Yes! Weekly Bungie Update: Today!

I would apologize for not posting last week\'s update, but it was short and boring anyways, and the majority of you don\'t seem to take an interest in them...

Anyways, here\'s Twentienth update from last week, originally posted at Bungie.net.

Friday, May 28th, 2004

Smallest, lamest update in weeks, thanks to missing staff, deadlines and the crazy 3D shot we put up today. Sorry.

The community team has been swamped this week - the net guys put up some new forums, and expanded the number of avatars available and basically got dragged into anything that wasn\'t related to actually programming or designing the game!

• One cool thing that I got to do was look at Joe Staten\'s awesome dialog for single player "events" like what characters say when they get in and out of vehicles, or when they retreat from Covenant, or even, sniff, die. Gripping stuff, but going over Joe\'s scripts also serves to illustrate how complex the AI reaction to events is. There are like six different possible lines for a character getting into the passenger seat of a vehicle! Crazy!
  
  Joe\'s dialog is very cool too, and just skimming over the scripts gives you a sense of how epic some of these encounters are going to be. Joe\'s researched this stuff pretty intensively, and let me borrow one of his research tomes - a fat book devoted entirely to war slang. My favorite line? DILLIGAF which is an acronym for, "Do I Look Like I Give A..." and I got cut off before I read the last word...although I\'m pretty sure it was probably "fudge."
  
  
• Parsons\' Crazy Theory

OK everyone. Deep breath. Studio manager Parsons has a theory, that the unkind might refer to as crackpot, but he\'s thought it out, so we\'ll go along with it for a bit. So his theory boils down to this fundamental premise: "If you want a flying car, you must buy a Roomba." Now it gets more complex than that. Parsons thinks that the Roomba\'s tech is cool, but relatively inconsequential, but its social impact is of paramount importance.

Now a Roomba, for the uninitiated, is that robotic vacuum cleaner. He thinks that if you\'re cool with leaving a Robot, or SuckBot as I call it for short, to rampage around your house while you\'re out, then you\'ll be cool with all sorts of AI in your house and life. Like a fly-by-wire robot-driven car.

I\'m sure there\'s a lot more to it than that, but that\'s the gist of it. I would counter that obviously Robots are good at one thing: Rampaging. And there are further problems. For starters, they never have hands, always claws, gaping sucking maws, or lasers. None of these implements is useful for hugging, massaging or any other things you think you might want in your house.

• Nathan and John\'s Tower of Tweening

Not much from animation this week...but Nathan reports from the side of animation with the best hair situation, saying that John Butkus has started the first cinematic! Which also means that the animation team will move to cinematics very soon, collectively! Which means that most of the regular character animation is done! Kinda. They\'ll be going back and forth for sure, but obviously this indicates that the bulk of that work is over. Cinematics of course require lots of NEW animation - often more complex too, since the cinematic scenarios are different from the gameplay ones. That said - the cinematics don\'t have the same capacity for cluster***** that game animations do.

John\'s first cinematic features everyone\'s favorite angry officer, Sgt. Johnson - who delivers a very powerful line in this scene, and it has nothing to do with "God\'s own anti-sonofabitch machine"

Nathan also mentioned that Mike is beavering away on animation for one of the secret characters, and will be bringing a fun, and previously unmentioned weapon to life next week. Bill is finishing up on the Grunt...his food nipple is laden with steroids, whey powder and Creatine now...

Nathan himself, has been working on Brute animations and listening to the horrible sounds from the local country music station to get in the proper rage mindset and transferring those feelings on over to the Brute. Nathan angry! Nathan smash!

Bigger news should happen next week...

• John\'s Perspective on the same thing....

"This week I was working on the Earth City intro cinematic with Chief, Johnson, and a couple of marines. It\'s going pretty well, and it\'s a big effing help to have CJ lay out the characters in the scene and lock down the camera moves before we even touch it. I was on another project where I had to do all that stuff and it was really time-consuming, so the cinematics guys are my heroes right about now. Other than that, I\'m working on bug fixes and miscellaneous elite moves that I haven\'t had time to do because making unique animations for vehicle seats for five different weapon classes on the same character sure is exciting stuff compared to cinematics work....but it needs to get done, so here I am."

• Carney!

Carney, while not hiding Carneyholes in multiplayer maps, has been doing some very cool stuff to everyone\'s favorite sequel. Well, my favorite sequel at least. He\'s currently working on an Earth City-based multiplayer level with cool geometry, lots of hiding places and plenty of tall, futuristic architecture. It\'s part of a group of four maps that Chris is concentrating on right now. In addition to that, Steve Cotton, the new multiplayer artist, has been working on what Carney calls a "small Team CTF-type map" that has much more of a Covenant feel.[/list]
Here\'s Mister Chief. Fearing progress:

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Twenty First update, originally posted at Subnova

Bungie Weekly Update, June 04, 2004

Creepy. Now when I ask people what they\'re up to this week, they\'re like, "finishing this" or "completing that." Nobody is actually starting anything. Which is both exciting and frightening. Although it\'s five months \'til the game is on shelves, it\'s only three or four months \'til we\'re complete. Scary! So naturally, everyone\'s swamped. Here\'s the deal this week:

Cam\'s Castle

We never talk to the marketing guys, because all they do is drive around in black Porsches, buying martini lunches with their expense accounts, while their Armani suits are tailored and cleaned of weird white powdery residue. That said, without the sharks, there\'d be no mystery in the deep blue ocean of Halo 2 development, not to mention metal boxes, TV campaigns, magazine ads, cool storefront displays – in short just about everything related to getting Halo 2 in your face and into your Xbox. So we asked Cam Payne (seriously, that\'s his name) what\'s been going down in the world of mktg., for short. This is what he said:

"Do you consider lots of meetings and hundreds of e-mails as something cool?  Mainly this week was a lot of the day-to-day stuff for a game coming out in five months: Coordinating with agencies, reviewing advertising and POP (Point of Purchase) creative, planning and generating assets, working out the details of specific PR (Public Relations) tactics coordinating with the dozens of subsidiaries (countries that is) across the world that will market and sell Halo 2, and so on and so on

I do get to fly down to LA today for a Friday night meeting with Joe, Marty and one of our agencies.  A quick 15 hour trip, as I come back tomorrow morning at 6:30 am to go see the Dora the Explorer (hyperviolent Japanese anime) show in Seattle with my kids (elite squad of Ninja assassins).

In order to save time, effort and transportation costs, I’m staying tonight in the same hotel where Marty and Joe are staying.  Well, you know Marty and his need to be well pampered and taken care of—this means I get to stay in a nice fancy place where every room is a suite that’s bigger than my last apartment.  In fact, I mentioned I was traveling with Marty when making the reservation and they called back and wanted to know if I wanted the peeled grapes and hand massages when I arrived or Saturday morning."  

Environmental Impact

Dave Dunn didn\'t have much to say, but what he had to say was tremendously important. The environments and the geometry are done. That is to say, there is a building, a door, a wall and a floor everywhere it\'s supposed to be, you can run through the entire game without finding any gaps, and now he and the guys have moved on to polishing. They\'ll be tweaking textures, futzing with lightmaps and tweaking things here and there, but now they\'re on a different type of schedule.

The geometry and environments guys have been pretty much left to their own devices for a long time, but now they\'ll have a lot more to-ing and fro-ing with the designers as they tweak bits of environment to suit gameplay requirements. Dave says that while it may seem like they\'re cutting it close; this is a lot further ahead than it was on the first game, by comparison and with a whole heck of a lot more environments!

Cuban\'s Casa

Adrian "Cuban" Perez describes his week: "This week I’ve done a bunch of stuff, some might be more interesting to the outside world than others…"

• The damage handling code now pushes around the cause of the damage (i.e. what weapon it came from, what vehicle you were hit by, which sniping weapon you were just headshot with).  This is something we’ve been meaning to do for a while, now enough people at the end of the damage code pipeline (multiplayer messages, stats) want to know said info that we’ve taken care of feeding them.
  
• I made a few changes to the lightmapper that will let the artists iterate their lighting faster.  The fact that the lightmapper is much faster than the Halo 1 lightmapper is irrelevant since the artists have made much more detailed geometry with much higher res lightmaps, completely nullifying any speed advantage and making the iteration times just as long.  The kinds of spaces that the artists are lighting are so different than what we were trying to do in halo 1 that I’ve had a hard time making the lightmapper keep up with them.
  
• I did a couple of small changes to the weapon/damage code to handle a bad guy too nuts for the existing systems.  Nuts in the sense that he has CENSORED where death comes out of and two separate CENSORED.  Oh yeah and he’s big and mean, kind of like a Tyrannosaurus.
  
• The new HUD is in and working well enough to do all of the new weapon huds.  We’ve been arguing back and forth a lot over the best way to integrate dual-wielding into the HUD; I think the system we have is supasweet and will be both discoverable and useful, kind of like a Tyrannosaurus.

Butkus\' Barn

John Butkus explains this week\'s bizniss: "Nothing too exciting this week…mostly miscellaneous bug fixing and making sure that the elite and marine work as vehicle passengers with all weapons and that their hands are properly locked on the warthog and scorpion hand rails.  I know.  Fascinating.

I also animated the first-person CENSORED (both single and dual shot), so that should be in the game and working now…it looks pretty cool, but it’s definitely a lot weaker than CENSORED and it has CENSORED now, so people are probably going to CENSORED and CENSORED.  Oh well, all’s fair in the cruel world of gameplay balance."

Walpole\'s World

Rival Canadian Nathan Walpole gives another Cananimator view: "Not much has gone on this week that differs from the regular attachment of animation excitement. All of us are still working hard and resisting the urge to bust home early to play Full Spectrum Warrior. We do have some current news to report. Two new animators are coming on board to help us bring the fans some incredible motion. We have a mercenary animator on loan for 2 months from a sister Microsoft studio, FASA (By the way, thanks for sharing your peeps with us - feel free to make a giant Robot in Mechassault that looks like a Grunt...). He will be helping us pound out some riveting storytelling in our cinematics. We also have a new contract junior animator starting out next week that will be helping make the in-game animation tighter than a walrus’ butt hole. Oh, and the FASA mercenary happens to be Canadian too, so 50% of the animation in Halo 2 will remain Canadian made. Go Canada. Go Halo 2!"

Hoberman\'s House

Max is typically reserved this week as he gives a hint of what to expect from Halo 2 on Xbox Live. I know specifically what he\'s talking about though, so I can tell you he\'s understating its coolness!

"Not a very exciting week for those on the outside, but I\'m incredibly psyched. For the past several weeks we\'ve been reviewing all of our UI and Xbox Live plans. This is the hard part, polishing the design and solidifying the final specs. Should have happened sooner, but we\'ve always known we were on to something cool, and now I\'m even more certain that Halo 2 on Xbox Live is going to be incredible. I\'m mainly referring to the whole LAN party over the Internet experience, or as we sometimes refer to it the Halo 2 "virtual couch". It\'s going to take some getting used to because we\'re doing things that have never been done before. But once people are used to it I\'m confident everything else will seem broken."

Butcher\'s Bivouac

Chris Butcher, watching over all manner of programmy shenanigans lets us know what code craziness went down:

Luke Timmins has voice communication working in game for real, and has done some very neat stuff with player CENSORED and team voice stuff.

Bart is busy doing automated take home networking tests, it’s cool, we all take the boxes home and plug them into our networks and they just play games over and over all night, silently recording the results to our data mine server (unless they crash or get stuck).

Chucky and Ben went to a technology conference yesterday, which should be important for future Bungie games.

Cuban did the damage type reporting so the game engine can have different messages appear for Melee kills vs. Sniper kills vs. Needler kills, plus we track them as separate stats which is cool.

Jason Major is back from paternity leave and immediately did some cool distortion particle FX.

And to finish, here\'s a pic of an early Spartan technology:


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Hey Nu, how do you actually play in the new maps that people create, i dont seem to see any in the lobby?

You have to turn them on in the filter.

Damn, Nu, your Sai in the Asgard clan right? Your clan owned us, we are still n00bs in CE.

Heh, what\'s your clan\'s name, and what nick do you go by? I know you told me earlier, but I\'ve forgotten.

[EoE]Victus

We got slaughtered. You were in that game.

Aahh! You guys didn\'t do so bad in Death Island... We spanked you in Timberland though. Ouch.

Look foward to playin\' with you again. I\'ll remember that nick from now on.

Twenty Second update, originally posted at Forerunners.org

BUNGIE WEEKLY UPDATE - June 11th

Can you feel it? Getting closer? Halo 2 is in the home stretch, just a few short (or long) months to go, and the game code is fatter, phatter and finished-er. Every week that goes by brings it closer to completion, and Bungie staff are playing it in earnest as you\'ll see below.

ANIMATE!

Nathan Walpole, lead poutine-wrangler, Flyers fan and all-round baldness champeen, is bursting with excitement and information. Let him inspire ye:

"Animation is abuzz with the addition of two animator mercenaries. Stacey Moore joins us from sister MS studio FASA to aid in polishing the brilliance of cinematic animations while Jeremy Fones comes to us to help in tackling remaining in-game animation with the zeal of an assassin. While their time here is short, on the force for about two months, the effects of their firepower will be felt with shock and awe.

In other animation news, all in-game animation is getting closer to complete and cinematics are revving their engines for the Rally ahead. All first person animations will be finished this week, allowing us to focus on the effects of that arsenal on the Master Chief and his supporting cast.


TEST!

Harold Ryan, king of testing has been hot and bothered this week, as he imported and setup 300 Xbox kits for Halo2 automation, blew the power in several rooms of the building and raised the temperature of the earth by 5 degrees.



COMMUNICATE!

Brian Jarrard, Community Manager, master of your future Halo 2 stats and all round Frankie-killer, has had a cool week:

"The best part of my job, besides interacting with so many great people in our community, is obviously getting my fill of Halo 2 hands-on play.  As many of our Bungie.net members know, Frankie and I have an ongoing rivalry (of which I now lead 9 to 0).  Yesterday\'s highly touted match was another great battle and though the score doesn\'t reflect it (20-11), it was actually a closely fought game.  And, to those of you who voted against me in the ( http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=159192 ) poll. asking who you thought would win, don\'t think I didn\'t notice that. You\'re on my list.
 
During the weeks surrounding E3 I\'ve only been playing the Zanzibar build that we brought to the show. While that level and those elements were being polished, the rest of the game continued to move forward and yesterday was the first time I got to see what I\'ve been missing out on.  Some of the original maps that I played long ago are now barely recognizable due to a big overhaul in the graphics and design departments along with the addition of refined HUD elements, additions to the UI and even some new goodies that I dare not mention.  For months now we\'ve been taking boxes home at night to play and test online but now, as we enter into the final stretch, I can really start to see everything in its full glory. Wow. That\'s all I can say. I can\'t wait to strap into the real deal and experience the online goodness with all of you!  In the meantime I will continue to hone my skills by beating up on Frankie. "

COMPLAIN!

Mat Noguchi complained, "I got to work on yet another thing that no one outside of Bungie will ever care about, namely, improving our tag system to allow for smaller Xbox tag builds and faster load times."

Well Mat, in defense of your deal, I had the pleasure of playing a tag build last night and it loaded quickly and efficiently and in a way, Mat is my hero.

VOMIT!

Poor Lorraine, sick as a parrot, and busy to boot:

"I got sick. Spread germs around that I chased with some disinfectant wipes and yelled “I got cooties. Nya nya.” And threatened people with germs."

Lorraine continues, "But other than that, the art book is wrapping up (at least the assets dump is dwindling – until I found the STACKS of storyboards from Staten on my seat on my day off, even.)  I had to wade through the two-ton folder.  Took hours to get to my seat to check my e-mail and see if a file-transfer worked.  I put a shelf up on my desk early in the week to help me declutter and prettify my now ‘cozy’ desk, but only to find I’m probably moving in a couple of days.   But that’s okay, if I guess correctly, I can shoot spitballs out towards the environment artist pit whenever I want now (darn, I should have taken advantage of the perfect line of sight I have now at the back of Frankie’s head!)
 
Oh!  I helped a bit with combat dialog for um… a set of characters that cannot be named, I think? And am trying to get another big project started that involves cool art and words and will probably be found at bookstores… (I’m really excited about this project!!)"

JUICE!

Chris Butcher is always good for some juice, and he fails to disappoint this week:

"Luke (Timmins) has our proximity voice in which is awesome. my favorite uses of it are in order:
 
1. To thank dead foes for giving me their shotguns
2. Next time I’m fighting them, to ask them if my weapon maybe looks a little familiar
3. When I’m stalking someone with a shotgun, call out their name and watch them stop and look around in puzzlement
4. To run up behind someone, yell “BOOM!” and then a second later pull the trigger."
 
AUTOMATE!

Ryan Hylland\'s been busy too:

* We’ve gotten about 100 of the 300 automated boxes delivered, networked, re-imaged, re-named, live accounts created, and in automation.  We ran out of power in our room otherwise we would have had more!

* We’ve been running playtests every night in the multiplayer lab testing out voice (my taunting skills have elevated now that proximity voice is in), new maps and game variants and their settings.

* Take home tests have begun!

* Testing matchmaking (see above) and leaderboard ranking"

COMPOSE!

Jay says that a fan got into his head a couple of years ago that he would catalog every single piece of combat dialog, he got to 1000, before Jay took pity on him and admitted there were 6,000. Well, that guy better get his pencil sharpened, because in Halo 2, we\'re looking at about 15,000 lines of combat dialog. There are lines of speech for every eventuality

C Paul\'s favorite line is for when other Marines are pissed at the Chief for betrayals. "Don\'t shoot him in the head, you might hit Cortana. She\'s hot. She\'s blue, but she\'s hot."

So that\'s it for this week. One other snippet of news is that we got our rating from the ESRB. We\'ll tell you what it really is later, but this is what it could have been…

I am going to have a ton of fun with proximity voice.

Originally posted by Soul Reaver
You have to turn them on in the filter.

 

i did that and now i can see them but every time i try an enter one i get a message saying "Unable to join game server!"
?????????

Yea, that\'s cause you have to download them first.

Here\'s a link.

Custom Maps

There are about 92 maps available.

we should all meet up at some time on a server, i can host about 7 players apparently or if one of u guys has a faster connection...

Eh, just let me know when you want to play, PS2_-\'_\'-_PS2, Soul Reaver, and I\'ll set up one of the 4 Asgard servers for you guys.

Haha

Yea, we should do that sometime.

Originally posted by Nu
Eh, just let me know when you want to play, PS2_-\'_\'-_PS2, Soul Reaver, and I\'ll set up one of the 4 Asgard servers for you guys.

how about now?

That\'s fine. Head on over to Asgard 1:

game.asgard-halo.org:2302

[EDIT] - Errr... Scratch that. Password\'s been changed, can\'t alter the map cycle/settings right now. Try this server:

69.56.201.195:2302

S\'not mine, but it should do the job just fine... Only maps on cycle at the moment are Fissure Fall and Cliffhanger. And there are already a bunch of folks playing there... Give it a shot.

I\'ll go check it out.