ce-lighting

Better lighting for Halo: Combat Evolved on the Master Chief Collection. A Spark mod that adds lighting Halo CE never had, driven by each level's own sun.

Work in progress. The first effect, god rays, is being brought up now.

What it does

• Each level's real sun. Halo CE keeps every level's sun (direction, color, power) in the level's sky. ce-lighting reads it, so the lighting matches every level with no hand tuning.
• God rays. Light shafts streak out from the sun wherever there's open sky around it, so cliffs, Forerunner arches and the ring's edge cut beams out of the light. Screen-space, from Halo's own depth buffer (GPU Gems 3, ch. 13).
• F7 turns it on and off, to compare.

Planned: ray-traced sun shadows and ambient occlusion from the level's real geometry (not just what's on screen), and proper shadows for characters and vehicles.

Install

You need Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam with Halo: CE. Offline only, with anti-cheat disabled. Never use mods online.

1. Build it (below), or grab a release when there is one.
2. Put ce-lighting.dll in <MCC>\MCC\Binaries\Win64\mods\ and load Spark into MCC (started with anti-cheat disabled).
3. Load any Halo CE level.

Works alongside HaloCraft (Minecraft inside Halo CE).

Building

Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (C++) and Premake 5.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/festella22/ce-lighting
cd ce-lighting
premake5 vs2022
MSBuild.exe ce-lighting.sln /t:ce-lighting /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=Win64

tools\reload.ps1 builds it and (re)loads it into a running MCC.

Credits

• Spark by KodyJKing: the Halo CE MCC mod loader and SDK.
• The light scattering method: Kenny Mitchell, "Volumetric Light Scattering as a Post-Process", GPU Gems 3, ch. 13.

MIT, see LICENSE. Fan project, not affiliated with Microsoft, 343 Industries, Halo Studios or Bungie.