Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

This page is incomplete! You can contribute information using GitHub issues or pull requests.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, commonly referred to as H1A or CEA was first released in 2011 as a collaboration project between 343 Industries, and Saber Interactive. It aimed to modernize the look and feel of the original game for use with the more powerful Xbox 360. With the release of Halo MCC, CEA has also seen a port to PC and Xbox One.

One of its quirks is the ability to switch between classic and remastered/anniversary visuals and sounds with the press of a button.

As of season 7, H1A represents a merger between the original H1CE and H1PC branches of the engine.

Modding

H1A officially supports modding with the release of the upgraded H1A Editing Kit. The editing kit can be downloaded via Steam and used to make custom maps. As of now, users are able to play custom maps with the use of the Steam Workshop, as long as MCC is launched with EAC off.

Changes

The H1A engine saw some adjustments to the map format. This made it difficult for some existing modding programs to read the new format.

  • BSP vertices are stored outside of the BSP tag and BSP data is loaded at address 0x41448000 instead of within the tag data space.
  • The tag data address has been adjusted from 0x40440000 to 0x40448000.
  • The maps (and other files) are compressed using a variant of zlib compression.
  • Bitmaps, and sounds have been relocated from their respective bitmaps.map/sounds.map locations. The sounds are now in FMOD sound banks, and the bitmaps are stored inside ipaks.

The rest of the tags system appears to be unaltered.

With the introduction of the Saber3d engine also came new file formats:

  • The ipak holds all the texture information for the game. This includes classic textures as well.
  • The imeta holds entries for the ipak. This links textures in the ipak to the level.
  • The fmeta is designed to link dependent files together.
  • The s3dpak is an archive file holding the files needed for the Saber engine.

Differences in versions

There are some differences between the PC PC (MCC), and Xbox 360 version versions; most of the assets have been rearranged to optimize things for their respective platforms.

  • Xbox uses a different compression algorithm. The chunking is still done the same; however, it does not utilize zlib.
  • Xbox does not utilize ipak/imeta/fmeta. Instead the primary filetype is the s3dpak.

It is unknown how the MCC Xbox One version compares.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following individuals for their research or contributions to this topic:

  • Kavawuvi (H1A BSP data base address)
  • zatarita (Documenting H1A differences from PC and between versions, summarizing new formats)