Heres a compendium of posts by Bungie employee Ferrex on forge, copied from a thread on the Bungie forums. It is pretty long, there is alot of them. Sorry if the formatting seems off in places, I copied these from the forums to notepad, so it will be rough in places, however I think this is worth reading. It came from 17 pages of comments, so it is easier to read it direct like this than to link to the bungie forum. Spoiler Posted By: ferrex "Shape" controls the shape of the object boundary. That's what we use for things like KOTH hills, respawn areas, kill zone areas, et cetera. You can choose "None", "Cylinder", or "Box", and when you do it shows you the dimensions (Height, Radius, etc) too. To make a Warthog a KOTH Hill, you'd set the shape to be "Cylinder" or "Box", set the size, and then mark that Warthog as being a "koth_hill", which is an option under the Advanced submenu which I don't think we showed in any videos. So, if you wanted, you could have a map with some Warthog hills, some Mongoose hills, some fixed scenery hills, and the game engine will just Do The Right Thing. BTW, you can set up Infection Safe Areas the same way. Yep, sharp guy. Pretty much this. No weather effects in the Forge. Was something we wanted, but something we didn't get to in time. But, there are filters similar to the ones we introduced in Sandbox, a few of which do a pretty good job of making it look like night, late afternoon, and some other visual effects. In the case of KotH, it'll move the Hill to the next object set up to be a Hill. It really is more fun with indestructible vehicles, though. You can offset it up or down (by setting the top and bottom heights appropriately), but not to the left/right. We figured you'd just move the object if you wanted to do that. Yes, but they're quite a bit better now. A lot of objects are grouped together so that they share the same object limits ("inventory".) So if you're setting up a map and can place, say, 50 wall pieces, it's actually 50 wall pieces of any type, not "10 doors, 10 corners, 10 single-width, 10 double-width, etc" The limits are pretty generous too. All of the maps we built are comfortably within the limits. A phased object stays where you put it. Sure, my pleasure. I just don't always have the bandwidth to do it. You'll have to switch the gametype to set up objects for that gametype (e.g., choose KOTH to place KOTH Hills.) It's not the most elegant solution, but we figure 90%+ of maps are set up for one gametype at most, so it ended up being the simplest overall solution. DLC? You mean "don't leak clues"? Can't speak to what we have planned there. That's up to gentlemen like Sketch and Urk. The Bomb (and Flag, and Oddballs) work a bit differently--you can control where they spawn, but not what actually spawns. But, you could play Assault where the goal is to plant the bomb on a Warthog (or any other vehicle.) Or on a soccer ball! There is not. (Shocking fact herein revealed: we don't even have an Undo button on our internal tools! It's maddening! But it's also really complicated to bolt on at this point...) Fortunately, object positioning is so, so so much better than H3 that it's usually pretty easy to get that object right back where you want it. Working with Rotation Constraints and Nudges makes it trivial most of the time. You wouldn't be able to build, say, Lockout in 3-4 places on the map. But you could certainly set up some Hemorrhage bases in a bunch of places on the map. You can actually build quite a bit and pretty complicated structures pretty cheaply, so if you're imagining some grand battles across the entire length of the map, going from base to base, I'm pretty sure you could manage it. There were some on the map already. The maximum number of Scorpions on Forge World is *checks map* 4. Yes, exactly. (I was hoping that question would come up in this thread, I've seen it a few times.) Sorry, there is no corresponding "Advanced Editing" gametype. Basic Editing is already pretty Advanced. A lot of it. Most of it. The Forge is 99% for the community, so we really took a good swing at building it "to spec", based on what the community was already doing with the Forge in H3. 1. There's audio (flying sounds) and some little visual touches, but nothing on the objects he's editing. 2. There's lights, global screen filters, and a good selection of decorative objects. No explicit signs, I don't think (might depend on the map.) 3. If by interactive you mean destructible glass, afraid not. There are definitely destroyable objects, though. 4. Yep, you can set a teleporter to work on (and I'm pretty sure only-on) vehicles. It loads as fast as any MP map. (Load times mostly come from things like texture resources, and FF maps pay a large cost from the AI characters we have to load.) There's one big interior space built into the map, and a couple of little tunnels on the Island. Player cap is 8 players in Forge (we pay some amount of networking overhead for the editing, so we can't have as many as normal MP), and sadly no, there's no tool for welding objects together (for technical reasons.) Why not? Deep water is as fatal to Spartans as spikes are to Megaman. No, but we do have some one-way shield door objects that you could use to accomplish the same game mechanics. Yes, and yes. Afraid not. We ended up not using many of these at all on our maps, so we didn't spend a lot of time building them. Those that we did build were very map specific. Yep, you'll see these in Matchmaking. And the kill zones/safe zones are set up per map variant, so there's no fear of someone Warthog Jumping from one safe area to another. Afraid not. The phased objects would remain fixed in their location, and the vehicles would push themselves out of the fixed object. The answer is 8. (And I'm going to skip object count questions from here, otherwise you guys'll have me listing out the entire palette. They blend BETTER, but it still depends on your technique. A lot of the objects are designed to be snug up against each other, and that's the best way to avoid the z-fighting (the term for that flicker.) No, that one should be fixed now. That was one in particular that we wanted to crush. Folks, I'm going to head out for the night, so I'm going to try to answer questions up to this post and call it an evening. I'll try to jump on tomorrow night to do another round. It's really just setting a specific color for the object instead of using the team color. The hardest part was t-blam!- it down to something we could finish, polish, and ship. That's always the hardest part, cause you know that every one of those little features would've BEEN SO COOOL! But that's how the process works. The most enjoyable part was seeing folks like Shish building real, new maps. And, of course, working on my own ports of old favorites. Afraid not. Other than garbage collection, the engine doesn't have any concept of "despawn time", and it never came up as something we really wanted. I can see how it'd be useful, though... dang. Got me there. I think we're shipping a blank version on disc this time. 1. Depends on the gametypes, of which I'm not sure if we've announced all of them or not. And if I don't know, I can't say, sorry! 2. Ditto the above, haven't announced all of the maps yet (just the names.) More of a game options question, but yeah, you can start everyone with any weapon in the game. Not everything can be fixed. Vehicles, for example, will always be physical. And it looks like Jon is shaking his fist at me right now. Hmm. Afraid not. Forge is a humble object editor, not quite capable of full on terrain editing of that sort. You could pile up a bunch of rocks and then delete the ones in the middle, though! Time actively spent in the Forge does provide some credits. (And pre-emptive chill-out: we do distinguish between "active", "idle", and "rubber band on your controller". All weapons, all maps. The MP guys had strong sauce this time, and budgeted accordingly. Yep, there's shallow water. I had some fun early on setting up a Race map which send you driving along the beach beside and around the Island, a lot of which has you swimming and fording shallow water. Safe Zones limit players to certain parts of the map, as defined by the map author. If you leave the Safe Zone, you either die (hard Safe Zone) or are warned to return to the battle (soft Safe Zone.) I don't think there's any trees. They're just not very good objects for this kind of use--very floppy, physical, and hard to pull off believably. And number of objects depends on the objects you choose. It'll vary a lot. It's like swapping weapons, so the old one hangs around. There is, in fact, a gigantic wall object. It's pretty damn large. Yep, those sorts of objects still exist. No, but you could make a lethal fall by using a kill zone. And I'm pretty sure man cannons can't negate fall damage. User beware! No, I don't think vehicles pay attention to which team owns them, except for inheriting team colors (in the case of the Mongoose on Rocket Race.) Pretty dang high. There's lots of room for this kind of stuff. Ok guys, I'm at my cutoff. I've gotta run, but I'll check in tomorrow and perhaps wade into another thread. There may be some more stuff to talk about then. Cheers!
Suprised now asked about A.I.'s like in Chess. But if they had it in chess they probably will have it in forge
Most likely those were just holograms. It could easily have been manipulated to make it look like they were playing chess that way.
No Look up the Chess Vidoc. Also if they were holograms how did they move spaces if they were placed on the board already.
I was hoping someone would've asked about Civy Vehicles, Other maps with the level of forge potential, and troop Hogs.