What if Halo 4 returned to this, but incorporated a form of ATLAS into the game?
ATLAS 2.0
- Accessed by holding, say, D-Pad Down.
- Brings up an overhead layout of the map.
- Current locations of your teammates and their statuses (i.e. blue - safe, yellow - taking fire, red X - trounced)
- Weapon layout on the map.
The weapon icons change to red 20 seconds before they respawn, change to green for the 10 seconds after respawn, then change back to the default black background. The icons don't disappear or change to indicate if someone has picked the weapon up, they only tell you when it is about to respawn (or just respawned). So you won't suddenly see the Rocket Launcher icon disappear and know that an enemy nabbed it, but three minutes later you would see the RL icon change to red then green.
Basically it makes timing weapon spawns easier for casual players. MLG can disable the map view, or maybe just select parts (i.e. show the layout but no player positions or weapon respawns).
- What if you could use screenshots of your Forge creation to make your own map layout for ATLAS 2.0?
When you take the screenshot, the game records the camera coordinates and uses the weapon coordinates to place the icons on the ATLAS map (it also places icons for the Red and Blue flag spawns, which only show up on the map in the appropriate CTF games).
During the game, the system takes player locations and does the required coordinate transformations to put their dots on the map. That, or the map layout tool locks you to certain camera angles to make the coordinate system easier to use (i.e. overhead so you only deal with X and Y translations).
Even without the in-game updates to player locations and weapon respawns, a static map of weapon locations for Forge variants would be really helpful and could be done with a simple stamp tool. (I'm sure the full idea would be insanely complicated to program. I'm just daydreaming here.)
