At long last, the 6.0 release of Forge World Ultimate is finished. Or at least, as finished as it possibly can be.
If you don’t care for all the info and stuff, you can download the finished map from the download portal here, or on Nexus Mods. If you do, however, care about some of the inner-workings and what exactly you can expect to find, keep reading.
What’s New
If you haven’t kept up with previous blog posts, the general gist of what this map is intended to do is provide a variety of new forge objects – with the goal being to allow for more creativity and detailed forge maps compared to what is normally possible.
Most of these objects come in the form of structure pieces – some custom, some taken from the Installation 04 firefight map, and some pulled forward from Halo 3.
Some of what’s included in the map includes, but is not limited to:
- Custom terrain pieces (Planes, Flats, Hills/Bowls, Ramps)
- Trees of all shapes and sizes
- Foliage
- New forerunner-themed objects created based on geometry from Installation 04 firefight map (cex_ff_halo)
- Sandbox and some Foundry forge objects
- Particle effects
- And more!
What’s Absent
Unfortunately, as mentioned in my previous post, some things had to be left behind for this release. The Editing Kit for Reach seems to have no known support for using shared cache files – something that the retail release of Reach (and every other Halo game) uses to avoid having copies of the same assets over and over across 20+ map files.
The mod tools do not have this ability – this issue, combined with a hard limit on how many tags a single cache file can contain, resulted in a lot of stuff that I wanted to include being left behind in favor of other content.
There’s no giant skybox ships this time around, nor are there any custom weapons or variants like I wanted to do. Sadly there just wasn’t room for all of it – and introducing them would have required cutting many of the new structure pieces instead, and I felt that the structure objects would be more useful overall. Having a giant ship in the sky is cool, of course – but for the purposes of mapmaking and forging, they can’t really do much other than look cool in the distance.
What’s Next
For now, I’m taking a break from Reach modding – if there’s any major bugs I’ll likely fix them, but I’ve got a game engine project as well as a Minecraft server that I need to run – and this map has taken a great deal of time and effort away from those.
What I may end up doing in the future, however, is attempting to make something similar to this for either Halo 4 or Halo 2 Anniversary Multiplayer once the tools for those release. If possible, I’d love to be able to bring Forge World (and its structure pieces) forward to H2A – though with the tools for H2A not even being out yet, it’s far too early to say how feasible that will be.
I do have other ideas for mods I’d like to make for Reach as well (still mostly forge-focused), but they’ll likely be a bit more focused than what this map was. This map has always been a weird one – attempting to shove in as much stuff as possible into a single map. Perhaps in the future I might look into making “themed” canvases, that introduce a single structure palette themed around a certain aesthetic – such as Covenant, UNSC, civilian, or whatever. Further yet, if there does indeed come a day where shared cache files can be created/used, then I may revisit this map yet again and make a 7.0 version that actually has everything I want it to have. But all of those are projects for another day – and for now, I’m happy with this.