I've never used forge before, and I was searching what the budget was. I found that is 10000 and that items seem to cost about 10. I also realized there was a limit to the number of items of each kind you can put in a map, but I couldn't find if it is the case with halo 4, and if yes, what are the limits?
I don't mean to be mean, truly I don't - but you own the game, right? Just fire up forge and look. There's an overall budget of 10000 and each object category has a limit of its own as well (e.g. 100 blocks of any kind, max).
I wouldn't truly worry too much about the amount of pieces overall, because if you are working on a map on paper just remember the one simple rule for forging - K.I.S.S., which means keep it simple stupid... lol It really helps when your trying to keep your piece count down, but your map looking nice. Less is more when you choose the right pieces, which texture or forge world you choose or even which direction you set pieces down in. If you have Halo Reach, most of the pieces and piece counts are the same and there are videos of all of the pieces available on youtube these days. Hopefully that helps, also when sketching a map for a beginner you should read all of the basic multiplayer map designs 101 you can here on this site and other places on the internet. They will help guide you to build a map with great lines of site and good flow around the map. Reference Warlock from Halo 2 for example or even Onslaught from MLG (for examples...), they are very basic in design, but brilliantly complex in game play and extremely memorable because of how they are laid out.
level design isn't a problem, though I'm not familiar with Halo gameplay, but that looks good for a "modern" FPS. well, I'm used to limits, since I work on Timesplitters 3 which has a limit of 200 tiles and 50 items, but I found a forge article about halo 3, and limits for items were very low.
They're high enough in Reach and Halo 4 (which have basically the same forge) to do most things you'd want to do. You're limited to 50 or 100 of most types of structure objects, of which there are many categories: walls/doors/windows, blocks, inclines, bridges/platforms, decoratives, natural, buildings, and in Halo 4 only, each forge map has a category of object specific to it as well. All of those have limits of 50 or 100 except for buildings, which is 12. You'll find that you usually have more than enough of everything except blocks and walls, so in a larger build you may need to use some objects from other categories creatively; building walls or floors out of inclines is a good way to save needed blocks and (actual) walls for other uses.
so basically, stuffs like walls, blocks, inclines, bridges should be large flat items you can rotate however you want, which would actually multiply the limit by 4, somewhat. I saw a map here made of a lot of that octogonal windowed corridor, which is quite a complex tile, so I guess it isn't a building.
That's an object specific to the canvas map they are building on. It's just a corridor piece, and that category, on that map, has a limit of 100 pieces.
do we have a community of good mappers here, because most of the maps actually look at least moderately decent and pretty clean, or are most maps like that? on Timesplitters 3 and Far Cry 2, the vast majority of maps was just terrible. can we hope that the few good maps that get released do not get burried under a mass of terrible ones?
You can hope. But as soon as the fileshare system goes live , there will be a flood of garbage maps released. And yes, there are many damn good builders on this site. And most are willing to help and teach you the tricks.
i'm going to be new to releasing things to the community as well. I created a few good maps for Reach but didnt' have XBL to share them. with that said, what is good to one person may suck to another. but I do study what makes a map and its gameplay "good" and have tried to use that. I made levels for Jedi Knight, including the 26th most popular ever, a Stargate map w/ functioning gate using some glitches and exploits in a creative way. The new game will bring out even more creative people, but about 10x as much crap, for sure! However, hopefully even if there is a sea of crap to wade through, the most popular maps will be the best ones and thus downloaded more often?? How does that work on the fileshare? Can you see # of downloads?
that was not the case on far cry 2 nor in timesplitters 3. mapmaking in timesplitters may have stagnated without videos from me or admiralhowdy. some good maps become popular, most don't, and worse maps sometimes become even more popular.
is there a way that this site could help manage this by including a rating system for each map? Make a list of shared maps sortable by most popular? Featuring good maps as map of the week or whatever, will get more downloads and spread the word about it. Then, that would get the best ones sorted at teh top of the list. that's how it worked in JK.
there are things like that on FCmaps.net, but I suppose it only makes maps more popular within the community. well, at least we know what to download. there also was a list of maps recommended by ubi for far cry 2. I think at the beginning they put 10 maps in it each month. still, they missed quite a lot of good maps, but it's better than nothing. I'm not sure the fact they cleared the list each month instead of just adding to it was a good idea.
There is also a invisible global object limit, like not allowed to build more then 1000?(random number idk the limit) forge objects on the map. Even if you still haven't hit the individual object limits, Even if you haven't hit the budget.
I know the video is ugly, but would it be possible to build something like this : Tokyo rooftops V1.3, Mapmaker map for TSFP - YouTube ? and if yes, is there anything that looks hard to build?
It would be possible to remake this by the looks of it, yes. Having said that, I'm not sure how you would recreate the automatic doors, unless you used the crate/landmine doors from Reach (player steps on a shielded landmine that does no damage, sets off other explosives that release the door mechanism, crate falls down, opening the door). The main problems with this were that it took a while to reset, it wasn't very reliable, and it looked pretty ugly. There might be new ways of making automatic doors in Halo 4 though. I guess we'll find out in due time. Apart from that, it looks like you're good to go.
I made it without the automatic doors in far cry 2. I don't think they are absolutely necessary, it's just the best way to have something look like a door in timesplitters 3 [br][/br]Edited by merge: I got the game. the forge looks a bit tedious to use but I'm getting used to it. there is an impressive amount of options. is it possible to select several items at once?