Games
The modders behind SPV3, a Halo: Combat Evolved PC mod, discuss the challenges involved in making a 2003 game look and feel more modern – all while paying homage to their heroes.
There’s no question that Bungie’s 2001 Halo: Combat Evolved changed the gaming landscape. The Xbox launch title not only made first-person shooters truly viable on console, but it also took strides in storytelling, design and establishing a vast world and lore that’s still being added to nearly 20 years later.
It would take two years for keyboard and mouse gamers to be able to taste the fruits of Bungie’s labour, as Gearbox Software worked to port the landmark title to PC in September 2003, complete with online multiplayer and sharper graphics, albeit with some performance issues for some gaming rigs. But once it was on PC, those gamers would be treated to the same incredible journey that millions of other Xbox players had experienced.
Yet, that was about it for Halo on PC – the console shooter remained a heavily Xbox-focused franchise, with Halo 2 later releasing as a Windows Vista exclusive, while the 2011 ten year anniversary remake of the original game remained an Xbox 360 exclusive that would later be playable on Xbox One via backwards compatibility, as well as through the Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
That multi-pack of Halo titles is set to receive a PC release later this year after a tumultuous few years of bugs since its original Xbox One launch in late 2014, yet it feels like PC fans of Halo have been left largely in the dark. If you’ve wanted to journey back to where the franchise started, and relive the classic game in all its glory on PC, you’ve had to either deal with the fairly out-of-date port, or wait for The Master Chief Collection to ship.
For a group of die-hard fans, to wait so long for Halo to look even remotely modern on what to many is a superior platform, simply wouldn’t do. So they took matters into their own hands.
Enter SPV3 (standing for Single Player Version 3); a total overhaul of Halo: Combat Evolved’s campaign, that’s complete with new weapons, new enemies, added vehicles and new areas for you to explore. Even features from later games in the franchise, such as sprinting, have been brought to life, while the soundtrack has been given an overhaul, too. Support for 4K resolution, spruced-up models and textures, plus bonus easter eggs and skull modifiers have been planted by the team to give a new spin on the classic title. Remastering and expanding an existing game is no easy feat, but it’s more than just a simple nostalgia trip, as Masterz1337, the lead dev of the mod explains.
“I’ve been a Halo fan since 2003. While I was a little late to the party, playing Halo: CE blew my mind after spending time with it. All I had was a demo disc of “The Silent Cartographer" and I just played it over and over and over again, starting on Easy and working my way up to Legendary over maybe eight hours.”
“While I played before with my cousin, I had thought it was a cool game but experiencing it on my own and having this compulsive drive to try and do better and better and learn new ways of interacting with the enemies, was unlike anything I think I had played prior. It was just non-stop fun, and while I didn't know why at the time, the game really captured me and it became an obsession of mine for the next year,” he says.
“The thing about our project which some may find interesting, was that it was never about making a case of Halo on the PC, or provide motivation for more titles to be released,” Masterz1337 explains. “It was always about expanding Halo in a similar but different direction than the official games. In some ways, we look at it as more of us developing a console game to be played on the PC than a PC game.”
Slow and steady
As the name of the mod implies, SPV3 is the third version of the mod – but unlike your typical boxed game sequel, the third major version is where things really started to get going and is more organised like an actual developed project. In fact, it had much more basic, humbler beginnings – and just grew and grew in scope and size.
“It's really hard to say when SPV3 started,” Masterz1337 tells us. “There were prior versions of the mod (SPV1 and SPV2) but even earlier than that, I had gone in with very basic tools to adjust certain things like the Assault Rifle and the pistol on the PC. SPV1 basically got started as a texture swap mod, which then started to include new models, animations, weapons and it just ballooned from there. This was back in 2005.”
“SPV1 was maybe an eight-month long project of ‘What cool stuff can we do?’ and we released it back in 2006. It was a crazy success, even though it's a laughable project now. It actually ended up on the front page of Bungie.net and our web host at the time was overwhelmed and left with a thousand dollar overage fee. We then started SPV2 as a patch to SPV1, but it just went off the rails and frankly we never had any direction with it other than as a sandbox to play with things we wanted to do, unlike the much more structured nature of SPV3.”
The third version of the mod would then take a few years to get started, and even then, would take several years to get into a place where you could play the game from start to finish – a long journey for any game or mod, but after all, this is a side project for many of the 100+ team – and they’re dealing with what is essentially legacy software.
“SPV3 officially entered development back in 2011, but sort of stagnated and serious work on it didn't begin until fall 2013,” Masterz1337 explains. “We then released the first six missions in June 2016, the back half of the game in August 2017, and more recently six more missions in July 2019.”
That’s a long stretch of time, but many of the recent additions to the mod wouldn’t have been made possible until parts of the engine were essentially unlocked with some new extensions written by a fellow community contributor.
“Halo PC has always had a dedicated if small community. It's been really fun to see where things and interests in it have gone. But what made us want to revamp it, and what has allowed us to do the stuff we did was the engine extensions that were added to the game by Sean ‘Kornman00’ Cooper who now actually works at 343 Industries,” he says.
“This just let us do so much more than we could in the past, and really opened up a lot of new doors and lifted old restrictions. It's really that, which has allowed us to do some of the most impressive stuff in this project.”
Contending with legacy code
Even with the engine extensions in place, and more serious work could be done to the aging game, there were still plenty of hurdles to overcome, and challenges to beat – after all, it’s a game that’s nearly 20 years old, meaning some creative coding has had to be employed.
Emilian Roman, aka yumiris, who works on the installer and launcher, explains, “Most of the issues arise due to conflicts between modern and legacy stuff. As software and hardware progress, they cripple compatibility with anything which is inevitably stuck in the past. In the context of HCE and SPV3, this hasn't been too problematic – we just needed to have some players install some missing software on their computers.”
“For pedantry's sake, this included installing DirectX9.0c for HCE, a newer .NET version on older Windows versions, and updating GPU drivers. SPV3.2 is also rather demanding, so a lot of people's hardware simply won't work with it,” yumiris explains. “The loader permits turning down the graphical effects as much as possible, and that often allows more people to play on lower end computers.”
“Regarding compatibility with the game itself, one challenge was figuring things out without thorough documentation or source code. In fact, the SPV3 loader heavily focuses on editing the Halo settings, which are stored in a binary file that nobody has seriously analysed. Figuring out where and how things are stored has been quite an exercise in patience. Of course, documentation on the respective binary file has been released – I'm not having anyone go through what I've been through.”
Of course, with a game that’s nearly 20 years old, there’s plenty of legacy code that only the original developers could easily decipher; making the work the SPV3 team have done even more impressive – but that’s not to say the modern additions have been anything but smooth sailing.
“Amusingly, most of the issues stemmed from modern stuff. The main mod that SPV3 uses – OpenSauce – has a notoriously brittle installer, despite being released only a few years ago. I had no choice but to completely create a new installer which lacks the pedantic requirements of the previous one. It ended up being my most starred GitHub project at the time of writing this!”
“The biggest pain we've found, however, is antivirus software. We had to compromise a significant amount of convenience to prevent AVs from getting in the way. For example, the SPV3 loader had the ability to auto-update itself; however, from an AV software's eyes, a malware would do the same thing,” he says. “As such, we have no choice but to prompt the user into manually downloading and installing the updates.”
A love letter to the franchise
For the team, and Masterz1337 in particular, the goal was to make the game fit the player, not just feel like another entry into the franchise, even if it is a remake.
“It was important to me at least, to make sure this did not feel like another Halo game in the series,” Masterz1337 tells us. “As someone who loved Halo CE, Halo 2 was just a devastating blow to me. I've come to appreciate more about it as the years have gone by, but in many ways, I feel it put the series in a direction in which it never fully was able to recover from. It was just so big and so many things were expected of the next games due to what it introduced – there was no way to backpedal.”
“Halo 2 and onward have many great games, but none of them really feel like Halo CE to me. So the goal in my mind was how do we make it still feel like Halo CE, but introduce all the great ideas and concepts that are in later games, but were never fully developed. To me, it's all about player interaction. We try to branch things out a bit.”
“For example, there’s not just one weapon like the Halo 1 pistol, instead there are five. But why you want to use one over the other in different situations is what makes players think and make choices that impact their interactions with all the AI,” he says. “The different weapons, ranks and tactics the AI use, are all designed in a way which compliments the weapons you can use and how they can be used against you. In short, we focus on making the player have to be aware of their interactions with things in the sandbox, rather than a focus on being reactive.”
That focus for the team has driven much of the work they’ve done; but that has also made the mod grow and grow.
“I think people would be surprised how much we agonise over certain things, like even the spawning locations of weapons or ammo packets. It can be hard at times, because the game is just so massive. It's 17 playable missions, and nearly 24 hours of gameplay. On top of that, it has the most enemies of any Halo title and the most weapons,” he says.
“Plus it has so many other features that have to be modified individually for each mission. This is all before you get into how different monitors may display the images we present on screen, and how certain hardware and software settings can affect sound. There's been some users who have had pretty big issues with the latter, too, that did not show up in QA testing.”
Adding features from the future
Bringing in features from later games back to the first in the franchise is going to be a challenge, full stop, no matter what it is. Even something that seems as trivial as sprinting in-game sounds like it wouldn’t be the most difficult thing in the world, yet adding it to the mod and making it work seamlessly took plenty of hard work, and some visual trickery, too.
“Sprint was something I always wanted in the mod, as I do enjoy it in modern titles and it does make sense for many areas of Halo: CE. In fact, sprint was a planned feature by Bungie for Halo 2 based on the feedback they got from the first game. In the beginning, sprint was just going to have your weapon reticle disappear when you started sprinting, as you literally can’t get a weapon to play any animation in first-person in Halo, other than pre-defined usages. For SPV3.0 and 3.1, we actually load the player into a second biped and have it use a predefined ‘sitting in Pelican’ animation which shows the gun lowered,” Masterz1337 explains.
“But that didn't work as well as we wanted. For 3.2, we actually give the player an entirely new weapon, and transfer certain data over (heat level, battery, loaded ammo for guns that have displays) so it appears that you are playing an animation, but really it's all smoke and mirrors. You can see through the illusion because every time you exit sprint, you will see the same ‘ready’ animation for the gun you are holding. Gameplay-wise, as to how to make it make sense in Halo: CE, was pretty much something we had figured out since day one of wanting it there,” he says.
The life of a game mod means there’s never really any end goal in sight: there are no ‘going gold’ deadlines to meet, no publisher pressures to bend to, while the constant want to improve and improve means there’s always something to do – Masterz1337 and his team are still aiming upwards and forwards, and taking further strides with the mod, as after all, much like like Master Chief’s fight against the foes of the galaxy, his work is never really done.
“For the future of the project, right now, we are focused on doing some bug fixing and going over user feedback. Having people look at the project with a larger array of hardware (especially displays) and especially with fresh eyes is incredibly helpful. It's still difficult to parse certain feedback, as making an easily accessible game to master and blow through was not our design intent,” he says. “We wanted something that felt challenging and unfair, just like the original game felt back in 2001, but that a player could over time learn and understand in a way they can blow through it. It's very much in opposition to how many people consume their games these days where people jump rapidly from game to game and consume them much more casually.”
“We also have a single-player Firefight mode planned for release in the fall, and a whole new sub-project currently codenamed LEGACY which will be a single player experience, but not necessarily a campaign. It’s a radically different take on Halo, and really builds on the free roam concept introduced in Halo 3: ODST, with bits of Apex Legends and Batman's Arkham series mixed in. That should start production this winter, should we choose to follow through with it.”
From what started as a simple mod to change up textures in-game, has now become an incredible creation in its own right, and its cast of developers, artists, voice actors and other contributors, are a testament to the creativity and passion of a community, and we can’t wait to see what the team cooks up next.
