Yes! Weekly Bungie Update: Today!

Originally posted by mm
bah, as long as they dont use the same 3-4 levels again like halo, i\'ll be happy

No you won\'t, it\'s still 30fps.

Originally posted by Bozco
Scary, you\'re admitting in a way that Halo is a good game.

teh gasp!1 :eek:

Oh, I know Halo is a good.  Just hearing it from mm is shocking.

plus hopefully other marines will drive the vehicles, and you can just be on back as gunner or something...

i want more enemies and weapons, but more difference about them all..... as some game have different guns, but basically the same


i just noticed he is holding 2 guns in that pic

kopking, you didn\'t watch the E3 demo, didja?

• Marines are now capable of driving vehicles.
• Bigger selection of weapons, same awesome balance.
• MC will be able to hold two guns at the same time. Only for smaller weapons like SMGs and Plasma Pistols though.

halo 2 is 30 fps?

wtf?  :rpissed:

Yes. They\'re improving so much at the cost of keeping the framerate capped at 30fps. Of course, it\'ll be much more stable this time around, there were never any dips in the E3 demo... And hey, as long as there isn\'t any massive slowdown, it should be fine, right?

[Jumpman]

30 fps therefore it sucks! /end mm logic

[Living-In-Clip]

If it maintains a solid 30fps and does not dip, than it will be tolerable. However, if it dips, than it is purely unacceptable. I have problems playing FPS without getting sick and when the frame-rate dips, it makes the situation even worse.

Weekly Update, Friday Jan 23rd

Holy crap! Last week was apparently just a slow introduction to the whirling vortex of thrills that is Bungie. Now I\'ve been flung in at the deep end, and all the allowances they make for n00bz have been thrown out like bad milk. It\'s a weird combination of frenetic, stressed, exciting and fun. Like being kicked in the groin by a fairy made of peanut-flavored light. Approximately.

I also just took a close look at a Prophet for the first time. I didn\'t realize it was a Covenant deal. I just glanced at it and I thought it was HotTubGuy*. I even invented a whole mythology around him. Like, that maybe he\'d knocked an 8-Track stereo into his hot tub and traveled through time. Shows what I know.

Anyway, I\'ve been witness to a tremendous amount of Halo 2 related activity this week, and I\'ll tell you what I can about it.


The whole web thing is getting crazy. We\'re relaunching Bungie.net soon-ish, and we\'re trying to assemble, create and collate all the content for it. It looks super cool. Brian is taking point on a lot of that stuff, and he\'s also been rounding up the n00bz for today\'s pentathlon. We\'ll let you know the results on Monday, but basically it\'s a contest between various layers of the Bungie hierarchy. Grizzled Ancients, Old Skool, Middle Skool and Noobz. We won the Summer Pentathlon last year but I reckon the grizzled ancients are planning to cheat this time around. The events include EyeToy and Mario Kart, but we\'re all pretty psyched to play Halo 2. That\'s right. Different multiplayer maps and different game styles, including CTF and Slayer, of course. We\'re trying to learn one of the more complex maps, provisionally called Burial Mounds. Favorite new Halo 2 expression? "He\'s goin\' Ribs!"


Lorraine, our artist, has been incredibly busy. Some of what she\'s doing is punch-in-the-face secret, but she has also been working on the Halo 2 logo. It looks SWEET. It rocks harder than meat-flavored toothpaste at a British dental convention, but Lorraine isn\'t quite satisfied and has been tuning it. She reckons the next version has a 50-50 chance of being the final one, which means there\'s a 50-50 chance you\'ll see it soon. She\'s also been finishing a Gold Elite action figure, which will be available soon, and an amazingly detailed special edition Master Chief, which will only be available in one exclusive place (details to be released soon).


Greg Snook and the animators are doing some really cool stuff with the Chief\'s walking and running animation. Right now he sidesteps convincingly, has a real walk animation (instead of just a slow version of the default run set) and even cooler, he crouches and crouch-walks much more convincingly. It sounds like a small thing, but if you go back and look at Halo compared to this new stuff, the difference is astonishing.


The coolest stuff going on this week though has got to be the way the animation and AI are coming together. You watch demos of the technologies interacting with each other and you\'re thinking, "This LOOKS incredible." Then you take a step back and realize, "Oooh. This is GAMEPLAY." The demo we watched was running in realtime, basically a huge warehouse filled with objects, obstacles and Covenant. The AI sends a mixture of grunts, Elites and more, charging across the cluttered map to see how they deal with obstacles and each other. Grunts typically sprint around fallen beams and boxes, but Elites are frighteningly smart, making fast, natural and athletic maneuvers and Hunters will simply charge through the map. We watched this happen from a Chief\'s-eye perspective and it\'s pretty frightening.


Ryan and our multiplayer test team, , have been almost impossibly busy. Tons of post mortem meetings to discuss what went wrong and what went right with various test builds. How\'s the networking holding up? What problems are we encountering on DSL connections – the office is set up with a variety of broadband connections for test. They\'ve also been busy accommodating Bungie employees with their own multiplayer builds and Xbox systems to pad out the test process. As you can imagine, it\'s not difficult to convince someone they have to play Halo 2 as a part of their job. The testers have also been on call for ad-hoc testing ¬ -- running around in mostly-complete levels to test specific systems and problems – a physics thing here, an AI issue there. That and like everyone else, they\'re training hard for the Pentathlon – and they\'re testers, so they\'ve played more Halo 2 than anyone else…



* Next week, more, bigger, better stuff from the maelstrom of excellence that is Bungie. Until then, enjoy this artist\'s impression of Mister Chief and the HotTubGuy.

http://www.subnova.com/forum/?pid=20040123.183024

Posted on January 30th, 2004 at 10:14 AM by Frankie

Visibility: Visible to the public
 
So remember last year when we told you we don\'t announce release dates until we\'re confident well meet our deadline? Well now were confident. Halo 2 will ship in Fall, 2004. Please make a note of it.

Since you are our most important audience we wanted to tell you first. We\'ve enjoyed your support, your patience and your loyalty, so this is the least we could do.

There will be a fair number of new details and announcements to follow over the next few months, and of course theres always E3. Here at Bungie.net, as you\'ve recently witnessed, were ramping up a campaign of new content, details and snippets of info, just to keep you sated while you get ready for Fall. Until then, feast your eyes on the first ever Multiplayer screenshot of Halo 2, and check out this week\'s UPDATE. Can you smell the bacon yet?

FIRST EVER MULTIPLAYER HALO 2 SCREENSHOT!

http://www.bungie.net/perlbin/blam.pl?file=/site/0/news/news_detail.html&id=C2D1DA44-6C29-4769-AF11-5F9E4948BF0B

when the xbox drops down to 99 bucks i\'m getting one with this game.

It has been a busy week. We\'re going bananas building and designing the new website (more on that in the coming weeks) and generally having a ball seeing the game come together. Animation, sound, environment and gameplay are all frantically combining into a delicious soup.
The Cananimators have also been working on very subtle transitions between walking, running and sprinting, so that the movements look fluid and natural. More impressive, bizarrely, is the animation for stopping and turning. The trick is going to be finding a balance between its usefulness and playability – which is true of almost any game feature.
Joe Staten and CJ Cowan have been very busy bees. Yes, the same kind of bees that Homer\'s nightmare dog spits out. They\'ve been working diligently on game-engine cutscenes and transitions between levels. Using the game engine helps keep the player anchored more firmly in the game world. There have been some tweaks and modifications however, so the cutscenes will look sharper, thanks in large part to the use of the new graphic engine\'s features. Specular highlighting, mad bump-mapping etc.

The cutscene I watched had been put together fairly recently, and was for timing and positioning of cameras, but looked pretty finished. The only way to know it wasn\'t done was the fact that none of the characters had walking animations, they just kind of glided around.

None of the actor voices (unless you count Joes Staten yelling, "I\'m fighting!" in a high-pitched voice) are attached to the cutscenes at this point – more on that next week, hopefully. The cutscene in question is actually a tremendously important one. Email me months from now and ask me which of the many shockers it was and I\'ll tell you.
"He got the POOPS working!" You\'ll be relieved to know that "POOPS" is not an acronym, rather just a term Chucky, one of the programmers, uses for "instance geometry." Instance geometry is a term that covers what Chucky describes as "low level" stuff. You might describe it as bits of the Halo world. Instance geometry "objects" aren\'t strictly objects at all, at least as far as we define them. They\'re things like columns, planters, basic world objects. As far as getting the POOPS working, Chucky simply got them all to behave the way they should in terms of AI reaction, shot ricochets, player collisions – all that kind of stuff.

The beauty of instance geometries is that while they\'re textured, lightmapped, bump-mapped – the whole nine yards – they seldom involve much work for the level and environment guys. Often they can simply be placed in the right spot and left to do their business. Normal objects have to be sealed and carefully implemented into geometry – instance geometry is a whole lot easier to deal with.

Normally these things are pretty ho-hum, but anyone who\'s been in a campaign firefight, or a game of rockets on Hang \'Em High knows that POOPS are pure gameplay. They\'re places to run, hide, dodge and take cover, and they often breathe life into a level.

Mat Noguchi is up to something pretty special too. He just perfected a neat technique/tool/trick that allows the player to hear all the important game dialog in a completely natural way. No longer will you sprint by an event and miss a vital clue from an NPC (Non-Player-Character). We can\'t tell you exactly how it works, suffice it to say that when it happens, it\'ll make perfect sense.

Marty O\'Donnell and co., have been tooling around with footsteps, trying to make sure that when Master Chief walks, runs, sprints crouches and creeps, that an appropriate footfall is heard (or not in the case of creeping). Right now, thanks to some experiments with Dolby surround, it\'s occasionally possible to think your own footsteps are someone else\'s. That little "feature" is very easy to fix – but one issue with surround sound is that there\'s no "down" so Marty\'s feeling is that footsteps should cue from the front and center speakers since they handle "close" sounds better. But you will be able to detect a subtle difference between left and right footsteps.

Of course, all these sounds are based on the surfaces you\'re moving on – so different sounds and effects are going to be applied for metal, indoor environments, echoey spaces, gravel, you name it.

A big meeting this week happened to get the manual process in gear. One thing you might not know about Bungie, under the auspices of Microsoft, is that this studio gets an amazing amount of control over every detail of the project. That includes action figures, poster art, Grunty Thirst mugs and of course, the game manual. The Halo 2 manual will be awesome. Maybe, dare we say it, a heck of a lot more awesome than last time? Working on a manual is pretty brutal too, since you have to cram so much information into a space small enough to fit in a DVD case. If it were up to us, it\'d be 500 pages long and bound in holographic Mylar. With an LCD panel on the front. So far, the only section finished is the list of multiplayer levels which are…no wait, I can\'t put that here.

Finally, I would like to thank Alta, the Bungie Princess for hooking us up with food all the time – people here are putting in crazy hours at both ends of the day (except for Parsons, who rolls into the parking lot in his Ferrari around noon on a good day) and totally kicking ass. Anyhoo, enjoy the new objet d\' horror and we\'ll see you next week! For more! Bungie! Update!

GOD I can\'t wait!

i certainly can

zzzzzz

Less than 30 FPS for a First Person Shooter = Laughable.