Making a New Distinct Weapon

HALO: REACH

This page will tell you how to make a new weapon from an existing one, but give it separate tags so that changes you make to it do not interfere with the original weapon. This will serve as your introduction to basic tag duplication. My tutorial is based on this video tutorial by SoulThePupper.

In my example images I will be duplicating the plasma pistol.

Things you will need
When making a completely new weapon, you will not only need to duplicate the .weap tag of the base weapon, but a number of other tags referenced by the .weap tag and other tags depending on the extent of modification you are trying to achieve.

To make a new weapon that you will be able to change the color and behavior of, you will need AT LEAST the following:

Model tag .hlmt

Imposter Model tag .impo

Render Model tag .mode

Projectile tag .proj

Shader tag .rmsh - there may be multiple that you need to duplicate

Weapon tag .weap

There may be other tags that you will have to duplicate depending on your desired modifications, for example you may the plasma pistol has .rmhg shader_hologram tags for its hologram indicator on the back of the weapon. You may also want to duplicate the jpt! damage_effects tag to have more specific control over the damage properties of your weapon.

If you are doing this with a vehicle, there are more additional tags to duplicate, but after you should be able to figure out what you need to looking at all the tags associated with a current vehicle.

You will also need to prepare strings for the weapon. String are simply the strings of text appearing throughout the level, including hud messages and forge menu text. Some template strings can be found here. Go to the strings tab, click English, and the strings for that map will open. Then use the drop down menu to navigate to the HUD messages.



Once you are on this screen you can press "add new". This will add a new entry all the way at the bottom of the list. It does not matter where in the list your entries are, or what order you add them in, though having consistency in your additions will make it easier to make changes in the future.



After you have the strings added, don't forget to click "save all" adding them to the file. Then you can begin duplicating your tags. This can be a bit of a tedious process, especially if you intend to duplicate a lot of tags, as there is no way to batch duplicate tags and you have to rename each one individually. Be sure to change the name of the weapon you are duplicating EACH TIME it appears in the tag file name. Just paste your new name over every instance of the old name.



Here is what you should get when you are finished duplicating tags.



Now you have a new unique weapon that isn't linked to original... almost. There are still need to go into each of these new tags and change any instance that references one of the older tags. hltm, mode, and weap should all have instances of this, but make sure you use the search feature to find every instance of the original tags.



If the values you find reference tags that you have not duplicated because you do not intend to modify that aspect of the weapon, you can just leave it the same, it will reference the unchanged aspect of the original gun and save you work and the game some memory.

However if you find a field that you are interested in modifying that I have not explicitly told you to duplicate, for example the material effect of the projectile .foot tag, you should go ahead and make a duplication of those tags. If you want to make changes to something you didn't think about during you initial duplication process, you can always make those individual changes later.



Pay special attention to the .mode tag. When you search for your base weapon in this tag you will find the materials block, with a "shader" value in it. There are multiple entries in this block, so make sure you go to each one and change it to the appropriate shader.



There are similar situation on other tags depending on the weapon. For example, the Plasma Pistol I copied has two projectiles, and on the weap tag in the barrels block you will notice that it has two barrels, one for each projectile.
 * Note: the mechanics of how the plasma pistol charges are very interesting, but that will be the topic of another tutorial.

Once you complete this process on all of your tags, your new weapon is finished, and you can begin making changes to the different tags that make it up. There are a lot of different things you can go on to do from this point, but I recommend some of these tutorials.


 * Try adding your custom entry to your own custom Forge Menu.
 * Make a new custom level object like a Simple 1-Way Wall.