Advanced Spawning Guide

Greetings! Today we have a very informative article for all you forgers out there, written by MrGreenWithAGun. Before I go on I should let you know that this isn't a particularly easy read, but if you have the patience to sit down and take it all in, you'll find the info presented in this article to be of incredible value. Green goes in-depth with Halo 4's spawning system, providing proof of his tests and detailed results. So if you're looking to master the art of spawning for your next map, be sure to check this out!

Spawning: Discovering the Weights - MrGreenWithAGun

Here's a little snippet to wet your pallete:
Cataloging the relative influencers of the Spawn Engine for Halo 4 is a dramatic turn for me to make, having witnessed endless fails and having preached the futility of doing so with Reach. But a claim that it is possible having been found true (to a point) piqued my interest to write this article. Though the tests are a bit complicated, the relationships between the influencers can be effectively reduced to a single graph. And knowing these relative weights can help forgers understand the spawning behavior and help them design their spawn layouts more knowledgeably.
Thanks for reading! Peace out dudes.
o/
 
Wow, really impressed. I haven't seen anything like this since Devinish took on spawning in H3.

For those who can't make it through all this (and as explained in the intro), here is the heart of the article, and all that a forger really needs to get out of this. It's the approximate, relative weights of all known spawn influences:
Mr. Green said:
  • Enemy Proximity: roughly -20 out to about 9 units away, then mimics negative Ally Influencer to about 25 units away.
  • OddBall: -5 out to 12 units, then drops to 0 for a total radius of about 15 units.
  • Enemy LOS: around -2 to -3, depending upon the weapon
  • Ally Death (and probably Suicide as well): -2 at center of death, drops off to 0 after 12 units away.
  • Anti Respawn Zone: -2
  • Weak Anti Respawn Zone: -1
  • Weak Respawn Zone: +1
  • Ally Proximity: a little more than +3, slow drop off to 0 around 25 units.
  • Respawn Zone: +14
  • Enemy Death, Ally LOS, Ordnance Drops yields no influence.
  • Imminent Danger is extremely strong and extremely short lived.
  • There has never been a Halo title that has demonstrated dynamic zone influence.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Titmar and Wakko45
The big one to pay heed to is the radius of influence for enemy proximity. That coupled by the massive negative influence (in relation to other influences), makes it extremely easy for players to consciously influence spawns on a map. A great way to work with this is to spawn 4 hill and set them to a 9.5 radius and gauge how players can influence spawns on a map. You'll be hard pressed to design a map that does not have some form of a spawn trap, but so long as the map is segmented enough to prevent more than one or two players make having line of sight to the trap, it shouldn't be a problem... Depending, of course, on how easily the trap is set up...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Titmar
Oh, I'll definitely take a look at this. I've always had spawning logic problems on my smaller maps concerning spawn trapping.
 
Awed by the time and intensity it takes to look so closely at a game from outside its own design & development team. Mr. Green = Devotion.
 
This is beautiful... :') Hopefully I can put this information to good use! Thanks a lot for sharing!
 
Interesting but I mainly do smaller or medium maps.

The guide doesn't really apply to a certain map size. Everyone is encouraged to read! It's actually especially beneficial when it comes to 1v1 or 2v2 maps, when spawn trapping is more likely to be a problem.
 
Just read through the whole thing, not being able to understand half of it. I think I'll read it through again tomorrow.

I'm really impressed by the work that's gone into the article, and Mr Green should definitely be recognised for his work. This certainly will help me in my (hopefully) more complicated future maps, as well as every other Forger out there.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ormy96
Thank you all for your kind words. Let me say that I just updated the article with a revelation on the LOS bug and the influence it produces. And this type of misinformation that I presented before is EXACTLY what I was referring to when I said I had ventured into waters I don't believe anyone should ever wade into. The following is part of my update.
28 Jan 2013 Update:
I want to update this article with new information about the LOS Influencer. It turns out that the tests I conducted were concealing the true and typical influence produced by the LOS Influencer, that the test configuration I describe for most of my testing did not take into account what was known before as the LOS bug. (Honestly, I wonder if it is a bug after all, given what I learned here today.) I describe my new findings below under the LOS Influencer section, but I want to take a moment here and repeat that it can be damaging to one's reputation to put an article like this together, since there is a heavy reliance upon empirical evidence rather than solid original source. And as I show in this particular update, I simply didn't think that adding a third Respawn Point to the test would have altered the value of the LOS Influencer, let alone from -3 to off the charts beyond -300.
This potential for great misinformation is the nature of empirical evidence. The sample points represent only a very narrow set of configurations that we can think to try out. They don't tell us how the Spawn Engine handles every situation, and thus when unexpected behavior occur, we wonder if the model presented (as in this article) is even close to reality, or what? That is where the author's credibility takes a beating.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ormy96 and Tedium