Add Custom Edition support into retail

[SnowyMouse]

This will require:

• Loading Custom Edition maps in retail (fairly easy)
• Joining Custom Edition games in retail (very difficult)

[SnowyMouse]

For joining Custom Edition games using stock retail maps, the stun of the following .damage_effect tags will have to be set to 0 to prevent desyncing:

• vehicles/banshee/banshee bolt.damage_effect
• vehicles/ghost/ghost bolt.damage_effect

Joining retail servers with Custom Edition maps will equally result in desyncing if these vehicles are present. The best way to handle this is to prevent players from using Custom Edition stock maps and Custom Edition maps when joining retail servers. Since the retail map's CRC is unlikely to match its Custom Edition counterpart, the game will have to falsify the CRC.

There are other ways to handle this, but I feel they would ultimately make things worse:

• Make people use Custom Edition stock maps at all times (thus Jason Jones the stun back in when joining retail maps). This overcomplicates things for the user, though, by requiring them to copy in all of the Custom Edition maps when installing Chimera.
• Make people use Custom Edition stock maps when joining Custom Edition servers and retail maps when joining retail servers. This not only overcomplicates things, but itwould require separate maps folders, and Chimera would have to account for the user inadvertently mixing and match their maps.

Also, doing it this way and not the alternative ways will discourage people from using maps that workaround Halo Custom Edition-specific bugs bugs like fog issues with .shader_environment shaders on models.

Also, for using existing Custom Edition maps, sound/sfx/impulse/ting/ting.sound's randomization gain will have to be set to 0.2 due to retail playing this sound 5x as loud vs. Custom Edition.

[SnowyMouse]

Upon testing, I've found that there are several multiplayer Halo Custom Edition maps hosted on the HAC2 repository that have non-indexed bitmap and sound tags that directly reference the bitmaps.map and sounds.map files.

I always assumed that tool.exe did not do this with multiplayer tags, but it seems that tool.exe actually checks the tag data and raw data separately. Here is the observed behavior:

• If the tag data is the same size but the asset data is a different size, the raw data will be internalized into the map.
• If the tag data is a different size but the asset data is the same size, the raw data will be referenced externally by the tag.
• If the tag data is the same size and the asset data is the same size, the tag will be indexed.

I imagine that this can happen if sprites are added, such as new weapon icons, but some of the bitmaps are the same size.

Unfortunately, there is no reliable way to determine which kind of bitmaps.map and sounds.map resources were used when creating these maps, and there may be many maps that have this problem.

Therefore, I'm going to have to close this