Halo 2 Map Editor: Prometheus

A long long time ago in March of 2005 an old Halo modding site known as HaloDev announced development of a new map editor that was going to put all other map editors to shame.

Prometheus is a map editor that supports the editing of Halo and Halo 2 maps, along with anticipated support for any future Bungie / Halo Engine games. Prometheus gives an all-in-one interface to the creation of all new maps, making your life easier by giving you all the tools you need in one place.

It was going to do this by offering a scenario editor to manipulate the map in real time with visualizing of models & scenarios. This was quite a departure from other map editors at the time which worked strictly off tag editing with varying support of the types of tag extraction (sound, models, bitmaps, etc) supported.

Now why build a map editor like this? Well knowing that the Halo 1 Editing Kit was released in late 2004 - we learned a bit of how maps were officially made. They used a wide variety of tools which roughly broke down:

• Guerilla - A tag editor
• Sapien - A BSP editor
• Tool - Compilation of tags to .map files.
• Standalone - A bare bones iteration of the Halo game that loads tags instead of maps, but disables tons of retail features.

This was important context because most editors at the time relied on directly editing the .map files, which could be roughly correlated with directly editing a cached compressed iteration of the tags. It was a bit more difficult to modify a .map file because you had to ensure changes properly shifted data around and corrected any checksum.

This explains the different approach tools like H2Core/Guerilla, Mutation and Prometheus took where they preferred to disassemble map(s) to all their respective tags. At that point in tags - editing could take place before the compile back into a .map file.

Easy to explain, but far more difficult to execute as the completion of H2C/H2G, Mutation & Prometheus was a pillar difficult to reach.

The development team of this rumored Prometheus application packed some usernames (Grenadiac, MonoxideC, Nick, ViperNeo, kornman00, CLuis, JamesD, and Aztec) that all excelled in some feat of Halo engineering. CLuis may have gone on to co-create the amazing Mimesis project, while kornman00 joined 343 Industries as an engineer.

As time went on it seemed the claim was a bit ambitious as nothing was released in the public, but towards the end of 2005 we learned a bit about the tool via one of the alpha-testers.

when I first received an alpha of prom, I was impressed with the functionality that the team had already coded. in typical modder fashion, the alpha build was time-bombed and my name was hard coded into the application title bar – a guarantee that I wouldn’t leak the application to anyone.
http://geeklit.blogspot.com/2005/12/prometheus-future-of-modding.html

Builds were being passed around, but they were time limited and fingerprinted for each tester. Great care was being taken to protect Bungie's IP, by preventing pure extraction of the assets. You could move assets to produce a mod by moving models between maps, but you couldn't extract the assets for usage outside the tool.

This little blog and screenshot awoke the population of Halo modders that were ecstatic about the promise of this tool and it seemed real now! People were looking at a screenshot of Ascension suggesting it was being rendered live at 30fps. It may have been missing some map elements and sky box, but this was revolutionary.

Unfortunately as months turned into years it turned into a bit of a meme in the community of when Prometheus would be released. That didn't stop HaloDev from continuing to tease the community with a small group of testers/developers refining the tool and producing screenshots of progress.

It seemed we had low fidelity rendering of models and Halo 2 scenarios of popular maps like Ivory Tower, Waterworks and Zanzibar. It seemed too good to be true for a regular teenager unaware of how everything worked under the hood.

As the Xbox 360 came out and Halo 3 entered the scene - we saw the Halo 2 community dwindle. Especially paired with the drama of HaloMods ownership moving hands leading to a splintering of a community. At this point with developers moving onto their own tools or their focus moving elsewhere progress slowed down.

After a bit of a hiatus a few more screenshots went up that showed the evolution this tool had taken.

It may have gotten an interface overhaul in DevXpress, but this project appeared to be growing too large to reach completion.

• It offered a BSP viewer
• A full tag editor
• A full script system
• Prefab library
• Integration with other tools
• Integration with Xbox for automated upload/testing
• Revision control with projects
• Import support for textures, models, sounds and BSPs
• An API with HaloDev for saving/sharing/bug reports
• It packed support for Halo 1 & Halo 2 and was being updated to support the various PC ports of said games.

I mean look at this bug report template in circa 2006.

With talented authors all working on different components we saw some interesting drama/development. As some components were feature complete and others struggled along with issues - authors splintered out to work on their own tools while angry forum users demanded something being worked on for free.

CLuis may have worked on Mimesis, but also worked on a tool known as XapienC that was simply the rendering of the BSP's from the pure .map files. However, since XapienC used Prometheus code it meant releasing XapienC probably depended on the release of Prometheus.

The illusive tool of visualizing a Halo 2 BSP remained out of reach of the public - with the exception of some leaks.

Moving the clock forward a decade - Prometheus never came out officially. The mystery faded and other map editors expanded features that intersected the features Prometheus was offering.

That was until Mar 10, 2017 when kornman00 put the source code online. At this point the remaining people modding Halo 2 had to be less than 10, so only a few nostalgic folks remained to build the mysterious tool. Some of those being folks who originally had access in the prime era.

At this point we have to talk about Mutation and Grimdoomer, who you might recognize as a name who has delivered some interesting recent work on the Xbox/Halo community.

• Halo 2 in HD: Pushing the Original Xbox to the Limit (2024)
• Tony Hawk's Pro STRCPY (2024)
• Reading an Xbox EEPOM with a Raspberry Pi (2015)

Grimdoomer, much like plenty of HaloMods users, was around in 2005 struggling like most of us to use the variety of tools that existed to properly disassemble and recompile a map. Halo 2 Core/Guerilla was buggy and with no clear software version on the builds - they were passed around in zips mixing and matching them in order to do BSP transfers and this sucked.

Grimdoomer wanted to make a better set of tools so set off in 2008 to make his own. Ultimately that progression led to a map editor named as Mutation which was rumoured and discussed so often, but sadly also resulted in a cancelled project. So by 2011 there was no hope for any modern Halo 2 Xbox tool that resembled the official mod tools in terms of visualizing BSPs.

A tiny bit of excitement was shown as Halo MCC came out, boasting official mod support for Halo 2 on MCC. However, the interaction with the Xbox iteration of Halo 2 just wasn't there.

It was cool either way to continue to see how modern Halo games were produced with the classic set of Sapien/Guerilla doing the work.

On April 1, 2021 Grimdoomer tweeted an interesting thread that some perceived as an April Fools's joke.

This was the start of tweets that went on over the next 4 years showing the progression and build out of the reborn Prometheus tool. Built from scratch with the learning's of the past 20 years Grimdoomer was remaking a historic tool.

The tweets as they were posted were basically a live development diary of the work in progress. For those around during the Mutation era this was all too familiar except this time instead of forum text posts we got media packed tweets.

• April 19, 2021 - Working on proper shader passes.
• April 24, 2021 - Showing a model injection.
• June 4, 2021 - Spawn placement with "snapping".
• September 4, 2021 - Rendering decorator objects.
• September 8, 2021 - Animation support for machines.
• December 26, 2021 - Xbox-to-PC vertex/pixel shader JIT system.
• January 6, 2022 - Debugging z-fighting precision loss issues.
• January 6, 2022 - Shader work - fully rendered BSPs.
• January 28, 2022 - Debugging NVIDIA precision loss.
• February 16, 2022 - Object placement tool development.
• February 25, 2022 - Shader bugs and default lighting vectors.
• August 15, 2022 - AI support for pathfinding.
• May 7, 2023 - Water rendering.
• May 22, 2023 - BSP water geometry rendering.
• November 21, 2023 - Animated shader support.
• January 1, 2024 - KoTH animations for spawns rendered.
• December 5, 2024 - Transformation gizmo completed.
• January 20, 2025 - Model injection for vehicle.

Prior to 2024 ending I saw I was invited to join the "pre-alpha" of this tool so once I was back in town I sat down and took it for a spin. Out of the gate I was required to select the maps I wanted to extract into tags - so naturally I selected every single Halo 2 map including DLC and campaign.

Of course with the nostalgia coming back I had to open Ascension as I remembered my hundreds of hours playing "tower of power".

As the video shows above I was mind blown near instantly. This was a tool I heard rumors about 20 years ago and now I was flying around a map in real time rendering. It even looked near identical to the actual map, maybe even better!

I toggled on layers for scenery, objective points and interactive machines and without even modding anything I was having a blast just opening each of every map to fly around. So of course I had to open some campaign maps and remember the great Halo 2 journey of campaign.

I still haven't even copied a modified map to my Xbox as I'm too caught up just flying around maps in a viewer. I guess only those around during the original Xbox Halo 2 modding would understand.

As I dug more into this tool - some of the features were polished to an insane degree. I don't have any game knowledge to accurately comment on the features in Prometheus, but I think an object placement tool that has control for pitch/yaw/roll rotations as well as x/y/z placement with an interactive interface with built in "snapping" features rivals probably real game developer tools.

Grimdoomer has mentioned this is just the beginning as he works to push his shader compatibility to 100%. You can follow along in the GitHub and pull down this software to scratch an itch of nostalgia if you wish.

With that I'll end with a video that Grimdoomer created recapping his journey building this tool.