In Halo, “the sandbox” often refers to the weapons and vehicles connected a representation astatine immoderate fixed time: each the toys you person to play with. But for a full different acceptable of Halo fans, that sandbox is the crippled itself. Be it done Forge oregon ambitious modding projects similar SPV3, playing with the precise halfway of the crippled itself is portion of the bequest of the franchise. Now, Microsoft has made that adjacent easier aft publishing a thorough postulation of modding resources for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. And arsenic a surprise, immoderate of these resources incorporate immoderate never-before-seen images from Halo 2’s improvement mode backmost successful the aboriginal 2000s.

Today, Microsoft released authoritative documentation for Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s mod tools, specifically Halo 2 and Halo 3 (other entries successful the bid are expected to person documentation astatine a aboriginal date). As spotted by Halo modder Kiera connected Twitter, immoderate of the documentation for Halo 2 contains worldly straight from Bungie circa the aboriginal 2000s. With it are a fewer improvement images that fewer person seen until now.

What’s chill astir these images is that they amusement disconnected the interior workings of Halo 2’s engine. One of these images illustrates the “screenshot_cubemap” command. I’m not going to wholly unreal to cognize what this does, but based connected the documentation, it’s for usage successful generating reflective surfaces, similar we spot successful the aged documentation photograph provided.

Another neat brace of images shows disconnected debugging information, listing information for erstwhile a exemplary is utilizing circumstantial weapons oregon playing retired assorted animations.

Like galore behind-the-scenes shots, these are hardly glamorous. But they are chill nonetheless. The improvement of Halo 2 is simply a communicative of precocious ambition astatine the outgo of abusive crunch, overmuch of which has been talked astir openly. Various materials from the game’s improvement person been seen before, portion others stay retired of reach, similar the legendary 2003 E3 demo (which 343 has precocious pondered yet making playable). Today, a small much has seen the airy of day.