I'm semi-back after a short hiatus. During my brief time away from the Halo Wars modding community, a patch to the game was released that added support to load a TXT file that describes other directories which contain game data. This makes it so you don't have to rebuild or even use ERA files for testing or distributing your game changes.
For example, if all you wanted to do was change data/leaders.xml to give you more Spartan population, you could use this new "ModManifest.txt" to point to a folder that contains the said file with your changes. Then when the game loads, it would consume this loose file in favor of whatever file may be in an ERA.
I originally posted the following in the Halo Wars modding Discord chat about a month ago, but I guess no one really paid attention or picked up what was going on:
In the UserRoot folder (the same folder gameconfig.dat exists) you can now add a new file:
“ModManifest.txt”
[Example]
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.BulldogThreshold_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\ModManifest.txt
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Halo Wars\ModManifest.txt
The file format is simple, just a directory per line. You can use the semicolon character (;) to essentially comment out a directory if you want to disable it.
[Example]
e:\temp\TestMod
Now, the content of each of the directories will override files in the base game’s archive packages.
[Example]
Directory of E:\temp\TestMod\Art\unsc\vehicle\warthog_01
05/11/2017 12:00 PM <DIR> .
05/11/2017 12:00 PM <DIR> ..
08/11/2016 03:54 PM 5,592,528 warthog_01_df.ddx
You of course need to replace the "<username>" part of these paths with your account name. The first path is if you use the Windows Store copy of the game. The second path is if you own the Steam copy.
You could place your data/leaders.xml file in this theoretical "E:\temp\TestMod" folder too. Basically you need to remember that any files you wish to override via a directory in the Manifest must maintain the same directory tree as it appears in the ERA files.
Showing posts with label halo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label halo. Show all posts
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Wow, 15 years of Halo
Wow. Just realized that it's been 15 years now since I first got an Xbox and with it, Halo. I think it was bundled with a few other games too (Munch's Oddysee, an NFL game, Project Gotham Racing, and DoA3 I think), but I'm focusing on Halo today.
I think I actually got the console+games bundle before Xmas, but still in the month of December. I wouldn't have been able to really play it until winter break started anyway. I remember looking at the box thinking "hmmm, this looks cool...I wonder if it will be anything like Jet Force Gemini? I loved that game"
GoldenEye and Jet Force were the bread and butter of my N64 experience. Around that same time I would have probably been playing Driver 2. Earlier in 2001 I had moved from a different state and with that event I branched out to more single player games since I didn't have my old friends to play co-op with in legends like GoldenEye.
Anyway, I was looking at Halo's DVD case thinking "hmmm...those things [Grunts] kinda resemble the Ants in Jet Force. Why am I not playing yet??". So I finished setting up the Xbox and inserted the game. Splash screens roll by, main menus are briefly hit, and finally, a new campaign is started.
With the game's first cutscene I pretty quickly forgot the "is this like Jet Force" question/mindset. I was pretty amazed at what I was seeing, given that everything else I had played before was on an N64 or PS1. While I did play PC games too, the last interesting title I had played before then was a Star Wars Sith Lords game or Thief Demo from an EGM disc.
However, Halo's cinematics were just amazing and looked pretty. It had all my attention. I played through the first mission. More! Played through the second mission. Moar! Played through the third- "wait...are there no boss fights?". I realized that in the back of my mind I still had some hopes/expectations of what I experienced in Jet Force to appear in this game. One of those things being boss fights. The realization, for a moment, felt weird: "No boss fights?". But that quickly faded. "No boss fights!" It was back to shooting what I now knew as Grunts and Elites.
Now, if you're reading this you've more than likely played the first Halo. After all, it's been released and re-released four times now on four different platforms. So unless you are some PlayStation exclusive nerf herder, you probably already know that midway through the game a new foe is introduced: The Flood. At the time of course, none of us knew or anticipated this reveal.
Let me first paint a better picture of the environment I was playing this game in: I was in North East America, it was winter, cold (probably snowy), middle of the night, and I was in the basement of the house I lived in (practically another floor, since it was carpeted, mini bar, and with a sliding glass door to the the outside). Oh and the house was basically built into the side of a hill with thick woods. In a town where your neighbors were a hike away.
So yeah, I was already feeling quite isolated and susceptible to things too spooky. Then the game goes "here's The Flood, have fun!". My adrenaline was flowing. It was awesome. It probably helped that I was still middle school age too. No game or movie really hit me to such great affect after that. Well, expect maybe Signs. Only because I had scarred myself to the concept of "little green men" back in the 90s with the abduction/UFO shows that aired on TLC (you know...back when it didn't just air reality garbage) and Discovery Channel, plus due to some other events. I want to believe.
I'm fairly certain I finished the game in one sitting/night. While I had finished the game, I was by no means finished with it. I replayed it over and over. I would go to a friend's house and use GameSpy to tunnel mulitplayer matches. I discovered warthog jumping (warthog jumping revisited also needs mentioning).
It wasn't until I was in high school that the Action Replay came out for Xbox. Back in my N64 days I was a big GameShark user. I'd go online, find codes for games, then randomly start changing parts of the codes in hopes of getting something even cooler/different. I seem to recall the GameShark also coming with a VHS that explained basic hexadecimal, among other things. Sadly, I soon realized that the Action Replay was only a device for transferring game saves to/from the console and PC. I couldn't use it to modify a game's memory on the Xbox. But that wasn't the end of that.
Not wanting to let the investment go to waste, I used the device to transfer a Halo game save to the PC and opened it in none other than Notepad. At first anyway. The game used binary game saves, literally memcpy'ing the game state memory (always allocated at a fixed address) and flushing to disc. Before I would venture on to use Hex Workshop to view the bytes of the file, I scrolled what all I could read of the game save in Notepad. To my surprise, I saw help strings relating to the game's scripting engine (which was LISP inspired at the time, these days Halo and Destiny use Lua). This was due to how the engine "freed" datum in the game state memory. It would fill the datum blocks with random bytes from the executable itself. I didn't realize this was the reason until many years later when working on Halo Custom Edition.
All of this would eventually lead me to the Halo modding community and many, many other reverse engineering hijinks that would require their own post. It's kinda incredible to think that it's been 15 years now, longer than I had been alive by the time I first played Halo.
Incredible enough to make me take the time and write this blog post anyway. Perhaps I'll try firing up the Master Chief Collection and try playing Halo 1 again, this Xmas day? I say 'try' twice, because I'm uncertain if that game will function properly. It's too bad no one will do a technical post-mortem on that uber game. I'll probably get two or three missions finished before the nostalgia wears off and I realize I have better things to do with my time these days anyway :)
I think I actually got the console+games bundle before Xmas, but still in the month of December. I wouldn't have been able to really play it until winter break started anyway. I remember looking at the box thinking "hmmm, this looks cool...I wonder if it will be anything like Jet Force Gemini? I loved that game"
GoldenEye and Jet Force were the bread and butter of my N64 experience. Around that same time I would have probably been playing Driver 2. Earlier in 2001 I had moved from a different state and with that event I branched out to more single player games since I didn't have my old friends to play co-op with in legends like GoldenEye.
Anyway, I was looking at Halo's DVD case thinking "hmmm...those things [Grunts] kinda resemble the Ants in Jet Force. Why am I not playing yet??". So I finished setting up the Xbox and inserted the game. Splash screens roll by, main menus are briefly hit, and finally, a new campaign is started.
With the game's first cutscene I pretty quickly forgot the "is this like Jet Force" question/mindset. I was pretty amazed at what I was seeing, given that everything else I had played before was on an N64 or PS1. While I did play PC games too, the last interesting title I had played before then was a Star Wars Sith Lords game or Thief Demo from an EGM disc.
However, Halo's cinematics were just amazing and looked pretty. It had all my attention. I played through the first mission. More! Played through the second mission. Moar! Played through the third- "wait...are there no boss fights?". I realized that in the back of my mind I still had some hopes/expectations of what I experienced in Jet Force to appear in this game. One of those things being boss fights. The realization, for a moment, felt weird: "No boss fights?". But that quickly faded. "No boss fights!" It was back to shooting what I now knew as Grunts and Elites.
Now, if you're reading this you've more than likely played the first Halo. After all, it's been released and re-released four times now on four different platforms. So unless you are some PlayStation exclusive nerf herder, you probably already know that midway through the game a new foe is introduced: The Flood. At the time of course, none of us knew or anticipated this reveal.
Let me first paint a better picture of the environment I was playing this game in: I was in North East America, it was winter, cold (probably snowy), middle of the night, and I was in the basement of the house I lived in (practically another floor, since it was carpeted, mini bar, and with a sliding glass door to the the outside). Oh and the house was basically built into the side of a hill with thick woods. In a town where your neighbors were a hike away.
So yeah, I was already feeling quite isolated and susceptible to things too spooky. Then the game goes "here's The Flood, have fun!". My adrenaline was flowing. It was awesome. It probably helped that I was still middle school age too. No game or movie really hit me to such great affect after that. Well, expect maybe Signs. Only because I had scarred myself to the concept of "little green men" back in the 90s with the abduction/UFO shows that aired on TLC (you know...back when it didn't just air reality garbage) and Discovery Channel, plus due to some other events. I want to believe.
I'm fairly certain I finished the game in one sitting/night. While I had finished the game, I was by no means finished with it. I replayed it over and over. I would go to a friend's house and use GameSpy to tunnel mulitplayer matches. I discovered warthog jumping (warthog jumping revisited also needs mentioning).
It wasn't until I was in high school that the Action Replay came out for Xbox. Back in my N64 days I was a big GameShark user. I'd go online, find codes for games, then randomly start changing parts of the codes in hopes of getting something even cooler/different. I seem to recall the GameShark also coming with a VHS that explained basic hexadecimal, among other things. Sadly, I soon realized that the Action Replay was only a device for transferring game saves to/from the console and PC. I couldn't use it to modify a game's memory on the Xbox. But that wasn't the end of that.
Not wanting to let the investment go to waste, I used the device to transfer a Halo game save to the PC and opened it in none other than Notepad. At first anyway. The game used binary game saves, literally memcpy'ing the game state memory (always allocated at a fixed address) and flushing to disc. Before I would venture on to use Hex Workshop to view the bytes of the file, I scrolled what all I could read of the game save in Notepad. To my surprise, I saw help strings relating to the game's scripting engine (which was LISP inspired at the time, these days Halo and Destiny use Lua). This was due to how the engine "freed" datum in the game state memory. It would fill the datum blocks with random bytes from the executable itself. I didn't realize this was the reason until many years later when working on Halo Custom Edition.
All of this would eventually lead me to the Halo modding community and many, many other reverse engineering hijinks that would require their own post. It's kinda incredible to think that it's been 15 years now, longer than I had been alive by the time I first played Halo.
Incredible enough to make me take the time and write this blog post anyway. Perhaps I'll try firing up the Master Chief Collection and try playing Halo 1 again, this Xmas day? I say 'try' twice, because I'm uncertain if that game will function properly. It's too bad no one will do a technical post-mortem on that uber game. I'll probably get two or three missions finished before the nostalgia wears off and I realize I have better things to do with my time these days anyway :)
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