MAP FEATURE
SANDTRAP by WyvernZu


view original map thread
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Sandtrap was Halo 3‘s largest Big Team Battle map at launch. It took large, open-scale vehicular warfare and through it into the desert, with little but ruins and the natural slopes to protect you. While coveted as a community favorite for years, it was never able to be faithfully remade in forge until now. WyvernZu spent countless hours assembling this remake and pioneered the visual theme of a desert atmosphere. Many people watched her build on twitch as she measured and matched Halo 3 to Halo 5 achieving a perfect 1:1 scale. The map was built with the intention of providing a classic Halo 3 experience as possible, so be sure to grab the classic game modes in WyvernZu's fileshare as well. To note, the game mode removes all spartan abilities including clamber and sprint to make it feel truly classic. Its remarkable to see one of the best Sandtrap recreations in forge history made within the first month of forge's release. Our community is off to an incredible start...forge on!

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Today ForgeHub featured the recreation of a widely celebrated map from Halo 3 called "Sandtrap" by WyvernZu, a new member of our community from Sweden. She is very artistic has a background using many level editing systems and has plans to release more forge maps to the community in the future. I had the pleasure of sitting down with WyvernZu for an interview while she told me more about her story and her passion for games.



WARHOLIC
How long have you been a fan of Halo and have you forged in any previous halo games?

WyvernZu
My first Halo was CE on the original xbox. I started forging in Halo 3 but my map making started with Half-Life 1.

WARHOLIC
Why am I not surprised to hear you played Halo 3? You made a fantastic recreation of Sandtrap, the best we've ever seen. What inspired you to recreate that level to such perfection and what benevolent insanity allowed you to believe this was achievable?

WyvernZu
Thanks! Yeah Halo 3 was the Halo game I've probably spent most of my time in. I just loved everything about it. It just felt like they got everything right in that game. I remember having lan nights with my friends playing infection and ctf on Sandtrap and we always had a blast playing it. I feel like there's just something special about the map. The blend between vehicular and infantry combat was perfect so when I first saw the Halo 5 forge I knew right away what I would first try to make.


The Halo 5 forge just seemed out of this world when it was first revealed. So when forge for 5 released I just went right into forge to try and make it. After playing around with the forge for a while I started to doubt that I would be able to do it due to the fact that spawns, objectives and callouts was included in the object count but I kept going anyway.


But it just didn't look right with a Sandtrap on Alpine so I started to play around with different skyboxes and lighting setups on all of the forge canvases. Eventually I found out that using the asteroid terrain on the Parralax canvas you could get some really believable sand terrain and skybox. That’s when I realized that I probabl had something going so I started to forge the map.


I had a second monitor with an Xbox 360 with Halo 3 hooked up so I could constantly compare the the maps to one another.


After a while into making my map a friend of mine said that he thought the sand effect I had started working on looked really cool and he asked if I was making Sandtrap. I just became quiet and asked him how he knew what I was doing. That’s when I found out that anyone could look through all your saved forge maps so I got really anxious that someone would just take my map and claim it as their own so I got the idea to livestream the entire process instead.


I would never have been able to finish this map without the enthusiasm and constant feedback from everyone who watched my streams and played my revisions of Sandtrap. I feel like I owe it all to community.

WARHOLIC
The livestream you hosted during the construction process grew quite a crowd and created a lot of anticipation for the release of this map. The time and attention to detail really payed off, I think everyone is extremely satisfied with the outcome. This may be another impossible feat but have you thought about placing elephants on this map?

WyvernZu
I’m still stunned by the amount of attention my project received. I feel very happy with the current state of the map, it runs great and there’s no issues with the lightmap or physics and I really hope that people will have a great time playing this map. My initial goal was to have scripted elephants placed on the map but as I kept building it I soon realized that it could be very hard to do. But at this time I’m at 100% object usage so it would be very hard to get those in here. I might get them in at a later date when I probably have found a way to reduce my object count though.

WARHOLIC
I assumed as much, the elephants would be a huge challenge to recreate even if the amount of objects needed were available. I'm sure everyone is wondering what you will build next as this SANDTRAP remake really set the stage for all of us here. What can the community expect to see from you in the future? Do you have any plans to recreate more maps from the Halo franchise or will you pursue an original design of your own?

WyvernZu
My current plan is to remake Guardian, Highground and Valhalla. I'm also working on some other maps like Dugout (A version of Sandtrap Adjusted to the Halo 5 Gameplay) and some other maps that are still in a very basic form. So I'm going to continue on remakes but also start with some original designs.

WARHOLIC
That's a great list of maps, the community is really fortunate to have such a faithful author attempt to revisit those. I'm personally looking forward to see Highground make a come back but I think we will need the 1 flag gametype for that to play at its best. Seeing that you are a huge fan of classic Halo maps and settings; If you were to design an original map, would it be intended to suite classic settings as well?

WyvernZu
Thank you! I’m really looking forward for Highground as well, it played really well back in Halo 3. I might be able to create a One Flag version of the map by making one flag inaccessible.

I actually enjoy the new gameplay in Halo 5 quite a lot but I will always prefer the more classic gameplay of Halo 3. If I were to design an original map I would probably do it for the new h5 gameplay but I might do some original classic maps later down the line too.

WARHOLIC
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? What is your nationality, where do you live? What is the story behind your gamertag: WyvernZu?

WyvernZu
I'm 19 years old and live in Sweden. I've always liked creating things no matter if its been lego or drawing to designing maps for games. I've been playing around with level editors and using photoshop since I was very young. I also like playing drums, bass sand downhill skiing.

I actually have no idea why I chose to take the username WyvernZu, I had a really hard time finding a good username. I think Wyvern is some kind of a dragon and Zu is just a name.

WARHOLIC
Sounds like you have a lot of avenues to express this creative passion towards. In addition to Source Engine, what other level editing systems have you used in the past and how do you think forge compares to them?

WyvernZu
I tried Unity before but now I mostly use Unreal Engine. Forge has evolved a lot since h3 and it's shaping up to be a great map editor but I still feel that it needs a propper terrain editor and group naming to be able to hold up against other editors. Maybe even a separate program for PC in future titles.

WARHOLIC
I couldn't agree more, the evolution of forge has been an incredible journey and there is still a lot of room for improvement. The forge team at 343 is hard at work to bring forge to its full potential with more canvases, textures, blocks and more. I would absolutely kill for a voxel based terrain editor! Thanks again for sharing your story with us. We're extremely excited to see what you will bring us next and wish you the best with all of your forging activity!

WyvernZu
Oh yes definitely! The 343 forge team is amazing! It was a pleasure being interviewed by you! Btw, huge fan of your maps haha.

VIDEO FLYTHROUGH​