This tutorial covers the same basic mods as HPC: Modding Halo PC Trial and Full for Beginners using Eschaton 0.7. Eschaton 0.7 can be gotten here.
Getting Halo Trial and Demo
Download the trial or demo version of Halo at the links below. These versions only come with two maps: BloodGultch and Silent Cartographer.
Halo Trial: Download
Halo Demo: Download
Using Eschaton
Go to the file menu and select the open option (not open and expand). Navigate to your Halo folder and within that the maps folder. For Mac users with Halo Universal Binary (versions 2.x) you will need to right-click on the Halo app, go to show package contents and navigate to contents, resources, game data and in there should be the maps folder. To access that maps folder you should create an alias of it and put that alias somewhere on the desktop. In general it's always a good idea to make backup copies of your map files. Eschaton when editing maps automatically writes data to the map file. For editing you'll want to use the open option and the map will appear in the maps (read/write only) folder. Open and expand is only used for rebuilding which will be covered later on.
Making MC Run Fast and Jump High
To edit things related to MC you'll want to go into the bipd (biped) tag class and find cyborg_mp which refers to the multiplayer cyborg body. Editing the values and enabling the options as shown below will make it possible for MC to walk on walls, jump higher and die due to falling damage. When entering values, press enter to set the value otherwise it won't be written to the map file. This applies to all editing that has fields for entering data like integers, floats and strings.
The following values in the matg: globals\globals tag which handles game play information are used to make MC run faster.
Changing What Comes Out of a Weapon
The following technique is known as dependency swapping. Dependencies and loneIDs are bits of data in a tag that reference another tag in the map. So a weapon is dependent on the tag data for a projectile. The shotgun tag is in weap: weapons\shotgun\shotgun and that's what I'll be using for this tutorial. With that selected switch over to the reference swapper tab and scroll down to the dependency for the projectile (tag class is proj). In the drop down on the bottom select the tank shell tag and press the Swap button. The shotgun will now shoot tank shells.
Skinning
Skinning is a very simple process. Those of you familiar with HMT's skinning process and use of DDS can still use that functionality with the inject/extract buttons. For something a little easier is the import/export options which will be covered here. So first navigate to the bitmaps tag you want to edit. I'll use the warthog as an example. Press the Load Preview button to see what the image looks like. To be able to edit the image, press export and save it in whatever image format works best for you. Then open that image in the editing program of your choice. Some programs to look into for Mac that are free are Pixen and GIMP. For windows there's obviously Paint in addition to Paint.net and again GIMP. In this tutorial I'm using Pixen but it doesn't matter too much. Simply edit the image to your hearts content and save it. Then in Eschaton press the import button. A new window should appear. For this bitmap it has a single image so the window only has options for that image. Press the load button and select your edited image. It should appear in the window. Then simply press the import button. After a second or so a message will appear telling you the bitmap was imported. Press Load Preview again to make sure the new image is the one you want. There is also a youtube version of a similar tutorial here: Bitmap Editing.
Making Vehicles Fly
This particular tutorial only works with the older plugin sets. You'll have to go into the preferences and make sure HMT plugins is at the top of the list and save preferences. For this tutorial we'll make the warthog fly. First select the warthog vehicle tag. Then change the enum32 called Vehicle ID from warthog to Drop Ship / Pelican.
Making the Warthog "Turretless" AKA Civihog
First navigate to the mod2 (models) warthog tag. This tag contains the information related to model for the warthog. What we're going to do here is null out the dependencies for the shaders related to the chain gun so that it becomes invisible. Then to make sure no one can get into the turret, go to the vehicles warthog tag. In the seats section select chunk 3 which is the gunner and change the string to read P-gunner. This sets what animations can interact with that seat and since MC doesn't have a P-gunner animation he can't get in. Remember to press enter in the field to write the string.
Making High Capacity, Automatic Weapons
These are simple edits in the weapons section. Changing the starting ammo, clip size and reload clip size to be very large on the order of 10,000 should make it so you rarely need to reload and when you do it will last just as long. Changing the reload time to 0 makes it faster depending only on the animation involved with no extra delays. Make sure in the bitmask section the single fire is unchecked so that the weapon is automatic and bump up the minimum and maximum rate of fire (ROF) to make it shoot quickly. Keep in mind that a very high ROF will make going through those extra large clips a lot quicker. Below is an example of the pistol edited to these specs.
Making MC Have Nearly Unlimited Health
This is a simple way of effectively making it impossible to kill MC. Go into the coll (collision) tag, cyborg and edit the maximum body vitality and maximum shield vitality to both be something very large like 10,000. If the plugin you're working with doesn't have it, rearrange your plugin ordering to see if the others have it. The picture below was taken with starter plugins as the first choice.
Importing Flyable Pelicans Into Multiplayer
Good news. This works for both full and trial/demo modders. First open up a campaign map like b30.map which was the vehicle you want. I'll use b30 since it has a pelican and is available for trial/demo modders. Select the vehicle pelican tag and from the maps menu select recursively extract tag. This will extract not only the data for the vehi tag but also all of the dependencies and their dependencies (ad nauseum) until every tag necessary to make it work is used. Now from the file menu select open and expand. Using that option open up your target multiplayer map. I'll be using bloodgulch. Open and expand will take a little bit as it loads all of the map data into memory slicing and categorizing the data. Click on the map in the maps folder that isn't read/write only. From the drop down menu select the pelican tag and press the add tags button. The map information should update and the tag count should increase. Press the rebuild button and choose a name for your map file (by default it's called build.map). Eschaton will take about as long writing the file as it took to load it. To free up memory you should use file->close map on the expanded multiplayer map. Now open normally the new map file and go to the weapon plasma pistol. In the reference swapper, swap the proj charged bolt tag for a vehi pelican by first typing vehi into the class field and selecting pelican from the drop down menu. Now go into the vehicle pelican tag, seat chunk 1 and change the string from P-driver to W-driver. The modding part is done. Just make sure to name the built map file the same name as one of the maps in your maps folder so that Halo loads it. Now when you shoot the over charged plasma pistol a flyable pelican will pop out. In the youtube version, the classic editing preferences are enabled. The youtube tutorial for this is here: Rebuilding.
Have fun modding Halo.
