Chapter 10. Display Mods
Hacks 77–81: Introduction
Although altering the properties of weapons or players may have the greatest impact on game play, visual hacks are often the most rewarding. As with after-market work on a car, people enjoy being able to personalize their Halo 2 experience.
Whether it’s creating your own Halo 2 demos, altering the splash screen, or using Halo 2 to shoot a machinima movie, this chapter explores various hacks for customizing the presentation of Halo 2.
Film High-Quality Videos and Machinima
Use the Machinima Companion to remove the HUD and increase texture quality.
The practice of filming movies using video game engines is known as machinima. The most impressive—and popular—Halo machinima can be found at http://www.redvsblue.com. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend that you take a look. If you like these creative videos, you should look around the Net and you’ll find many more sites to enjoy. For example, http://www.xboxottawa.ca/movies.htm has a number of videos.
Watch the Red Vs Blue videos closely; you’ll notice that the first episodes contain the reticle for the camera operator’s weapon. However, the new episodes don’t contain an on-screen weapon or any HUD indicators at all.
There are a few tricks that you can use to remove the HUD and increase the quality of the video. These hacks will allow you to film your own highquality Halo 2 game videos—or even create your own machinima films. For example, you can remove your weapon and reticle by using the Oddball glitch [Hack #46] or you can remove the entire HUD by using the Blind skull [Hack #8] . However, if you’re serious about getting the best quality, you should consider using Iron_Forge’s Machinima Companion. The Machinima Companion was actually created for the guys at http://www.xboxottawa.ca.
The Machinima Companion provides a simple means to remove all HUD and radar indicators. In addition, the mod removes low-level detail and gives you quick access to five levels of zoom.
The first step is to install the mod. While it’s true that most mods don’t come with an installer, this one is an exception (see Figure 10-1).
Tip
If you’re wondering what it says on the Dokey Okey install message, it reads: “The Camera Man can cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.”
For a video preview of the Machinima Companion mod, refer to http://files.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=26185. To download the mod, visit http://files.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=25038&highlight=machinima+companion.
Iron_Forge created this mod by applying changes such as removing the HUD. He did this by editing the metadata of roughly a dozen objects. The original textures for these objects were replaced with transparent bitmaps. To achieve even better quality, the Machinima Companion also removes the low-level version of Halo 2 models.
After you apply the mod to a map, sign the map [Hack #53] , and transfer it to your Xbox [Hack #54] , simply pick up the Battle Rifle and the Machinima Companion will be activated. Now you are free to create your own Halo 2 cinematic masterpiece (see Figure 10-2).
During the production of this book, I captured various screenshots from video. To ensure that the videos were of high quality, I connected the Xbox to a capture card using the original style Xbox High Definition adapter. This adapter allows you to connect the High Definition out ports to the component video inputs of your capture card (see Figure 10-3). In this case, a SweetSpot capture card (http://www.pluggedin.tv/sweetspot/) was used. The new style adapter will work for capturing video, but it will not allow you to split the sound outputs to the PC sound card.
The software used to capture the video was iuVCR (http://www.iulabs.com) (see Figure 10-4). However, you could also use the open source DScaler (http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/) application (see Figure 10-5).
Once the videos were captured, I used Adobe Premiere (http://www.adobe.com/motion/main.html) to walk through each frame and decided which would be best for the desired figure (see Figure 10-6).
Manually Remove Low-Level Textures
Increase video quality by removing the low detail textures.
Although the Machinima Companion [Hack #77] will remove all of the low-level details for you, you may decide that you only need to remove the low-level details for a few textures.
To allow the Halo universe to render more quickly, Halo uses different quality textures based on how far you are from an object. For example, when you are far away from a surface, the first texture you will see is a low-level detail version. However, when you get closer, the high-quality texture will be shown. This mechanism may speed up the game, but it isn’t so useful when you want to film high quality videos.
Removing low-level detail (LOD) textures one by one is relatively simple. Open up the map in your favorite map editor, and save the metadata for the bitmap that you want to edit. Then open up the meta for the texture in your hex editor [Hack #54] .
This is what your standard bitmap (in this case the objectsvehicleswarthogitmapswarthog_standard.bitm) hex looks like:
00000100 01000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00020002 060B0A0000000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
The twelve values of interest are in bold. Every bitmap is allowed up to six LODs. However, many just have one. The first six values are the raw offset to the texture, followed by the sizes of those six textures. Notice if no LOD is available, it’s set to FFFFFFFF and its corresponding size is set to 00000000.
Removing the low levels of detail is just a matter of telling the bitmap that it only has one section of raw data available. Therefore, you need to change:
0036FF88 00E0FD88 008AFD88 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 80550500 80550100
to:
0036FF88 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 80550500 00000000
With this change, you have removed the two LODs for this particular bitmap. This is really only useful for skinners who only want to deal with injecting one texture, or people doing machinima. If you actually want to do this to every texture, the Machinima Companion [Hack #77] is your friend.
Once you have made your changes, inject the texture back into the map, sign your map [Hack #53] , and transfer it back to your Xbox [Hack #54] . Now you can be sure that you will always see the high-resolution version of the texture.
Improve Your View of the Battlefield
Use this hack to alter your field of view.
The Field of View (FoV) is the angle of your perspective in the game. By default, Halo 2 presents a 70-degree FoV. However, using a hex editor [Hack #54] , it is possible to alter this value.
Halo 2 .MAP files store the FoV value in radians—70 radians equals the value 1.221730471. To alter the default FoV value, open up your map file in a hex editor. Search for the number 1.221730471 and replace it with a different value. In this example, you will use 1.6 (i.e., 90 degrees).
Tip
When you use the find feature in the hex editor, you will need to select the float type. The easiest way to change the value is to use the Replace All option (see Figure 10-7). However, if some other value that happened to match the FoV number, it would also be replaced. In other words, be careful with Replace All.
After altering the FoV, Sign your map [Hack #53] and FTP it to your Xbox [Hack #54] . Once you load your modded map, you will find that you can see a lot more of the arena (see Figure 10-8).
Customize the Halo 2 Splash Screen
Give your Xbox a personal look by changing the Halo 2 main splash screen.
Is the Halo 2 logo getting too boring for you? By editing mainmenu.map, you can create your own customized splash screen for Halo 2.
Open up a copy of mainmenu.map in Ch2r [Hack #51] and navigate to the [bmp] tags. Once you have found them, scroll through the lists until you find start_screen bitm (see Figure 10-9). Next, use Ch2r to extract this tag (see Figure 10-10). As with textures, the logo is a DDS file. After extracting the file, you can edit it using your favorite DDS graphics editor [Hack #72] .
Once edited, you need to inject the image back into the map (see Figure 10-11).
Remember to sign the mainmenu.map file [Hack #53] before you FTP it to your Xbox [Hack #54] . Once you start Halo 2, you can enjoy your custom start screen (see Figure 10-12).
Customize the Halo 2 Demo Videos
Use this hack to play your own videos as the Halo 2 demo.
Altering the Halo 2 splash screen is cool, but adding your own demos to the game is even better. Creating a custom Halo 2 video involves replacing the files in the bink directory. In this example, I will replace the video used in Halo 2’s attract mode.
To work with the BIK file format, you can use an application developed by Rad Game Tools. To download the program, visit http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm.
First, record your personal demo using your own capture technique. Once you have the video, open it in the RAD Video Tools program and click Bink It!. This will create a .BIK file based on your video (see Figure 10-13).
Once you have the file converted, simply change the name to attract_60.bik and transfer [Hack #54] it to the Halo 2/bink directory on your Xbox (see Figure 10-14).
After you transfer the Bink video to your Xbox, you just need to wait for the demo reel to run (see Figure 10-15).
Tip
If you want to add your own sound to your demo, you will need to do some extra work. First, highlight the file, and click Mix in sound. Next, add a hyphen (-) to the top box. This will erase the current sound from the file. You can insert your own sound by replacing the hyphen with the sound file you want to insert. Now select the file and click Play. This will play the new demo with your personalized music.