Yes! Weekly Bungie Update: Today!

i saw someone called [EoE] Sol, i thought that might have been u but u went offline before i could ask

No, I was Sai when I was there. You couldn\'t have missed me, \'cause I talked a lot and whined about my dying.

Unfortunately, my stay was short when I posted that at around... 7-ish(EST). Family issues. I got on a bit later during the evening, and I think I saw you there, Victus... Anyways, we\'ll all meet up one of these days. Keep trying that server, guys.

Originally posted by PS2_-\'_\'-_PS2
i saw someone called [EoE] Sol, i thought that might have been u but u went offline before i could ask

Nah

That\'s someone else from my clan. He was playing with some gearbox people.

New media!

LINK

Most of them have been seen in gaming publications, but these are official, and hi-res.

Enjoy.

[EDIT] - Oh, and I\'ve neglected to post the last... Two(?) updates because they were pretty damn boring, so I just kind of forgot. I\'ll get to it later.

Heh, kinda wondering if it\'s worth it to bump the thread with the Bungie Weekly Updates now(it\'s about seven updates behind)...

...

Bah, I\'ll just do it. It\'s a pretty slow morning... Plus, I don\'t want to look like a slacker.

Twenty Third update, originally posted at 343GS.com

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, June 18, 2004
Short and sweet this week, since I\'m cranking on the manual and some other stuff.

* Ryan\'s Slaughter

Ryan Hylland, test freak and well-known spawn camper has been working on my favorite thing in the universe. Take-home tests. Where Bungie employees take home Halo 2 and playa against each other, enjoy social interactions and learn colorful new swears. This is Ryan\'s week in brief:

• A bunch of game variant settings.  Slayer specifically.  Ah, the CENSORED and Scorpion on Waterworks, such a beautiful thing.
  
• Had a couple of "take home tests" to check out how our fragile child-game performs in the high school play ground.  I think we only got one black eye...
• CENSORED and CENSORED tests.
• User Interface pass for the next build of the game.
• Tons of test case workbook house cleaning (thanks to Joe).
• I think we took some names too
• Are you ready to get your ass kicked tonight in our take home test?

* CJ Cinema!

Been cranking along on the videomatics...We\'re closing in on having all the cinematics of the game videomatic\'d out. Which means most of the game\'s cinematics now have timing and camera work that is locked down, as well as basic animation for the animators to work off of. Even better, most of them actually work in engine, which is a miracle in many different fields including nuclear science, landscape architecture, and dominoes. This week I finally started blocking out the videomatics for one of the last levels of the game that we haven\'t worked on previously. It\'s cool to start on these, because we know these cinematics will be seriously building the story tension towards that glorious climax when CENSORED finds out CENSORED! Joe and I also went in and cleaned up some silly issues that we hadn\'t gotten around to. Like re-exporting the Phantom\'s cinematic animations with the NEW Phantom that has a different number of bones than the OLD Phantom. Weeeee! Other than that I spent the week unleashing my Chris Christmas video collection on the unsuspecting Bungie crowd. Vote Chris Christmas instead of Santa this year, boys and girls. He\'s the man.

* PARSONS NOSE

So Parsons comes over, says he has something for the weekly update, eats his lunch noisily, lets fly with an eye-watering air biscuit and takes off, saying, "That\'s a sushi fart."

Thanks Parsons. That\'s great.

* LORRAINE\'S ODDYSSEY

Since we\'re expanding, and new faces keep popping up, it should be no surprise that desks are moved around to accommodate. Lorraine was forced to move and entire desk over, and quickly set about rebuilding her unassailable tower of anime, weapons and robots.

* Jaime Jams

Jaime says they\'ve finished adding "boarding" seats to all the vehicles. That means that quite apart from the vehicle-jacking stuff, every vehicle that can be boarded, sat on or otherwise utilized, now has functioning seats for real-life multiplayer and AI single-player modes. One thing hardly anyone at E3 noticed, was that when you board a Warthog, instead of taking over the driver seat immediately, you simply yank the driver out  you then have to hop into the Warthog manually. A two-stage process designed to create interesting encounters on the slightly more boardable Hog.

          Jaime also showed off the largely complete HUD which has moved everything around dramatically, but should still be recognizable to Halo folks. Obviously adding dual wielding makes this challenging, but the new HUD handily shows off the ammo/charge left in a gun, and more importantly, it tells you what your reserve, or third weapon is. THIRD WEAPON!!!? WHATCHOO TALKIN ABOUT FRANKIE? Well, if you\'re holding a weapon in one hand, and you have another "holstered" you can dual-wield a third. That means the reserve weapon simply stays put when you pick up the dual-wield weapon. Effectively that lets you have three weapons at one time.

Of course, that means that for newbies at least, it can be tricky keeping track of what you\'ve got. To be honest though, after an hour or two of play, you stop thinking about it.

There\'s also been something of a separation for church and state as far as the shield level and health meter are concerned. You\'ll see in good time how that works, but it makes a big difference.

* WATER!

One cool new graphic feature being played with right now is water. The briny deep demoed at E3 is not the final water. In fact, several techniques are being experimented with, but I saw a cool one yesterday in a Zanzibar test level. Only it was deliberately broken. So when you jumped, the level literally filled up with water. It was kind of funny to go inside the control room part of the level (where the defender\'s flag normally sits) jump once and flood the place with sparkly, gorgeous, reflective wet stuff. Did I mention I loved video game water?

* Alta\'s Rival Princess

Look, Alta is awesome, obviously. And the Bungie Princess is even more attractive than Nathan! However, Alta has help. New-girl Amanda is a princess-rival. For example, we now have a keg of beer. Now I\'m not saying that Amanda is responsible for this new beer-status, but it IS a big coincidence no? Anyway. Beer. Keg. Kegstand. Most practical way to consume beer.

* Max Rules

Seriously, Max Hoberman rules. Here\'s why:

" A bunch of the artists, including of course our multiplayer SWAT team, are just finishing up a 48 hour "lovefest", time dedicated to polishing a handful of multiplayer maps. It\'s amazing what 48 hours of relentless man love will do to a level. Steve Cotton, the newest member of our multiplayer art team, was just showing me the purple underbelly of a CENSORED, one of our multiplayer levels for the upcoming milestone. I can hardly believe this is the same kooky level I sketched over a year ago in Illustrator, it looks so damn good. Right smack in the middle of the map is an area that I\'m convinced, once combined with a little magic that Adrian snuck in for me waaaay back, will be the ultimate King hill. Not for those with weak stomachs though. Too bad we\'re not working on King of the Hill right now, I can hardly wait! In the meantime Carney has taken our very first ever Halo 2 multiplayer map (also the map that\'s gone through the most complete revisions ... lovingly dubbed "Space Toilet" in its youth) and turned it into a real treat. Our goal from day 1 with this map was to capture some of the fun of an old favorite Marathon map, Mars Needs Women. It\'s looks absolutely nothing like that map, but people keep telling me that it feels like it. Awesome! Not only does it play great, once they get the "neighborhood" in this map is going to look incredible!
       
*

Dave has the new HUD in and looking mighty fine. It\'s a change from what people are used to, but there\'s good reason for the change and we\'re confident it\'s the right decision. In fact, Jaime just got back from a usability test and is standing at my desk telling me just that. Oh, and of course we have the new multiplayer scoreboard in as part of the HUD! Woohoo! Dave and I are also working on cleaning up a whole slew of UI in time for the milestone. Mat Noguchi is just now checking in the magic code that makes players on Xbox Live look like more than just a name, I\'m psyched! Our Xbox Live UI is going to make people jump with joy, and I don\'t think I\'m exaggerating. Once you try it you\'ll never go back. Anyway, way too much to do, currently 38 bugs on my plate for this milestone. Gotta get back to work!"

Anyway, CJ\'s obsession with Chris "Christmas" Rodriguez (google it) has rubbed off on the chief.


[/size]

That took a couple of minutes longer than it should have... I\'ll get back into the groove of things in a sec\'.

Twenty Fourth update, originally posted at MLGPro.com

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, June 25, 2004

* Lorraine\'s Sordid Shower Scene...

This week was full of back-to-back deadlines and "Your Attention Is Required Right Bloody Now" matters.  The two big things were the POP (point of purchase) art for big stores like Toys R Us and box art. Needless to say there is never enough time.  The YAIRRBN matters beyond those big pieces of art were more art or things regarding the game manual, Halo and Halo 2 action figures, the Making of Halo DVD, the art book, and some, uh... sensitive matter with Marketing and the advertising team.  I didn\'t get to go home last night — hey, lookit that, the file is now actually writing to my hard drive — but that meant I get to eat a hearty breakfast from the cafeteria.  Now if my hubby can get over here soon, I\'ll get to eat it too.  The buttermilk pancakes smell awesome and the scrambled eggs are quite good (I had to give a taste!).   Oh, and last night I discovered that the towel service in the shower room is being discontinued next month.  Bummer.  And the other thing th — oops.  The file is saved and the screen has redrawn the image.  Gotta go.

- L

* Michael Wu\'s Long Panoramic Shot

In general the enviro pod has been hammering away from late morning (recovering from night before) till late night (when the security guards come over and play Street Fighter) on texturing and lighting their levels.  I\'m working on New Mombasa (with short forays into Old Mombasa to help on the single-player milestone).  I\'m actually working on a lot of geometry finessing before I get to texture and light the city.  In general we feel like we have just enough time to finish, but I mean barely!

* John Butkus\' Tight Close-Up

Well, I figure I might be the only animator chiming in today so I\'ll throw you a bone and let you in on what we\'ve been doing.  For the past couple of weeks I\'ve been working on the CENSORED cinematic.  I think it\'s the second longest one in the game at somewhere around CENSORED minutes or so... it has CENSORED different characters in it so I\'m basically animating my ass off every day.  It has two CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED the CENSORED into the CENSORED chamber to face CENSORED and CENSORED.  It\'s coming along pretty nicely and I should have CENSORED\'s part mostly finished by the end of the weekend.  It\'s nice to have the final dialogue in the game, but when you\'re animating it you have to listen to it frame by frame or scrub through it quickly both forwards and backwards so after a while you go a little nutty.  In fact, I\'ve lost it.  I\'m gone.  No I\'m not — yes I am!   Stacey has been working on a cinematic with the chief jumping across these huge beams as nasty shit is going down behind him and then there\'s this sick-ass explosion and CENSORED.  Mike and Bill have been troopers and are putting the finishing touches on a lot of vehicle and character animations, and Jeremy has been a massive help with finishing off a lot of stuff for the Chief.

In other news, it\'s Friday and that is so sweet.  I\'ve also discovered that 2 out of 3 Americans do not appreciate the taste of ketchup flavored potato chips, which I find odd since they are so damn tasty.

* Ryan\'s Artsy Short

"Bunch of testing for the internal-only beta."

* Brian\'s Gotham Flick

This week I was recruited for a top secret mission to escort Halo 2 Zanzibar discs to a special event taking place in the Big Apple. As you\'ve read in other updates, Bungie is uber focused on security our builds are never made available to anyone or any group outside of our Studio.  So, when the marketing folks stumble across an opportunity to promote Halo 2 and a build is needed, we\'re called on to deliver the goods and make sure not a single trace is left behind.  Duty called and I endured 11 hours of cross country air travel for what amounted to about 1 hour of actual Halo 2 involvement.  I can\'t reveal the specifics of this mission but if it works out, the fruits of our efforts will be revealed sometime in CENSORED.  Ask me about it then and I can share some stories!  Equally exciting was just strolling through Times Square and getting stopped by dozens of people who noticed my Halo 2 t-shirt.  "Halo 2 is going to rock!!" "When is Halo 2 coming out!?" "Can I have a free shirt!?" "Sweet soul patch dude!" It\'s cool to see so many random people familiar with and fired up about Halo 2. And no, you can\'t have my shirt.

* Marty\'s Stirring Score

I still remember the first Halo Weekly Update. I was just a wee lad of 64; none of the others who are here now are old enough to have been around back then. That is the advantage of being "The Elder". In those early days I was making music for Halo on a ukulele. Now for Halo 2 I have the power of a Mac SE and an Electronic Casio Keyboard. Progress is a wonderful thing. The dialog files for Halo were around 27 unique vocalizations, all by just one actor (Joe\'s father) and now we\'ve recorded over 112 different sayings by up to 4 different actors (including Joe\'s father\'s son Joe)! All the weapon sounds for Halo were made by pitch shifting one mouth noise I had recorded by accident in the bathroom (...don\'t ask). Now for Halo2, we\'ve been able to recorded, pitch shift AND filter mouth noises made by not only me, but Jay and C Paul! Who knows where we\'ll be by the time we celebrate Halo2\'s 200th Weekly Update?

 Marty The Elder
 (I\'m not losing it,,,)

* Butcher\'s Auteurism

I\'ve mostly been working on weird boundary cases and stabilizing for the beta. Our matchmaking system is coming up and it\'s almost playable which is the suckiest period, because you are really excited when it works and very sad most of the rest of the time. In other news, I was excited to see that the first ever New Zealand game developers conference kicks off this week! http://www.nzgdc.org.nz/

My favorite bug this week: One that allowed a player who was booted from a CTF game, but was able to rejoin with his old score intact, and the mysterious and useful ability to see any player, friend or foe, from clean across the map — through objects, buildings, whatever. And as a bonus, he could see both flags, no matter where they were.

Only 24 hours remain for us to fix bugs in the beta.

--
Frankie\'s Autobiographical Epic

What have I been doing? Well, apart from neglecting the site content, I\'ve been crunching with the UX guys on the manual, which is half-joy, half-horror as we struggle with how to describe dual-wielding in a way that a mom can understand, or explain the difference between a game-type and a game rule and then just when we think we have something finalized, the team points out that they added an entire game feature that you didn\'t know about.

Describing the new weapons is fun too, since it means I know pretty much every weapon, vehicle and device that\'s going to be in the game, how they work, which ones boost, which have secondary fire, what the zoom levels are and what it is exactly that shoots out of them. This doesn\'t necessarily mean I know how to use them...

We also went and did a Zanzibar demo at a Microsoft job fair thing. J Allard was trying to hire the cream of the crop from all over Microsoft plenty of them whooped and cheered when the Halo 2 demo started.

Anyway, that\'s it for this week, more next and until then, enjoy the awesome poster for the Mister Chief movie, When TriSquids Came to Eat Earth Because it Smelled of Prawn Cocktail

Twenty Fifth update, originally posted at Haloplanet

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, July 2, 2004

So, this week was a mighty important week. We finished and started to manufacture the internal Halo 2 Beta. That means that lots of lucky Bungie and Microsoft employees (and we mean lots) will be playing a few multiplayer levels from Halo 2, for a few short weeks. Like the Alpha, we\'ll be using this to test things like networking and data speeds, but unlike the Alpha, it\'s also our first major gameplay test for multiplayer.

We\'ll be grabbing data and opinions on gametypes, weapons, even the few level designs that are out there. The main part of the test though, is to see how some of our Xbox Live features - voice, matchmaking, all of that, work in the real world, with real players and real situations. All of the data and information that comes back from this beta test, will be used to make the game as close to perfect as we can before we ship it on November 9th.

We also have the mixed blessing of playing the single player game. Why\'s that a mixed blessing? Because it is RUINING the plot! Wah! Still, Brian and I keep interrupting each other to say things like, "Ohmygod did you see what that Elite just did?!?" Anyway, on to the short and sweet update:

* Stefan\'s Stiff Resistance

Stefan tells us he created the first ever Halo 2 clan. They\'re called BMF. I cannot tell you what that stands for. We also can\'t tell you anything more about the clan or how it works, but if he says it\'s the first one, then so be it.

Coolest thing Stefan saw on the Halo 2 Beta this week was: "Consecutive "Running Riots" with the plasma sword on FORMER SECRET LEVEL NAME, err, CURRENT SECRET LEVEL NAME... glorious."

* Butcher\'s Kiwi Fruits

Chris Butcher is a busy, busy man, but still found time to illuminate us just a bit: "Damian got CENSORED with AI working, it\'s fun, but we run the risk of having CENSORED turn into a CENSORED. A CENSORED with attitude, but it does make CENSORED less CENSORED which isn\'t really a good thing."
Coolest thing Butcher saw on the Halo 2 Beta this week was :"The coolest thing I\'ve seen so far is that I got to play with some guys from Australia and kick their asses. Score one for Kiwi pride!"

* Lorraine\'s Brain Drain

Lorraine says,]b\\ "Zoe and I double-teamed on the Halo 2 Point of Purchase and box cover[/b]. I\'m also getting the Halo 2 action figure packaging done too so I can\'t say much more...

But despite how busy it got, I managed to take home a build and play 1:1 with Robt. He said he was panicky in spots, even though he won 25-16. The two coolest things that happened while playing in the SECRET LEVEL NAME. Robt was jumping from one alcove onto a platform, I was running sideways and backwards, keeping an eye on the motion tracker and the screen. I made a big guess and tossed a plasma grenade and stuck him in the ankles while he shot downwards with the rocket launcher. He missed, but my little blue friend did his job and all that nice ammo came raining down. Robt also swears I\'m psychic - that or I have virtual eyes on the side of my head. I was running on the mezzanine, trying to figure out where he was. I hear the sound of the rocket launcher and I immediately jump. I hear it again and I jump while running and trying not to fall off. Apparently, both times I jumped, I avoided certain SPNKR death. Ha!

--

* Hylland\'s Hy-Jinks

Test team created and handed off the beta disk and are now working on testing and building the auto-update.

We didn\'t do anything cool.

Coolest thing: watching Butcher as last man standing on our team of three in an elimination game kill all three of the other team after the other two of us had been killed.
Or perhaps being surprised (unpleasantly) by Jones crouching with a damn sword as I rode to the top of the elevator on SECRET LEVEL NAME. Needless to say, I was diced.

* Cuban\'s Conundrums

"This week I\'ve been doing a slew of stuff, up to and including:

• Resurrecting some of the Halo 1 gametypes to work in the Halo 2 engine. I forgot how much fun Oddball was; Our streamlined implementation needs a few more features to flesh it out but otherwise it\'s sittin\' pretty. King of the Hill is almost back from the dead.
  
• Optimizing the lightmapper. I\'ve been working with the artists a lot this week addressing problems they\'re having lighting their spaces (if someone had told me that one of our levels would take place in a miles-wide valley I probably would have made decisions a little differently). The lightmapper is generally about 30% faster than it was last week, which is neat
  
  • Working on player training. We have a much more elaborate training system than we had in Halo 1 - but elaborate hopefully doesn\'t mean annoying. The objective with this system is that any seasoned Halo player won\'t get bogged down by player training (except maybe for the one that teaches you to press and hold the action button to enter vehicles) but a newbie player will be gently led through the paces[/b]
    
  • Fixing a ton of little nits.
  The coolest thing I\'ve seen in the beta this week is the design of SECRET LEVEL NAME, one of our new maps. The more I play in it the more I like it."
  
  Adrian
  
  * Jay\'s Audio BaconWrap
  
  Jay has been working through a lot of dialog. He also handed off the entire dialog to the localization guys, who can now turn all of the combat dialog into seven other languages. That\'s Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Italian and German. Times seven. That\'s a lotta crazy foreign guy talk!
  
  Jay also did some last voiceover sessions with Seattle, Chicago and LA actors, some pickups and just a little bit of new stuff.
  
  So far, there are 15,107 lines of combat dialog recorded and implemented, with just a little more to go in.
  
  * Staten, Stat!
  
  Joe spent the entire week fixing a... [HEY! Wait Joe, I can\'t even TYPE what you just said to me. That is the MOST SECRET thing I ever even heard of. I ain\'t even typing that, I\'ll get my ass fired for even thinking about it too hard. -Frankie]
  
  Joe also got into a knock down drag out Dynasty-style bitch fight with Marty O\'Donnell over something so feminine, that neither dude would tell me what it was. I figure either make-up or tampons.
  
  Joe also mentioned that John Butkus finished the animations for one of the longest and most complicated cinematics in the game and more importantly, running in the game engine. And the animation DOES feature the thing that I censored Joe on, two paragraphs ago.
  
  * Robert\'s Rebuttal
  
  "You are already at least partially aware of what I\'ve been doing this week (editing manual text), but did you know that I was also writing difficulty-level-sensitive level dialog, supplying environment artists with broken down couches, rusty dumpsters and generic box vans, slaving over bug fixes (recognized and un-recognized) and robotically grinding out LODs?
  
  Bonus: Female marines. Because I\'ve been trying to get women (as active participants) into a Jones driven game for almost ten years now! (I had one minor success: the Fetch. But they had to wear the skins of men in order to get snuck in.)
  
  Cheers!
  
  - Robt"
  
  
  Bonus Shoutout to tru7h.co.uk and GoWeb.
  
  And until next week, here\'s Mister Chief, celebrating, and blurring the line between deliberately bad art and regular bad art.
  
  [/size]

Twenty Sixth update, originally posted at HBO

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, July 9, 2004

Mammoth update this week kids. So enough with the intro - dig into all this good stuff:

* Greg Snook

I\'m going to go out on a limb and say we have too many animations in this game[/b]. Most people would consider that a good thing, but when your job is to make sure all those animations fit in memory and play back silky-smooth; having this many animations just sucks. Perhaps it\'s a problem with Canadian math skills, but Butkus has authored some 881 animations for the Elite alone. We have more characters than the original Halo, and each one performs far more actions than the previous game. The end result is a fine looking game which requires the memory of three additional Xboxes So, this week was spent looking into new animation compression schemes and devising a system to cache animations off disk while the game is in progress. Luckily, much of this work was already in place to handle the metric ton of geometry and textures we have, so caching animations slipped right in. The end result is that the levels now fit in memory and look fantastic. W00t!

* CJ

Joseph and I killed three videomatics this week, which could be a new record for us. The first one was the intro to CENSORED, which has a touch of grunt comedy, and should get some laughs. The second one is also in that level, and has nearly every major character in the game in it, which was...uh..."fun"...to set up. The last one is the cinematic that proceeds the final CENSORED, and should nicely build the tension before that fine piece of gameplay. We are also starting on a short one this morning, so maybe we\'ll try to get four done this week! Woohoo!
           
We are starting to get cinematics back from the animators all polished up, and they look GREAT! It\'s really cool to see these cinematics come back, because we\'ve gotten so used to seeing them in their basic animation form. The final animation makes all the characters really come to life, and makes them much more fun to watch. Now if we can just get some lighting in there...

* Nathan Walpole

Wow, what a week. I have been putting out fires, starting new ones, making friends, making enemies and eating crappy food...ain\'t crunch-time grand?

Animation this week has been working on a variety of things. John is still going strong on cinematics, Mike is pounding on what could be one of the coolest characters ever known to man - and taking boarding to the NEXT level. Bill is hard at work finishing the Grunt and the CENSORED and will be pitching in his great timing sense towards Brute animations. I am hard at work on the Brute, and the CENSORED...both of which are shaping up to be formidable and unforgettable. Nat King Cole \'Unforgettable\' it will not become, the Brute could never be that smooth, but they should be unforgettable nonetheless. Jeremy is trucking away on varied bug fixes and miscellaneous animations in the game.

So we have a god amount of work ahead of us. Yes, I said a \'god\' amount of work. Normally we would need to be Gods like Vulcan to be able to pound out this massive charge. Gods we are not, but Cananimators and Amanimators we are...

Oh, just one more thing. I would like to publicly remind Paul Bertone to stop pinching my nipples.

* Chris Butcher

Been working on the beta... the data mine gives us the tools to analyze our users\' play patterns, see which bugs they\'re encountering and whether they brushed their teeth in the morning.
           
* Tyson Green

           
The Living Room Simulator is now open and ready for business, and many of the single player missions are to the point where we are getting polish level feedback.
           
Aside from grinding on my levels, in the past week I\'ve been picking up some odds and ends. The Pelican received an update, and can now do more than just look intimidating when it enters a hot drop zone. Ditto for its Covenant counterpart. Both dropships are now moving around entirely of their own accord thanks to Damian and Jaime (and a little Eamon), which means we\'re updating our levels to make use of that ability.
           
During some downtime, I spent a bit of time making a human vehicle more drivable, and even more destroyable. Happily, it behaves almost exactly as you\'d expect when someone takes one of its wheels off. Before the day is done, I hope to have it a little more stable when taking hard corners—it rolls like an SUV right now.

* Adrian Perez

• Been working with the graphics guys on lightmapping the \'sets\' that will appear in some of the cinematics.  They\'re not BSP level geometry, they\'re made as objects (so it\'s easy to use them in multiple levels).  Also I\'ve been working with the artists on specific problems with the lightmapper and fixing them.
• Did some more work on the player training; the user testing we\'ve been doing has been really encouraging.  We had a gamer who had never played an FPS the other day, and after half an hour the game had taught them enough that they were ready to smack down Marty.  After another half an hour they were ready to start tackling the game on normal.
  
• A bunch of nitty little bugs and features for single player were implemented this week.  Example, if you pulled the trigger back during your ready animation the plasma pistol wouldn\'t start charging when it was done with its ready animation, things like that.
• In between all that I\'ve been working on the gametypes and the game engine in general.  King of the Hill is back in, just need to get the rendering of the hill re-done with the new shader system.  Started work on re-doing one of our new gametypes, Also been sneaking in little multiplayer polish things, like when you get into a vehicle it shows the names of the other passengers over their heads for a second.
  

Adrian

* Jaime Griesemer

I am convinced that the primary reason Halo 1 was a success was that it was extremely approachable.  Many games are almost sadistic in the way they abuse novice Players.  They throw you into a confusing high-pressure situation with almost no guidance and then punish you with long load times and loss of progress when you inevitably fail.  Halo, on the other hand, was a greased slide that took novice gamers, hooked them, introduced them to the controls and the game mechanics and taught them how to have fun with the game.  When they die, Halo gets them back in the action within seconds, without losing any progress or abilities.  It doesn\'t punish them or make them feel incompetent.  That means that Halo was played by a lot of people that would be turned off by most game experiences.
           
The way we made Halo into a greased slide for novice gamers was user-testing.  Lots of user-testing.  We brought people in, put them in front of the game and watched them from behind one-way glass.  We recorded them, analyzed them, questioned them and then we took all that information, changed the game, and did it all over again.
           
So that\'s what I did this week.  Adrian got the first version of our training system working and we brought in a bunch of people to try it on.  I\'m not talking about hardcore Halo fans.  We brought in a 40 year old mother who only plays games to make sure they are appropriate for her young children (guess what, Halo isn\'t) and an 18 year old RPG gamer that doesn\'t like anything that isn\'t turn based and a 55 year old City Councilmen who only uses his console to play golf games during the winter.  Then we threw them into a free-for-all deathmatch game and see how well our training system worked.
           
It\'s painful to watch.  You want to go rip the controller from their hands and show them how to play.  You want to ask them why in the world they aren\'t reading the help text for dual-wielding.  You want to shake them and force them to use the look stick and the move stick at the same time.  But you can\'t because if they can\'t figure out how to have fun on their own, then nobody else will either.
           
Luckily, our tests went really well.  We had some rough spots, but the 40 year old mother was gunning folks down with dual-smgs within 20 minutes.  The RPG gamer was intentionally giving the enemy his Ghost so he could board them and take it back.  The City Councilman decided that leaping down on someone and shotgunning them in the head was better than putting for birdie.  We\'ve got a long way to go, but Halo 2 is on track to be as user-friendly as the first one.  Next week we put the tutorial in the labs, and since it\'s only half done, I guess I know what I am doing this weekend...[/size]

26th update continued in next post...

26th update continued here...

* Roger\'s LA Oddyssey

"12 Hours in Los Angeles"

Last week, when Harold, our Test Manager, asked me to make a quick trip to Los Angeles to prepare for our upcoming internal-only Halo 2 beta, I was perfectly happy to go. The plan was, I would pick up the master data tapes from Microsoft\'s lab on Wednesday afternoon, hop on a flight to LA, drop them off at the DVD manufacturer around midnight, get a little sleep, pick up a sample batch a few hours later, give them a quick test to see that they worked, and escort about 200 DVDs back to Redmond after about 12 hours in L.A. It would be a nice way to wrap up the week before a holiday weekend, right?

Hour 0
Got the rental car at LAX, along with fairly flawed directions on how to find the highway. After driving for about a half hour and getting the feeling that this wasn\'t the way I was intended to go, I turned around to head back. (When I finally got to my hotel, morbid curiosity had me pull up Microsoft MapPoint with the data overlay of crime rate; I wasn\'t too pleased so see where I had just been. It reminds me of that time I got turned around in Dallas last summer, where in the course of the time it took me to make a U-turn in a gas station, I saw three drug deals...)

Hour 1
Found the highway

Hour 2
Got to the manufacturer, about 50 miles away, and dropped off the tapes around 3AM. Found a hotel with Internet; spent an hour on the phone with tech support helping them analyze their packet flow to trace a connection problem before giving up and using a modem. Found out that the DVDs wouldn\'t be ready as early as we thought, so I changed my return flight to a later one.

Hour 8
Got a call that the DVD process would take a little longer than planned. Changed my plane ticket to a later flight, again.

Hour 12
Decided to spend the afternoon in Santa Barbara, since the weather was nice, and the DVDs were delayed, again.

Hour 18
You know you should have packed a shaving kit when a street bu... ehem, "person on perpetual vacation from employment," tells you that you need a shave. (I was supposed to be home 3 hours ago, ok!?) Got a call that there was a delay, so I changed my ticket a third time.

Hour 20
Another delay, until the morning. Changed my plane ticket for a fourth time. Went to Target for shaving supplies.

Hour 32
Got the test batch of 250 DVDs, but found out that our delays had pushed us right into the middle of a maintenance window for the beta Xbox Live network, so I still couldn\'t test. Changed ticket a fifth time.

Hour 36
Live came back online and I started testing. It took just a few minutes to find out that something was wrong, and just a little longer to find out that it was a problem in the way one of the game files was signed for Xbox usage. Which means, the master tapes were useless and we\'d have to start over. At least they only made a small test batch of DVDs so far.

Hour 37
Found out that due to the previous day\'s delay, they had already made all 8000 DVDs without waiting for us to give the OK. Changed my return flight a sixth time, with a slim chance that the problem could be fixed on the server side. I needed an internet connection to test from, so I returned to my hotel and asked if I could get a room for just an hour. The manager gave me a funny look, and I explained that I need to test some computer equipment and needed the internet connection. She referred me to Kinko\'s, but I added that I actually needed the TV, too, which got me another funny look. I ended up taking the room for the full night, and as I left the lobby, I heard the manager say to another guy at the desk, "So, you think he\'ll have a girl with him?" Actually, I was quite pleased to hear that as much as I had protested that I was traveling on business to test computer software, she still saw me as a lying guy on a tryst rather than a computer geek. Or something like that.

Hour 44
Heard that the problem couldn\'t be fixed server-side, so I arranged to meet Frankie at the Burbank airport in the morning to pick up a new batch of master tapes, and stay in town to test those. Changed my return flight for a seventh time. Went to Target to buy some fresh clothes, etc. Heard from Bungie that we need those 8000 DVDs by Tuesday morning, and if they couldn\'t find a shipper, I\'d have to buy luggage and get them on the plane somehow (!)

Hour 56
Got the new tapes from Frankie and headed back to the manufacturer. Round trip, 140 miles of driving before 10AM!

Hour 57
Delivered the new tapes, but found out that the DVDs wouldn\'t be ready until 1AM. Changed ticket an eighth time. But at least they found a shipper, preventing me from having to tote about 700lbs. of luggage and discs back with me.

Hour 72
Picked up the new DVDs for the test pass - they work!

Hour 81
Much to my surprise, I actually boarded a plane out of LA! It\'s been a long 12 hours...

Hour 84
Mission completed, 250 DVDs delivered to the office, and time to sleep.

* Frankie

So Parsons sticks his head out of an office at around 7pm on Friday night, just before 4th of July weekend and says, "Frankie! Is Mrs. Frank in town this weekend?"

I was all, wow, the bossman is gonna invite us to his BBQ! Career advancement here I come!

So Parsons instead tells me he has this "Great opportunity." Which as it turns out is the "chance" to wait around until 3am for replacement code to be ready, stay up all night and then fly it to Roger in Burbank at 5am on Saturday morning. I was then trapped in Burbank airport from 9am til 2pm. And the airport\'s single espresso machine was broken, so I couldn\'t even get a coffee. Thanks Parsons. Still, 12 hours of screwing around with tapes, DVDs and no sleep is still better than a Parsons sushi fart.

* Michael Wu

OK, so something magical must have happened to the lightmapper or the lightmapper farm - you\'d have to ask Adrian and Zach to find out - but my lightmap jobs are flying through the farm these days.  Now, I changed a couple settings, so maybe it was as simple as that, but I haven\'t had a failed job in a week.  This is how Boeing must\'ve felt when their test planes stopped crashing and they just flew.  I mean my jobs went from all night long to about 4 hours.  This compares very nicely to Halo 1\'s 12-36 hours per BSP.  Plus our BSPs are much bigger than Halo 1.  So this is very good.
           
Could be better though...
           
Work is progressing on Earth City very nicely, but there\'s still so much stuff to do -- it\'s a little nerve racking when the guys you\'re counting on to help you are stuck on their previous levels debugging features with the programmers.
           
Alas,
wu

* Ryan Hylland

Shipped the beta
Posted the autoupdate
Kicked some n00b asses

So one last thing: Check out for an amazing opportunity to win a Halo 2 LAN party.

And check out this hideous vision of Mister Chief enjoying his time in LA. Sorry bout the Speedo...

Twenty Seventh update, originally posted at Penny Arcade

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, July 16, 2004

Short and sweet this week? Why? Because by comparison with last week\'s update, anything will seem short, but more importantly, many Bungie team members were lost at the mouth of hell, the delightful location where we had our first company photo in ages taken. At least it wasn\'t Snake Village. Then nobody would have returned. But that said, there\'s plenty to chew on here as Bungie staffers discuss matters as diverse as water, physics and yacht club etiquette.

* Tyson Green\'s Autobiography

Tyson started this week asking for a pair of shoes to borrow, since he\'d arrived for a top-level meeting in his bare feet. "Fortunately, Michael Wu was kind enough to loan me a pair. Unfortunately, this cost me the opportunity to walk around a ritzy yacht club in my stockinged feet.

Still grinding on levels, with a bit of weapon experimentation on the side. Most of these side projects will never see the light of day, but sometimes one slips through and gets some schedule love.

Biggest thing this week has been getting a huge new vehicle up and running. I was pretty worried about some animation issues, but Eamon stepped up and made some code changes that help mitigate that. Today and over the course of the weekend, the related encounters will finally begin to take on a final form."

* Chris Butcher\'s Collected Shorts

The game becomes steadily more fun. Jaime mocked up a fake multiplayer game with some Master Chief AI that just stands around and lets you shoot it - so I spent about half an hour exploring some new physics in-depth.

The beta is a lot of fun, we\'re getting the chance to do a lot of in-depth playing of a single fixed build. This is a really important part of the process - in order to understand your game in a deep way, you have to have a lot of continuous time with a build that isn\'t changing. We\'re coming out of the beta with a ton of changes that we want to make to the physics and weapon balance for the final game.

* Adrian Perez\'s Masterful Tales

• We have a big milestone this week so I spent a lot of it crushing through the last few bugs I had. One neat one is now the artists can specify random damage to get applied to objects when they spawn; they can just say "I want 3 busted warthogs in this area" and the game will determine an appropriate and different level of bustedness for each one.
• The new hud has finally grown to the point that we can remove the old hud. This frees up some data and memory to the rest of the game[/b]. The shader that renders the Halo (1 and 2) shield meter (a fancy 1-texture 1-pass mux shader) will be studied by archeologists thousands of years from now as evidence of the insanity of the early 21st century; maybe they\'ll understand it better than I do.
  
• We were >this< close from cutting one of our new gametypes. But I implemented it in six hours and now it\'s essentially finished (read: harder to cut). It\'s a gametype explicitly designed for those people who have friends but not live; something fun that 3-4 people can play. One other type didn\'t make the cut, unfortunately.
  
• Worked with the graphics guys to generate better lightprobes out of the lightmapper. Hao has this crazexy precomputed radiance transfer system he built to help light our BSP\'s, and to make them mesh into the world correctly we render little lightprobes. That way if a bright red object moves past it, it\'ll look the part, with a nice red hue on one side of it. It\'s a really hard problem to solve right, but it\'ll really help make the spaces seem more real. It\'s a hell of a long way from how we lit objects in Halo 1.
  
• Gave some more sweet love to the training system. The more people we bring into test the game, the more stuff we find that needs training. For example, if people have never learned how to zoom they can accidentally click the right thumbstick without knowing it, then not know how to get out of it.

* Nathan Walpole\'s Dubious Diatribe

Tensions were high in the animation pit this week, but were quickly lifted in anticipation of our visitor. Christopher Walken is a really great guy. He taught us how to pause our animation gently between words this...week. He was damned...that he...would help... us out. So after Walken was tired from giving us great reference for animation we went to dinner. At the dinner table the waitress did not know who Christopher was, so we had a little bit...of fun...with that. All of these shenanigans led to a fun night on the town. We drank some Kokanee. Seattle is a crazy place with a Hollywood star and a bunch of rowdy animators on the loose.

So in short, it was just a normal week for animation.

* Lorraine McLees\' Largely True Tales

Just busywork this week - but lots and lots of it. I\'m finding art book materials can double as images for the manual. The Brute looked pretty enough for me to take shots of though. Conceptualizing covers, marking up and approving stuff; art book, mini Warthog that comes with a Master Chief and a Marine (that looks strangely like Matt Segur)....

* Ryan Hylland\'s Penny Dreadful

Beta, beta, beta, beta, beta update

We\'ve been testing the update and honing our test cases for the code complete

We are now up to 22 CS testers and 4 FT testers, getting 7 more next week I think. ]b\\That will be a total of 34 testers I think[/b], and that is not including Harold or the SDET team. The army is filing into their ranks, anticipating the death march.

* Michael Wu\'s Meandering Fable

Water and weather - we\'re messing with Hao\'s new systems for getting environmental effects in. You\'d be surprised how much more complex these systems are compared to Halo 1. Earth City uses 3 types of water so far. Fortunately some of the improvements in our tools makes it easier to propagate our settings from one scenario to another. So generally one of us has to figure out the settings for a given type and then the rest of us can copy it and then tweak it until we\'re content.

If the lightmap farm ever crashed, we\'d be sunk for a day, because that means we wouldn\'t have an accurate representation of our previous day\'s work. Unfortunately it happened this week so that set us back a bit. Zach figured out what caused the crash and put it down, so hopefully we won\'t crash again. At this point every hour counts.

Xbox development and our engine changes so often that if you don\'t keep up you\'ll have no choice but to wipe your dev kit and resync - a process that can take almost 2 hours. Yesterday it took 4 people to identify and fix one such dev kit in our art pit.

Somebody documented Paul Russel\'s Halo 1 "Michael Wu don\'t like it" Easter egg on the web and now you hear it in the environment art pit whenever somebody doesn\'t like something.

* Max Hoberman\'s Dusty Tome

We just got CENSORED working and it\'s da bomb! No wait, that\'s a different game. But this game is going to be damn damn fun, especially for people with just a single box and no Xbox Live, but a bus load of controllers and lots of willing, friendly, yet competitive friends. And to think, we almost cut it! We also got CENSORED working earlier this week thanks to Adrian\'s magic coding fingers, although that game takes a larger group and larger maps to test, and everyone has been so busy with this Beta and with other looming milestones that we haven\'t really had time. Yes, it\'s possible to have too much cool stuff to do at once.

This week and last we started playing on our final two multiplayer maps. One is in some ways the wacky love child of Battle Creek and Hang \'Em High, but so much prettier than either. The other has no comparison from Halo. It\'s asymmetrical like Zanzibar, but big like Waterworks, and it\'s going to knock your socks off! Anyway, we\'re going to take a break on these maps and playtest them for a bit, and in the meantime Carney and Cotton are sneaking a little work in on CENSORED AND CENSORED. It\'s amazing what one can do with a shovel, a bottle of sun tan lotion, and perhaps a little too much time spent in the sun.

Ooh yeah, this one\'s good. Stefan got clan support working in the UI this week. Clangina? Or was that Clan Mangina? Whatever floats your boat, Stefan. We simplified the system a while back, but let me be the first to say that sometimes simplification is a good thing. A few quirks here and there, but overall the UI for this thing is very user friendly and very much at your fingertips. Speaking of UI, we can\'t forget about Dave. Looks like he\'s working on what is absolutely the most boring part of our whole UI. But hey, it looks damn good, way to go Dave![/size]

Last part of the 27th update continued in next post...

The rest of the 27th update...

* Cam\'s Bucolic Recollections

It\'s been a hectic week. Spent 3 days in London (+ 2 days traveling) meeting with the product managers for all the European subsidiaries to talk about how the global marketing plan translates into their markets. Lots of great ideas for those markets, and the global launch of Halo 2 is going to be very cool. Now that I\'m back, I\'m way behind on everything, which sucks since Sketch and I are headed to NYC for 3 days next week, which will put me further in the hole. However, it\'s exciting right now because a lot of stuff is all happening, with regards to marketing. The cinema teaser trailer starts today in 1500 Loews cinemas. The final packaging for both the metal box and the standard SKU are all nearly done. The next set of print ads is nearly complete. Most of the pre-launch POP is locked and loaded for retailers. Our global PR event calendar is looking good. A cool hardware licensing deal is moving along. There\'s still TONS of work to be done, but we\'ve gotten a lot done. The hard part is carving out enough time to play the beta. "Enough" would be all day long, every day, but right now it\'s just a couple hours at night if my wife and kids fall asleep early. Plus being out for 5 days hurt my stats.

Until then, here\'s Mister Chief, expressing this week\'s mood in graphic form.

Twenty Eighth update, originally posted at Bungie.net

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, July 23, 2004

It\'s been a busy, busy week. So busy in fact, and so crunchtacular, that basically nobody is really available to chat this week. Sorry. Don\'t yell/flame/freak out.

• Sketch was out in New York being a muckety-muck all week, and I got roped into another classic Parsons travel-trap. It involves a passport, and some international shenanigans. Think sauerbraten. Anyway, lots going on in the studio, and I\'ve been playing through a very nice-looking build of the game. I noticed the skyboxes are looking amazing. Skyboxes are basically the sky (duh) designed to look 3D with flitting clouds, translucent fog and a feeling of real space and height. One in particular made me actually gasp as I looked up. \'Gasp!" went I.
  
  The skyboxes are often fixed later in the polishing process and a bunch of the placeholders have had big holes in the center for a long time. Probably the ozone layer or something. Anyway, placeholders are becoming rarer and rarer. There\'s even a placeholder sound. A startling, yet melodic tinkle accompanies any footstep on an undefined texture - that is to say, a texture that hasn\'t yet has a footstep sound associated with it.
  
  I kinda miss the tinkle on multiplayer maps, since it loudly announced when somebody was walking in certain areas. Which you would then blast. With a Brute Shot. "Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. Whump, whump, whump. Blam! Blam! Blam! Ow."
  
• Marty also let me hear one of the new pieces of finished music from the game. It was perfect. Totally inspiring, a soaring cavalcade of angelic ecstasy, tempered with just a hint of mournful longng, and all this to a totally danceable Euro-technobeat....I\'m just kidding Marty. It was great.
  
• Last week\'s experimental foray to the Penny Arcade forums was a roaring success, if that is, you judge success by the number of flames, death-threats and pictures of distended sphincters you get. The Penny Arcade guys (who fear to tread there themselves and are super-nice) actually warned me, but by then it was too late. I read about 40 pages of angry flames before I realized that I had no idea what they were mad about. They were complaining about the arrival of the "noobz" yet only a couple of percent of the posts were actually by "noobz." It was a self-powered nightmare, but we all had a good laugh.
• I\'ve actually been playing more and more of the single player campaign, but last night, playing multiplayer, through my own crappy connection, I noticed nothing. No slowdown, no lag and no garbled voices. It was like playing on a LAN. Wonders never cease. I hope that\'s typical of how it will be in the retail game.

In single player, I\'m being distracted by the lovely environments of course, but also by the amount of interaction there is in the levels. There\'s a lot more use of cover, by both good guys and bad guys, but there are other ways you interact with the environments that are both novel and old-school, simultaneously....

And on that graphics whore note, I noticed two new types of water. One shallow, one deep. Both lovely[/b]. Splish splash. I sure do love game water. My favorite all time non-Halo game water? The icy pool in Dead or Alive 3. Brrrr!
[/list]
* Adrian Perez

Adrian\'s bug-fixing has reached something of a crescendo.

"Every week we get closer to finishing, which means that every week the bugs I\'m fixing are less and less critical. This also has the unfortunate side effect of making them less and less interesting to talk about. I added a few gravy features to the HUD so that Dave can work his magic, fixed a few lightmap problems that have been plaguing us since the beginning of time, and fixed a couple dozen miscellaneous bugs. One cool thing I did was allow the designers script control over the damaging of specific sections in a model. If they want some scripted event where the left tire of a warthog explodes and goes tumbling away, they will have a lot more control."

* Chris Carney

Our multiplayer maven is tweaking, tuning, fixing and hammering on the multiplayer levels.


"Concerning updates, Steve "Land of " Cotton and I have been spending our waking moments trying to finish up all of new content by next Friday (i.e. content complete). Included in this last mad dash is some familiar lands, and yes, I can not be more specific. But let\'s just say that we have been spending some serious time with some old friends. In addition, we are going through all of our maps to try and finalize any outstanding game play elements, and are also deeply involved in polishing the art in the environments to a fine glossy sheen. One of our major goals in Halo 2 multiplayer is to have at least one or two of the new maps look as shiny as Butkus\'s car."

Bam.

* David Candland

Our User Interface maestro is getting seriously down and dirty with icons, iconography and iconification.

"This was the week of icons, icons, and more icons. First off, I updated the Xbox Live icons in the friends, clan, and players menus. We needed a special icon to represent a specific team member. Max suggested adding a large sombrero or foam cowboy hat to the friend icon. Although I laughed initially nothing better popped into my head. Fine, sombrero it is...for now.

Next, another throwback to the Myth days. Our player level system is getting icons based on the Covenant caste structure. You will soon be able to see how good a player is just by looking at his rank icon.

Lastly, I\'m working on refining some of the custom player emblems that don\'t read well at small sizes. Sorry, but I\'m afraid the shrunken head has got to go. Event horizon is borderline. Flaming Ninja has won the battle of emotional attachment over legibility. He\'s in.

So, that\'s it until next week, when I\'ll recount my mysterious trip. I know it was short, and a bit limp, so I\'ll make it up to you next week. Until then, here\'s Mister Chief reacting to a skybox. It\'s more of a scream than a gasp...

[/size]

Also, here\'s the 29th "update". It\'s not really an update, just a tale of Frankie\'s trip to various parts of Europe, getting HALO 2 rated \'n\' such. It\'s kind of entertaining if you appreciate Frankie\'s humor. But no new HALO 2 information.

Thirtieth update, originally posted at videogames.co.nz

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday August 6th, 2004

I\'m back, and so is regular style weekly update stuff. Next week I\'m gone again, in the Yucatan Peninsula. I may report from there. An update for conspiracy theorists:  I\'ve sorta been following the fuss – too busy to really get into it, but Halo 2 will still release on Nov. 9th in the US and most other places, and Nov. 11th in the UK. Nor will we release a playable demo, anytime soon. In fact, we\'re so busy with the game that there\'s no chance we\'ll even think about a playable demo until after Halo 2 ships. And that is official. It isn\'t happening folks. The game is however, happily on schedule for November 9th. As this week\'s update will demonstrate.

* Greg Snook\'s Plea

DEAR GOD HELP US (and send Pocky!)

Send all Pocky (including unusual Pocky variants to: Greg Snook, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

* Michel\'s Crunch-Nearing Antics

Michel Bastien, in full producer mode, has been as busy as a wasp-like honey-gathering creature, but still took time to note some of the team\'s achievements this week:

Michel pointed out that the 3D artists are supporting the environment artists for final polishing on two of the single player missions.

The animators are almost all working on character animation for cinematics, meaning that more than 95% of game play animations have been put to bed. Jeremy is holding the fort on the gameplay animation front, and authoring cool combat dialog animations.

Chris Carney decided to come back from his trip. he’s back to close on MP maps with Cotton and they’ve been working on a very cool secret map, that everyone will love.

Hao is supporting the artists with scene-specific lighting.

Chris Butcher\'s Authoritay

Chris, we should mention to the New Zealanders reading this, is FROM New Zealand. Go New Zealand!
 
I’ve been finalizing the beta, working on adaptive network detection code, arguing with beta testers on our newsgroups. Just making sure we can ship.
 
Damian has done a bunch of cool stuff lately, including making the AI know how to pathfind up and down gravity lifts which is super cool.
 
Nathan Walpole\'s Laundry List

We are off our rockers over here.
The team has been doing some killer motion and cinematic ownage. Stuff is starting to get really exciting. John Mike and Bill are heavily into the cinematic glut while I am working on special Brute stuff and another wicked CENSORED…um…thing. Jeremy Fones, our resident resident – no I did not stutter – is firing on combat dialog animations for all necessary characters. I am so excited about animation in Halo 2.

It is a very electrifying time of development around here, where everything becomes better, broken, bombastic and beautiful all at once…bursting your bubble with a big bang…we are abuzz with fun and fury!

I am starting to get nostalgic about the days when I was merely a Halo fan, before I became a part of the team. I guess the current state of the game, with all the elements coming together led to the return of this fanboy! Coupled with a frenzied AI, animation is going to rock. It has every opportunity to make you feel like the center of attention, which could lead to an interesting laundry day if you are wearing your Sunday best. I cannot wait until November 9th.

Edooba Docku,

Nathan

Mat Noguchi – Audio Wizard

Haha. I called him an Audio Wizard because that\'s the kind of thing a newspaper that really didn\'t get it would call him. Anyway, Mat points out that localized combat dialogue is in the following condition: 4526 File(s)  4,170,768,287 bytes
 
And that’s only the European languages. No Asian included yet.
 
Mat interjects, "Oh, I also spent the last two weeks making the sound engine 1,000,000,000 times better. That’s right, a billion."

Score between Mat Noguchi and Jason Jones: 1 – 0 respectively. No further explanation necessary or impending.

Max Hoberman\'s Update within an Update

The past couple of weeks have been alternately thrilling and frustrating. Getting close to the end is bittersweet. On the one hand you get to see a ton of hard work come to fruition. On the other you have to make some tough decisions, weighing finishing the game and making sure there\'s time to polish what you have against adding new features and changes that you know would make the game cooler, more fun, more user friendly etc. We\'re now almost beyond the process of making it cooler, friendlier, whatever, at least in significant ways, and are in the midst of shifting to the process of making it work and getting it done. Fortunately for all you weekly update readers Halo 2 is already damn fun!
 
Lately it has been a crazy mishmash of work in multiplayer and UI land. Dave had to tear out a system in the UI visuals that he put a ton of work into, but fortunately it\'s on the way out to make way for something much bigger. Bigger is cooler, of course, but I\'ll always have a little nostalgia for what we had, it was ... slick. Dave has also been knee deep in bugs, including a lot of fine tuning work on the HUD, UI changes to make room for localization, blah blah blah. After we ship remember to ask him about that damn shield meter.
 
In the meantime Steve has been a busy wasp-like honey-gathering creature, putting the polish on a big outdoor map that I can\'t talk any more about for fear of excommunication. Suffice it to say it\'s looking damn good! I\'m looking at a reflection on the ceiling right now. Ooh! Ah! Where was I? Oh yeah, it seems like the rest of the project will be finishing polish for Steve. I think that\'s in his job description. Of course polish for multiplayer is more than just visuals, especially since we\'ll be online. I was just using an analogy I stole from Charlie and repurposed, about how our maps should be like a watertight container. Well, not that they should look like a watertight container, but they should certainly behave like one when it comes to restricting where players can go. (Sorry, taking all the fun away, I know.)
 
Carney just got back from a research expedition to North Carolina, where he was gathering valuable information on weather systems. We had to call it a vacation to get The Man to give him leave, that\'s how dedicated he is. Oh wait, did I say weather? That\'s a big thumbed nose to the censors. Bleep that out, I dare you! Bring it! Anyway, he\'s back and back to work on our final and our grandest multiplayer map. This one is coming in a little late, but considering the fine state of our other multiplayer maps we\'re pushing it some. It\'s going to be worth it, but there\'s still a lot of hard work to be done.
 
Wow, a lot happens in two weeks. Well, I\'m making up for Frankie hijacking last week\'s update. I\'ve been up to my neck in 1) continuing to help drive the Beta and gather useful data, especially about matchmaking and stats. Yes, that involves a certain amount of playing the game on the Internet. Far and away the hardest part of the day. 2) Trying to save the tiny handful of relatively easy UI and MP features that are on the chopping block. 3) Making our multiplayer game fun fun fun fun fun. The way the weapons, vehicles, starting locations, etc. are configured play an enormous role in the enjoyability of a map. Take Zanzibar, for example. Our first playable version of the map, before E3, started with the defenders having a whole slew of vehicles to counter the attacker vehicles. CTF games invariably turned into giant confusing vehicle smashfests. While these certainly have their place in our game, we also care a great deal about making Halo 2 a thinking man\'s game. Strategy is king, and in this case shifting the vehicles all to the attackers and giving the defenders the tracking rocket launcher to counter made all the difference. I just made a change on another map that I suspect will do the same.
 
-Max

Brian Jarrard\'s Ahi Feast

Wow, there\'s so much going on lately it\'s a whirlwind of crazy excitement around here...As launch nears, a number of events are popping up, like the media shindig we hosted here last weekend. We had over 60 members of the press come in and spend the day playing our ongoing internal Halo 2 beta. The entire room was macked out with flat panel TVs, bean bags, Bose systems and plasma screens...basically gaming nirvana. Some of you may have even witnessed some of the action via our webcam which was stealthily placed at the front of the room. After a quick speech (which got translated on the fly into Japanese) and some rules of engagement, we turned the unsuspecting press loose amongst our thousands of frag-thirsty testers. We had a blast and everyone left with big grins on their face...even Frankie, who finally found opponents worthy of his skillz (i.e. noobs). Also, it\'s now official, "Swords" is an International hit. We\'ve got a lot more events coming up, near and far, as the Halo 2 hype machine picks up momentum.

Beyond that, I\'ve also been busy with the Bungie Princess working on cool stuff for our upcoming brand new Bungie Store, getting the Halo 2 strategy guide off the ground, testing take home builds as often as I can and of course, herding a few goats here and there. Good times.

Well that\'s all for this week folks, and in preparation for my trip down Mexico way, here\'s a "tribute" to Mexican artist and icon, Frida Kahlo. I call it Frida Halo.

New Maps:

Midship - A Covenant Cruiser.
Ivory Tower - The Top of a giant Skyscraper.
Waterworks - The Stalagnites on the screenshots are destroyable, they can even destroy a Tank if they fall down.

New Weapons:

Covenant Carbine - A Covenant Battle Rifle.
Covenant Energy Sniper Rifle - As the name says.
Brute Shot - A mortar that fires 4 grenades that explode on the second impact.
Pistol - You can use 2 at the same time, thats the only info on this weapon.

Vehicles:

Banshee - The Banshee can do "Loopings" and it can spin around if you hold down A + Directional Buttons. A Banshee can be boarded while it is flying.
Tank - The tank has a new control layout.
Boarding - Only Brutes and Elites can board vehicles, the Grunts an Jackals don\'t are intelligent enough to do it.

Controls:

The white button is a Team Speak button now, the flashlight is no more. The Directional Pad can be used for Tricks in combination with the A button.

XBL:

- There will be a ranking system.
- There will be DLC, including new maps and "more".
- There will be a Feature called "Virtual Couch", you can play with a buddy and if he leaves the server you will automatically follow him.
- There will be Sword Only gametypes that are really cool.

Few minor pieces of information:

- Bungie doesn\'t have plans too bring a Version of Halo to X-Box Next.
- Halo 2 will get support from Bungie for a really long time.
- The Game will keep a good framrate even when 16 players are on the screen at the same time.
- The Game still plays like as Halo, it is not as completely different as we have thought.
- The Symbols over the heads of your allies have a special meaning, if it is Normal than it indicates that your Buddy is in good condition, if it is yellow your Friend is firing a waepon, if there is a big X above the his Head he is dead.
- The Brute Shot is hard to control because the projectiles won\'t explode on contact.

Great news about the Banshee. Months ago, a bit before E3, I was begging for the Banshee to have more maneuvering options and a boost to avoid enemy fire and eliminate the constant 360 dogfights that were in HaloPC. Bungie has delivered on both points. I\'m quite happy.

More:

Maps-

The build only had three maps. These were.

ZANZIBAR- The same as it was at E3. Really a well thought out and balanced
map, and, to be brutally honest, puts maps like Blood Gulch to shame. Not
much to say about it because we all already saw it at E3. The one thing is,
getting the plasma sword isn\'t as hard as they make it seem.

MID SHIP- A level taking place on a covenant battle ship. Mostly a round
map, it has plenty of different height elevations that allow for sneaky
tactics, especially in CTF. A main platform in the middle holds a new
weapon, witch I will get to later.

IVORY TOWER- I don\'t really get Ivory Tower, it seems to be some sort of an
enclosed greenhouse or park. It has elevator type platforms, something that
was missing from Halo:CE MP maps. It also has powerful air vents that if you
walk over will send you soaring through the air to the level above. Those
are an excellent way for avoiding death and turning the tables on your
attacker.

Weapons

SMG- Not as bad as it looks. It will definitely satisfy people who are
missing the ol\' assault rifle because of its large clip size, but that
little baby packs a punch. Two SMGs can take kill a person in about one or
two seconds. Watch out for that one.

SHOTGUN- Back and badder then ever. It has a slightly new look, very sexy if
you ask me. The reload rate is a little slower, but it makes up for it with
it\'s powerful attack.

SNIPER RIFLE- Guess what it has? RECOIL WOOT WOOT! There is a slight recoil when you shoot it, making it difficult to kill people as easily. Finally, sniping in that game will take a little more skill then before. The bullet
trail is still there, and it sports a new, slicker look. It\'s scope is round instead of square, and the rifle itself is more streamlined.

ROCKET LAUNCHER- Not much to be said here. It\'s a little bigger then it was
before, and fires slightly faster. Target tracking isn\'t as unfair as it
seemed, it actually adds more balance.

BATTLE RIFLE- A fun and cool looking weapon. Much deadlier when it is
scoped. Because it fires bursts unscoped, it can be more difficult to hit
your target and I prefer the SMG for close quarters stuff.


NEEDLER- Fast. Deadly. Awesome. This gun will become a favorite very
quickly. The needles are lightning quick and it fires much faster. SMG and
Needler duel wielded is really really deadly.

PLASMA RIFLE- Not much to say, sports a new look and sound and doesn\'t
freeze you as much when you are hit with it.

PLASMA PISTOL- Once again, not much has changed. New look and sound, still
pretty useless.

BEAM RIFLE- OMG OMG OMG new weapon! The covenant Beam Rifle is the equivalent to the human Sniper Rifle. It has the same scope power, two times and ten times scope. The main difference is that like all other Covie weapons, it does not have to reload. This allows you to stay scoped as long as you want. It has 100 charges and drains 4 charges with each shot, so you do the math. However, it does overheat, and will do so after two rapid succession shots. If you have patience though, you can keep up a steady stream of shots without overheating.

BRUTE SHOT- Another new weapon, it is the Brute rifle. Not really a rifle
though, more of a grenade launcher. I didn\'t use it that much, the only map
it was on was Mid Ship. That, and it wasn\'t very good. It fires grenades
that bounce around, so it is hard to hit your target. Still cool though.

ENERGY SWORD- Don\'t mess with the best \'cause the best don\'t mess. That
pretty sums up the energy sword. If you see someone coming at you with it,
back away and empty every clip of every weapon you have into them, because
it is deadly. Once they get a good lock on you, pressing R will do the lunge
attack and one hit kill you back to Halo 1. I have lovingly dubbed it the
"n00b stick" to go along with it\'s other n00bish partner, the n00b cannon,
or rocket launcher.

Differences and new stuff:

-You can jump higher
-You seem to throw grenades a little shorter
-You can see your feet
-You see your shields spark and crackle when they are taken down, and you
see a ring similar to the one at the beginning of PoA when they recharge
-All weapons have more than one melee attack
-When scoped in with any weapon, it has an ammo count in the scope to tell
you how much is left.
-All weapons aside from scoped weapons have binoculars.
-Hijacking vehicles is hard but awesome. And I mean awesome. It\'s like. knifing some one on Counter Strike.
-When in the warthog passenger seat, it is a third person view instead of
FP, making it much easier to aim.
-The warthog handles better, and the right trigger is a horn and the left is
a brake. It DOES NOT have a boost.
-The Ghost is still awesome and has unlimited boost.
-One strange thing I noticed was that there is no fall damage, but that is
probably just the beta.
-The HUD is completely different. The health bar is now vertical, and is
above your radar in the lower left hand corner. Your right-handed weapon has
taken the health bars previous spot, and the left-handed weapons info is in
the upper left hand corner. You also can see what your reserve weapon is. In
the bottom right hand corner is a score keeper, a red bar and a blue bar
that show the difference between kills, flag captures, etc. This allows you
to quickly check the score without having to press back.
-There is no more health. Once your shields go out, you can take three or
four more shots, but there is nothing to indicate how much health you have
elft.
-Frag grenades don\'t look like pineapples anymore.
-You move slower while carrying the bomb or flag, and must hold x to pick
them up.
-Spartans and Elites grunt in pain when they are it with no shields up.
-Halo 2 will support four people on one Xbox for LIVE play. All at the same
time. In case you didn\'t here me, I just said FOUR PEOPLE ON LIVE AT THE
SAME TIME ON THE SAME BOX! How awesome is that?
-There is no flashlight it is now a teamspeak button.

New Gametypes

SWORDS- Yes, there is a swords only game type. \'Nuff said.

ASSUALT- This is not like the assault with flags. This one is done with
bombs. It is a lot like bomb maps on CS. One team is on defense, while the
other is on offense. Some one on the offensive team must pick up the bomb,
which is like flag in that you can melee with it but can\'t carry it and use
guns at the same time. The offensive team must then escort the bomb bearer
to the defensive teams base, plant the bomb, and prevent the enemy from
defusing it. You defuse by simply standing on the bomb. After the round is over, the teams switch roles, like one flag CTF. It is really an awesome
gametype.

Rumors killed or confirmed-

-You CANNOT drive any vehicles while carrying the flag or bomb.
-You CANNOT duel wield plasma swords.
-The flag and bomb DO slow you down.
-There IS NO DIFFERENCE aside from appearance between Spartans and elites in
MP.
-There is NO health meter.

Maps-

WATERWORKS- You can all see the waterworks screenshots, and it is really, really huge. It has all of the known vehicles; Tanks, \'Hogs, Ghosts, and Banshees. This map truly is gigantic, and you need at least 10 people. In the middle of the map is a giant crevice that you can fall down (and die) and fly banshees down (and live, but nothing is there). The bases have an assortment of weapons and a stationary gun turret with a good field of fire.

Weapons-

COVENANT CARBINE- I never found this before because it is hidden on both
Midship and Ivory Tower. Why is it hidden? Well, I\'ll tell you. It is probably the best gun in the game. It basically is the equivalent to the battle rifle, only better. It always fire single shot, but you can hold down the trigger. This way it is like shooting a machine gun with a decent rate
of fire through a scope. Also, it doesn\'t overheat, it fire cartridges. That
little flower thing on top is the clip. It has a 20 shot clip.

MAGNUM- So there it is. The pistol. I hope all you pistol crazy people are
happy, it\'s there. Honestly though, what game doesn\'t have a pistol? It HAS been toned down though. I couldn\'t tell about the amount of damage it did, but it only has a ten shot clip and no scope. It still has the same shape as before, but it is completely black.

Vehicles-

SCORPION TANK- There it is, it also is back. It is the exact same thing as
before, except it\'s main weapon has a faster rate of fire, and cooler explosion effects. It also moves on an independent axis from it\'s turret.
Now you can "strafe" so to speak with a tank. Also, it doesn\'t take any vehicle damage. I spent 5 minutes shooting it with every weapon, including another tank and it didn\'t leave a scratch.

BANSHEE- The Banshee also is the same, except for a few minor performance upgrades. It can strafe, that is a big improvement. It also doesn\'t have a fuel rod god, that was replaced with the boost. It CAN be hijacked

Stuff to note.

-Vehicles damage is highly case sensitive, and you can\'t shoot out the tires of a warthog
-The SMG target reticle is the same as the AR from Halo:CE.
-Elite hands look funny, our clan HAS to be Spartans.
-The Elite HUD is purple.
-No melee while duel wielding.

Of course, these are beta impressions and some things... Llike health/shields, fall damage, and the Scorpion\'s apparent "invincibility"(Bungie has already stated that all vehicles have detailed damage models) are subject to change...

I highlighted the really interesting new pieces of info in bold. And underlined the obvious unpolished/questionable stuff that will more than likely be changed over the next 3 months.