Halo 2/3/ODST Emblem/Snapshot/Service Tag Documentation

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I've always been interested in how Bungie displayed your Halo Emblems on their site. I don't know why, but the math behind it all just gets my attention. Sometime about a month or 2 ago I tried to write a little script in PHP to calculate all the possible variants of the Halo 2 emblem that you could create...and it killed my browser. The number is so massive that even a server couldn't handle calculating it.

So I decided to go further. Earlier today I wrote some documentation on the specifications of the Halo 2, 3, and ODST Emblem, Snapshot, and Service Tag values. It covers the format of the URL and what each value in the URL meant to generate the desired result. You can view that documentation here:

http://infectionist.com/misc/halo_emble...tation.txt

It's only a text file, so I'll probably update it into a fully qualified specifications document before long (maybe), but it gets the job done.

I wanted to take it another step further though and go back to my old project and finally find out just how many unique variations of the Halo 2 emblem you could create. Holy crap there are a ton. According to the specifications these are the following values and ranges:

primary color: 0-17 (18 total)
secondary color: 0-17 (18 total)
primary emblem color: 0-17 (18 total)
secondary emblem color: 0-17 (18 total)
foreground style: 0-62 (63 total)
background style: 0-31 (32 total)
foreground layer style: 0-1 (2 total)

So, multiplying all those numbers together gets you

18 * 18 * 18 * 18 * 63 * 32 * 2 = 423,263,232

There are a total of 423,263,232 different combinations, here's that in plain text:

four hundred twenty-three million two hundred sixty-three thousand two hundred thirty-two

possible combinations...to put that in perspective, there are about 300 million people in the US.

So I whipped up a quick C# program to iterate through all of those combinations and write each one to a line in a text file. After testing, building, and running the program...then waiting, then seeing that the generated file was already a gig and going strong, I decided to see just how much the resulting file might be. I was astonished.

So I estimated that at the maximum length that each line can be (86 characters, so 86 bytes) plus the new line character (which takes up 2 bytes), my file should be somewhere within the range of

37,247,164,416 bytes / 1024 =
36,374,184 kilobytes / 1024 =
35,521.66 megabytes / 1024 =
34.69 gigabytes

Almost 35 Gigs! Of course this is an estimate, but I can know that the file won't be any larger than 34.69 gigs and will probably be around 33 gigs after all is done.

So, I started my program at 2:48:46 am my time, and it's still not done as of 3:30 am. My file is sitting pretty at 26 gigs. It takes about 10 seconds per 100MB.

Luckily I put in a notification when the program finishes. It'll pop up an alert letting me know that the task is finished and how long it took. I'll edit when that (finally) happens.

I was originally planning on downloading all the different possible variations to the server, for no reason, just because I could. I'm not gonna do that anymore. At approximately 1.5 Kilobytes per emblem (at the default 70 pixels width and height), multiplied by the number of unique variants, that would be about 605GB. Not worth it.

EDIT: Here it is. The task finished and it took 0:50:27:263 (hours:minutes:seconds:milliseconds), and there were 423,263,232 unique combinations, just like I determined. The file ended up being 33.6GB. WOW!
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I've always been interested in how Bungie displayed your Halo Emblems on their site. I don't know why, but the math behind it all just gets my attention. Sometime about a month or 2 ago I tried to write a little script in PHP to calculate all the possible variants of the Halo 2 emblem that you could create...and it killed my browser. The number is so massive that even a server couldn't handle calculating it.

So I decided to go further. Earlier today I wrote some documentation on the specifications of the Halo 2, 3, and ODST Emblem, Snapshot, and Service Tag values. It covers the format of the URL and what each value in the URL meant to generate the desired result. You can view that documentation here:

http://infectionist.com/misc/halo_emble...tation.txt

It's only a text file, so I'll probably update it into a fully qualified specifications document before long (maybe), but it gets the job done.

I wanted to take it another step further though and go back to my old project and finally find out just how many unique variations of the Halo 2 emblem you could create. Holy crap there are a ton. According to the specifications these are the following values and ranges:

primary color: 0-17 (18 total)
secondary color: 0-17 (18 total)
primary emblem color: 0-17 (18 total)
secondary emblem color: 0-17 (18 total)
foreground style: 0-62 (63 total)
background style: 0-31 (32 total)
foreground layer style: 0-1 (2 total)

So, multiplying all those numbers together gets you

18 * 18 * 18 * 18 * 63 * 32 * 2 = 423,263,232

There are a total of 423,263,232 different combinations, here's that in plain text:

four hundred twenty-three million two hundred sixty-three thousand two hundred thirty-two

possible combinations...to put that in perspective, there are about 300 million people in the US.

So I whipped up a quick C# program to iterate through all of those combinations and write each one to a line in a text file. After testing, building, and running the program...then waiting, then seeing that the generated file was already a gig and going strong, I decided to see just how much the resulting file might be. I was astonished.

So I estimated that at the maximum length that each line can be (86 characters, so 86 bytes) plus the new line character (which takes up 2 bytes), my file should be somewhere within the range of

37,247,164,416 bytes / 1024 =
36,374,184 kilobytes / 1024 =
35,521.66 megabytes / 1024 =
34.69 gigabytes

Almost 35 Gigs! Of course this is an estimate, but I can know that the file won't be any larger than 34.69 gigs and will probably be around 33 gigs after all is done.

So, I started my program at 2:48:46 am my time, and it's still not done as of 3:30 am. My file is sitting pretty at 26 gigs. It takes about 10 seconds per 100MB.

Luckily I put in a notification when the program finishes. It'll pop up an alert letting me know that the task is finished and how long it took. I'll edit when that (finally) happens.

I was originally planning on downloading all the different possible variations to the server, for no reason, just because I could. I'm not gonna do that anymore. At approximately 1.5 Kilobytes per emblem (at the default 70 pixels width and height), multiplied by the number of unique variants, that would be about 605GB. Not worth it.

EDIT: Here it is. The task finished and it took 0:50:27:263 (hours:minutes:seconds:milliseconds), and there were 423,263,232 unique combinations, just like I determined. The file ended up being 33.6GB. WOW!
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I normally won't reply to my own topics, but I wanted to keep this seperate from the actual post content. Here are the Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST Service Tags lists:

Halo 3:
http://infectionist.com/misc/halo3servicetaglist.txt (12.6KB, 2,600 items)

Halo 3:ODST:
http://infectionist.com/misc/halo3odsts...aglist.txt (9.61MB, 1,679,616 items)

I'll get a list for the Halo 3: ODST Player Snapshot up too, since there aren't that many items in it (only 9,900.)
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I normally won't reply to my own topics, but I wanted to keep this seperate from the actual post content. Here are the Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST Service Tags lists:

Halo 3:
http://infectionist.com/misc/halo3servicetaglist.txt (12.6KB, 2,600 items)

Halo 3:ODST:
http://infectionist.com/misc/halo3odsts...aglist.txt (9.61MB, 1,679,616 items)

I'll get a list for the Halo 3: ODST Player Snapshot up too, since there aren't that many items in it (only 9,900.)
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[Poisonblood]

You used 35 gigs for the space? Or you just found out that it would take up 35 gigs.


And


HOLY SHIT!
_________________

[Poisonblood]

You used 35 gigs for the space? Or you just found out that it would take up 35 gigs.


And


HOLY SHIT!
_________________

[KJdog23]

Damn ODST list, crashed my computer.
_________________

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Poison, I actually wrote the file, it ended up being 33.6 gigs. I still have it. No, I won't upload it.

And KJ, it takes my computer a good 30 seconds to open it in Notepad, you should be able to open it in something like Wordpad though a lot quicker. Or even just use your browser.
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Poison, I actually wrote the file, it ended up being 33.6 gigs. I still have it. No, I won't upload it.

And KJ, it takes my computer a good 30 seconds to open it in Notepad, you should be able to open it in something like Wordpad though a lot quicker. Or even just use your browser.
_________________


~HaLo2FrEeEk