Smallsylum (scale remake of Asylum)

I'm not really a remake guy or a cute-scale-model-remake guy usually, but after running into a modded gametype in a custom lobby recently (the one where all the spartans are comically tiny, but use regular-sized weapons) I decided to make a half-sized Asylum. This is that thing. You can play it regular size (and still fit through all the doorways), and sprint from one base to the other in about five seconds, or if you're living dangerously you can track down a modded gametype with child-sized spartans for a surprisingly normal Halo experience.

I'm testing this now along with some other maps - click my sig banner if you want to get into a lobby where this may or may not be played soon.









"I'm huge!"


"I'm not so huge!"

 

You mean the sniper huts? Those are only 2-story. But yes, they were there all along.

Why thank you. I may have to make another one of these, if I can think of another map that seems like a good candidate for half-sizing.

 

The one I hypothetically might have used to test this map, not that I would do such a thing, makes you maybe 60% as tall as a regular spartan. There are various ones floating around though. The incredibly silly one I played by accident that inspired this map makes you less than a foot tall, I think.

 

You're correct, I forgot that detail. I'll add them in later.

By the way, this map is not a 100% accurate remake. In most particulars it's the same, but I took a few liberties for the sake of making it a bit more friendly to object count, budget and aesthetics. Still, it plays very much the same, and some of the smaller nuances (like the trick jump to ring 3) are there in some form, even if not a completely familiar one.

It has just one significant glitch, but it's kind of a doozy. Mini-spartans have normal hit detection only with respect to map geometry. That means if you have a doorway slightly too small for a regular-sized spartan, the mini version can't walk through it either. Weirdly, but happily, the hit boxes work properly for the purposes of shooting each other; they scale to your actual size.

So basically, you can only make maps that are mostly open-air, and where the doors and corridors are big enough to accommodate a regular spartan; and even then, you don't want a lot of overhead stuff to worry about, because people won't be able to jump in those spaces, even though it looks like there's room. (For this reason, I raised the top of the ring a little above scale when compared to Asylum; that allowed me to make the doorways into ring 2 a little taller so you don't hit your head when jumping through them.)

But if you overcome that obstacle, it works pretty well, especially if you tweak the game settings to match the size. For some reason, 50% speed and jump actually feel a lot lesser than you'd expect; I found that 75% speed & jump as well as 75% player gravity works well with the adjusted size. Oh, and radar range needs reducing as well, or you see red dots for players miles away. My next test will be with the minimum 10 meter radar; I think 25 is the default.

There's some other interesting quirks that are more funny than game-breaking. Holograms and hardlight shields are full size, as are all equipment, vehicles and weapons.

But I like the possibilities of this. Besides goofy remakes, you could potentially build some really ambitious maps this way. Vast, sprawling type of maps that were previously difficult or impossible in forge.

 

Those are all good ideas, SJ - the only problem is that most of those huge maps require natural geometry, or just look kind of crappy. Asylum is flat-floored so I swallowed my pride and made it with artificial flooring, but it says everything about Ravine (unhappy sigh) that I couldn't even find enough flat ground to build a half-sized Asylum on grass. I actually started it on grass twice and had to scrap it both times - the first time just from measuring, and the second after I built the entire map, I ended up elevating it and re-flooring it because the ground was too uneven and it was closing up the shotgun tunnels.

Some of those maps might be possible, but they also might end up ugly as sin...

Also, any map involving vehicles is not going to work because the vehicles will be full-sized. You can still drive them (and it's hilarious), but it's not really suitable for competitive play.

 

That would be a hell of a project. It's such a ridiculous idea that I kind of want you to do it.