Halo Map Tools V2.0 Readme [Introduction] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- HMT is an app designed to make Halo hacking easier. It is plugin based and can be easily extended to provide additional features. Currently, HMT supports the following for both XBox and PC: - Texture injection and extraction for DXT1, DXT2/3, DXT4/5, A8R8G8B8, X8R8G8B8, and A1R5G5B5 formats. - Texture thumbnail previewing. - Sound injection and extraction of both sound formats (Xbox ADPCM and Ogg Media). - Scenery, Vehicle, and PlayerSpawn placement and type editing. - Raw MetaData Injection and Extraction. - Easy editing of Index Data. - Offset swapping. - Batch resource extraction. [Instructions] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This application should be simple enough to use so I'm not going to hold your hand or anything... Open a map file and click on a tag to get started. If the tag has an editing plugin, then it will be loaded in the panel on the right. If not, only index tag editing will be available and the panel will remain empty. The following tags have plugins at this time: - bitm - scnr - snd! [FAQ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: I can't play some/all of the sounds! :( :( :( :( :( A: For the ADPCM files (.wav) you need the xbox adpcm codec, which I cannot supply. You need this codec for PC sounds as well - not just XBox sounds! Try asking around on IRC on some xbox hacking channels and someone should be able to point you to "the usual places" where homebrew xbox apps, utilities and things of that nature are found. Also, many of the PC sounds are OGG Media format, so you'll need that codec as well. It is open source and should be easy to find. Q: What is a DDS file and how can I view/edit it? A: DDS is a DirectDrawSurface file and is the standard directX texture file format. To view these files, I recommend the DDS photoshop plugin on NVidia's developer site. You can also use the DirectX texture Tool for viewing and converting to other pixel formats. Q: How do I hax0r Halo d00d??!!!? A: I dunno.. Besides, there's plenty of tutorial sites out there. I recommend Iron_Forge's excellent site @ http://forge.does.it Q: What's the password to decompress the RAR file??!! A: It's the first four letters of the names of the three people I thanked in this readme - lowercase. For example if I had thanked myself three times (which I should have hehe) the pass would be monomonomono Q: Why the hell did you put a password on it??!!!?! A: I saw someone else do it with their mod PPF and I thought it was brilliant. A great way to weed out the dumbasses that can't read the readme. I spent many hours on this release - you can spend a couple minutes (if that) to figure out the password. Q: The program crashes when I scroll through the bitmaps really fast :( A: This is a known bug that I haven't been able to fix yet. It will be fixed in an update - I don't want to hold out on releasing any longer. [Greets/Thanks] There's some great people involved with this scene. First I'd like to thank Iron_Forge. He helped me get started on adding Halo PC support by providing information about the changes in the map file format from the xbox version. He's also a great guy who doesn't hesitate to share his vast Halo hacking knowledge with the community. Thanks Iron! I'd also like to thank KornKob - he helped me get started with object placement by providing me the file structure for that section of the scnr tag. Without his help, HMT would have no placement abilities so thanks KK! Pfhorslayer started all of this and without him Halo Map Tools wouldn't be possible. He has shared his discoveries and code with all of the dev team from day one and has been there to answer our questions when we had them. And he also went through the trouble to make sure his code was cross-platform so that others could benefit from it! (he's not a Windows user). That's just awesome - Thanks Slayer! Greets to everyone in the scene and all the regulars in #halomods and #halopc on freenode. Enjoy the release! -MonoxideC ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Released October 22, 2003