Wall Coliseum vs Station Corridor pieces

Station corridor looks better in general, cleaner, no stupid sections on the edges. It also causes lighting to break faster. So try not to overuse them.

 

Wall Coliseums are far better for larger areas, however, they look bad and aren't overly smooth on the edges. Station Corridors look great, but I wouldn't advise you use them to much(Overkill), because they're no good when it comes to your dynamic lighting :/

 

do you even have enough of them? I mean are you using all 100 pieces?

 

Since we don't have station corridors on Ravine and Erosion, it's clear to me: Wall Coliseums.
But I actually never use those for floors in a whole map, and never did so in the past either. I usually combine several objects to differentiate the flooring, which looks far better in my opinion than having the same floor all over the map. (But hey, I make Flood maps so I can imagine competitive forgers don't have a choice.) In the two maps I've been working on in Halo 4 so far I used mostly natural ground resp. blocks and bridges to build up the floor.

 

If you push wall coliseums into each other to remove those darker textured sections, you can get away with minimal z-fighting and some clean flooring. Just an FYI.

 

It's useful to know that the Station ramp is a lot less costly on the dynamic lighting. You can place down 4x as many as the Station corridor to have the same strain on the engine. The clean underside of it is exactly the same too.

 

If we were to get precision editing back sometime in the future, I would recommend the 2x2 Ramp Steep to anyone. It's perfect for everything, even for floors - if we get precision editing back that is. It takes some time to get used to, but eventually you'll love it. I like it even better than the new 5x1 from the blocks section, which is also an extremely useful object.

That's indeed to go know for when I'll be starting to forge on Impact. Thanks!

 

Shouldn't require precision editing, even. Just get one perfectly flat, then duplicate it (so the duplicate is at the same angle). Turn magnets on and move it so the two objects occupy the exact same space and z-fighting kicks in. Then turn magnets off, grab one, and move it to line up with the other one. I'm using this method extensively to get paired objects with the exact same weird rotation that need to line up - or even simple things like 2x2 ramps side by side and at exactly the same height (for which magnets do not work, annoyingly enough, because there are no magnetism nodes on the sides of the ramps).

 

what if you wanted to try to make a BTB map on Impact and connect the two asteroids with a large floor, and still retain a lot of dynamic lighting left to finish the large map? I guess Coliseum Walls would be the only choice for a floor that large?

 

Basically yes.

It's somewhat frustrating to me that they didn't add more large-scale objects like coli walls in forge. Especially for BTB forging, but even for doing bigger 4v4 maps, it can be a huge pain trying to build so many floors, walls and roofs with even the biggest blocks and platforms. Coli walls are useful, but obviously it's just one object serving multiple purposes (so maps all end up looking the same), and the wall in H4 is actually worse than the one in Reach due to the edges and texture.

I've also noticed a weird glitch, not sure if anyone else has seen it, but it SEEMS to be caused by coli wall flooring. I had it in one particular place on my first map, and I just saw it a few days ago on a friend's map as well. It's this: when you walk around in certain spots, your spartan starts glitching weirdly with your feet jiggling up and down, almost like you're jumping very fast (but without actually changing height), or crouching while floating in place. It doesn't affect playability but it looks really dumb and distracting. I haven't figured out if it's a particular spot or side of the wall piece, or if it has to do with merging them with other objects - I know on my map it only happened when walking on the wall, within a few feet of some other objects that formed a wall and window in that area.

 

You see, this is something you shouldn't be doing anyway. A floor that large is generally too large and flat for even a good BTB map. There were a lot of people who tried to connect Montana and Alaska back on Forge World in Reach. This rarely worked at all, and when it did it still had a lot of issues because the length of sight lines and the flatness of the map. I guarantee you that no matter how good this idea seems now it is not worth doing, no matter what the floor is made of.

 

a few things:

as someone said, Station Ramp pieces are better for lighting than the Corridors. They still use lots of framerate reportedly (and from experience). Station 90's are okay too, as they ahve a pretty large bottom area, though not rectangular.

colluseum walls tend to shift whereas others do not tend to shift coordinates.

5x1 flat blocks have the same horrible edges often requiring thme to be overlapped and z-fight.if you connect them by their L & R sides rather than U & D, there is no need for this.

many pieces actually have different textures on two if not all six sides, so rotate until you find the texture you think is most desirable for a floor/wall/ceiling.

 

Yeah I see what you mean. I was just trying to think of a way to make a large map in Halo 4 that would be a similar scale to something like Sand Trap, Hemorrhage or Valhalla. All three Forge maps' terrain seems too small to do this without adding coliseum walls as flooring to extend the map's terrain. So, I can't really think of anything else. It's too bad Certain Affinity doesn't know how to do terrain in a forge map.

 

I feel like there will be another huge map, if not, a few smaller maps for forge pallets in the future of this game. If you think about it, Sandbox itself wasn't even thought of until after the game released foundry and Bungie saw how innovative people were.

Considering this is 343's first real game, they're messing up all over every medium of this game. In time, I feel like every problem will be addressed, and to put it simply, forge def shouldn't be at the top of the list. I still have hope for this game, and it's forge. But I don't understand one simple thing. No matter how hard it is, or what's going on in the studio, why is it that nobody made something for a damn floor? It seems so simple! But hey, I'm not a game developer, just a designer.

If you could make some connections to the forerunner area on both sides of Ravine, you'd have a pretty decent sized map. Build some buildings, pull out some rocks to make more caves, or even a cliff area, and you can build a seemingly huge map in a small space. I'm going to be attempting something like that very soon if you want to exchange some ideas.

 

large floors covering huge distances don't have to be straight or flat, you know. creating hills and bumps isn't that hard. only thing is I hate the idea of floors replacing terrain. but we do what we must

 

I just wish they had more cave systems or things of that sort. Maps like Isolation, Snowbound, and Containment. I like the idea of being under the main terrain. I can only imagine the maps people would build if they were able to utilize cliffs, or bodies of water. sigh.

 

It's gonna be hard to do that on Ravine because you can't really build anything inside the forerunner structure that looks good due to the pieces not matching the forerunner metal structure. At least I wouldn't be able to think of anything to build in there. Certain Affinity are idiots when it comes to forge. Remember Tempest? yeah, nice forge map...couldn't do anything on it. Remember Ridgeline? Couldn't do anything on that one either due to trees everywhere and the terrain. Remember High Noon? Couldn't build anything on there either due to all the catwalks you would have to place a floor on top of them which leaves no height at all for the rest of the map.

I don't see Certain Affinity fixing anything in Forge other than precision editing and monitor zoom. I don't even see them making a new Forge map. They already have the maps planned for the final 2 map packs (the maps are probably already done or mostly done). I do hope there is forge maps in them but I just don't see it happening. If they did do a forgeable map it would be like the Reach anniversary maps where you cant build anything and the forge pieces are just a tease and illusion to make you think you can.

 

I have my doubts about this. The reason for the forge DLC (Foundry was actually the first, with Sandbox following) was that Bungie didn't realize how creative people were going to get with forge, which was really just intended for weapon and limited scenery object placement. People immediately started trying to make real maps, so they came up with Foundry, then Sandbox as the next level. It was a great response to a sub-community that built itself on the fly.

By contrast, Reach shipped with one forge map, and died with one forge map. None of the DLC was forge-oriented (though Tempest copied Forge World's palette with a few new objects but less room to build and less budget). No serious attempt was made to augment forge through DLC. Notably, a large part of Reach's lifespan was shepherded by 343.

Now we have a new company in charge, one that at least SO FAR seems less responsive than Bungie to the funkier little corners of their community (as evidenced by the loss of all the cool, weird, highly unrealistic gametypes except for Grifball, and the general lack of attention paid to forge and custom game staples). In fact, for their first Halo title they didn't even build forge themselves.

I find it unlikely, in light of all this, that forge will see any meaningful DLC upgrades. I kind of doubt we'll even get a Tempest-like mix of competitive map and forge canvas. We have three and they're probably satisfied to leave it at that; we may get bug fixes though, including the restoration of the much-complained-about precision editing tool, though honestly I expected that to have been done already and so far it has not.