{"id":22773,"date":"2015-08-30T12:44:29","date_gmt":"2015-08-30T17:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/?p=22773"},"modified":"2015-08-30T12:44:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-30T17:44:29","slug":"halo-community-update-rigged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/?p=22773","title":{"rendered":"Halo Community Update: Rigged"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a reblog from Halo Waypoint:\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

By B is for Bravo<\/p>\n

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Hello friends! PAX Prime is upon us, which means that we\u2019ve got long days and long nights ahead, and hope to spend many of them with many of you. Due to the holiday weekend, we\u2019ve got a quick update this week, but we\u2019ll talk about a new Halo 5 Arena map, the latest MCC playlist update, and more.<\/p>\n

Before we move on, just yesterday, we brought Halo 5: Guardians to the ID@Xbox event at the Xbox HQ in Redmond, and it was a pleasure having some of you join us for the pre-PAX festivities. If you joined, you were likely able to snag some game time, plus limited edition Chief & Locke posters and pins from Frankie and Josh Holmes as well. We hope you had a great time, and we thank you for spending your evening with us. Let\u2019s do it again some time.<\/p>\n

Speaking of, we want to hook some Halo fans up with some last minute, surprise PAX badges. Whether you\u2019re local to Seattle, or are willing to hop on a plane in a moment\u2019s notice, just reply to the below on Twitter. We’ll be selecting and contacting winners this evening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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HFFL:<\/strong> I don’t know about you folks, but I sure wish I had tix\u00a0to go to this. One day….that’s what I keep telling myself anyway…<\/span><\/p>\n

As a reminder, we\u2019ll have 24-player Warzone goodness on the show floor in the Xbox booth all weekend long. We hope you swing by, say hello, and play some games.<\/p>\n

The Rig: a deep dive<\/h2>\n

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In this week\u2019s Halo Bulletin, Jay Fresh is showing off a bit more of the upcoming Arena map, The Rig, which you first saw at gamescom. The Rig, short for Mining Rig, is set on a planet called Meridian, which you\u2019ll learn more about in the near future. It\u2019s also one of our Pro Team\u2019s favorite maps, and one that we hope will become one of your favorites as well in just a few months\u2019 time. This week, I hung out with the team who made this battleground a reality, and they generously shared some fantastic insight and work-in-progress images from throughout the development process to shed some light on how the map came to be. Today, you\u2019ll hear from Mike Byron, Multiplayer Producer, Christopher Hands, Senior Environment Artist, and Adrian Bedoya, Multiplayer Level Designer. Let\u2019s get right into it.<\/p>\n

Mike Byron, Multiplayer Producer<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Rig was an interesting map. It was the first map that the Design team felt captured the mixture between old Halo map layout, and our new movement set introduced in Halo 5. It quickly became a favorite around the office during playtests for different modes and weapons. In fact, the Sandbox team even used the map as their primary test bed for all their weapon and ability tuning for much of Halo 5\u2019s development.<\/p>\n

Since we started later in development on the map, we had to make sure we built the map smartly and efficiently to allow enough time to hit the quality bar needed for the project. Chris Hands worked with the campaign teams to use Meridian\u2019s solid foundation, and benefit from all the lessons learned throughout their lookdev\/pre-production time. This allowed us to do a quick massout (where the art team roughs in all of the major shapes, themes, and ideas for the map), and cut down on our art development and iteration cycle.<\/p>\n

Chris and the Art team worked really hard with Adrian, throughout the process, to continually improve map layout and visual identification of key landmarks to help orient players. It was a map goal to stay as close to the block out as possible, due to the fact that it was an internally loved map played often, while still trying to push the theme of being on a giant moving facility and making all of Adrian\u2019s block out designs make thematic sense. We also tried to hide some fun little surprises around the map to let people discover once the game is out.<\/p>\n

Christopher Hands, Senior Environment Artist<\/strong><\/p>\n

For The Rig, our inspiration was industrial mining platforms combined with the crawler-transporter, so a combination of these two:<\/p>\n

\"rig1-727c1803f18f46da8d6c0a4e7f77705c\"<\/a>\"rig2-905bcbcc45924808ae4bcdea1f7fdf3a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The original pitch for this map was a large mining platform that is also a large vehicle that is mining on a sand-covered, desolate planet.<\/p>\n

Originally, I wanted the vehicle to be actively moving while the match is going, but we settled on having it stationary, so that we could have the drill actively mining instead. Since the vehicle no longer moves, we had to visually communicate that the players are on a giant vehicle so we decided to place other mining vehicles in the skybox.<\/p>\n

HFFL:<\/strong> Okay, that would have been uber cool to have this map moving.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

From there we had our concept team started on the \u201cvision piece\u201d for The Rig:<\/p>\n

\"rig-vision-260a5262ffee4fa5b602ff6ad727b04a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The \u201cvision piece\u201d for The Rig<\/em><\/p>\n

HFFL:<\/strong> BEAUTIFUL! Well, in an industrial sort of way…LOL.<\/span><\/p>\n

The vision piece for The Rig helped guide the environment, lighting and skybox teams. It also defined the buildings aesthetics which we kept throughout the level.<\/p>\n

But we still didn\u2019t have a clear idea of what the vehicle actually looked like, so we needed another painting to help describe the exterior and skybox:<\/p>\n

\"rig-concept-aa4291fdd89f4762b1a6f00a6e7277e7\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Exterior and skybox concept art<\/em><\/p>\n

HFFL<\/strong>: WOW! I’d love to have a poster of this! How about you???<\/span><\/p>\n

The Drill Pit really makes The Rig stand out, so we wanted to make it a unique and interesting area to fight in. The original design blockout only had a pit, so when we decided to add a giant drill we also needed players to be able to jump or interact with it.<\/p>\n

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The Drill Pit<\/em><\/p>\n

We settled on adding a platform on the top of the drill so that players can precariously jump from the catwalk onto the drill, and this is a concept of the final iteration of the drill:<\/p>\n

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Adrian Bedoya, Multiplayer Level Designer <\/strong><\/p>\n

Starting a new level from scratch is one of my favorite times during a project, a blank canvas where anything is possible. There are many ways to start a map, paper designs, picking a theme and building from there, or sometimes working it out in 3D. The Rig was one of those maps I decided to just go for in Maya (3D). Early on I usually don\u2019t worry too much about the theme or setting of the map when I\u2019m roughing in a layout, because my ultimate focus is fun and interesting gameplay spaces. The Rig in prototype form was codenamed Towers, because the main focus areas of the map were these towers in various areas of the map.<\/p>\n

One of the things I do on nearly every map I make is have defined materials for the upper and lower floors, walls and any accent pieces. I also do a very quick lighting pass to help define the areas. This is all helpful for playtests to help players orient themselves within the map.<\/p>\n

\"rig-prototype1-3bdf50c6dbd9467eae3eb82688109e8f\"<\/a>\"rig-prototype2-1c29bc002cca4b3c9da34a3a03715106\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Early on I wanted to create a map with a lot of interesting play around verticality and a map that took some time to learn all the best routes and flanking options. Once the block out is at a good place, we get into the engine, and we start play-testing as much as possible on it to get feedback. Maps always evolve and change over the course of a project and The Rig was no different. Although much of flow and layout of the final layout is very similar to the original block out, we tweaked and tuned many areas to improve on the design.<\/p>\n

Tower One\/Two<\/strong><\/p>\n

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One of the biggest changes was to the main Tower area next to Red Spawn. In the original, it was more of an open platform that was very difficult to fight against because of the lack of ways to grenade bounce. Red Spawn had also connected to the lower section of the tower, but we closed off the lower path and made it connect to the upper platform. This prevented people in the lower cargo area from jumping up into that path.<\/p>\n

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Final Layout of Tower One and Two<\/em><\/p>\n

Lower Dock<\/strong><\/p>\n

Next, we found that the lower dock area was too porous and offered players a bit too much escape, and we decided to close off this route.<\/p>\n

\"lower-dock-ef0b663e19b24afca43764b2b6a6678b\"<\/a>\"tower-one-two-final-128d04d6f613419fb0a364d36235b46f\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Block out and final layout of the Lower Dock<\/em><\/p>\n

Nest and Engine Two<\/strong><\/p>\n

During that same time, we tuned and reworked the Nest area on the more open half of the map. As we played the map more and more, we found we needed a route from Engine Two into the other side of the map, thus we added a catwalk and opened up a route to Nest from Engine Two.<\/p>\n

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Original and final layout for the Nest<\/em><\/p>\n

\"engine1-2451d8ae381d445c91b811bf4574afda\"<\/a>\"engine2-75488bc156b14d038f1290c82904017b\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Blockout and Final layout for Engine Room Two<\/em><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

About one year ago, and possibly more, I recall playing on the block out of \u201cTowers,\u201d and it\u2019s one of those multiplayer maps that\u2019s purely fun to jump around on, and one that should allow for some great routes and variety \u2013 but we\u2019ll let you be the final judges of that. It\u2019s exciting (and slightly crazy) to think that we\u2019ll be playing with you on this map in less than two months. I\u2019ll see you in the Drill Pit.<\/p>\n

Playlist Update<\/h2>\n

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Just yesterday, the playlist team pushed out the latest playlist update, which adds Infection. Many of you have fond memories of fighting off infected hoards, and we hope this playlist provides you with some brand-new variety. Additionally, based on feedback last week, we\u2019ll be keeping the HCS playlist around a bit longer, and retiring it a bit closer to the release of Halo 5.<\/p>\n

HFFL:<\/strong> Heh..and my more competitive friends were worried… See folks, 343 does listen to we fans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a quick recap of the changes that went into yesterday\u2019s update:<\/p>\n