H2CA Shader Templates

While my full project around "H2CA" is still a long ways from release, I figured it best to not hold back the shader tech I've been throwing together for it and to instead let the Halo 2 modders have some fun with the visual stuff.

So what are these shader templates, and in what ways are they useful to you?

The H2CA shader templates utilize Halo 2's graphical capabilities to some of their highest extents, and push some even further beyond. This includes creating workarounds/adding support to do things that were otherwise previously impossible with the stock shaders or fixing some issues. Stuff like bumped cubemapped specular transparency for instance is now doable with these shaders. There's also some custom shaders meant to finish some stuff that Bungie never quite got done in time such as the shader template "transp_cornea" which finishes the original intention of transparent overlays for some alien characters' eyes to make them appear much more "real" than a 2d image could convey. I also extended these with support for animated colours, cubemaps, and mutlichannel illumination. Also, my new hologram shaders don't freak out if they're against a skybox.

A word of warning, these templates are inherently more expensive than stock Halo 2's shader templates. I've made sure to set these up to be as optimized as possible while still allowing the most utility out of them as I can. These shaders all have LODs properly set up, and are built around power-of-two logic parameters which in theory should make the lod assignment stage every frame significantly faster and save performance in moments where a lot of things using these templates are active all at once.

I've included an example scenario/bsp with a fair amount of these already set up as working examples, and I've done my best to fill out the documentation of all the shader templates within their tags. There is also an included readme textfile as well as a string list that contains this same information for easy access within the modding tools.

If there's any documentation I failed to fill out (that isn't obvious), or maybe a simple mistake that slipped past me in creating these please just let me know and I'll fix it as soon as I can.

REQUIREMENTS:

- The publicly released Digsite shader passes: https://github.com/digsite/h2

HOW TO INSTALL:

- Extract the folders to your "tags" folder of your Halo 2 MCC Editing Kit.

Shader template list:

- add_generic

- add_hologram

- add_meter

- add_plasma

- add_plasma~alpha

- add_plasma~offset

- add_plasma~shield

- add_texcam

- alpha_generic

- alpha_multiblend

- opaque_2cc

- opaque_2cc~illum

- opaque_2cc~mp

- opaque_4cc

- opaque_4cc~illum

- opaque_4cc~plasma

- opaque_generic

- opaque_generic~illum

- opaque_stra