture, the announcer will say to that Defender, "Base Capture Initiated!" Don't worry: this is incorrect. The Defender is only preventing the previous base capture; they are not capturing the base for themselves. My proof-of-concept uses a Teleporter hub. As you may see in the video, Halo 4 does not reliably display a Teleporter's status. A Sender Node may appear to be inactive when it is in fact fully functional. Building an Invasion Base Spoiler 1. Construct the base structure. Start with a Block 4x4, to serve as the base floor. Now, spawn two Block 3x3s, and rotate them to serve as parallel walls. Place them atop the Block 4x4, and line them up with the back corners of the 4x4. Spawn some Dominion Barricades, with label DOM_DECOR, and set the appropriate Spawn Sequence. Place these in front of the Block 3x3s. You should have a bottom set, facing upright, and a top set, rotated upside-down. There should be no horizontal gaps. For Corner Barricades, the vertical distance should be about 0.8 world units, to ensure a perfect seal. (If you whip out a Block 1x1 and place it, the top and bottom barricade lines should Z-fight with the block's top and bottom faces.) Spawn a small item to serve as your DOM_BASE; a Flag Stand or Hill Marker will work well. Label it properly and set it to the Defender team. Set the Shape to a Cylinder with Radius, Top, and Bottom lengths of 1.3. (The Shape makes it easier to see where the invisible hardcoded sphere capture area will be.) Horizontally center it between the Block 3x3s, and vertically center it between the barricades. (A precise position is needed since it's a sphere.) Ensure that the cylindrical shape points past the front of the Block 3x3s, but does not protrude through any other sides of the base. Place walls and blocks as needed to fill in the rest of the base walls, and its ceiling. The front-side walls should at least touch the barricades. Now, your DOM_BASE should be behind a bare, solid wall... But people might get a little confused seeing a waypoint behind a bare solid wall. So decorate that wall with objects that make it look like an objective -- Dominion screens, Capture Plates, whatever. Place the remaining Dominion-related doodads. Add a DOM_BASE_ZONE covering the entire area the base is in, to ensure that people get Base Offense and Base Defense XP payouts when they kill players near the base. Finally, test it in a Custom Game. Make sure that you don't get base messages ("PRESS [X] TO CAPTURE" or "YOU OWN THIS BASE") from any sides except the front. Remember that you must aim in the DOM_BASE's general direction to see such messages. Make sure to test the base post-capture as well -- you should not be able to see base messages of any kind through the closed barricades. You may need to go back into Forge and move the DOM_BASE object closer to the front, to ensure that the sphere capture area can be reached at the proper times. 2. Progression Unfortunately, we cannot have objects delete themselves during a match, like in Reach. There is no Dominion counterpart to INV_GATES. So all round progression has to be additive: spawning in grav lifts, or ladders and ramps, or cushions for long falls. Your Phases therefore need to be separated by large cliffs or high walls, with objects that spawn in to help players cross these barriers. If you're familiar with Dominion, your first thought may be to use the DOM_UPGRADE label. Don't. The only way to get it to work is to set the object's Placed at Start to FALSE and Respawn Time to a value other than Never, and that means that the object will eventually spawn in regardless of Phase progression. This leaves DOM_SHIELD as the only suitable alternative. However, DOM_SHIELD objects will fail to spawn if a player or active turret is too close to them, and if the object isn't set to respawn, it won't "try" to spawn again. So use DOM_SHIELD for lifts, ramps, et cetera, but be sure to set their Respawn Time to 1. If you do that, then players will still be able to stop the items from spawning, but the items will still spawn in as soon as possible if that happens. 3. Read the potential problems section above, and make sure you handle all of those issues.
Ok, this seems too good to be true. I HAVE to try the map and game variant in your file share. If I can grasp this concept, I just might be able to recreate the tower defense map that I had hoped to perfect in Halo Reach, but could not because of armor lock and drop shield as the only two blocking armor abilities.
Invasion is also somwhat possible with Extraction with that same type of concept.. you have the extraction point assigned to the defender team so they cannot capture it, and when the attackers do, you make it so the defenders cannot fully capture it, by putting the conversion time to the max, and have it so the countdown keeps going.. you get the idea. It does seem like it could be a lot better with using the bases though, great idea! I just wish they kept Invasion.. (or hopefully add it) as it is a sweet gametype, but in reach matchmaking, I think it was just horrible.
Can't get my head around your explanations. **** it, and **** 343/Certain Affinity for not including Invasion. Good luck with it though.
All these reasons are swimming around my head about why this won't work out very well, but I'll give it a chance.
Even from the middle of Reach I never expected Invasion to continue. Let's face it, if was is in MM it would eat up maps that will only play invasion and bad BTB. In customs we had a few good maps and even then it got a bit repetitive. I enjoyed invasion quite a lot, but by the end of Reach I felt it was ready to fade out. There were very few maps even in the custom community that were really enjoyable to play standardly (meaning not just for shits and giggles) and in the end Invasion hurt Reach BTB a lot and was probably the reason I stopped playing Reach MM. And on a side note you couldn't fit an invasion map on any of the forge maps. You could barely find a good place for one on forge world. Interested to see how this works, not convinced it will, but I will look at it once file shares are up. Still not making another invasion map though.
Each to their own. I personally saw a lot of amazing community invasion maps that were fun to play. I wont argue that matchmaking invasion sucked... cos it did. I had many unfinished, unique Invasion maps that I never completed due to the Reach community slowly dying. I always thought Id get the chance to restart and complete in them in Halo 4, but sadly no.
YES. I loved invasion in Reach. I would love to make/play an invasion map in Halo 4..but I don't own it.
343i took Invasion and split it down the middle. The result was Dominion and Extraction. In dominion, we get the ability to spawn objects in during intervals of the game, and in Extraction we get the ability to despawn objects.
They're already up, but you have to do a File Share Search in-game, and not a Custom Search by author. Search up my (DavidJCobb) File Share, and the files should be right there. I already built and tested it -- again, the proof-of-concept is on my File Share and you guys are welcome to take a look at it. I'll probably do some more casual experimenting, but my more dedicated work on this is done. I'm trash at Forging Invasion -- always have been. I'm just an Infection guy who loves screwing with gametype labels. I wanna see what the real Invasion lovers can do now that I've devised a mechanism they can use.
I hate to say it, but this can't really be considered Invasion. It's missing the main two aspects that defined Invasion; Fireteams and spawning on teammates. There's no real way of getting these back, either.
Why would you feel that one playlist hurt another? Was it too much competition for canvas layout available for MM? (Personally, I never look back. I keep my Reach CDs to forge around and study the maps, but I won't go back and play any of it ever again. That is why I will never attempt any remakes.) I never interpreted what he was saying as able to create a Reach invasion map. What he really should call it is a campaign map to differentiate from Reach's Invasion. Edited by merge: They tossed it entirely. Extraction comes out of Assault. Dominion is the sadistic child of Land Grab and Invasion Slayer.
The reason I say Invasion hurt Reach BTB is because most of the on disk BTB maps were designed first and foremost as invasion maps, and so played fairly badly for Big Team. The trend continued to a degree with the first DLC, and by the time Reach was done we had less good BTB maps by my standards than we do at the start of Halo 4. I didn't go through the whole post, but yes, I suppose we couldn't do true invasion without fireteams anyways, so you could call it something different. I also agree that dominion and extraction are not really a split up of invasion, but regardless I love them both and I feel they are worthy new objective modes overall.
Description of Spire and Boneyard Honestly, I don't know why Spire is a BTB map besides because of Bungie's lazyness to create more maps or to not use two discs. Just stupid D: If they cut off the dead part of Boneyard (the right side if you are on red team) Boneyard would actually be a fairly good BTB map, but they weren't thinking about that I guess..
I played a game of Dominion where I grabbed the rockets at the start and took Bravo and held it with those rockets and the resupply of rockets - by myself. i found that so boring... Then in another game I found myself losing badly with other randoms. The game experience is so bad now on Dominion whether you are a random losing badly or part of a team winning without challenge, it is no longer fun (because it lacks any serious challenge). I won't go back to that playlist until they nerf the ordinance drops to bring back real firefights. Edited by merge: Reach was Invasion... No other Halo has come close... It was obvious that H4 would not have Invasion, since it was a playlist of extreme complexities that catered to a small minority of the population. Ah, the end of an era...
I would say that the multi-tiered progressive objectives were the most defining characteristic. :\ However, I certainly do recognize the importance of Bro spawning. Hiding in nooks and crannies near the objective and pumping out teammates made for some very interesting gameplay, and it sucks that no one can rebuild that.
Progressive objectives were in other Gametypes too, take Territories for example, or Extraction now. It's just that in Invasion, each level of progression was more profound and distinct. It actually had a significant effect on the map, through geometry, spawning, transport and vehicles, and weaponry. So I can see exactly what you mean by that. However, the combination of 2-player Fireteams and teammate spawning was an undeniably unique, game-changing mechanic, although it was only ever Invasion forgers and the more serious Invasion players that ever seemed to realise this.
Let's revive the discussion, because this is actually really interesting: Using Extraction (not Dominion!) to emulate Invasion - YouTube