More on Modding, Halo 3

I was reading into the wee hours of the night and came across a Bungie.net update on Halo that included some info on Forge.

Forge is Bungie's level editing software that, at least as far as I know, has been available for all of their PC games, like Myth.

Now every both the PC and Xbox 360 are getting Forge on the disk. We'll be able to litter any level in the multiplayer game and upload it for anyone to download and play. Here are the apparent rules:

- When editing levels ( with friends or alone ) you are the Monitor [flying orb character].
- You can place objects, weapons, or vehicles.
- Objects include such things as boxes, barricades, and crates.
- You can also make spawn [start] points and [flag] capture points, and also change spawn times and options for the [starting] weapons such as ammo.
- By pressing up on the D-pad you can turn into a player and test what you made.
- After editing/making a level you can upload it and anyone can download it.
- Bungie[.net] will have a page with featured level edits.
- You can not edit geometry of a level or make one from scratch.

I'm also assuming you can't change the universe of the game, such as change the physics (gravity, weight of objects, etc.) in the game engine, things you could do with other software Bungie had called Anvil.

The TimeSplitters series has always had in-game level creation (from scratch), but never took off for some reason. I thought it's stamp-like graphics editor and trigger-event based level programming were genius.

Game Graphics Get Easier

In a nutshell, producing game art is now going to be as easy as painting in Photoshop. I bet a lot of people didn't think it was very hard to say, make a city street look like a city street in a game, but it takes lots of man hours and computer time. id just made it much, much easier. And they even give it away. To you.

id Software has come up with a new graphics engine that once compiled, developers software will run on PS3, Xbox 360, PC and Mac all at once. Using the same code!

This will totally increase the number of cross platform games, short of political, 1st party titles that console companies buy the rights too.

Another revolution in their Tech 5 software is that game artists, the ones that paint on faces and mountains and vehicles are really no longer constrained to memory issues on their work and multiple people can work on the same "level" at the same time. So, in English, it means tons and tons of details with no slowdown in the game speed and much less time in the game's development.

And making mods for games on PCs is huge in the gaming community. So I bet those Mountain Dew drinking keyboard jockeys just peed in their pants just a bit.

While It's Raining, Free Game Images

Just about 80% done with re-sealing my deck and teh vicious thunder rolls out of the sky. So here are some game desktop backgrounds to show you what I found while it was raining. I wouldn't explore the site too much, especially the celebrities section (barely SFW).

And as some summer showers do, it's finished almost as fast as it started.

New Glitch and Weak Story Distraction

Kotaku just posted up a couple of videos showing off some new graphics engine. What were they showing off? Upgraded leaf making skills.

Seriously, if developers spent any amount of time coming up with better collision detection and animation scripts that didn't glitch in online play, I'd have better respect for our industry of choice.

But for now we're stuck with pretty scenery and sniper rifles that don't hit anything (Gears of War, you bad boy).