H4 Forge vs. Past Forge

The forge pieces are essentially the same shapes but the textures are different. Part of the idea seems to have been to remove lights and elements that caused performance problems in Reach on some objects; the textures also seem less sharp vs. Reach, but I'm not sure if that was for performance reasons or just because Bungie did a better job in that respect. There also was supposedly attention paid to making the textures more uniform so you could merge them more easily than in Reach (where merging different pieces would often result in ugly texture clash). However, the black lines, curved edges, and colored borders on many pieces in H4 mean that while the textures are more uniform, clean merging is still not always possible.

I generally feel like this:
- Dynamic lighting, when properly used, makes maps overall more attractive in H4. It's easier to make a nice-looking map that feels like a distinct space in this game than in Reach or H3.

- However, I preferred the gray textures of Reach over any of the textures we have now. The high contrast white and black objects available on Impact are good; Ravine is bland but acceptable; Forge Island and (worse) Erosion have outright ugly textures, and bad contrast to boot.

- I never felt like H3 maps were attractive, particularly in retrospect. The objects weren't made to be merged and the textures/colors on the two canvas maps were both very ugly and uniform to the point that it was hard to establish any kind of contrast. Sandbox was probably the more appealing of the two; Foundry maps that are really built up have a lot of visual noise and are just hard to look at, to me. I did like fence boxes and walls though.

 

Halo 3 forge objects had vertices that pertruded out. Reach/4 don't really have any.

Foundry also had a crate you could trap people with.

 

Unfortunately this current version of forge pushes the 360 to it's absolute limit in terms of processing power. It's the hardware that is outdated. There is a certain glitch too whereby at a certain object concentration/budget usage, the dynamic lighting breaks and goes completely bonkers. Also, even very low-budget forged maps cause terrible frame-rate issues even in split-screen.

As for your idea bout turning off textures, i think that would be a great advantage. You could build far more complex structures without taxing the cpu of your 360, and I reckon lots of people who play from a purely 'competitive' standpoint would relish a visually simple yet structurally complex build.

And apart from the textures and 4 different pallettes, Reach forge and Halo4 forge are nearly identical. Also Halo4 is missing a very crucial element that was ommitted by mistake- precision vertical positioning. In reach, by holding the left thumbstick in you could use the bumper buttons to move the object you are holding up and down by near-PIXELS. That allowed you to negate z-fighting and build overlapping objects far more easily.

 

It is seriously too situational between which canvas looks better IMO. Every game's forge has unique advantages. But also, it's impossible to assume that every map would or wouldn't look better if reforged on Halo 4 because every map requires a unique set of objects. For example, I'm rebuilding a map I had in Reach that is looking infinitely better than what Halo Reach had to offer due to successful contrast; but I previously rebuilt a map to look absolutely awful because the potential for color on that map was butchered by Halo 4.

Just some food for thought from an aesthetic perspective. There are times I think Halo 4's forge is better, but some maps make me think the opposite.

Though when you look at Halo 3 forge maps, the palettes contained "mono-textured" pieces that make merging look extremely clean, and the canvases themselves promise a wide variety of colors (Foundry had gray, yellow, army green, dark brown, faded white / and Sandbox had sand, gold, grass, Framerate-friendly lights, and a dark sky). How I see it, Halo 3's forge is very underrated from an aesthetic perspective.

 

Halo 3 Killballs.
'Nuff said.

 

Personally, I preferred Halo Reach's to some extent... Dealing with framerate really separated the good forgers from the bad, and dealing with 2PL set the greats worlds apart. Not to mention Coli Walls were actually useable... They suck in H4.

I do really like the magnets system that came with H4 though. I also like a lot of the textures *gasp* and aesthetics... Just wish they had stream lined 'em a little better.

 

If Halo 4's forge pallet had textures more similar to the 3x3 short and no little cutouts/round edges, it would be fantastic. These little annoyances are holding it back a lot.

 

I agree with the 3x3 short looking extremely good.

 

We the community asked for blocks that were not gray, and they gave us blocks that look rusted instead with dramatic and noisy lines running through most of the blocks in all directions. I prefer the pristine gray and want to go back to it now.

But the truth is that they just need to dump the blocks entirely and give us real pieces, like asphalt, cement, grassy hills, more useful selection of varying shaped rocks, stairs that don't have useless edges that get in the way, FLOORING! and lots of it that looks like flooring, not walls used as flooring, and the list goes on.

It is like they did what we asked, but it would be nice to have extra effort on making very unique pieces rather than just basic blocks that we are forced to try to make look like something specific. But we have seen them do a little here and there that we would like to see a lot more of, like the massive rocks on Forge Island, and the shiny pieces on Headlong.

I would like to see 343i/CA simply analyze how we have used the pieces in Reach and H4 and ask themselves how they could give us the pieces we were trying to fake in? What kind of flooring could they give us?

One of the most interesting things they did was the coli floor on H4. While it is painful to use from an architectural perspective, they made the edges able to merge within each other so that they hide when lining up two walls together. When you create a floor with those walls, they will not hold a perfect alignment, and this helps to hide that problem a lot. I would like to see that concept, but I would like to see the edges more subtle colors, nothing sticking out strong from the bulk of the object.

One of the complaints we made was that the blocks were too visually noisy, and they made some of the blocks very quiet on Forge Island, but this backfired in that in the shadows you cannot see the edges of walls and floors. The video rendering makes the edges of their intersection disappear entirely.

 

Excellent points all, Mr. Green. I wish they'd pick a few serious, longtime forgers and use them as consultants (which I know they'd happily do for free - I surely would!). There are so many concepts and ideas that could easily be integrated into the existing forge and its palettes without getting into pie-in-the-sky territory like retexturing and time-of-day lighting and all that stuff that we ALSO want.

I'll know they're taking this seriously if Halo 5 has a new object category called Floors. That's for starters.

 

Forget new object categories. I've said this a million times and I'll say it again: All we could ever want is access to the SDK. If we got SDK access, the number of people making custom maps for Halo would skyyyyyrocket.

 

It's pointless to even talk about this - it would never, ever happen. MS keeps too tight a hand on the reins, and SDK access would make it really hard for them to sell DLC.

 

Why would Microsoft want to prevent us from getting a mapping/gametype customization tool? If anything, it would increase sales.

As for DLC, there are many ways to make money post-launch besides maps. Armor skins, weapon skins, gametypes (look at Ricochet), new campaign levels (Spartan Ops took a shot at this) to name a few. The SDK could also be made an add-on DLC with a somewhat limited version aimed at new level designers released for free.

I don't know about you, but I would pay more than $10 for access to the SDK. Plus, I won't buy Halo 5 unless it's absolutely incredible (I'm not very inclined to hold my breath given the recent trend) or has SDK access. On top of that, I don't think releasing the SDK would be overly time-consuming to do given that it's already there and complete... perhaps that's good enough with the time it took to design lego blocks and worlds to put lego blocks in.


Also, pretty sure there was a dev twitter comment a while back to the effect of "Imagine how cool it would be to have a full tool that you could make maps with on the PC." Can't seem to find the source atm, I was 99% linked there from beyond and I'm banned there.

 

If I remember correctly, that quote was from somebody responding to a query about what we'd like to see from Forge in H5. It was a comment directed to a developer, not a comment made by a developer. It's possible I'm wrong about that, but I'm about 80% sure that's what happened. Wish I could remember where I saw that link...

 

Don't get me wrong, this is the exact model I've advocated for the future of Halo. Replace forge with a dev kit; let the community generate new maps, and make the best ones free downloads and mandatory for matchmaking; no more map pack DLC for cash; sell armor skins, avatars, and such crap for revenue; and sell the SDK as well, to bring in more money and ensure that only people who really care about map-making (and have something invested in it) are taking a shot at it. I love this model.

But Microsoft won't. They have a system that they're comfortable with, that makes money, and that offers players no access to the back-end of the game or console programming unless they violate their terms of service (and even then, our hands are partially tied). There's a reason that we've been through this many generations of consoles with *no* triple-A games giving away a dev kit, and from what I can tell, Microsoft is more control freak-ish than either Nintendo or Sony.

I'd love it, but I don't ever see it happening.

 

I think the halo CEA had the best forge overall. It didn't have dynamic lighting but the pieces (especially on Hang 'em High) were absolutely beautiful and didn't need it. I think 343/CA/Bungie or whoever did it did a fantastic job with that canvas and That was what I was hoping for for the different maps in h4, not just the same textures for every map just with a different color palette. I feel like CA just didn't really try to make good looking pieces as they should have

 

I believe that the reason MS doesn't want modded content is an issue of quality of product. Mods have the potential to introduce bugs and viruses.

You can develop games for XBox now. It would be nice if MS provided a Halo Content Dev Kit (CDK) and then like Apple, inspect content that the community developers created, signed them, and introduced them in their Halo product store. We could sell our content or we could give it away for free to get mass recognition. Either way, MS can control the content and make money on the CDK. I believe they would get more than a handful of community developers if they sold such a CDK for $1k. But then again, they would need more than dozens of people to buy into this strategy to make it even come close to worth their effort.