Weekly update 2: Assault, King of the Hill and Saturday's playtest

Weekly updates now come out on Saturdays, the day of our playtest, so each one can tell you what's new and what we most need tested that evening.

This was a big week. Assault completes Halo CE's Standard game types, and 46 maps were updated to offer them. Until today nearly all of it had only run on one PC. We ran it between two of our PCs today and fixed what turned up, so this Saturday matters more than most.

Saturday's playtest

• When: Saturday, November 7, 6 PM MST
• Join us: the Discord event. Click Interested and Discord will tell you when it starts.
• Watch: twitch.tv/devnull9090

We play every Saturday at this time, so if you can't make this one, come to the next.

Before you join

1. Open the launcher early and let it update. It brings your mods to 0.46.4 and your maps up to date. This week's map updates come to about 1.5 GB if you have every map.
2. Install Yoyorast Island and check it says 2.7.1. Earlier versions don't have the map's gates and buttons.

What to test

We'll start on Yoyorast Island and work down the list. All of this needs real players, because bots can't hold a hill, carry a ball or take over as the Juggernaut.

1. Joining. Everyone loads in and sees the same score. Everyone sees the two Mongooses at the top of the ramp, and a joiner hears a vehicle's engine and sees it move. If the host picks a map you don't have, you should be told which map and offered its download.
2. Gates, shields and teleporters. Nobody has used these with a second player yet. Press a button as a joiner. Does the gate rise for everyone, block players and vehicles, and drop after 60 seconds? Does a panic shield come up, block, and drop after a minute? If someone joins while a gate is up, do they see it up? Do the teleporters work both ways?
3. The Mongoose. Drive it off a high ledge onto the beach, where it should land on its wheels and drive away. Brake hard with someone watching from behind: the lamps should glow. Carry a second player on the back, and check you both see the same thing.
4. Assault. It has never been played by two people. One flag starts on Blue's stand. Red can take it and Blue can't. A capture moves the flag to Red's stand with Blue attacking. Five minutes with no capture sends the flag home and swaps the sides. Three captures win. Check that the flag's marker stays on it for everyone, that only one flag shows after a capture, and that ATTACK or DEFEND is right on each player's screen.
5. Capture the Flag and Team Slayer. You can only score while your own flag is home. A dropped flag goes back when its own team touches it. Every Warthog and Mongoose should be on the map. With three or more players, killing a teammate costs a point.
6. King of the Hill. A second player on the hill stops the scoring, and every screen should say HILL CONTESTED. In Crazy King the hill moves every minute, so tell us if it ever lands somewhere you can't reach. In Team King, teammates shouldn't contest each other.
7. Oddball, Juggernaut, Stalker and Reverse Tag. Killing the carrier drops the ball. Killing the Juggernaut, the Stalker or whoever is "it" should pass the role to you, on every player's screen.
8. Race and Rally. Nobody has driven a lap yet. Yoyorast's is 27 flags and about 2.2 km. Take a Warthog or Mongoose round and tell us about any flag you can't reach. In Rally, touching the live flag should score and move it somewhere else.
9. Forge. Host Forge. The map's vehicles should be there, and a joiner should see them too. Grab one with the Monitor, move it, press F5, then host Slayer: it should start at its new spot.
10. Leaving. When the host picks SAVE AND EXIT, the host should go back to the lobby with no vote. A match that ends on its own should still hold a vote, and everyone should travel to the winner.

If something breaks, note which item it was. Before you close the game, copy Meteorite\Binaries\Win64\ue4ss\UE4SS.log from your game folder and post it in our Discord. The full checklist is on GitHub.

Assault

One flag at a time. The attackers carry it to their own base while the defenders stop them, and a capture or five minutes on the clock swaps the sides. Three captures win. It's under Capture the Flag on every map that has CTF.

Assault on Blood Gulch: attacking Blue's base, with the flag 51 metres away and the sides swapping in 2:10.

A line under the score says whether you're attacking or defending, and counts down to the next swap. If you join a game already running, the countdown starts at the first swap you see.

King, Oddball and Race on 46 maps

Game types only appear on a map that carries their hills, balls and flags, so we rebuilt 46 of the 51 maps to carry them:

• The nineteen classic maps and Yoyorast Island have King, Oddball and Race.
• Coldsnap and all 25 Halo 2 maps have King and Oddball.

Each of those comes in variants: King, Crazy King and Team King; Oddball and Team Oddball; Race, Team Race, Rally and Team Rally. Three more game types are on every map with Slayer:

• Juggernaut: the first kill makes you the Juggernaut, and killing the Juggernaut takes over. It deals half as much damage again as everyone else, melee included.
• Stalker: the first kill makes you the Stalker, invisible and fast, while everyone else takes half damage. Kill the Stalker to take over.
• Reverse Tag: the first kill makes you it. Whoever is it moves slowly and scores a point a second until someone kills them.

That makes 17 game types on Blood Gulch alone. The same map updates also stop you respawning on a health pack's spot on the Halo CE maps.

The hill stands out from across the map. A wall of plasma rings it and a beacon rises from it, gold when it's empty, cyan when you hold it, orange-red when someone else does, and flashing violet when it's contested. One rule to know: unlike Halo CE, a contested hill scores for nobody, as in Reach. This look reached players today with CE runtime 1.19.0, which the launcher installs.

An empty hill on Blood Gulch: a gold wall of plasma around the hill, with a beacon rising from the middle.

The same hill held by the player: the wall and beacon turn cyan, ON THE HILL shows under the score, and the score climbs.

A marker that shows you the way

A badge now sits over the hill, the next Race flag or the Juggernaut, with the distance under it. Capture the Flag and Assault show one for each flag, in its team's colour, and it stays on the flag when it's dropped or carried.

The hill's marker on Blood Gulch, 20 metres away and below the player, in front of its beacon.

When the spot is out of view, the badge slides to the edge of the screen and points the way to turn. It pulses when a hill is contested, and fades when it's over your crosshair so you can still aim. The Stalker never gets one.

With the hill behind the player, the marker sits at the left edge of the screen and points the way to turn, 92 metres out.

The line under the score now says only what the marker can't, such as ON THE HILL, HILL CONTESTED or LAP 1 OF 3.

New game type and map screens

With this many game types, the old tiles couldn't cope. The game type screen now shows seven families, each naming its variants, and the family you pick lists them as buttons on the right. SELECT says exactly what you chose.

The game type screen: seven families on the left, with Capture the Flag open and its Assault variant chosen on the right.

Map select uses the same families as tabs, and the tab you pick opens a tray with its description and variants.

Map select's game type tabs, with Juggernaut open and its three variants below.

The Mongoose and Yoyorast Island

Yoyorast Island is the first Custom Edition map to bring its own vehicle. The Mongoose has its own engine sounds, headlights and tail lamps, and carries a driver and a passenger. Version 2.7.1 also brings the map's buttons, gates and panic shields, and it offers every game type on the list above.

A Mongoose on Yoyorast Island, with a Spartan ahead of it and the island's tower beyond.

Its handling isn't final, and it still shows the Warthog's HUD icons. Tell us how it drives.

Forge

• A converted map's vehicles now appear in Forge. Before, Forge showed none of them on a converted Custom Edition map. It now starts with the ones a Slayer game would place, and they stay when you load a saved layout.
• F2 can't quietly lose your save. One press used to move your saved layout into history with nothing on screen. It now takes two presses, and the first tells you what will happen.
• F6 brings a reverted save back, even after a restart. Objects you placed after your last save are still lost by a revert.

Fixed today

We played this week's game types between two of our PCs today, one hosting and one joining, and fixed what we found. Two of these fixes help when you play alone too.

• Everyone is where they really are. On a joiner's screen, the marker on the Juggernaut, or on whoever was it in Reverse Tag, pointed at the middle of the map. The scoreboard didn't know the teams either, so a joiner had no "/ YOU" and no ATTACK or DEFEND line. Markers now follow the player, and every team shows from the start.
• HILL CONTESTED shows. With two players on the hill, both screens said ON THE HILL while nobody scored. Now they say HILL CONTESTED, and a hill someone else holds shows in their colour.
• One flag in Assault. After a capture, a joiner could keep a ghost of the old flag, with a second marker and a swap clock stuck at 0:00.
• Quitting goes to the lobby. A host who picked SAVE AND EXIT could land on the post-game vote, and the next match started 20 seconds later. A match that ends on its own still votes.
• The vote offers only maps you have installed. If a chosen game can't start, everyone goes back to the lobby and is told why.
• Missing a map? You're told which one. A joiner without the host's map, or with another version of it, saw only CONNECTION LOST. Now you see which map it was and its download screen. DOWNLOAD installs it without a restart, then you can join again. A kick shows the host's reason, and the screen stays up until you've read it.
• The right number of Spartan bots. When bots started before anyone had spawned, as in Forge, eight bots could become thirty-two, none of them on the board.
• Yoyorast's sea. The island could load with bare sand where the sea should be. The loader now notices and fixes it as the map loads.

They're in mods 0.46.1 to 0.46.4.

Player pages and leaderboards

Every player's page now has a combat record: a career ring with a spoke for each match, form over time, where they killed and died on each map, their arsenal, rivals and medals.

A combat record: career kills per death on the left, and a ring on the right with a spoke for each match, kills reaching out and deaths reaching in.

The new leaderboards rank Kills, K/D, Wins, Win rate, Headshots and Best match, over all time, 30 days or 7 days. To place, link your account from the game. A match counts when at least two linked accounts played in it, so a board can read lower than a career total.

A smoother launcher

• Launching works again. After mods 0.44.0, some launches stopped with Try again, and trying again failed the same way. Launcher 0.22.0 fixes that, updates itself, and finishes the update it couldn't complete.
• A refused mod is left as it was. The launcher now checks every file in a mod before it writes any of them, so a bad file can't leave a mod half-installed.
• Update checks are quicker on a long map list.

For modders and map makers

• Custom vehicles, scripts and devices. CLI 0.8.0 carries a Custom Edition map's own vehicles, scripts, buttons, gates and automatic doors into a level, and writes King, Oddball, Race and their variants. See custom vehicles and CE map conversion.
• Animation graphs. CLI 0.9.0 adds mjolnir jmad, which reads a graph, rewrites it for another skeleton, and proves a round trip byte for byte. The format is documented.
• Package tools. mjolnir ue scan searches the game's packages and mjolnir ue clone copies one under your own path. Nobody has loaded a cloned package in the game yet.
• Game types with traits. mjolnir megalo write now writes game types that change a player's traits, including Stalker and Reverse Tag.
• Vehicle sound banks. Launcher 0.23.0 and CLI 0.10.0 let a map carry Wwise banks for its own vehicles, so they follow your volume sliders. No published map uses them yet, so nothing changes today.
• Clearer reviews. Authors now see every release they've uploaded, and the moderator's reason for any held back.

Versions

Every release is listed in the changelog.

See you Saturday

Update the launcher before 6 PM, join the event, and come break things with us. If you can't play, watch on Twitch and tell us what you spot in our Discord.