Q: Where are the new videos of testing gameplay?
A: Right here. 

Here’s some gameplay on a new forge map made by Clutchism. We’ve shown you a lot of gameplay videos of various games played on newly created forge maps, but one thing we haven’t really show much of is an in-depth look at how to actually use the new forge. Clutchism has recorded the full 1.5 hour forging session of the making of this map so you can see exactly how the new Forge is used. We will show this full 1.5 hour video in the next (and hopefully last) pre-0.6 blog post. We’d show it now, but YouTube will still be processing it for another day or so.

Here’s a game on “Valhalla Dusk”, a dimly lit variant of the map at dusk in which you can see the beautiful stars overhead. (Courtesy of J)

Here’s a game on the foggy, snowy guardian that I posted a picture of in Part 1 of the blog post:

This last one’s just for fun. A week or so ago, there was a post on the /r/haloonline subreddit titled "The Ball Room on the pit”. During testing, we played 3-team Oddball, and I happened to capture the madness that goes on in the “Ballroom” during oddball matches. It also shows dead bodies being violently thrown around by explosives :) : 

Happy Holidays! I know, I know, we didn’t make a blog post last week. It’s the holiday season, and just like you, we’ve been spending time with with friends and family, which takes much greater precedence over this game. We do, however, have plenty to update you on. 

Bug Fixes since last week:

• Reverted bitmaps that cause freezing crashes from mipmap errors. (These were the main crashes mentioned last week)
  
• Base map variant files have been updated (Weapon placements, spawn zones, ect)
• Fixed Beam Rifle spread. (We accidentally had made it extremely innacurate. Oops.)
  
• Cached infoserver response data every 5 seconds. (Increases performance)
• Added push-to-talk noise toggle to settings
  
• Fixed some server variables not being written to preferences file.
• Removed headshot sounds and effects.
  
• Enabled always ragdoll on death 

The AMD Freeze

As you may have seen from my Reddit post this week, we needed a bit of help from the community in getting testers with AMD cards to help us figure out the issue that causes the game to freeze; It’s easily the most complex issue we have come across in a long time. 

The process: Much of the rendering engine was stripped out. There was No lighting, no shadows, no effects, no water, no shield impact, no glass, no effect particles, no contrails, and the list goes on and on. With these features stripped out, unsurprisingly, the freeze did not occur anymore. Over the course of three days, these render features were slowly re-enabled one by one and tested in isolation. After many many hours, finally, the problem revealed itself in contrails.

What are contrails? Contrails are mostly used for trails on bullet projectiles e.g. sniper tracers. Many people have said that they believe it happens when they explode something, which actually turns out to be true. They are in-fact used on explosives. Here you can see contrails created from a fusion coil exploding:

The solution: With these contrails disabled, we’ve had zero reports of any freezing. It has been tested extensively by at least 30 people for hours at a time. While disabling these contrails, fixes the issue, it is not ideal. Particularly the sniper tracers as that directly affects gameplay, and could be said to give an advantage to non-AMD users. Fortunately, only the beam rifle seems to have this issue. We will continue to search for the exact cause and try to save these contrails for AMD users, but it’s proving to be very difficult. The exact cause of what makes the device crash has yet to be determined.

However, we would like to thank you, the community, for helping us out with this. Over 50 community members volunteered their time to help us figure this thing out. There are many people we’d like to thank, but we’d especially like to thank a few of our testers, Rex706, Xennma, and JeBobs, who dedicated countless hours working directly with unk_1 trying to narrow down the cause. 

Q: Why haven’t you released yet? What is preventing you from releasing right now?

1. The new updater has made some more progress, but is not finished. We feel very strongly that an intuitive, bug-free, one-click updater is crucial to be included with 0.6. We still need to implement the ability for it to self-update, as well as skin the UI. Our estimate is that 15 development hours remain on it. 
2. As mentioned above, since the AMD freeze cause has been narrowed down to contrails, we need to finish up fixing it. 

And that’s pretty much it. The AMD Freezing issue was never a must-finish for us, but now that contrails have been identified to be the culprit and we are closer now than ever to having it fixed, we will fix it. Worst case scenario is that we have to add a setting to remove the offending contrails for AMD users. But releasing a game that doesn’t run on a GPU that holds 15% of the GPU market share while a fix is nearby would be pretty foolish.

Q. I want to see more cool 0.6 gameplay. Where is it?

A. Right here, of course.

You know that big crater off in the distance on Diamondback? Well I made a griffball map inside of it. Here’s Craterball: 

We did some more experimental gametypes. Here’s gameplay of an 8-team Multi-Team game (2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2) of King of the Hill. It was madness.

Here’s some gameplay of ‘Matador’ on ‘Valor Dome’ - a new forge map made by Rex706 and recorded by Xennma 

Here’s Anvil Royale on Wasteland - a new forge map made by Rex706 and recorded by J. (Ignore the incorrect time remaining on the vote screen, it’s been fixed)

Here’s some CTF on Diamondback (recorded by Rex706)

Rex706 also made a cool Dodgeball map, with both night and day versions. I don’t have much for gameplay, but here are a couple of pictures and a gif of it:

I’ve been messing with the flycam and adding more fine-tuned controls to adjust movement, look, and up/down speed on the go using the triggers. This allows for better cinematic shots for people who like to make videos. (cough trailer cough).

Conclusion

And there you have it. We would have loved to get 0.6 out the door by the end of the year, but unfortunately it just wasn’t in the cards for us. Hopefully, there will only need to be one or two more of these blog posts. Thanks for being patient. We’re just as ready and excited as you are to for this to be released. 

Til next time, 
Rabid

It’s only been a week, but a lot has gone on since our last update post. We fixed some important bugs, fixed some bugs we didn’t even know we had until this week, and also managed to implement a couple cool new features into the game. I’ll start by listing some of the bug fixes that have occurred, then revisit last week’s question: “What is preventing you from releasing right now?”

Bug Fixes since last week: 

• The awful CEF lag that affected UI screens and caused the scoreboard to stay on your screen 3+ seconds after spawning has been fixed.  
  
• Sniper Headshot medals have been fixed.
• Fix shield impact not honoring camera fx bloom. (This was causing it to be impossible to see your enemy’s shields drop/charge when playing on night maps.)
  
• Ragdolls falling through forge objects has been fixed. (All death animations now use H3 ragdolls)
• Dedicated servers occasionally getting stuck back at the main menu has been fixed. 
• Melee damage acceleration has been fixed. (items not moving when you melee them.) Here’s before, and here’s after. 
  
• Active Camo view model clipping has been fixed.
  
• As bug where you sometimes had to crouch in order to capture a flag. (The reason was because the player’s feet fell under the zone’s bottom which is almost always 0. When you crouched, it raised you and allowed you to capture) This has been fixed. 
• A couple of misc crash fixes.   

Q: Why haven’t you released yet? What is preventing you from releasing right now?

1. We’re still working on that new updater. It’s not 100% finished/tested. 
   
2. Crashes. There are still a couple of crashes left to fix. We have a few of them tracked down and the root cause identified, we just need to decide on the best way to fix them.  

There are also a couple of issues that are not preventing us from releasing, but we’d like to knock em off of the list if we can. 

1. AMD Freeze issue. Unk_1 has been hard at work on this one, and one of our testers has a card that we can reproduce the issue with. Great progress has been made, but it’s not fixed yet. It’s a very complicated issue. 
2. The Veto UI needs a few tweaks to make it more clear to the player how it works, as it has been a little confusing for our testers.  (For example, showing the remaining votes needed to pass), and some sort of legend telling them how to veto. 

Q: How long will these things take to finish?

A. Same answer as last week. As you can see, the to-do list is now half the size. We’re nearly there. 

Q: Do you have any new feature additions to tell us about?

A: Yup. 

Here’s some of the new additions/changes since last week. 

• The new Forge UI was finished and pushed by unk_1, and a few bugs for controller users were found and fixed. There’s a video of it in last week’s post. 
• Team properties have been added to forge screen FX - For example, you could use this apply a sepia filter on an infection map that only applies when you’re a zombie. Here’s a short video demonstrating this. 

Unk has also written a map converter that converts Halo 3 map variants directly to 0.6, 1:1. 

• Any map variant from Halo 3 that has a base map that is included in 0.6 (everything in 0.6 except for Icebox, Reactor, Diamondback, and Edge) can be converted.  
  
• It will also be able to convert 0.5.1.1 forge maps to 0.6. 
• It will be open source and available upon 0.6′s release. 

Note: While being able to play on some classic Halo 3 custom maps will be fun, 0.6′s new forge will allow you to create maps that will make Halo 3′s custom maps seem like absolute rubbish in comparison. Most of maps that will be used in 0.6′s ‘Official’ ranked servers and playlists, however, are converted directly from Halo 3′s Matchmaking playlists. 

Q: What are the ranks I see in the scoreboards?

I’m changing the way that Halostats’ global ranking system works when played on 0.6′s ‘official’ servers to be more similar to Halo 3′s ranking system. There will be an EXP component that will work exactly like Halo 3′s did. But instead of having trueskill ranks, which only work well with Matchmaking, you’ll have a skill rank for each playlist that will come from my hybrid system. 

This rank is an arithmetic progression function of XP - awarded or deducted per game, based a number of factors, including team performance, individual performance, your own current skill rank, and you’re enemies skill ranks). Just like H3, your global rank that you see in the scoreboard will be determined by a combination of your EXP and your highest skill rank. You can read up on Halo 3′s ranking system for more information. 

Q: Where are the new 0.6 gameplay videos that have been taken since last week?

A: Right here.

Here’s some gameplay of Braains on ‘Tree Rot’, converted directly from the classic H3 forge map. This also showcases the scoreboard working correctly for multi-round games:

Here’s a game of CTF played under the stars on Cenotaph (Forged by Dok)

Here’s some gameplay on a dark and snowy Icebox: 

Here’s some Multi-Team gameplay on Narrows, showcasing some of the performance increases, including the scoreboard lag and fps increase. Also showcases some more dual-wielding and equipment usage. 

Here’s a game of Crazy King played on a more polished version of Warlock, forged by Clutchism. (And won by yours truly. Well, almost won. We tied.)

Late again, but late’s better than never. It’s been 11 days since our last update, so we’d like to fill you in on what has happened since the last update, as well as give you an accurate depiction of what work needs to be completed before we release 0.6.

Q: Why haven’t you released yet? What is preventing you from releasing right now?

A:  During our last large-scale testing session, a couple rather important issues showed up that we didn’t see in our previous test sessions due to those usually being smaller-scale tests.  I’ll highlight the remaining things that need to be finished before we release. 

1. We’re working on a new updater. While it’s very close to being finished, it’s not 100% finished/tested.

2. When lots of players are in the game (13-16), the UI elements rendered with CEF (Scoreboard, medals, chat) can become very laggy, and cause some pretty bad fps drops on anything other than high-end rigs. For example, when you die and the scoreboard pops up, sometimes it would stay on the screen for an additional 2-4 seconds after you spawned, preventing you from seeing where you’re going. Obviously this is not good. Note: The videos posted below are from a higher end rig where the issue is not as prevalent.

We’ve narrowed down the culprit, which is the method and frequency at which we’re sending information to the scoreboard layer that’s eating up a huge amount of CPU, and are working (with promising results) on a fix which will resolve this. 

3. Crashes. We’ve gotten most of the crashes fixed, but there are a couple remaining that we’re finishing tracking down. 

4. We’re putting some final touches on UI elements, including the forge UI (which a video of is posted below).

Q: How long will these things take to finish? 

A. Honestly, not long. I know we sound like a broken record at this point, but we are very close. The end is in sight! 

Q: Do you have any new features or gameplay to show us?

A: Yup. 

The almighty unk_1 has been hard at work doing more badass stuff with forge. The forge UI got a pretty hefty (and awesome) overhaul. Here’s some of the changes:

• All lists now supports LT/RT, PAGE UP/DOWN page scrolling
• Loading/saving prefabs from within the UI
• Tool Settings
• Material thumbnails
• Quick search now allows spaces in the query
• Recently used items
• Recently used materials now supports colors
• Object properties color pickers
• Engine flags/gametype options allows you to select which gametypes an object will be spawned in. Useful to reducing the number of spawn points needed to facilitate multi-gametype maps.

Here’s a video highlighting some of these features: 

Some other things that have been done/fixed since the last post:

• Hitmarkers can be enabled/disabled on a per-server basis. You can also choose to disable hitmarkers if the server has them enabled. 
• Active Camo movement penalty is fixed. 
• Overshield decay is fixed. 
• Added controller support for right-click mute/unmute options in scoreboard 
• H3 landing responses - removed camera shake when landing.  
  
• Multiple crashes have been tracked down and fixed. Also, you know the infamous bug many AMD users have where the game doesn’t crash but the screen completely freezes, and you can still hear sounds? It’s a very complicated issue, but we think we’ve found the culprit and are confident we’ll be able to fix it. 

Gameplay:

Here’s a video (courtesy of tester RabidEskimo) of a match on a variant of The Pit that I made that has a bunch of forge lights and map modifiers placed. 

We also experimented with some new gametypes. Here’s a Big Team Multi-Team match (4x4x4x4) on Standoff Heavy. It was kind of a Cluster-Fuck.

Here’s a match of 2 Flag Heavy on Valhalla:

Here is a video of an assortment of gameplay on forge maps (courtesy of Clutchism):

Since each post only allows 5 videos to be attached, here’s a part 2 with a couple more gameplay videos. 

Here’s some footage of a Big Team Slayer game played on a forge map name “Offhand”, created by Clutchism:

Here’s a video showing the overshield decay and Active camo movement fixed:

ScooterPSU’s previous blog post did a great job of answering some of the questions you guys have been asking. Before I go into some of the features I’d like to highlight, I’d like to clarify some things and add some points to a couple of the questions: 

Q: Don’t you think it’s sort of a dick move waiting until the end of Sept to announce an “indefinite” delay on the update?

Scooter’s Answer: “We absolutely thought, at the time, that the end of Sept was a viable goal. Many of us pushed as hard as we could to meet it, but the result just wasn’t worth getting out there. Crashes, input issues, assorted bugs with all kinds of things. It was better than 0.5.1.1, but not at a quality level we felt comfortable releasing. For those of you that have been around, you remember that we needed a bug fix release pretty much immediately after every previous release. Descoping, the nVidia/AMD separate releases, so many big issues that needed immediate patches. Stuff like that scares the average user, and we don’t want to bring in people just to lose them again.”

Scooter’s answer is correct. it was myself who suggested we make the pledge (and who wrote the pledge in the post) to get 0.6 out before the end of September. I accept full responsibility that this was a poor choice of wording that lead people to believe it was a no-exception hard deadline. Serious issues came up that were both unforseen and extremely complicated to fix. Remember, we aren’t working with the engine’s source code, so every modification we make to it is not only time consuming and complicated, but also has the potential to introduce new issues. Releasing at the end of September would have resulted in a release no less buggy than the previous releases Scooter mentioned. For example, very frequent crashes, the scoreboard was broken for multi-round games, spawn zones were not working correctly, and the list goes on and on.

Q: What do you have left to fix?

(Rabid): The remaining bugs on the list are pretty low priority. As Scooter mentioned, what we’re focusing on now is hardening the game and trying to fix any remaining crashes. To give you an idea of how things are going - tonight, we had a testing session where for the very first time, neither the hosts nor any of the players had any crashes for the entire duration of the testing session. 

As for all of the other questions, Scooter’s answers were 100% on point, so nothing more needs to be said. 

Q: What is there for a ranking/progression system?

A: While forge and custom games will be the true bread and butter of 0.6, I’ve designed and implemented a ranking/progression system to fill the gap for the more competitive players. There will be a large set of ‘official’ servers that are running playlists identical or similar to what H3 used in their Matchmaking. These official servers fall under the category of Ranked and Social, while everything else is a custom game (Similar to how H3 did it). While stats from all games (even custom games) will be saved to the new halostats.click for archiving, Social and Ranked games will contribute towards your overall rank, which is the rank you see in the scoreboard in these videos. Example ranked playlists include “Lone Wolves”, “Team Slayer”, “Big Team Battle”, and more. Now since we don’t (currently) have a matchmaking system, my ranking system for 0.6 works a little differently than Halo 3′s did. You can think of it as a hybrid between Halo 3′s TrueSkill and Elo, and that’s all I’m going to divulge for now. :)

You will be able to browse the global leaderboards in-game with Halostats, as well as per-playlist leaderboards.  

Halostats also has an in-game server browser.  This server browser not only lets you see statistics of every player in each match, but you can also search for players to see which server they are playing on, so you can easily hop into the same game as your buddies.

While in-game, you’ll see a link at the top titled “My Stats”. Click this link to bring up your player page so you don’t have to search for yourself. 

Feel free to browse the new halostats that’s WIP (currently http://new.halostats.click)

Q: Show us some gamplay!

Here is some testing footage from a match from the “Lone Wolves” test server

Here is some footage from a dimly-lit blue guardian. 

Team Slayer on Warlock (Credits to Unk and Clutchism):

Team CTF on Warlock:

An image of a warm and cozy Valhalla lighting:

Adding/Editing light properties: