Halo Editing Kit

The Halo Editing Kit, often abbreviated as HEK, was released by Gearbox Software along with the Halo Custom Edition. It includes, among other things, basic "tags" for bitmaps, vehicles, weapons, bipeds, and other necessary elements of a Halo map.

Mapping Programs
The kit comes with three programs designed to assist mappers.

The first program is Tool. Tool is both the backbone and the pain of CE. Although it is capable of everything from bitmap creation to the final map-building, its old-style command prompt methods are frustrating for at least a few mappers.

The second program, known as Guerilla and labeled with a gorilla (pun intended), opens tags and edits them. Tags are files that make up everything in a Halo map: weapons, vehicles, etc. Guerilla can edit them so that mappers can alter what a specific item, what it does and how it looks (such as change a vehicle's color). Guerilla tends to crash when it encounters corrupted tags.

The third program is Sapien, continues the primate naming scheme. Sapien opens scenario tags and creates a visual representation of the final map. Mappers can insert vehicles and weapons, place spawn points, and make camera points for cutscenes. Everything that can be positioned in the map physically is done with Sapien. This is widely considered the easiest program of the three, and is comparable to Halo 3's Forge. Sapien is slow-loading, and crashes often; its debug.txt file is useful when attempting to diagnose such problems.

Other Materials
The Halo Editing Kit also includes a tutorial in the form of a step-by-step walkthrough of the making of the accompanying tutorial map. The tags that come with the kit are almost singularly made for this small map and include select bitmaps from the Campaign and Multiplayer maps. The combination of the tags, programs, and tutorial gives players a glimpse into the unique possibilities of the Halo Custom Edition.

Also, there are some programs that prove to be very useful such as Gmax/3DS Max for 3d modelling, and Photoshop for creating TIF images for creating bitmaps.

Experimentation by Players
Because the HEK is only a basic group of files, CE mappers had to experiment with it and share their discoveries on the workings of the game in order to form a useful knowledge base for editing. Over time, they realized that most of the game's tags were excluded from the HEK, eliminating a huge amount of creative possibilities.

It was at this point that people began tinkering with the HEK programs. Kornman produced a new version of Guerilla called "Kornman00", which unlocked all the grayed-out areas in the program. The new program allows for editing of terrain bitmaps and AIs, as well as many other previously impossible actions. He also created a user-friendly version of tool called "Tool++" and an unlocked version of Sapien called "a_hobo".

The largest breakthrough in regards to tag availability was Steelix B's "HEK+", which allows anyone to enter any original or custom map and extract any tag they want. Along with a few others, Steelix recompiled the entire Halo PC game into its basic parts. CE mappers now are able to do nearly anything they want, including programming AIs into maps, adding usable Pelicans and Longswords, easily creating Campaign-to-Multiplayer conversions or ripping the BSP from it. Also, this program had a feature to "protect" maps, which denied access to tag extraction. However, there was an encryption key, which could unprotect maps as long the the key matches the one used to protect the map.

With all of these new tools, the Custom Map Team re-created the campaign with modified skins, Halo 2 weapons, and new scripts. They are currently working on a sequel to the campaign mod, using Halo 3 aspects and expanded universe ideas such as adding entirely new landscapes, much smarter AIs, and even Brutes to levels.

Now, many advancements have been made within the program, the maps, and even the mappers themselves. Expert scripters such as Kornmann, Rec0, Bitterbannana, and Tiamat have made various scripts to help boost the interest in the maps.