Yes! Weekly Bungie Update: Today!

for the most advanced console out there?

im looking forward to it, i could bear the frame drops in the first one, though i shouldnt really have to

Originally posted by ooseven
Less than 30 FPS for a First Person Shooter = Laughable.

:o Troll.

Originally posted by mm
for the most advanced console out there?

+1

but you didnt contest what we said

stop making excuses

But I\'ve done it so many times in the past, it doesn\'t matter what I say, mm.

I don\'t read into stats and discuss numbers.  I just play Halo and know that it\'s easily more fun than any other console FPS, maybe even any FPS.

sorry Nu... but no matter what system its on PC inc\'.

"locked" 30 FPS is un accaptable.

Frames Per Second = the life blood for a First Person shooter.

aye, fps is all that matters

take some off the "gleam" off if thats what it takes

shame how the 1st halo pushed the xbox past its limit

Yea, I\'m sure Halo 2 will look no better than Halo. :rolleyes:

Just release it on the PC at the same time as the xbox, that way some of us might be able to play it the way it\'s supposed to be played....and code it right this time, god damned Halo on PC was some messed up shit.

It\'s not SO bad...

Friday, Febuary 13th, 2004

I get a lot of mail here. Some of it asks perfectly reasonable questions, about multiplayer Halo 2 features, or what it\'s like working at Bungie, that kind of thing. A lot of them are explicit or implied death threats, or impossible requests to store outlandish objects in uncomfortable places. I tackle it all with gusto, like a red-faced optimistic German tour guide. "Ha, ha, I am so jolly to enjoy your correspondence!" But a lot of the letters ask things like, "Why don\'t you put movies in the updates?" or, "Why don\'t you run this column on the front page of IGN?"
Well it\'s simple – the weekly updates are (and always have been) designed to be a window on the process and people here at Bungie. It is not some official geyser of Halo 2 information – for that very reason, we post in occasionally obscure Halo and Bungie fan forums. If we went up on the front page of Gamespot or MSN every week, people would have warped expectations of the weekly update. Of course, the update gets mirrored immediately, and that\'s cool – we want lots of people to read and enjoy the updates, but they\'re here for folks who\'re curious about the process not so much the product. Nearer the game\'s release, there will be fountains of really gritty Halo 2 stuff, but until then, the Bungie Weekly Updates will continue in the vein they have been.

• The Web Team is entering a phase that can only be described as ballistic. Long hours and brutal deadlines are just part of the process in our plan to bring you a new-improved Bungie.net, without sacrificing any of the charm, community or functionality you\'ve come to expect. A lot of programming work has been completed (and we\'re excited to unveil some cool new features in the near future) but a lot of the time consuming work at this point is graphical, as Zoe and Lorraine work hard to create pages that look fully Bungiefied.
  

Brian is heading out to LA on one of the biggest community events ever to happen in the Halo universe – it\'s the finals of the World Halo Championships, with participants from all over the world battling it out for ultimate Halo dominance. We\'ll bring you a full report on the events next week.

• One of our readers decided to make an HOMAGE to Mister Chief, which is as I had feared, another reason to flesh out the Mister. You can check out the fully playable, 3D, Mister Chief\'s Mayo (do NOT want to know what Mister Chief\'s "mayo" actually is) and pick up ammo, blast Covenant only slightly better drawn than Mister Chief himself, and eat ribs to refill your energy bar.
• The marketing guys take a lot of flak, but they really do work hard in some of the most unpleasant circumstances in the gaming world. This week for example, Cam and the guys had to make a trip to Manhattan, to choke down Martinis and steaks with ad execs on Madison Avenue, while discussing Halo 2 tie-ins: You know, like, "Viagra and Halo – the Two Biggest Things This Year" or, "Halo 2 Toilet Roll: Wiping the Galaxy Clean!"

They are actually working on some cool tie-in promotions, and later in the year you\'ll start to see the fruits of that labor. This time around Halo is very well known quantity, so other products want to get a piece of the marketing action.

• Tyson has been working on animation and AI issues on a giant piece of geometry. Since the geometry has edges and drop-offs, the trick is getting the AI characters – in this case Grunts – to fight and dodge successfully, without actually falling off, or getting confused by the boundaries of the object.
  
  
• They don\'t work for Bungie, but two guys are racing those Minimoto bikes around the parking lot. We\'re very jealous. If only there was a Miniwarthog.
• Marty and the audio guys are always a wealth of information. This week they\'ve been tuning the script – a lot of the lead voice over work is being recorded in LA next week and everything has to be super tight. There will of course be some returning favorites, like the Chief and Cortana, but there will be lots of new actors and talent too, so Marty\'s going to be working with a lot of new people, explaining things to them like, "No, Grunts don\'t sound like James Earl Jones, squeak it up more…"

He\'s also been trying to pin down final sounds for objects. The Warthog, for example, is being continually tuned for gameplay – so they\'re making teeny adjustments to acceleration and RPMs – problem is that Marty\'s sound effects are all tied into that, so anytime a tweak is made to gameplay, some slight overhauls of how sounds work have to be done. Marty\'s concerns are slightly different from gameplay – his Warthog has to sound satisfying while still accurately describing what\'s actually happening on screen. That\'s a careful balancing act.

• Adrian, who I am basically related to thanks to an in-law in New Jersey, is working on lightmaps for the game. Specifically, he\'s fixed the "incident radiosity vector." Halo 2 has a ton of real time dynamic lighting, but a lot of basic stuff, like big stretch of open city or grass, can be lit using lightmaps – basically a way of applying "fake" light sources by coloring and shading objects rather than wasting pointless amounts of processor overhead doing it on the fly. If you know how an area is always going to be lit, there\'s little point doing it on the fly – especially when you want to save CPU cycles for more interesting stuff.

Lightmaps are rendered an object or an area at a time – the color and light information isn\'t just painted on, it\'s carefully and painstakingly calculated (to be real-world correct) by a bank of (currently) 20 servers. The room they\'re housed in is a balmy 94 degrees right this second (and under constant supervision), but Adrian\'s very pleased by the exponential increase in rendering speed over the original Halo. A lightmap that once took three days to render can now be calculated in a couple of hours. On the last game, that meant that if a lightmap wasn\'t exactly perfect, good enough would have to suffice. This time there\'s opportunity to redo anything that isn\'t perfect.

The lighting decisions also affect how bump-maps look – so Adrian\'s looking at what direction a bumpmap should "shadow" when the final light passes are made. In short, the lighting in Halo 2 is a heck of a lot more convincing than that seen in the first game.[/b]

• Rob McLees was busy in his corner – too busy. When asked what he was up to, he looked up, barked, "More guns!" and went back to his screen.
• Pete Parsons claimed that he couldn\'t tell me what he was doing this week because it was so top-secret. However, he later admitted it was because it was boring.
• Bill O\'Brien is in tunnel-vision mode, animating a new type of Covenant soldier. Can\'t tell you much more about what kind of Covenant it is, but you know it\'s alien and you know it\'s bad. This guy has actually been partially-complete for a long time in design and AI respects, but now Bill\'s challenge is to get his transitional animations, when he stops, slows down or changes direction suddenly.

This particular varmint/critter/monster is presenting a number of fairly unique challenges for animation and AI, as well as some tricky problems for the player to contend with.[/b]

So until next week, check out what it would be like if Mister Chief had his own game! Even though now technically, he does...[/size]

Originally posted by theomen
... god damned Halo on PC was some messed up shit.

How so? It works a lot better than counter strike and hacking is non-existant.

Sixth update, originally posted at 343GS.com

Friday, Febuary 20th, 2004

Hello, and welcome to the February 20th edition of the Bungie Weekly Update, where we open the window just a crack, on the antics and shenanigans going on at Bungie Towers. The weekly updates are designed to illuminate Bungie and Halo fans on the game development process - not the product per se.

• The team has a big milestone coming up. A milestone is a thing invented by a grown-up about twenty years ago to make sure that programmers (in those days, fragrant hippies with bits of cheese and mice in their beards) quit sucking on bongs long enough to actually finish programming a game. These days of course, a programmer is a very different animal. Taut, lean and ripped, with cat-like grace and deadly martial arts skills, they\'d be Special Forces infiltration operatives were it not for their l337 haxorz skillz.

The object of a milestone is to first, prove that a team of 60 people hasn\'t simply been sitting around watching Spongebob and winging Twinkies at each other, and second - to produce a reasonably complete section of the game. In this instance, it\'s a very important level from later in the game (don\'t read too much or too little into that kidz, we don\'t always build levels in order).

The best thing about a milestone (apart from the fact that I just get to observe the process from the safe distortion of a beer glass) is that when it\'s done, we get to watch it and play it. Some of the biggest Halo geeks I\'ve ever met are sitting right here, making it, and every time a milestone is complete, the guys here enjoy it every bit as much as you would.

• Poops are back. Well, not that they\'ve been anywhere, but now they\'re behaving properly and playing nice with the non-player character AI. Poops, if you didn\'t read the prior update, are pieces of "instance geometry" like columns, planters, just things you might encounter in a real space. Poops are much easier to position, edit and move around than the more complex building structures and other objects – but populating a world properly with poops can really bring it to life. Damian and the guys have been implementing them in the levels, but with little attention to how they affect AI and physics until now.

Of course properly implemented poops mean that characters now behave differently than before, and this will give both testers and designers something to think about as they see how the AI responds to the new pathfinding challenges.

• Greg and the animators have been working hard to get Dual Weapons properly implemented in Multiplayer – the problem of course isn\'t putting them in, it\'s making them balanced. Early implementations basically turn Master Chief into an unstoppable force of evil and matches can end far too quickly – as if everyone suddenly had rocket launchers. The fine tuning and balancing required to make dual weapons an advantage, but not a ridiculous advantage, is a tightrope the designers will be walking for months.

For me the coolest part is seeing how the two weapons interact – control schemes are being fiddled with there’s a whole bunch of stuff I would love to tell you here, but can’t. I can tell you that Master Chief right now holds each type of gun in a totally convincing way. The other animations – for reloading, crouching with two weapons and switching them, look buttery smooth. I want to PLAY this.[/b]

Personally, I don\'t see anything wrong with suddenly becoming a horrifyingly powerful superplayer…

• Gaze Tracking, or the, "What the hell are you lookin\' at pal?" system is in, and it looks great. In multiplayer games, the characters will now turn their heads to follow either you, or the object in their reticule. That means that you can probably start to feel rightfully uncomfortable if some jerk on your team starts to stare at you. It will also have a very subtle effect in multiplayer battles, where you can see what else a multiplayer opponent or teammate is looking at, literally by following their gaze.

You may not even have noticed that in the original halo, characters simply pointed their faces straight ahead. Not a big deal until you see how it compares with this new alternative. Little things like that sound small in isolation, but put all these tiny factors together and they weave quite a tapestry. Of death. A tapestry of death.

• The scripts are finished and the first round of dialog is almost all being recorded this week. Joe Staten, the cinematics guru, lets Bungie folk pore over the scripts and make suggestions or changes – you\'d be surprised how tightly thought out the Halo universe is. A staffer could for example note that a bit of military terminology is being used incorrectly, or that an Elite would never say, \'Ooh, Master Chief gave me an owie!"

Seeing the script, the writing and the dialog are among my favorite aspects of the job – but it does kinda suck knowing what happens at the end. I mean, who\'d ever have suspected that Master Chief was a ghost? And a chick. A ghost chick! Seriously though, it\'s hard to know whether to be disappointed or excited by scripts. Part of you is like, "Holy crap, this is so amazing!" and the other part of you is like, "Aaw man, I just read 20 pages of spoilers."[/b]

Most of the dialog is being recorded in California but a couple of actors are based up here, and a couple more in Chicago so Marty and Jay and Joe are juggling that aspect too. I wanted to be a voice in the game, but my best baritone still sounds like a wasp farting through a harmonica.

• Paul Russell just showed me a hole in the ground between two parts of a level, and pointed out that thanks to the sheer scale possible in the new engine, he could literally fit all of the geometry from the first game, inside the hole. Of course, scale is relative, but that\'s the general idea.
  
• Lorraine, resident Bungie artist, has been porting over reams and reams of content from the old site to the future Bungie.net – a job as necessary as it is tedious. Lorraine actually created a lot of the art, and is very protective of Bungie\'s graphical assets. More interestingly, she just approved the base for the Flood Carrier Form action figure that was debuted at last week\'s Toy Fair in New York. We\'ll all get to see the action figures next week so they can be approved for production.
  

Lorraine has also commissioned artist Eddie Smith to create hi-res images that we\'ll use for "assorted promotional purposes." Eddie\'s stuff is fantastic and he works fast, so we can\'t wait to see the results.

Next Week: More of the same, plus some different stuff, plus a few things that are similar, but not identical. And naturally it\'ll be on a different forum. But until then, "enjoy" Mister Chief\'s near identical dual-wielding problems.


[/size]

This was a good update. The bits about the Dual Weapons, Gaze Tracking, and Geometry and Scale really got me thinkin\'.

I knew HALO 2\'s scale was going to be much larger than the first game\'s, but... That one "hole"?... Jesus. HALO 2\'s levels are going to be gigantic!

Sounds like it\'s getting there.  

Can Summer come sooner!!!