Homage to Forgehub

The first time I met TrueDarkFusion was when I had just joined his website. In an exchange of mail which I have long since deleted, I yelled at the (unbeknown to me) college age boy for 'banning' me from his forum. As TrueDarkFusion informed me in his distinctive style that mimicked something like contempt and confusion, I had not been banned, I couldn't post because I had not validated my email. Suddenly my indignant messages were highly embarrassing.

"Suddenly my X were highly embarrassing" is a sentence structure that could probably fit many of my experiences with the Forgehub forums. Certainly going back over my barely teenaged posts I can do nothing but cringe at their indignant, almost righteous sense of confidence. When I met TXGhost he laughed at my voice, which was apparently higher than I thought it was. I would often broadcast things about my life that not only did nobody want to hear, but were socially unacceptable in the extreme to say. Even my map submissions were aesthetically embarrassing. Though the gameplay merits of The Bloody Hall are something which I will defend to this day.

I first read about Forgehub probably in the same place most people in the year 2008 did, the front page of Bungie.net. I didn't join up immediately, but I did start reading the posts, especially the ones about new forge techniques. Bungie had accidentally created the soil for a strange culture to emerge. One that was ostensibly about playing games, but in many ways about making them too. If you had told me that I would spend the next three years of my life playing Halo 3, I'd have thought you were crazy.

In retrospect, I wouldn't have wanted to spend them any other way. Halos forge was originally for players to 'tweak' the map, to change weapon spawns and vehicle placement with a finer grained precision than was allowed by mere gametype settings. Pretty quickly people like TrueDarkFusion went beyond that, using ingenious mechanisms to fundamentally alter the nature of the game. The forge map that comes to mind is HoboHeights, which turned Zanzibar, and later Narrows, into a game about jumping on a fragile suspended platform and dodging lasers. I actually was well into my own forge career before I learned about and played HoboHeights.

Forgehub itself started as a wordpress blog by TrueDarkFusion where he'd post his maps. I'm not sure if he knew it at the time, but there were a lot of other people out there who were doing things just as interesting as him. They started sending him their maps, and they would be featured as guest posts. Soon the volume of comments and map submissions outstripped Fusion's ability to process them, and he converted the wordpress blog into a Vbulletin forum. This would later lead to the strange social hierarchy that existed in those early days.

My own forge career started in the way that I imagine most peoples did. I loaded up Zanzibar, built a huge pile of fusion coils, and blew them up. I would later learn that if I set it so that the minimum amount of fusion coils on the map was the maximum they would respawn instantly over and over, exploding in a display that taxed the Xbox to the point of lag. I had a friend whose gamertag shall be left out of this story, his name was Patrick. We would often join somebody else's game together.

One of the problems that existed at Halo 3's launch was that the good maps had not been made, and the ones that were being made had not existed long enough for most party leaders to have them. This meant that the average custom game was terrible. In addition, if you wanted to use Bungies databases to find maps, you had to link your gamertag to their website, a process that I couldn't complete. If I wanted to have good custom games I would need to make them myself.

I don't quite remember when it was that I started actively creating custom gametypes. I think that I started by saving the good games I found, and then tweaking them to be better. Or if I liked the concept of a game but found its implementation lacking I would created it myself from scratch. This was easier to do in the days before interlocking, wall merging and ghost merging. One of the problems I faced was getting large parties, the maximum number of players was sixteen but I really only had enough friends to get six.

How I ended up solving it was a trick me and Patrick came up with. We would join a smaller or about the same size party as a group of five or six and demand they give me party leader or we'd quit. Because they didn't want to lose their new players, I would almost inevitably be given party leader. And because I put a lot of time into making sure that I had good games, nobody really complained. While this tactic may seem aggressive in the retelling, it usually ended up being better for everyone involved.

The first map I can remember making would be considered almost laughably trivial by the standards of those forgers who kept building for Halo 3 until the arrival of Reach. It was a simple "Shoot the fast zombies with the warthog turret on sandtrap" game. Basically the humans would spawn by a large fleet of vehicles, and the zombies would spawn in the bunker at the center of Sandtrap, the zombies had gravity hammers, super speed, and no shields. It was very hard to spawn kill them inside the bunker, and the no shields + gravity hammer combo evened out a game that as I remember it usually had stupid settings like one hit kill energy swords for the zombies.

It's important to note that these rudimentary maps were made before I had learned about forgehub. They may have even been made before forgehub existed. I didn't learn about forgehub until Bungie released foundry. For the benefit of anybody who wasn't around pre-foundry, foundry fundamentally changed the game of forge. Before foundry every map had to exist as part of the environment of a larger map. This meant that something like HoboHeights had to exist as a little platform just off the side of Narrows. This limitation gave maps a strange sort of variety that wouldn't be seen post-foundry. After foundry almost every forge map took advantage of the new forge capabilities that only foundry had, and in this transition something was lost, but much more was gained.

Foundry was the final nail in the coffin for bungies original vision of forge as a tool for 'tweaking' maps. With foundry forgers were given things that they had been forced to improvise previously. Immovable blocks, mancannons, a spacious flat surface, energy shields, and a much greater variety of building materials than had been on offer for other maps. Overnight every custom game had foundry maps, and the DLC became a de facto requirement to play custom games. If I tried to describe every sort of map that was enabled by foundry, it would be it's own post, and that post would be inadequate.

Around the time that Foundry came out I checked the Bungie.net website. In the front page article they mentioned forgehub, which was to my knowledge the first website of its kind. As said before, I didn't immediately join up, I did immediately start reading the posts though. It would be a while even after that when I'd learn the art of interlocking. Remember that the blocks on foundry were immovable, they could also be set to not spawn at the start of the game. This meant that you could set an immovable block to not spawn at start, and then place another immovable block over it's spawn point. Because neither can be moved the two would merge, allowing you to create structures that simply weren't possible otherwise. The most extreme example of what you could make that comes to mind is the map Tunnel Rats.

I actually learned about not making objects spawn at start before I learned about interlocking. This led me to create an infection map in which the humans had a tiny base at the start, and this base would slowly grow over the course of three minutes to become a fortress. I called it 'patience'. The fortress was characteristic of my maps from that time period, messy, even for a map without interlocking. I had crooked walls and made no concerted effort to straighten them. There was a part of the map where an infected could slide in and hit your feet if you were backed up against the wall. I never bothered to patch that.

When I first learned about interlocking, it was from forgehub. Without forgehub I probably would have never gotten past the patience level of map making. At the very least my peak would have been a skillset that didn't include interlocking or wall merging, which is to say that it may as well have been my skill set when I made patience except I'd have gotten neater. I don't think I signed up to forgehub until I'd decided I wanted to start publishing my maps. And it was that day when I signed up that I met TrueDarkFusion.

The second time I met TrueDarkFusion (or as people called him in those days, TDF) was during one of the TGIF sessions. Which as custom games go were far above average. He was host, and I was shocked by the amount of screaming he did. It seemed like he screamed at everybody, he screamed at me, he screamed at the staff, the overall impression I got was of a man gripped by annoyance and mania. The common denominator in TDF's demeanor in all contexts seemed to be perpetual annoyance. After that first TGIF I started to hang out a lot more with Forgehub members.

One of the great amusements of being a forgehub member in the days of Halo 3 was watching maps you'd seen posted to forgehub start making their way into peoples custom games weeks later. After a year or so, most party leaders had okay games to play. It should be noted that in spite of this, the average custom game was still terrible. Partially this was because most party leaders only had a few of the good games, and never made any themselves, or if they did make their own they were of poor quality. I myself had a few of the games that were passed around on file shares and in lobbies, but 90% of my library was stuff I'd made. At the very least 70%.

Eventually TDF had to stop running forgehub due to college obligations or something. After that the site was given to Nitrous, and at that time I think Shock Theta was also admin. If TDF's defining feature was being perpetually annoyed, Nitrous's defining feature was a vague condescension. He gave off something like an aura of intellectualism. At that time the general chat and off topic were being flooded with threads like "Is there a god?" and Nitrous set up a special debate section just to get them off the front page of those two areas. Where I mostly saw him was there in the god thread, which seemed to be his personal hobby to argue on.

There was of course the memes like "13 and I almost have a girlfriend", the unceasing accusations of moderator corruption, the circle of trolls that would set up new accounts on Forgehub often, only to be banned again once discovered. But eventually my interaction with the site slowed to a trickle, and then that trickle ceased entirely. Even though I stopped visiting Forgehub, I kept making friends and making/playing custom games. The maps that I saw on Forgehub were so spectacular that they made my own feel almost amateurish. In that sense my library had more of the quality of a homebrew or moonshine than the polished games I saw on the 'hub.

I can count myself among those players who kept forging until Reach came out and Halo 3's population was gutted. I myself migrated to Reach, and after a lot of trial and error managed to start building new games. Most of my friends had by this point stopped playing Halo, one of the advantages that I didn't realize until later was that when I started playing Halo 3 my friends list was a clean slate, and everyone on it played Halo 3. Were I to start up my custom games today I would clean out the list and start over. I slowly stopped playing Reach because my games weren't as good as the ones in Halo 3, and what got me to finally stop was when my Xbox broke.

As I recall my Xbox broke two years ago. In that time I haven't replaced it because I had been waiting for Microsoft to release the new Xbox. After seeing it, I've decided that I don't really want to play Halo anymore. I had for a long time entertained the notion that I would resume my forging career when the new Xbox came out, but I see now that will not be the case. Without that notion it is clear to me that this particular saga of my life is over.

To me at least, tying up loose ends means obtaining closure with the community that enabled me to do what I did. Most people take their "farewell" to this board as an opportunity to criticize and insult, or to give a sermon from their soapbox. I intend to do no such thing. To all those people who helped build forgehub, and shared maps and made this site a community, never forget. And thank you.

 

One of my few laments is that the forge scene was something that only several thousand people got to enjoy.

No, I agree. I was talking more about this sort of post.

http://www.forgehub.com/forum/off-topic-vault/32852-attention-please-read.html#post434169