Halo: The Master Chief Collection will soon offer players a way to play the original E3 demo for Halo 2, as well as offering the modding community a host of previously unreleased assets, including vehicles and weapons. A group of developers at 343 Industries, called Digsite, has been digging through the Halo series’ archived data and assets in an attempt to bring the history of Halo to players’ fingertips. This month will have us learning about many concepts and ideas that were removed from the final versions of the earlier Halo games, and modders will have the opportunity to play around with previously unreleased assets for vehicles, maps, creatures, weapons, and more.
One of the biggest takeaways from the latest Halo Waypoint blog post (which should definitely check out if you have an interest in the series’ history) is that a rebuilt version of the E3 Halo 2 Earthcity scenario demo is coming to Halo: The Master Chief Collection . . .
at some point. Halo 2 Earthcity scenario demo is coming to Halo: The Master Chief Collection While 343i hasn’t offered us an expected release date for the Earthcity demo update, the fact that the Digsite team are talking about it can only mean that they’re confident that it’ll work on the new engine/version of Halo 2 in The Master Chief Collection. Digsite foreman and technical historian nicknamed General, does note however, that the team “can’t make promises on it being available on console,” though.
“This was NOT a trivial process, and we should probably layer on a whole page of caveats that come with taking a demo map for an engine that no longer exists and getting it to not blow up the current lightmapper (among other issues that come from letting people go into areas that were never intended to be seen). ” The blog post mentions that the Earthcity scenario was originally built as an E3 demo on what is now a dead engine and that it was never intended to be played “off-script,” so it’s been quite the challenge to get it running on the latest retail version of the game — “over 3400 lines of barely documented haloscript originally written under an insane time crunch almost two decades ago, which itself was made to work around various bugs of the engine at that time,” the blog reads. General notes that when the team started working on Earthcity they didn’t have very many assets for the map, only JMS files for the Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) and some scenery objects.
Digsite needed to dive into the Halo 2 source depo to uncover the source map files needed to begin piecing everything together. , which also led to the finding of missing demo animations. Due to various functions having been changed during the development of Halo 2, many of the original script files found within the Halo 2 Editing Kit aren’t compatible with the modern version of Halo 2, so the team has had to upgrade the script to work well now, while also keeping it in-line with how it was originally intended to operate.
“Our end goal is to get it running in the MCC and playable end-to-end and working as intended if you follow the presentation script (including the Ghost hijack!),” General says. “Hopefully, we will even make a few things shown in the presentation a “real thing” by using retail H2 elements where appropriate. This may be a shocker for some, but several parts of the demo gameplay were smoke and mirrors!” There isn’t an expected delivery date for the Halo 2 demo right now, but we’d urge you to check out the interesting post on Halo Waypoint while you wait.
Will you be wanting to have a go on Earthcity if and when it launches on Xbox and PC? Let us know down below, Spartans!.
From: trueachievements
URL: https://www.trueachievements.com/n50287/halo-the-master-chief-collection-halo-2-demo-and-more
