Today, Halo 5 forge was revealed. You can find a brief teaser video and an article from Josh Holmes and Tom French, the designer on H5 forge, on Halo Waypoint
here.
Alongside the big reveal was the announcement that five forgers were invited to the studio to see the new forge in action. I was one of them.
Forge Info:
The leap to Halo 5 forge is the biggest leap in forge history. Even the jump from H3 to Reach pales in comparison. Using a combination of community feedback and a desire to imitate professional developer tools, 343's forge team has rebuilt the forge toolset from the ground up. This iteration focuses on improving two key areas: capability and usability. The former involves
what can be built in forge, and the latter involves
how we build within the toolset. Below, you can find some highlights from Tom French about some of the key features which have made this vision of a more powerful forge a reality.
- Improved Control Scheme – Revised controls keeps users hands in the default “home” position so there’s less reaching for buttons which speeds up the building process. Don’t worry long-time Forgers, it took the Forgers we brought in a little bit to get used to but even the most hesitant were soon up and building maps at full speed.
- Multi-Select/Edit – Users can select and manipulate up to 64 individual objects at one time (more if combined with Groups); movement, rotation, property editing, everything you’re able to do to a single object.
- Free Camera – The camera no longer snaps to objects being edited. Users can freely position the camera to find the best vantage point to edit from. To orbit around selected objects like past Forges, simply click the right-stick to “lock on” to the objects and click again to cycle between multiple zoom levels.
The new controls did take some getting used to because buttons which had done the same thing since Halo 3 now had a different function. However, the new layout was intuitive and really maximized the control we had over the powerful tools. Each of us developed our own unique workflow, relying more heavily on some tools than others. This new forge really lets us build the way which works best for us.
- Grouping – Groups can be created dynamically with a single button press. Select more objects and press the button again to add to the group or press the button again to split the group up. It’s really that simple.
- Welding – Grouped objects can optionally be welded to their “parent” object. This allows them to all physically move around together; make a soccer ball with traffic cone spikes that rolls around, or attach a weapon pad to a larger animating object. Our producer Mike loves to remind Ben that this feature is so important to make some of our Arena map designs work that it is LITERALLY the reason he was brought aboard. Good thing it happened because Forge is better because of the addition of both!
The group function is one of the most important improvements to usability. This feature makes a group of objects perform as a single object. Groups are subject to all of the same manipulations available on single items. Welding makes a group behave as a single object in a physical sense. Yes, you can weld ten objects into one and have that object interact with your map on normal physics.
- 1600+ Objects – Take that in for a minute. Previous iterations of Forge had a couple hundred. Shaun, Randal, and Ryan on our art content team have been crazy busy building LOTS of pieces from primitive shapes, structure parts, accent pieces, detail props, and gameplay objects custom built for Forge. Mix them in with things like the weapons, turrets, and power-ups makes this Forge have pretty much the ultimate building block set you wished you had when you were eight years old. I’ve been working with our art lead Wade to try and squeeze in a few last assets before we’re done; that said we’re in pretty great shape.
- New Object Types – We’ve added lots of new types of object types to Forge this time; FX emitters, decals, invisible blockers (big community request), chroma screens for machinima makers, objects for building map intros/outros, and yes, even a large adorable whale toy that we love dearly.
- Projected Terrain Pieces – Our new terrain pieces sample textures from their position on one of our Forge maps which makes them blend in almost seamlessly with the prebuilt terrain of the level when you mix them together. Watching them move around the map for the first time generally breaks people’s brains for a few minutes because it looks like voodoo. I don’t think it’s actually voodoo but instead it’s a lot of complex graphics code which might as well be.
These are pretty self-explanatory. During our visit, we gave feedback on some of these objects and even talked the team into adding a few more, just for you.
- Multi-Budget System – Multiple budgets based on real engine systems; max object counts, memory, etc. This means when placing something like a large terrain piece, its large texture will only eat into the memory budget once, and additional same/similar pieces will only use up the object count budget because their shared texture is already loaded.
- Higher Object Count – We’ve increased the number of objects that can be placed in a Forge map to 1024. Higher object count allows for bigger maps with more detail than possible before.
- Soft Budgets – Some budgets are “soft” meaning they can be exceeded but will cause visual artifacts/anomalies. This lets you keep building around these budgets to find the fun, then come back later to fine tune things and make the map look prettier.
Vastly improving the capability front is the removal of arbitrary budget restrictions. That gives you the freedom to place a
lot of space whales!
Halo 5 will also ship with three massive canvases, each with three lighting modes. You can see the beautiful Glacier canvas below.
The new tools also give forgers unparalleled freedom to affect how their maps look with lighting adjustments, a massive suite of colors to choose from, and much more. Again, you can find all of these details in the blog post.
Halo 5's forge mode will not be shipping with the game in October but will rather celebrate its own release in December. This will ensure that the core game releases in a polished state, but lets the team take forge to its full potential on a separate timetable.
Community Forge Visit
It was a real pleasure to visit the studio. Meeting my friends
WARHOLIC and
The Fated Fire in person for the first time was very exciting, and I also became friends with
ducain23 and
NOKYARD in addition to the talented and creative people of the 343 forge team. We worked with designers, engineers, and artists as well as big names like Josh Holmes, Tim Longo, Quinn Delhoyo, and members of Pro Team. Each of us used the tools to build a new map which will be revealed before too long.
While we cannot divulge any information that was not revealed by 343i, we are happy to clarify on anything that has been revealed. A few of us will be doing an AMA on Reddit this evening which can be found here. You can also feel free to ask questions in this thread, but know that we cannot answer all of them.
What are you most excited about with Halo 5's forge?
