Playing With Sharp Objects

[part1]

Welcome back! Sorry for the delay in modding tutorials. This tutorial
will include one of the most popular, and simplest, mods for Halo pc.

The ability to shoot rockets out of your assualt rifle! This one mod
can change gameplay completely. It would be even better if it had
infinite ammo, because we all know you will be using this weapon alot.

Well, I will also show you how to make the assualt rifle have infinte ammo
as well. So, you will learn how to create an amazing, always loaded,
never empty, vehicle flipping, rocket shooting assualt rifle.

Just like last time you will need the following tools:
Halo Mapping Tools v3.5 -
http://halomaps.org/index.cfm?pg=3&fid=1343,
60 plugins pack for HMT -
http://files.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=4198 ,
and a full version of Halo PC (buy it here if you dont have it)

REMEMBER TO BACKUP YOUR HALO MAPS!!!!!
If you mess up one of your maps and dont have a backup, then you will
have to go through a long reinstallation of halo pc. If you have your
maps already backuped skip this. If not then do this:

• To do this go to c:\program files\microsoft games\halo
• Copy all the masp from the MAPS folder
• Right click and create new folder
• Rename the newly created folder as BACKUPS
• Paste all the maps from MAPS into BACKUPS
• If you mess up one of your original maps in the MAPS folder, copy the same map from BACKUPS into MAPS, and it’s good!

Instructions for creating the Assualt rifle rocket launcher mod:
**note: everyonce in a while an error will come up saying “Error while
trying to update and write structure” just ignore it and hit ok.

1. Make sure you place the 60 hmt plugins in hmt’s plugin folder.
2. Open up hmt v3.5
3. Go to file > open > c:\program files\microsoft games\halo\maps (or whereever your halo directory is.
4. Open bloodgulch.map
5. You should now see a ton of options apprear on the left side of hmt.
6. On the left side, Resource Browser, where all the options appeared, look for [proj] projectile(21 items), open it.
7. You should now see a bunch of new options appear.
8. In these new options search for weapons\rocket launcher\rocket, open it.
9. Once that is open the right side of hmt should be filled with text boxes and numbers. We don’t have to worry about those. Back at the left side of the screen in the box towards the top called “Tag Information” is a button named “swap” next to that is a code. Copy that code.
10. Go back to the “resource browser” and look for weapons\assualt rifle\bullet, and look for that same little button named “Swap” under “Tag Information”. Paste the code we copied over the code currently in the text box.
11. Hit the “Save” (not save meta) button next to the “revert button” at this point the screen should flash little) Now the assualt rifle can shoot rockets, but we still have to make it have infinite ammo.
12. To make the assualt rifle have infinte ammo, go out of [proj] projectile(21 items)
13. Search for [weap] Weapon(20 items), open it.
14. Once it is opened search for weapons\assualt rifle\assualt rifle, open it.
15. Once again more options will appear on the right of hmt. Scroll down in the right box until you find “Magazines” and a box next to it, open that box and select “0”. The screen will flash and revert you bake to the top, just ignore this and scroll back down to “magazines”.
16. Change Rounds total initial, Rounds total max, and Rounds loaded max to 9999.
17. Hit the save button on the left side of hmt again. The screen will once again flash and revert you to the top. (ignore it)
18. Scroll back donw on the right side and look for “Triggers” and a box next to it, open the box and select “0”. The screen will revert back to the top, just scroll back down to “Triggers”.
19. Change both minimum and maximum spread to 0.
20. Change Projectiles fired to 2.
21. Change Rounds per shot to 0.
22. Hit the save button on the left side of hmt once again. (not save meta!!)
23. Go have fun blowing things up!

To summarize for the technical folks: Basically you just made the assualt rifle shoot rockets, and never run out. By coping and pasting the code from weapons\rocket launcher\rocket over weapons\assualt rifle\bullet you changed the projectile. The code you copied was the rockets code, so basically you are changing the code the game gets for the assualt rifle bullet to the rocket. By changing the Rounds total initial and rounds total max, you told it that you wanted to start with 9999 bullets in the gun and that the most ammo you could carry for it was 9999. Then you made it so that if you did have to reload you would reload 9999 bullets at once. After this you changed the minimum and maximum spread to 0 which made the gun super accurate. The bullets no longer fly this way and that. Changing projectiles fired to 2 means it will shoot 2 rockets at once, and rounds per shot to 0 means it wont use bullets!

I hope this tutorial helps you out in your halo pc modding experience!

-bigern1990 (p.s.- watch the video to see what you mod should do)

A number of parsing issues have always plagued Feed On Feeds and thus MonkeyChow. Sometimes odd characters in a feed would throw off reception of the feed. Feeds would not validate for silly (but valid) reasons like Feeds should not be served with the “text/html; charset=utf-8” media type. I would notice that Google Reader, MyYahoo and Bloglines had no trouble handling these feeds. In some unfortunate cases I would not notice that the feed was broken until I noticed that the age for the feed was way off. In some cases strange characters would appear in the middle of the feed title of body and would throw off the formatting of the whole page. Sometimes an unexpected character would cause Magpie to throw out feed items, so that I would miss announcements. Since I rely on only RSS for my web browsing and incoming information, this presented a real problem. I lived with it for a while since it was only a few feeds and the outages were intermittent, but as feeds have become more and more mainstream, more feeds were breaking or misbehaving.

A new RSS parser recently appeared on Digg, and I decided to investigate. It turns out that SimplePie is distantly related to Magpie, and does a much better job of handling all of the above problems, and it is actively being supported. At one point I misunderstood how I was supposed to use part of the API and I jumped onto the IC channel where someone was there to help. I spent the entire day breaking and fixing code, and was able to migrate all of MonkeyChow over to using SimplePie. In reality changes were minimal and most of that time was getting the API to do what I wanted in order to avoid changing the way MonkeyChow looked. Hopefully you will not notice that this backend functionality has been changed. As of this evening I can say that it works like a charm!! This is only available in the latest SVN release.

After seeing the great looking SimplePie demo, I’ve been inspired to start looking at the look and feel of MonkeyChow and will soon start coding to that. I hope to provide some “preferences” functionality here so that people can decide how they want their individual install to look. Eventually this will lead to multi-user capability.

I’m still waiting for help with translations, so if you are fluent enough to know when Babelfish is bing awkward, drop me a line. I will want to have a few of those translations done before I put out the next milestone release.

Another Yahoo service that I thought would be useful to have in RSS is Yahoo! Astrology. This is the type of thing that they should be offering, but it’s nowhere to be found on their site. So I decided to scratch my own itch and roll my own service. Admittedly, I am screen scraping their site’s horoscope page, but I have left attribution to their site in the feed. If you wish to republish this in any way and plan to filter that out of the content, please put the (Daily Horoscope from Yahoo Astrology through http://www.shokk.com) attribution somewhere on your site.

Copy one of the following URLs and add it to your RSS reader. Anything else will produce invalid output.

Update: This has been Dugg… Digg me here.

capricorn
aquarius
pisces
aries
taurus
gemini
cancer
leo
virgo
libra
scorpio
sagittarius