Warren is a Halo Custom Edition map originally created for the Halo Modding Reclaimers Discord server's season 2 map contest. Its environment takes visual inspiration from the 343 Guilty Spark campaign mission and is set somewhere nearby.

Warren is based on contest layout #3 designed by Blaze Lightcap. Compared to the warren_beta.map released for the contest, this final version has received a few minor layout changes, lightmap fixes, and improved netgame flag/equipment placements. The map plays best with 8-12 players and supports all gametypes.

Thanks to the Refined project contributors, Jesse for the high res HUD, and General_101 for the JMS exporter!

The Halo Editing Kit (HEK) is required to build this map. In order to compile Warren from tags, its tagset must first be assembled. Paste the following tagsets into the HEK's tags folder, replacing files as needed, in the order shown:

1. HEK base tags: Already included in the HEK, but you may want to repair them if your tagset is dirty or corrupted.
2. Fresh MP/SP tagset (Refined Project): A more complete tag set extracted from Halo's stock maps.
3. Jesse's high resolution HUD: A higher quality player HUD by Jesse, found under enhancements.
4. The tags included in this repo.

If you have done this correctly, you should be able to build the map cache using Tool:

# creates maps/warren.map
tool.exe build-cache-file levels\warren\warren

Final lightmaps were run with quality and stop parameters: 1 0.01.

Rebuilt versions of this map which aim to be multiplayer-compatible should forge their CRC32 checksum to 0x7ADF1DB3 (invader-build can do this).

Source assets are also included under this repo's data folder. You can use the included Python script to synchronize data and tags from this repo to/from the HEK if you want to keep its files separate:

python hek-sync.py <hek-root>

Texture sources are .kra files for the free 2D software Krita. They are exported to flattened .tif files and then compiled to .bitmap tags using Tool.

The map's BSP was made in Blender and exported to JMS using General_101's Toolset. It contains the following objects:

• frame: Only children of this reference frame are exported to the JMS file
  • bsp: Main level geometry
  • fog: Contains plane which is assigned a fog volume in Sapien
  • playerclip: Contains player-only collision surfaces meant to stop players from going out of bounds
  • portals: Geometry which divides the map into clusters for rendering, sound, and weather purposes
  • weatherpoly: Contains weather polyhedra for masking cluster weather particles under overhangs and indoors

This map and its sources are shared under CC BY-NC 4.0. Feel free to remix or redistribute for any purpose as long as there's attribution and your derivatives are non-commercial.