[Released]Prisoner

[Blacklisted]

With the project Cartographer release and rising communities activity I have decided to get back into halo 2 content creation. I will be porting a few halo 1 maps starting with Prisoner http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Prisoner. This will be my main Prisoner WIP thread where I will be discussing the map and asking for input.

So at this point I'm open to suggestions, and already have a few questions for the community.

What to do with ladders? Halo 2 level design avoids ladders as much as possible, replacing them with gravity lifts or teleporters. Should I take the same approach? Cast your vote: http://www.strawpoll.me/12005856
A thing to note is that gameplay isn't preserved either way. While the map is scaled properly based on h1 and h2 spartan height, it does feel smaller due to movement speed and jump height.

Then comes the question about weapon placement. How should I approach the dualies? What should I replace flame thrower and health packs with?

That's it for now.

EDIT:
See release post: http://www.halo2vista.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=4527


Signing out,
Blacklisted

 

[UF ShadowTeddy]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Adding to what we talked about, I feel that the prisoner port should be as 1:1 as possible
Some things to consider:

• Lifts don't work well on the ported maps. Wizard is a great example of this
• Seeing as though the Flame-Thrower is a heavy weapon in Halo Combat Evolved terms, I guess it could be a heavy placement, but that may break the flow of the map. I think that the Flame-Thrower should be replaced with either a rifle (BR/Carbine) or maybe dual weaps (SMGs or the plasma rifle, you could also do the Brute plasmas)
• Something that you could bring to prisoner but would most likely definitely break the flow of the map is to put the Energy Sword in the most central position in the map (again wouldn't recommend it for obvious reasons)
• There's rooms at the bottom, where you can pick up plasma nades, you could add in some weapons there too (like dualies)
• Cause Halo 2 added a different variant of Plasma Rifle, you could replace all plasma rifles with brute plasma rifles.

If i think of some extra stuff, i'll add it in this post

 

[Ling Ling]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Don't worry too much about the flamer and health packs. The flame thrower is just a byproduct of Gearbox being Gearbox, and would NOT be missed if it had no equivalent in Halo 2, especially in fucking Red 2. PP might be a decent replacement though, as it might make an interesting foil to the stronger OS. The health packs can be some throwaway dualie or nothing at all, its well understood Halo 2 has no meaningful equivalent.

As for dualies in general...you certainly could put a few around the map (Prisoner is an empty map even for Halo 1 standards), but just realize that most dualies (except for PP) aren't going to be used that much or will be converted to BR/Carbines in competitive; they're bloat in the sandbox.

I find ladders to be very clunky as well, and if a map can operate without them, I'd encourage removing them. Yes, in certain Halo 1 maps, like Creek, the ladders are fairly crucial to balance, but I think Prisoner doesn't really have this problem. So there are 4 ladders on Prisoner:

1&2 Snipe boxes: The Sniper box ladders are actually very good positions in Halo 1, shielding you from regular gunfire and the typical barrage of frags that make the boxes unviable as long term power positions. Considering how weak Halo 2 grenades are, the boxes will probably become a tad too good as it is, so making the stairs "one-way" by turning them into a lift would probably be fairly desirable.

3- PR: This ladder is primarily a defensive position as well, mainly against window. A 1-way teleporter or lift would work fine here, as only a few sightlines can even see PR ladder. I say one way because you can just drop from top PR to bottom PR with ease if you just challenge window anyway, so in my book this will result in a decent tightening of the map.

4- Red 2: This ladder is this part is actually quite important for its two way nature. Red 2 is always under someone's sight and/or easily naded, so I think a teleporter or lift might be too easily exploited for lazy kills against people just trying to get out of Red 1 (a problem Halo CEA's Prisoner had). I'm not totally sure how I'd fix it, but a ledge jump (basically something like Guardian's gold 1 to gold 2 jump) would be an excellent solution if possible. It would allow players climbing to Red 2 to react to threats they encounter, while still giving them option to fall back to Red 1 ( like the ladder did in CE), and seems like the best solution since I'm under the impression a lift would be 1 way, and a teleporter would be far more disorientating and frustrating than other options.


Just my 2 cents.

 

[Blacklisted]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Adding to what we talked about, I feel that the prisoner port should be as 1:1 as possible
Some things to consider:

• Lifts don't work well on the ported maps. Wizard is a great example of this
• Seeing as though the Flame-Thrower is a heavy weapon in Halo Combat Evolved terms, I guess it could be a heavy placement, but that may break the flow of the map. I think that the Flame-Thrower should be replaced with either a rifle (BR/Carbine) or maybe dual weaps (SMGs or the plasma rifle, you could also do the Brute plasmas)
• Something that you could bring to prisoner but would most likely definitely break the flow of the map is to put the Energy Sword in the most central position in the map (again wouldn't recommend it for obvious reasons)
• There's rooms at the bottom, where you can pick up plasma nades, you could add in some weapons there too (like dualies)
• Cause Halo 2 added a different variant of Plasma Rifle, you could replace all plasma rifles with brute plasma rifles.

Wizard is a prime example of how not to handle the lifts, they can and do work nicely with the right tag values.

There is a rocket launcher in middle of the map, so swapping it for another power weapon wouldn't change all that much imo. It should also be possible to make it alternate between rox and sword on spawns.

I will be either doubling up plasma rifles or replacing them brute plasma rifle.

Don't worry too much about the flamer and health packs. The flame thrower is just a byproduct of Gearbox being Gearbox, and would NOT be missed if it had no equivalent in Halo 2, especially in fucking Red 2. PP might be a decent replacement though, as it might make an interesting foil to the stronger OS. The health packs can be some throwaway dualie or nothing at all, its well understood Halo 2 has no meaningful equivalent.

As for dualies in general...you certainly could put a few around the map (Prisoner is an empty map even for Halo 1 standards), but just realize that most dualies (except for PP) aren't going to be used that much or will be converted to BR/Carbines in competitive; they're bloat in the sandbox.

I find ladders to be very clunky as well, and if a map can operate without them, I'd encourage removing them. Yes, in certain Halo 1 maps, like Creek, the ladders are fairly crucial to balance, but I think Prisoner doesn't really have this problem. So there are 4 ladders on Prisoner:

1&2 Snipe boxes: The Sniper box ladders are actually very good positions in Halo 1, shielding you from regular gunfire and the typical barrage of frags that make the boxes unviable as long term power positions. Considering how weak Halo 2 grenades are, the boxes will probably become a tad too good as it is, so making the stairs "one-way" by turning them into a lift would probably be fairly desirable.

3- PR: This ladder is primarily a defensive position as well, mainly against window. A 1-way teleporter or lift would work fine here, as only a few sightlines can even see PR ladder. I say one way because you can just drop from top PR to bottom PR with ease if you just challenge window anyway, so in my book this will result in a decent tightening of the map.

4- Red 2: This ladder is this part is actually quite important for its two way nature. Red 2 is always under someone's sight and/or easily naded, so I think a teleporter or lift might be too easily exploited for lazy kills against people just trying to get out of Red 1 (a problem Halo CEA's Prisoner had). I'm not totally sure how I'd fix it, but a ledge jump (basically something like Guardian's gold 1 to gold 2 jump) would be an excellent solution if possible. It would allow players climbing to Red 2 to react to threats they encounter, while still giving them option to fall back to Red 1 ( like the ladder did in CE), and seems like the best solution since I'm under the impression a lift would be 1 way, and a teleporter would be far more disorientating and frustrating than other options.

Alright, some good info here. I must confess that I never played that much prisoner on h1 so I don't have too good understanding of how the map plays, so it's nice that you went in-depth.

I asked about heatlpacks because they are in central positions, and it would be nice to reward the player for coming out of the cover, as h1 does it with hp. Maybe some ammo pickups? The dualies seem like a safe way to clutter the map a bit and imo would be a good replacement for flame-thower too.

As for the ladders...I think i'm going with two way grav lifts everywhere. Two way teleporters fuck up everything too much, have you ever entered one just to come out the same way you went in? Or worse be stuck in teleportation loop. I really dislike ladders myself because you can't look around much and it's easy to fall off when you try to leave ladder at the top, so I think I have made up my mind about this.

But I think I will have to re-read you post and mull over it. And ultimately I will have to get some test games going to see how everything plays.

 

[Anz]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Hello! Great to see some people still making maps for this game. Prisoner is one of the missing maps from H2V, so im glad to see you addressing that. There was a port of Prisoner on halomaps, but I never got it to work, maybe it was corrupted or something. I put the links below. As for the gameplay I never really played H1 that much, but I did play it quite a bit on Reach Anniversary, maybe you could check that out and see how they made that version compared to H1 version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LjvWxVQOvE
http://h2v.halomaps.org/index.cfm?pg=3&fid=2198
http://h2v.halomaps.org/index.cfm?pg=3&fid=2206

 

[UF ShadowTeddy]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Its great to see that a whole bunch of creators are slowly making their way back to Halo 2 Vista

As far as the prisoner map on halomaps.org is concerned, the reason why that doesn't work is due to the 2007 Update that Halo 2 received which broke maps that were created before said update. The only way to remedy this would have been to get creators to remake their maps but seeing as though the original author pretty much disappeared, Prisoner was never finished

 

[Ling Ling]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Adding to what we talked about, I feel that the prisoner port should be as 1:1 as possible
Some things to consider:

• Lifts don't work well on the ported maps. Wizard is a great example of this
• Seeing as though the Flame-Thrower is a heavy weapon in Halo Combat Evolved terms, I guess it could be a heavy placement, but that may break the flow of the map. I think that the Flame-Thrower should be replaced with either a rifle (BR/Carbine) or maybe dual weaps (SMGs or the plasma rifle, you could also do the Brute plasmas)
• Something that you could bring to prisoner but would most likely definitely break the flow of the map is to put the Energy Sword in the most central position in the map (again wouldn't recommend it for obvious reasons)
• There's rooms at the bottom, where you can pick up plasma nades, you could add in some weapons there too (like dualies)
• Cause Halo 2 added a different variant of Plasma Rifle, you could replace all plasma rifles with brute plasma rifles.

If i think of some extra stuff, i'll add it in this post

On the contrary, nothing quite says Halo 2 like haphazardly throwing a sword on in the middle of a map and calling it a day. And a metagame where the ideal strategy is to sword cancel up floors? Hell yeah.

Adding to what we talked about, I feel that the prisoner port should be as 1:1 as possible
Some things to consider:

• Lifts don't work well on the ported maps. Wizard is a great example of this
• Seeing as though the Flame-Thrower is a heavy weapon in Halo Combat Evolved terms, I guess it could be a heavy placement, but that may break the flow of the map. I think that the Flame-Thrower should be replaced with either a rifle (BR/Carbine) or maybe dual weaps (SMGs or the plasma rifle, you could also do the Brute plasmas)
• Something that you could bring to prisoner but would most likely definitely break the flow of the map is to put the Energy Sword in the most central position in the map (again wouldn't recommend it for obvious reasons)
• There's rooms at the bottom, where you can pick up plasma nades, you could add in some weapons there too (like dualies)
• Cause Halo 2 added a different variant of Plasma Rifle, you could replace all plasma rifles with brute plasma rifles.

Wizard is a prime example of how not to handle the lifts, they can and do work nicely with the right tag values.

There is a rocket launcher in middle of the map, so swapping it for another power weapon wouldn't change all that much imo. It should also be possible to make it alternate between rox and sword on spawns.

I will be either doubling up plasma rifles or replacing them brute plasma rifle.

Rocks exist as a means of drawing players on top and the players on the bottom together (bottom players can use them to push up, and top players are incentivized to drop down and take them to prevent this), because of their sheer power. If sword or some alternate ends up not being as attractive as rocks (and the sword cancelling metagame doesn't pan out), it'll seriously hurt the map.

Don't worry too much about the flamer and health packs. The flame thrower is just a byproduct of Gearbox being Gearbox, and would NOT be missed if it had no equivalent in Halo 2, especially in fucking Red 2. PP might be a decent replacement though, as it might make an interesting foil to the stronger OS. The health packs can be some throwaway dualie or nothing at all, its well understood Halo 2 has no meaningful equivalent.

As for dualies in general...you certainly could put a few around the map (Prisoner is an empty map even for Halo 1 standards), but just realize that most dualies (except for PP) aren't going to be used that much or will be converted to BR/Carbines in competitive; they're bloat in the sandbox.

I find ladders to be very clunky as well, and if a map can operate without them, I'd encourage removing them. Yes, in certain Halo 1 maps, like Creek, the ladders are fairly crucial to balance, but I think Prisoner doesn't really have this problem. So there are 4 ladders on Prisoner:

1&2 Snipe boxes: The Sniper box ladders are actually very good positions in Halo 1, shielding you from regular gunfire and the typical barrage of frags that make the boxes unviable as long term power positions. Considering how weak Halo 2 grenades are, the boxes will probably become a tad too good as it is, so making the stairs "one-way" by turning them into a lift would probably be fairly desirable.

3- PR: This ladder is primarily a defensive position as well, mainly against window. A 1-way teleporter or lift would work fine here, as only a few sightlines can even see PR ladder. I say one way because you can just drop from top PR to bottom PR with ease if you just challenge window anyway, so in my book this will result in a decent tightening of the map.

4- Red 2: This ladder is this part is actually quite important for its two way nature. Red 2 is always under someone's sight and/or easily naded, so I think a teleporter or lift might be too easily exploited for lazy kills against people just trying to get out of Red 1 (a problem Halo CEA's Prisoner had). I'm not totally sure how I'd fix it, but a ledge jump (basically something like Guardian's gold 1 to gold 2 jump) would be an excellent solution if possible. It would allow players climbing to Red 2 to react to threats they encounter, while still giving them option to fall back to Red 1 ( like the ladder did in CE), and seems like the best solution since I'm under the impression a lift would be 1 way, and a teleporter would be far more disorientating and frustrating than other options.

Alright, some good info here. I must confess that I never played that much prisoner on h1 so I don't have too good understanding of how the map plays, so it's nice that you went in-depth.

I asked about heatlpacks because they are in central positions, and it would be nice to reward the player for coming out of the cover, as h1 does it with hp. Maybe some ammo pickups? The dualies seem like a safe way to clutter the map a bit and imo would be a good replacement for flame-thower too.

As for the ladders...I think i'm going with two way grav lifts everywhere. Two way teleporters fuck up everything too much, have you ever entered one just to come out the same way you went in? Or worse be stuck in teleportation loop. I really dislike ladders myself because you can't look around much and it's easy to fall off when you try to leave ladder at the top, so I think I have made up my mind about this.

Yeah, if you want players rewarded for coming out of cover, BR ammo and grenades are going to be the best motivators in Prisoner.

If you can get two way lifts working in an intuitive way, more power to you.

But I think I will have to re-read you post and mull over it. And ultimately I will have to get some test games going to see how everything plays.

Good, that's always the best way of doing this stuff. Theorycrafting good setups for the map and large technical details can be very beneficial, but it means nothing without rigorous testing.

If you want to see higher level CE gameplay on Prisoner, Missingno Wilder has this commmentary and a lot of raw gameplay on his channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-IthVVW1zQ

 

[UF ShadowTeddy]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Sword cancelling being used in a way to get to the top ez?

Hell yeah. :rofl:

 

[| SCRAPY |]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Wizard wasn't that great tried to make the lifts lift right with values and didn't spend maybe more than 30 minutes on it lol I just ported it from the halo 1 map mesh from some app I forget lol haven't touched map making in awhile -_- could use teleport also? Not sure but there's a tag for the h1 telescope. Good luck I'll try to be helpful, not on much lol but weapon placement make it similar to h1 but with a twist also the maps when ported tend to be smaller if I remember right. Not sure atm I don't have anything at on PC to help, my PC is down still. Have to upgrade to a new platform of hardware lol

 

[Anz]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Hey Scrapy, good to see you still around. Hope you´re still gonna make some maps when you get your pc up and running.

As for Prisoner Blacklisted, are you gonna port it or make from scratch yourself? Below is Twinreapers take on Construct (another multilevel map that is somewhat similar to Prisoner and a map I´d like to see made for H2V alongside The Pit), and I think that dark style would suit Prisoner well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7BrYgi2aIk

 

[Blacklisted]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

are you gonna port it or make from scratch yourself

It's a port using bsp ripped from halo 1. The less 3D work I have to do the better, I have pushed around enough vertices back in the day to have enough of that for a lifetime.

Wizard wasn't that great tried to make the lifts lift right with values and didn't spend maybe more than 30 minutes on it lol I just ported it from the halo 1 map mesh from some app I forget lol haven't touched map making in awhile -_- could use teleport also? Not sure but there's a tag for the h1 telescope. Good luck I'll try to be helpful, not on much lol but weapon placement make it similar to h1 but with a twist also the maps when ported tend to be smaller if I remember right. Not sure atm I don't have anything at on PC to help, my PC is down still. Have to upgrade to a new platform of hardware lol

I decided against teleporters, and grav lifts work quite well. Still need to fiddle around with some values little bit though. To make sure map is scaled properly I imported halo 1 player model and compared to to halo 2 metrics, everything matches perfectly.

I have a test version with slayer and ctf settings already done, would be nice to get a game going and see how it plays.
Some pics with shit lighting settings:

 

[Anz]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Not related to Prisoner, but is it possible to import map bsp´s from Halo Online? It has some really good maps that would be great on H2V, like the Turf remake and Reactor.

 

[Blacklisted]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Not related to Prisoner, but is it possible to import map bsp´s from Halo Online? It has some really good maps that would be great on H2V, like the Turf remake and Reactor.

As long as it is possible to export the BSP to any of the popular 3d formats. I don't know much about currently available tools for Halo games. To be honest I lost interest in anything halo after 343 took over and ruined the franchise in my eyes, h2v being an exception.

 

[| SCRAPY |]

Re: [WIP]Prisoner

Idk if he will make it from scratch not quite sure. It'd be interesting. Idk if I tried I'd port it from h1 and edit it in a weird different way. Idk how but I'd try something. But atm I have nothing set up lol my PC is dead lol I'll have to try finding a working crappy PC to run off of maybe. Idk I'll have to try something some how lol

 

[Twinreaper]

I've actually taken up some map again as well as playing with the GuerillaRadio source. Construct was about 75% complete and I did have a few others in progress...

1. Last Resort: ODST Costal Highway 90%
2. Highrise: ODST NMPD Level with the bridge and Shees 50%
3. HighGround: H3 cant seem to reduce enough to get bsp past 3d-2d node errors
4: Cascadia: ODST Crater level Finally in-game after geometry reduction
5: Corpsys: H3 High Charity level 100%
6. Grounded: H2 Foundation remake 100%
7. Trapt: H1 Chrilon remake 40%
8. Lockdown: ODST Security Zone 80%
9. Xenophobia: Reach Carrier Firefight Level thing in space 10%

As for the rest, I still have the perfect 1:1 H4 BR, SAW, Assault Carbine, Rail Gun, Reach DMR, Reach Assault Rifle, Reach Magnum, Plasma Repeater, Beam Rifle and Working Lifts, grav & steam types, as well as Plasma Shield doors still 100%.

Even though I had a falling out with the H2MT due to my personal life affecting my judgment, I am still willing to share my source for anythjng the H2MT may need as well as my finished maps. If there is any interest in the maps above let me know. I will finish them up.

 

[UF ShadowTeddy]

Well Twin, Kills Alone has pretty much left so as for the falling out with H2MT, its pretty much non-existent (unless Kills Alone comes back)

As for the source/finished maps, sure I'll take em
Always good to have a few things and whatnot

Cartographer is reviving Halo 2, and is also reviving the modding scene (to some extent)
I don't know if this change will make you reconsider making content for Halo 2 Vista, but things really are looking good now, as opposed to the dark ages (GFWL period)

 

[Twinreaper]

What happened to Kills? I really hope what transpired between us didn't make him want to leave. I owe him an apology as well as the other members.

I did install discord and the Cartographer update and things do look good. I would be more than happy to forward any source materials that someone wants to play with. Alkng with that, if there is any map or content that would like to be first worked on or completed in my list, let me know which one and I will begin asap.

 

[Ling Ling]

What happened to Kills? I really hope what transpired between us didn't make him want to leave. I owe him an apology as well as the other members.

I did install discord and the Cartographer update and things do look good. I would be more than happy to forward any source materials that someone wants to play with. Alkng with that, if there is any map or content that would like to be first worked on or completed in my list, let me know which one and I will begin asap.

As far as I can tell he got bored and moved onto Doom + other stuff. I'm sure you could reach him on his Youtube channel if you so wished.

I would definitely appreciate seeing your set of weapon models/tags as well. I've enjoyed a lot of your previous work.

 

[Sod]

#BringBackKills2017

 

[Blacklisted]

I've actually taken up some map again as well as playing with the GuerillaRadio source. Construct was about 75% complete and I did have a few others in progress...

GuerillaRadio? I remember hearing something about a similarly named tool back years ago, I think it was being worked on by kornman. Is this the same tool?. What can it do?

As for the rest, I still have the perfect 1:1 H4 BR, SAW, Assault Carbine, Rail Gun, Reach DMR, Reach Assault Rifle, Reach Magnum, Plasma Repeater, Beam Rifle and Working Lifts, grav & steam types, as well as Plasma Shield doors still 100%.

I would love to get my hands on those tags.