Halo 1 & 2 for PC
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Subject: No H2V Coop.
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For those of you who do not know, H2V will NOT feature Coop. Read here.

Written at 1up:

"The game also looks incredibly familiar -- the entire single game experience you know and love is right there, just like you remember it. Well, except for the omission of campaign co-op. Huh? Ferrealz? Sadly, the game will not allow PC gamers to hook up with friends for blasting back Covenant forces in tandem. Yeah, that's a little hard to swallow."


No online coop, this is not because Bungie or Hired Gun hates us, the engine just can't do it. One thing that confuses me though, is that even though they are spending so much time trying to even out the mouse and keyboard with the 360 controller, from what the have given us, there is no OFFLINE coop, some of us have some rather large screens, or at least a TV with a PC hookup, and I don't see how using something already a component of the game's engine would be so difficult it would have to be cut out. With all the talk about using a 360 controller as a lot of people's primary input, why not just let the other player use the keyboard and mouse?

I suppose that this would be a good question to ask Hired Gun, but seeing as the only place you really can leave a message for them is at IGN, they probably get a whole lot of messages from people stumbling accross it when seeing it at the top of the page. I would suggest, if possible, try to leave a message, I would certainly like some insight as to why one of the features which many peope regard as thier favorite, has been removed.

[Edited on 3/10/2007]

  • 03.10.2007 9:58 PM PDT
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Maw

I am stunned. I thought that there would be at least network coop.

  • 03.10.2007 10:05 PM PDT

I think Co Op for Halo would lag, and I don't know about you guys, but I really don't like having more then 0 other people at my desk with me, and I like having the full screen all mine so I can see things better, and I use the window mode with Halo, so I can keep a eye on the time, and it helps with a few other things...

  • 03.10.2007 10:09 PM PDT
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Maw

Aleph One was capable of coop, I don't think it could be the engine. Maybe it would need better hardware than they would ever put on the minimum requirements. More likely budget or time problems.

  • 03.10.2007 10:15 PM PDT
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Aleph one is an engine for marathon meant to get Marathon to work on other platforms. Different engine, different rules, plus, you need to remember that Marathon was built from the ground up to work on a regular computer, not an Xbox.

  • 03.10.2007 10:23 PM PDT
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Posted by: ROBO LEADER
For those of you who do not know, H2V will NOT feature Coop. Read here.

Written at 1up:

"The game also looks incredibly familiar -- the entire single game experience you know and love is right there, just like you remember it. Well, except for the omission of campaign co-op. Huh? Ferrealz? Sadly, the game will not allow PC gamers to hook up with friends for blasting back Covenant forces in tandem. Yeah, that's a little hard to swallow."


No online coop, this is not because Bungie or Hired Gun hates us, the engine just can't do it. One thing that confuses me though, is that even though they are spending so much time trying to even out the mouse and keyboard with the 360 controller, from what the have given us, there is no OFFLINE coop, some of us have some rather large screens, or at least a TV with a PC hookup, and I don't see how using something already a component of the game's engine would be so difficult it would have to be cut out. With all the talk about using a 360 controller as a lot of people's primary input, why not just let the other player use the keyboard and mouse?

I suppose that this would be a good question to ask Hired Gun, but seeing as the only place you really can leave a message for them is at IGN, they probably get a whole lot of messages from people stumbling accross it when seeing it at the top of the page. I would suggest, if possible, try to leave a message, I would certainly like some insight as to why one of the features which many peope regard as thier favorite, has been removed.


Online co-op is simply out of the question. It'd require a complete rewrite of the entire engine and network system. Offline co-op is still rediculous because it's called a personal computer for a reason. :\. The engine is very capable of offline co-op, it's simply a design decision for the game. Just as with custom edition, everything but the actual code splitting the screen will probably be there. I dont see why you're whinning about it. Unless you plan to get two people sitting in the same chair at a desk splitting a, on average, 17" monitor. You do remember there were problems with the HUD being incredibly difficult to read in splitscreen on small televisions right? The same problem would still be there, but instead of being unreadable, it'd just be too damned small to read

  • 03.10.2007 10:32 PM PDT
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Posted by: ROBO LEADER
Aleph one is an engine for marathon meant to get Marathon to work on other platforms. Different engine, different rules, plus, you need to remember that Marathon was built from the ground up to work on a regular computer, not an Xbox.


But its not exactly new, either. What I mean is the engine should be more than capable.

  • 03.10.2007 10:38 PM PDT
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I realise it is a design decision, but why? Like I said, some people have lage monitors, most PCs have output for TVs and newer TVs have imput for VGA cables, What if I have some company and want to play some Coop? Let's see, Halo 2 Xbox, or Halo 2 PC, which one do you think I would want to play, one that looks better and will let me use my mouse and keyboard, or one that looks so-so and leaves me stuck with a controller?

By the way, just so i don't have to deal with this argument later, you CAN use another keyboard and mouse as another imput device, just use some kind of imput emulator and have the computer see it as a controller.

  • 03.10.2007 10:49 PM PDT
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Posted by: ROBO LEADER
I realise it is a design decision, but why? Like I said, some people have lage monitors, most PCs have output for TVs and newer TVs have imput for VGA cables, What if I have some company and want to play some Coop? Let's see, Halo 2 Xbox, or Halo 2 PC, which one do you think I would want to play, one that looks better and will let me use my mouse and keyboard, or one that looks so-so and leaves me stuck with a controller?

By the way, just so i don't have to deal with this argument later, you CAN use another keyboard and mouse as another imput device, just use some kind of imput emulator and have the computer see it as a controller.


Support and resources. The reason they can get away with the things they've done to 'make it look better' is because it fits what they've tested. Do remember that a simply 800 x 600 resolution alone is more than six times the real estate of what the Xbox spits out.

Doing away with co-op is another thing they don't have to deal with during the port. It also frees up a large amount of resources, which allows them to force LODs to be set at ultra_high for the span of the entire sbsp and still have it run at a decent resolution on the 9800 for instance. If you want co-op to be included, that means you have about 1.8 times the information having to be processed and rendered.

Evolution has two maps in development right now with about as much content as would be with co-op . I can tell you it's simply nothing anyone other than a dev could love. Especially on those four gen-old cards that are the cutoff for Aero, such as the 9800 in my old rig.

  • 03.10.2007 11:38 PM PDT
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Posted by: Stealth_1000
I think Co Op for Halo would lag, and I don't know about you guys, but I really don't like having more then 0 other people at my desk with me, and I like having the full screen all mine so I can see things better, and I use the window mode with Halo, so I can keep a eye on the time, and it helps with a few other things...


He means lan, and how the hell do you play it windowed?

  • 03.10.2007 11:55 PM PDT
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I agree, Coop isn't really much of a big deal,as long as theirs multi online and single player then I wont be dissapointed!

  • 03.11.2007 9:43 AM PDT
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Why do all these Halo engines suck so badly that they can't put in online coop? I mean c'mon, Unreal was released 9 years ago and it supports online coop for up to 16 friggin players!

  • 03.11.2007 10:57 AM PDT
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Because Bungie wasted too much time on other stuff (that probably also got cut out) I'd say.

I'm pretty sure co-op was originally intended for H2, and that's perhaps why you need to sign out of XBL before split screen will work (might have been an easy way to cut it out).

  • 03.11.2007 11:05 AM PDT
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I still don't understand what the problem is because many older games support online coop (BF1942 for example).

I guess it isn't that big of a deal though, the H2 campaign sucks ass compared to H1's anyways, so I wouldn't play it but once.

  • 03.11.2007 11:18 AM PDT
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Heyyo,

As I posted in the other coop threads (oi, ya could've searched ya know, lmao)..

Halo2Vista WOULDN'T need a full engine re-write.. it just needs to support FakeClients... but what's a fakeclient? well, it's a computer-controlled npc for multiplayer gaming. HL1 had support for fake-clients, so svencoop was created.. Far Cry supports fakeclients so we see "Assault Coop" and the old coop mod that's outdated.. Source Engine supports fake clients so we see a dozen HL2 coop mods, and bots for HL2DM (RCbot2, still early developpment stages since fakeclient support in source engine is very limited), and CSS has official bots..

So yeah, fakeclient support = MPbots. Simple. If MPbots can be made, then the singleplayer ai could easily be ported to multiplayer since you just then need to tell the engine to update locations and behaviours of that bot to the server and then to other clients.

Halo1PC doesn't support fakeclients, BUT, via modded-maps, you can still tell the server to update the clients with the NPC's actions (just not very accurately..), thus you see multiplayer maps with very basic AI in them. So? what does that mean? if someone really tried, they could port Halo1PC maps to HaloCE (which has been done) and then make the map file do calls to update clients with the npc's, and you'd have basic coop... albeit, far from stable, and you'd probably have to rebuild the cutscenes or take them out to support multiple players..

Anywho, I'm sure since Halo2Vista is supposedly supposed to be easier to mod, a basic coop mod could be created. BUT, in order for it to truly succeed, the H2V engine, NEEDS to support fakeclients. If so? heck, we could even see a decent MP bot evolving from the community.

So yeah, I don't see all this talk about H2V's engine needing a rebuild, they just can't cheap out on fakeclient support, and their SDK would have to include full info on how to implement the bots. Of course, adding FakeClient support is easier said-than-done, but if HiredGun/Bungie/Microsoft wanted to make the H2V engine a very potent engine to mod and compete with the massive modding community following the Source Engine (used for HL2), this would help a lot.

  • 03.11.2007 12:04 PM PDT
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OH FREAKIN' WELL. No need to cry over spilled milk, or spoiled milk. So what?, I mean, ok, we STILL don't have Coop, but some of you seem really "stunned" about this. What else did you expect?

  • 03.11.2007 12:19 PM PDT

"Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop smokin'!"

The networking for co-op wasn't finished when Halo2 was propped for release by Bungie on the xbox. Not only would Hired Gun have to redo the networking to support a dedicated server architecture on PCs, but they'd have to finish networking code designed for a console system to then work on PC systems. Debugging and testing a dedicated server system made from the ground up would be a -blam!- by itself.
Think about how much longer the development process would be extended for finishing the design and code that was already started, then to test something that hadn't even been tested before (in its complete status) back on the xbox. Microsoft already couldn't release it with Vista's release, I don't think they'd allow something that could make it ship at the same time as Halo3 or even later.

  • 03.11.2007 12:39 PM PDT
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Posted by: Oni Ryu
Why do all these Halo engines suck so badly that they can't put in online coop? I mean c'mon, Unreal was released 9 years ago and it supports online coop for up to 16 friggin players!


exactly, and that was way back when 56K was like T3.

  • 03.11.2007 12:48 PM PDT
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Posted by: Oni Ryu
Why do all these Halo engines suck so badly that they can't put in online coop? I mean c'mon, Unreal was released 9 years ago and it supports online coop for up to 16 friggin players!


LOL!. You do know that the engine the Halo series has been developed on is one of the best engines out there? 16 player games is a design choice. It was done that way from a technological choice for the console, it was chosen for map design, and it was chosen simply because that's what they wanted.

I still don't understand what the problem is because many older games support online coop (BF1942 for example).

I guess it isn't that big of a deal though, the H2 campaign sucks ass compared to H1's anyways, so I wouldn't play it but once.

Those older games had online co-op in mind when they were developed. Halo 1 and Halo 2 didn't. You might not understand this, but the way Halo's multiplay works is completely different from the BF series.

Heyyo,

As I posted in the other coop threads (oi, ya could've searched ya know, lmao)..

Halo2Vista WOULDN'T need a full engine re-write.. it just needs to support FakeClients... but what's a fakeclient? well, it's a computer-controlled npc for multiplayer gaming. HL1 had support for fake-clients, so svencoop was created.. Far Cry supports fakeclients so we see "Assault Coop" and the old coop mod that's outdated.. Source Engine supports fake clients so we see a dozen HL2 coop mods, and bots for HL2DM (RCbot2, still early developpment stages since fakeclient support in source engine is very limited), and CSS has official bots..

So yeah, fakeclient support = MPbots. Simple. If MPbots can be made, then the singleplayer ai could easily be ported to multiplayer since you just then need to tell the engine to update locations and behaviours of that bot to the server and then to other clients.

Halo1PC doesn't support fakeclients, BUT, via modded-maps, you can still tell the server to update the clients with the NPC's actions (just not very accurately..), thus you see multiplayer maps with very basic AI in them. So? what does that mean? if someone really tried, they could port Halo1PC maps to HaloCE (which has been done) and then make the map file do calls to update clients with the npc's, and you'd have basic coop... albeit, far from stable, and you'd probably have to rebuild the cutscenes or take them out to support multiple players..

Anywho, I'm sure since Halo2Vista is supposedly supposed to be easier to mod, a basic coop mod could be created. BUT, in order for it to truly succeed, the H2V engine, NEEDS to support fakeclients. If so? heck, we could even see a decent MP bot evolving from the community.

So yeah, I don't see all this talk about H2V's engine needing a rebuild, they just can't cheap out on fakeclient support, and their SDK would have to include full info on how to implement the bots. Of course, adding FakeClient support is easier said-than-done, but if HiredGun/Bungie/Microsoft wanted to make the H2V engine a very potent engine to mod and compete with the massive modding community following the Source Engine (used for HL2), this would help a lot.


Easier said than done is correct. With motion prediction in PC/Custom Edition, any and all actors in a multiplayer scenario will not work. You might see it working on the xbox because it's running on the same processor/memory. And there are no commands for the server to update a client with an actors position and actions. The very nature of Halo's AI is against it. Why do you think fights never happen the same way in Halo except for a few in the first level? Also, there simply aren't any calls the server can make to inquire the location and state (other than dead/alive) to send to clients. It's been looked into and it can not be done without rewriting the entire engine to accommodate it. Even if you did that, you'd have a latency/bandwidth issue.

  • 03.11.2007 1:00 PM PDT
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This was pretty much what everybody already thought when Halo 2 Vista was announced.

  • 03.11.2007 1:18 PM PDT
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Posted by: Omnios
Posted by: Oni Ryu
Why do all these Halo engines suck so badly that they can't put in online coop? I mean c'mon, Unreal was released 9 years ago and it supports online coop for up to 16 friggin players!


exactly, and that was way back when 56K was like T3.


LMFAO.

  • 03.11.2007 1:43 PM PDT
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Please, do not bring up PC games with online coop. Those games were built from the ground up on a PC, not an Xbox, and were made with coop in mind. I tried to make the point that online coop is just not going to happen in my first post. My question, in a nutshell, is why is there no offline coop? Zeph says it is about resources, I do understand that it would require more resources to render two screens at once, I understand that, but if you have what Vista requires to work optimally, that really shouldn't be much of an issue. I simply want to just be able to play with my friends on campaign, I do not own an Xbox, or a 360, but my friend does, and both of us prefer to play coop rather then single player, so why cut it? Sure, you can push some more graphics on older hardware, but when at the same time you are taking out a core element of the gameplay, you are making a poor compromise.

  • 03.11.2007 2:14 PM PDT
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Heyyo,

Posted by: ROBO LEADER
Please, do not bring up PC games with online coop. Those games were built from the ground up on a PC, not an Xbox, and were made with coop in mind. I tried to make the point that online coop is just not going to happen in my first post. My question, in a nutshell, is why is there no offline coop? Zeph says it is about resources, I do understand that it would require more resources to render two screens at once, I understand that, but if you have what Vista requires to work optimally, that really shouldn't be much of an issue. I simply want to just be able to play with my friends on campaign, I do not own an Xbox, or a 360, but my friend does, and both of us prefer to play coop rather then single player, so why cut it? Sure, you can push some more graphics on older hardware, but when at the same time you are taking out a core element of the gameplay, you are making a poor compromise.[/quote]
Yo robo, ever heard of good ol' Serious Sam 1st and 2nd Encounters? (not Serious Sam 2) cause SS 1st & 2nd Encounters supported up to four freakin' players split screen on the same PC! It was awesome playing with buds. 2 USB keyboards and mice, and 2 gamepads. Hella-crazy fun on the laptop at school with buds during breaks, lmao. Hell, even online was badass cause of this.. that's right, when you join a server, it asks you how many on this comp wanna play, so you can do 4 pc's with 4 players on each... mucho-crazy..o..... well, you get the idea. ;)

Sadly, like Halo1 and 2 for PC, Split-screen gaming on Serious Sam 2 was cut out for time-restraints on release and graphics abilities...

Posted by: Zeph
Posted by: Oni Ryu
Why do all these Halo engines suck so badly that they can't put in online coop? I mean c'mon, Unreal was released 9 years ago and it supports online coop for up to 16 friggin players!


LOL!. You do know that the engine the Halo series has been developed on is one of the best engines out there? 16 player games is a design choice. It was done that way from a technological choice for the console, it was chosen for map design, and it was chosen simply because that's what they wanted.

Halo engine for xbox was plenty amazing yeah, but due to time-restraints on the PC version, it didn't turn out as good. Still good, but not great.

I still don't understand what the problem is because many older games support online coop (BF1942 for example).
Battlefield1942 had fakeclient support, thus, bots for multiplayer.


Easier said than done is correct. With motion prediction in PC/Custom Edition, any and all actors in a multiplayer scenario will not work. You might see it working on the xbox because it's running on the same processor/memory. And there are no commands for the server to update a client with an actors position and actions. The very nature of Halo's AI is against it. Why do you think fights never happen the same way in Halo except for a few in the first level? Also, there simply aren't any calls the server can make to inquire the location and state (other than dead/alive) to send to clients. It's been looked into and it can not be done without rewriting the entire engine to accommodate it. Even if you did that, you'd have a latency/bandwidth issue.

multiplayer ai could easily have been done with halo1, once again, would need proper fakeclient support, and fakeclient's, if done correctly, take next-to-no bandwith. If you ever tried Quake3Arena with bots on a server, they take maybe half the amount of bandwith of players, if even half, probably more like 1/4th the bandwith of a player, cause bots are more predictable to the game than players cause no matter how advanced they are, they are still done by script, unlike players which the server needs to interpolate their actions in order for it to be as smooth as possible gameplay. For re-writing the engine, once again, doesn't need to happen, they just need to add onto the engine. They need to add proper fakeclient support. Halo2 has moving conveyor belts in multiplayer, but I'm unsure if it has elevators, if not, then they would probably have to add code to properly synchronize elevators incase a level requires one like the Halo campaigns have, otherwise those would be lag-tastic like the Doom 3 coop mods (then again, the Doom3 Netcode is hella worse than HaloPC's netcode... default is 4 player deathmatch and it's still a 4 player lag-fest by default..).

Speaking of Doom3, it had fakeclient support too. The bot's weren't built for multiplayer. And the game didn't have proper elevator (moving parts of level) syncrhonization abilties, and Doom3's ai was pretty random as fights weren't always the same, and it still managed to crank out some coop mods, it just required a lot of work to re-write parts of the AI's code to attack multiple targets, and levels had to be modded and rebuilt to support multiple players ( like Half Life 1 and SvenCoop, AI was modded, and some levels had to be rebuilt). So yeah, I don't really care that Halo2Vista won't support online coop, but if they gave us the full support tools for us to make it, we could easily see a good 3rd party mod for coop.

  • 03.11.2007 5:19 PM PDT
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Christ people, we've known about this since November. Why is it such a big surprise all of the sudden?

  • 03.11.2007 5:21 PM PDT
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Oh NO! There is no coop! It's just like Halo pc all over again! What is the world coming too!!!

  • 03.11.2007 5:25 PM PDT

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