Hack 78. Manually Remove Low-Level Textures

Increase video quality by removing the low detail textures.

Although the Machinima Companion [Hack #77] will remove all of the low-level details for you, you may decide that you only need to remove the low-level details for a few textures.

To allow the Halo universe to render more quickly, Halo uses different quality textures based on how far you are from an object. For example, when you are far away from a surface, the first texture you will see is a low-level detail version. However, when you get closer, the high-quality texture will be shown. This mechanism may speed up the game, but it isn't so useful when you want to film high quality videos.

Removing low-level detail (LOD) textures one by one is relatively simple. Open up the map in your favorite map editor, and save the metadata for the bitmap that you want to edit. Then open up the meta for the texture in your hex editor [Hack #54].

This is what your standard bitmap (in this case the objects\vehicles\warthog\bitmaps\warthog_standard.bitm) hex looks like:

 00000100 01000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00020002 060B0A00
 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
 01000000 F0FC2F80 6D746962 00020002 01000000 0F000302 00010001 09001908 00000000
 0036FF88 00E0FD88 008AFD88 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 80550500 80550100 80550000
 00000000 00000000 00000000 E10456E6 00000000 00000000 0000C040 00000000 80990000
 80000000 0F000800 08000100 00000000 

The twelve values of interest are in bold. Every bitmap is allowed up to six LODs. However, many just have one. The first six values are the raw offset to the texture, followed by the sizes of those six textures. Notice if no LOD is available, it's set to FFFFFFFF and its corresponding size is set to 00000000.

Removing the low levels of detail is just a matter of telling the bitmap that it only has one section of raw data available. Therefore, you need to change:

 0036FF88 00E0FD88 008AFD88 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 80550500 80550100
 80550000 00000000 00000000 00000000 

to:

 0036FF88 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 80550500 00000000
 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 

With this change, you have removed the two LODs for this particular bitmap. This is really only useful for skinners who only want to deal with injecting one texture, or people doing machinima. If you actually want to do this to every texture, the Machinima Companion [Hack #77] is your friend.

Once you have made your changes, inject the texture back into the map, sign your map [Hack #53], and transfer it back to your Xbox [Hack #54]. Now you can be sure that you will always see the high-resolution version of the texture.