General Vagueness stopped by with a new project - 'Breaking out of Halo 4'. He's got fileshare downloads available of all the Multiplayer maps (from the 360 version, not the MCC version of Halo 4) that you can grab and play around with. (There are a few screenshots

A Community Customs production

This is pretty simple, it's about getting out of multiplayer maps in Halo 4 (Xbox 360 version) and looking around. More to the point, it's about enabling you, or whoever downloads the files linked below, to look around.
The saved film files are all on my file share.

Abandon

Adrift

Complex

Daybreak

Erosion

Exile

Forge Island

Harvest

Haven

Impact

Landfall

Longbow

Meltdown

Monolith

Outcast

Perdition

Pitfall

Ragnarok

Ravine

Shatter

Skyline

Solace

Vertigo

Vortex

Wreckage

Usage

To use the film files, you click a link, click "send to Xbox", go to War Games from the main menu in Halo 4, go to Theater, select the file from Local Files, and select Start Film. After that, you can press Y to detach from my Spartan and use the normal theater controls to look around (you might need to press Y twice).

You'll probably notice some text in the upper left part of the screen when you start the film. This is because panoramic camera mode or pan-cam is enabled. You can find a pretty good tutorial on pan-cam over here, and of course some in the upper right on this forum, bearing in mind it's a little different in Halo 4.

To get to more places, you can use the boost function (left trigger), you can wait until my Spartan is out of the map, you can use pan-cam, or you can use any combination of the above. Unlike previous games, in Halo 4 simply having pan-cam enabled (not necessarily active or turned on, just usable) removes or turns off a lot of invisible barriers on many maps. To get through the ones that are still there, you can switch to pan-cam mode by pressing the crouch button, the zoom button, and left on the d-pad at the same time. This changes the "normal" text in the upper left to "pan-cam", telling you it's active, it changes the camera controls to make boost and fast forward unavailable and make vertical movement only possible through the triggers, and most importantly it lets you use up and down on the d-pad to change the camera's movement speed.

As with Reach, you're limited to 100.000 for the maximum, but 100 is still a lot faster than anything you could achieve normally. Camera speed carries over between pan-cam and normal mode, so I recommend switching back to normal mode (with crouch, zoom, and d-pad up again) to re-enable normal vertical movement, fast forward, and boost so you can move more naturally and go even faster.

Aiming at a barrier (and sometimes other things) and going forward at high speed may push through that part of the map. Whether the camera goes through something or not depends on the barrier or object, the camera speed, and the angle of approach. Some barriers seemed unbreakable despite my best efforts, but I have a hunch that all or almost all of them can be pushed through or bypassed in one way or another.

Getting through most barriers that aren't removed by pan-cam will cause the camera to reset to the active player if they're inside the map (or sometimes another player, if there are others) -- this is why you may need to wait for the player's body (my Spartan, in these files) to be outside of the map.

The film files linked are clips because I wanted to remove the ten seconds of "dead air" at the beginning of each film but also because a film file saved with pan-cam enabled will not necessarily have pan-cam enabled when played back, depending on a player's network setting and if pan-cam was previously enabled. A film clip with pan-cam enabled, on the other hand, will always allow a player to make use of pan-cam while viewing it-- something to keep in mind if you want to make your own files to share.

Pic parade

While you're roaming around out there, why not take some pictures?
Here's some of what I saw (open in new tab for full-size versions):



A new view of Haven

Inside the cave just off the shore on Longbow

An outside view of Adrift

The planetoid on Impact up close

A view of the main tower and many rock and metal spires on Vortex

A fairly large valley way outside the playable area of Forge Island

I wanted to have more pictures but I don't think I have much of an eye for screenshots, and it's hard to find nice views of the kind I wanted most (showing some of the playable space), mostly because of out-of-map geometry in Halo 4 having gaps all over the place.

When I make a promise...

I know it's very late in the game's life span to put this out there, effectively the end, but the Master Chief Collection hasn't been out for long, it still has various issues including some severe ones, and I know some people (like me) won't even be able to buy an Xbox One for MCC for a while yet, or are even just not interested in it. I could tell you reasons this was delayed, but I did get this much done, and I wanted to share it. It isn't on our site because it's being redesigned and recoded.

If I did this over again, I would:

- not restrict myself to unmodified maps and gametypes, which I did to try to show there was no funny business going on and that anyone could do this
- possibly add videos demonstrating how to get out of maps more fully or replace the videos with ones that break out of maps more fully
- stick with it more and not let it sit for long amounts of time
- provide more commentary on getting out of the maps and what I saw out there, for example the ship on Outcast that seems to move, reset, and move again, and the one-sided wall outside Skyline, and the frustrating thing where strange white planes appeared in screenshots of Meltdown but not in theater (they don't seem to match up with the geometry)

Credit where it's due

Those of you who have been in the community a while might remember a project I did a few years back where I broke out of Reach's multiplayer maps in theater and did this same kind of thing, which I showed in threads here on HBO. If you missed it or want to look again, the more content-rich posts are here, here, here, and here, and the saved films are on my Reach file share. Those of you who have been around that long or longer might also remember a project/site called Views from the Edge, which inspired what I did, and which I neglected to publicly credit for the idea, simple and modified though it is-- so thank you, BlueNinja. I'd also like to thank the rest of Community Customs for checking files, reading this over, and providing moral support.

Here's hoping the community gets some enjoyment from this. :)