Yes! Weekly Bungie Update: Today!

Thirty Fourth update, originally posted at BG:H

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, September 3rd, 2004

Today is officially designated "Final Push" day, which means that there is about a month of hardcore development left, followed by success and joy, with any luck. Which means this update is short!
Screenshots! We\'ve been taking screens for upcoming magazines and we had to enlist some help. Brian is STILL getting married, or making a baby, or whatever it is you do, and so we\'re short handed. So we press ganged a lucky (kinda!) old school 7th Column member who was only too pleased to run around some multiplayer levels, blowing stuff up, sniping Lorraine and generally causing cool stuff to happen so we could take screenshots of it. We also forced him to sign an NDA so restrictive, that he has to breathe a certain way for the next six months, and is only allowed to wear elastic-waist pants.

Asked to describe the game in three words or less (and remember CENSORED has seen things nobody else has, he replied, "Oh. My. God."
The game continues to come on in leaps and bounds. It\'s advanced enough that we were even able to start work on an upcoming strategy guide. Certainly the multiplayer aspect of the strategy can be written right now, since very little is going to change in terms of rules, weapon placements or map layouts. Multiplayer strategy itself is a cavernous, never-ending thing. There are so many rules, gametypes, variants, weapons and vehicles, that even a simple list of "things" takes up a few pages, never mind the strategies that accompany them.

Single player strategy is another matter entirely, but lots of stuff is pretty far along, and some levels are being described as mostly finished. Yesterday I found a Carneyhole* that let me wander the rooftops of Old Mombasa, making hairier and hairier jumps. It was kinda scary, and completely pointless. But I do love a good Carneyhole.
Nathan\'s has two 6am deadlines coming up. Both Saturdays. Now think about that for a moment. 6am? Saturday? Who schedules deadlines like that? I mean, why not noon on Friday? Or 10am on Monday? Does anyone even know what 6am on Saturday looks like? For all I know (and I am colossally, impossibly lazy) 6am on Saturday could be bright green, covered in Chia and spew flaming Pez into a sky filled with barking helicopters.

Anyhoo, Nathan\'s two deadlines are – content complete for gameplay, this Saturday, 6am. That means, any animations or animation fixes for gameplay, will be complete, on Saturday, at 6am. The next deadline is the same thing, but for cinematics. If you look at the gameplay right now, you probably wouldn\'t be able to spot a single problem with animation (which is good, since his deadline is in about 12 hours) but there are still tweaks, additions and fixes to be made to the cinematics, which are coming along beautifully.

Mat\'s Noguchi\'s desk is like Satan\'s underwear drawer. If you want to know what the universe will look like when the Big Crunch finally sucks the entropy back to a singularity, just go over and look at his desk. Honestly, it\'s like a Hieronymous Bosch painting of Toys R Us. It is the messiest desk of all time, piled high with garbage, layers of paper, veins of old snack substances, and supported by an intricate network of columns…well, technically they\'re half full cans of Mountain Dew. Soon it will collapse, and certainly it will destroy us all.

Ironic then (you knew I was getting to a point, right?) that Noguchi spent this week cleaning up Halo 2 code of what he calls "Two years of crap that people filled up our code base with." Basically Noguchi\'s task is to ensure that the game fits on the disc, which won\'t affect the game performance (none of the extraneous messages to PookySchnookums, dead-end utilities or unused graphics actually affect code) but it may have some effect on loading speeds, since the disc sectors are bound to be more efficiently jammed with Halo goodness.

Mat promises never to clean his desk, saying that he will instead "wait \'til it becomes something new, evolves and escapes from its terrestrial prison."
Adrian Perez has been fixing little gameplay exploits – or "features" as cheats call them. One of these is one some, but not all of you will know about from Halo one. If four players stand on the respawn point of an active camouflage power up, and they are all there at the same moment it reappears, you guessed it, all four become simultaneously invisible and take off on a rampage of destruction. Halo 2, for what it\'s worth, checks to see how many jerks are standing there, and awards the power up to whoever is most on it.

The manual shipped. Completely. Now I\'m getting more of those strange requests from Japan asking what "jerk-face" and "ass-clown" mean. The manual looks great. I think. Anyway, if you enjoy the manual, just remember, it\'s about the only aspect of your Halo 2 experience I had anything positive to do with. Congrats to the UX team for going above and beyond the call of duty. On November 9th, you\'ll have a better idea of the hard work and talent they put into it.
Jay points out that they still have dozens of scenes of cinematic foley to implement, but was glad to report that they had recorded a crowd scene at last. The crowds in this case being Jackals and Grunts, played by Bungie employees, yelling at the top of their voices in an acoustically correct makeshift recording studio. Much to the annoyance of the people working in the offices connected to it.

Marty is putting music in the game. He is 95% composed. And by that, we mean of course that he has composed 95% of the music, since he himself may or may not be composed. I have only seen him once this week, and he was gripping his coffee cup very hard, so I was scared to ask how he was. Jay says the final deadlines for audio are about a week away, but that he and the audio team will be tuning, tweaking and perfecting until Harold physically drags them away. Technically, all the raw data should be done in about a week, but there will then be lots (a relative term these days) of time to manipulate stuff that\'s already in the game.

Jay brought his inflatable queen sized bed. He had to measure his office first to make sure it fit. It does.

He also recently added some effects to the Rocket launcher projectile sound. The new-improved noise includes a kind of hollow echo as the rocket tube empties. It basically sounds a lot more dangerous. The rocket itself sounds absolutely terrifying and leaves you in no doubt that it is headed straight for your face.

Dave Dunn and the invincible environment artists are fixing bugs. Bugs of course in environment art can mean all sorts of things, including missing textures or odd lighting effects. No new content is being created, except to patch holes in things, or fix faults. But the basic upshot is that apart from some wacky lighting and two or three transparent green placeholder crates, all of the environments look finished, to my eye at least. The artists, being artists are lovingly poring over every pixel.

--

Carneyhole* - Imaginary hole placed in geometry that Chris Carney hides in his multiplayer maps so he can hide, popping up occasionally to snipe. The hole is full of guns and health and ammo.
So here\'s Mister Chief, searching, futilely on Zanzibar for Carney.

--

This update really let it hit home: HALO 2\'s almost here. Seems like just yesterday E3 was done and over with and everybody was whining about how long 6 months was. Now we\'re down to 2, and the wait will be made much easier thanks to the steady stream of media and information that will flow out \'til November 9th.

New HALO 2 screenshots! Most of these images have been seen in recent HALO 2 magazine articles over the past month, but for those of you who missed \'em:


This takes place in the multiplayer map Mid-Ship.


That\'s what the Banshee looks like when it Barrel Rolls. This takes place in the multiplayer map Waterworks.


A SPARTAN boarding/hijacking a Scorpion Tank. This lools like Waterworks too.

Lil\' more detailed information from a member at TXB named Shaedon:

"I don\'t know if this is a forcible boarding (which I believe) or if this is simply someone tagging along for the ride, as there are new animations for that as well. Notice the tank\'s Y axis is moving independantly of the X axis. This is one of the new elements of the Scorpion Tank. When you board a Scorpion Tank forcibly, one of three things happens. If you board with grenades, you\'ll latch on and toss grenades in the cockpit. If you do so without grenades, you\'ll either be able to melee the driver out of the vehicle from the front or rip a panel off from the back and yank some wires out, until the driver relents."


Zanzibar... Same ol\', same ol\'. *yawn*


Nice view of a SPARTAN holding the Covenant Carbine(the Covie Battle Rifle, not the Covie Sniper Rifle), and it\'s shield charging back up. It looks great animated, you can get a nice look at it in the 50min MLG footage. This scene takes place in the multiplayer map Lockout, I believe.


That is the BRUTE SHOT! And it\'s HUGE!... For those of you that forgot, the Brute Shot lobs 3 or 4 grenades that explode about 2-3 seconds after being fired. Not sure if the \'nades are plasma based or not, but at any rate this weapon should have much destructive potential. It\'s ammunition is very limited though... This scene takes place in Mid-Ship also.

New HALO 2 beta information. Got this from a forum post at Nightly.net.

As before, I\'ll bold some of the really interesting information, and underline questionable things that will likely change for release:

So enough about the technical side of things. We hooked Bob\'s dev machine up to Evil\'s giant HDTV for some multiplayer action. There were a total of eight of us and we were all salivating. I plopped myself down on the couch and grabbed a controller before anyone else could beat me to it. (Hey, I just made some major sacrifices with my fiance. You didn\'t think I was going to be nice about this did you? 8-) )

So the first thing Bob told us is that the machine could crash at any time and when it did we would likely be SOL until he got it back to the office and up and running again. This made us all a little queasy at first but we plodded on. So the first thing we did was make our own separate profiles and controller setups. The amount of customization to your multiplayer "look" are amazing. I can confirm that at least for this test build you could only play as an Elite or a Spartan. The first map we played was Zanzibar. I had the controller with the "power" so I chose Zanzibar since I had watched the MLG video and felt confidant that I knew the level enough that I would have an advantage over the other players. (Hey you gotta use any advantage you can right?) So I proceeded to school everyone because they didn\'t know how to do things like duel wield, hi-jack vehicles, fall 10-stories without dying, find and use the brutal energy sword, etc... So after the incredible beating I gave everyone they asked "how\'d you do that" Then I proceeded to tell them how I know so much about the game already and blah, blah, blah. I decided I could either whoop everyone\'s butt that night and be bored out of my mind or I could school them on the finer points of Halo2. So we played halo 2 again and I proceeded to show them all of the "secrets" that I had learned.

Now the game was on and I was running for my life on the next level. We played Ivory Tower next. We decided to try something other than just Slayer and while setting up a game of Oddball we noticed settings for weapon selection. Yes, weapon selection. Just like the good \'ol days of Perfect dark they had a map default as well as several weapon group types but they also had a customize option where you could put in any weapon you wanted. We chose a weapon group called "New Classics". There was an "Old Classics" as well. New classics had mostly covenant weapons like the carbine, plasma sniper, sword, etc...

We then continued playing multiplayer for the rest of the night. We got to play all of the levels that Capt\'n has on his BETA DVD except for Midship. In total we saw about 11 different levels on the selection screen and we could select them all but on some of them when you clicked on the start game button it would say "one or more players could not load the map" Bob said he wasn\'t sure what was causing this but that it was probably an issue with the test build of the map itself as many of the maps still had place-holder graphics and incomplete geometry. We were bummed to say the least. We did get to play some maps not that I have not seen mentioned anywhere else. So here we go.

I have a terrible memory with names so I apologize in advance that I don\'t have the exact map names. I\'m hoping that we can get Bob to bring the box home again another night and I\'ll be sure to bring a pad of paper and a pencil with me if I get to do this again.

- Since I don\'t know the exact name I\'ll call the first new level "Gas Giant high-wire act" The description for this level said something along the lines of "What did the forerunners need with all this gas?" It reminded me very much of "Gephyrophobia" from the PC version of Halo. It was outdoors with a long bridge between two towers and large circular central area. Two side bridges ran parallel but a little lower than the main central bridge. The central area had a tall structure with 4 or 5 struts that came down to the edge of the circle on the ground and the struts rotated around a central axis. The struts were angled in such a way that you could actually run up them and snipe from a perch at the top. there were also two banshees on the level one behind each tower. There were some very rough spots graphically and Bob told us it was an unfinished map and that we were seeing some place-holder graphics as well as some primitive textures. This was a great sniping map. We were having a great time trying to get the best headshot. There was also this cool device that I will call an "anti-gravity pad". From one of the side bridges you could actually jump off on the side opposite the main central bridge and land on a small circular pad. In the middle of the pad was a rocket launcher. Along the edge of the pad though was a glowing green square. When you stepped on it it would vault you into the air and land you in the middle of the central circular area with the rotating spokes. What was so fun about is that you could grab the launcher, vault into the air and rain holy havoc down onto unsuspecting victims beneath you in the central area before you landed. It was great!

-The next new map I will just call "Earth City". This map had by far the most surprises in it. I could go on forever about this map but I\'ll keep it short and just reveal the most interesting surprises I might post some more details later. On this map there was a NEW weapon. This weapon has not been described anywhere else to my knowledge so this is my token of authenticity plus I have another one I\'ll reveal later that I\'m sure capt\'n knows about for further proof. The weapon was named the "disintegrator". When you picked it up it was this large white round blob of a gun. It actually looked like it might even be human in origin. Frank was actually the first to find the gun on this map. We all sat around with a stunned look on our faces when he pulled the trigger button. It shot out this awesome looking stream of electricity. Think ghostbusters but orange instead of green. We all fell over ourselves trying to be the first to get to Frank so he could fry us with this new toy. But much to our dissapointment when I got there he zapped the crap out of me with the new gun and it made all these pretty effects but nothing happened. We showed Bob and he said they probably just added the gun and hadn\'t programmed in the damage for it yet. Needless to say we were all dissapointed but it was still cool regardless. Another new item on this map was what I will call the "convenant plasma caster" You know those stationary guns the humans have that spew out .50 cal bullets? Well the convenant now have one too but it rains down plasma bolts similar to the ones on the ghost and the banshee. They moved slowly enough though that it was hard to stay on target you had to really lead them if they were moving to connect. And finally I can confirm that the Fuel Rod Cannon was on this board as well. It looked like the explosion animation wasn\'t fully functioning yet and the splash damage left a little to be desired but a direct hit was an instant kill. I also noticed you could 5x zoom with it and still fire! It also did not have the extreme arc on it that the PC version has. Finally one of the cooler things we noticed about the map was physics appropriate moving geometry. Let me explain. Near the middle of the map (this map is huge by the way) There is a piece of what looks like a 4-lane highway suspended in mid air by a cable coming down from a crane. You can jump onto this roadway from a nearby ledge. When you do you immediately notice the roadway in front of you begin to lift into the air. As you run to the center of the roadway you notice the ground level out. It was using the connnection points from the cable as a central pivot access and your weight would cause the roadway to go up or down just like a teeter-totter. It was a fantastic use of physics and could even have an effect on game play. If you noticed someone sniping from the elevated roadway you could shoot a missle at the other end of the roadway and make it swing in the air and screw up their aim. It was great!

- Ok final map and it\'s a doozy. I will call this map "Blood Gulch Redux" Yes it\'s back folks. (What, you didn\'t think they\'d leave R. v. B. hanging did you?) This map was great. We could tell it needed a little work still, some of the textures weren\'t quite right, but otherwise it was a fantastic CTF map. The bases on each end have 3 levels instead of two from the original. The "basement" of each level (you go down a little ramp from ground level) had a banshee parked in it. There were warthogs and ghosts on each side as well. The "ground" or middle level is where the flag is positioned in CTF. and the "top" or upper level has the teleporter as well as a few goodies. There is the sniper rifle up there of course but now there is also a rocket launcher up there as well. We had a great time using the new "lock-on" feature to shoot down the other team\'s banshees over and over again. It was very reminiscent of the original classic map but with enough new mixups to make if fresh, new, and exciting.

The rest continued in next post...

The rest...

Ok now a few things I need to clear up with Capt\'n just because I\'m curious if it\'s the same in the BETA or not and also to increase my street cred.

Capt\'n,

- First meleeing. In our build of the game I noticed meleeing was substantially different from HALO. It seemed to me that if you were really close you would just whip your gun out and smack them but if you were far enough away it would do that lunge attack that you do with the energy sword when it locks on. With the sword it\'s great because it kills usually in 1-hit but with melee it doesn\'t and left me vulnerable numerous times when I missed. I also noticed it was very heavy on the upper-cut motion and that if you weren\'t below your target or pointing downward you were just as likely to lunge clear over their head and completely miss them. The other thing I noticed is that when you are on the receiving end of a melee attack it seemd that you got stunned for short period of time. Did you encounter this? What was annoying is that you could be filling the other guy full of lead, he smacks you, then while you\'re stunned he unloads on you with a full clip before you can return fire. I found this very annoying.

- The banshee. In our build you could hi-jack the banshee if it was barely moving but you were just as likely to hi-jack it and then accidentally eject yourself immediately afterwards. I think they should have put in a delay seeing as how the hi-jack button (x-button) is the same as the eject button. Also it flies very differently from the original. It has this new hover feature now where if you don\'t give any joystick input it just hovers in your current position but you can\'t do the back-up and hover. In the old game you could point your nose down and press back and it would slowly lift you into the air backwards and you could lob fire straight down. Now when you do that you just fall to the ground. It seems like they are forcing us to use strafing runs much more now.

- The tank. In this build I hate this thing with all of my heart. It is vastly overpowered in my opinion. Tell me if any of this is wrong Capt\'n. You cannot hi-jack the tank. You can ride along side with the driver, but you cannot hi-jack it. I tried everything. You can press X when you are near it and you will board the tank but then any other button you press does nothing. You can\'t melee, you can\'t throw grenades, you can\'t shoot your gun, nothing. So there you are being taken for a ride on a 20-ton behemoth while everyone and their mother is shooting at you on the tank. This is my other problem with the tank. The driver is virtually indestructable inside the tank. We tride sniping the driver lobbing numerous grenades, plasma and frag, shooting rocket launchers, fuel rods from a banshee, you name it. The driver just kept plucking along like we were throwing stones at him. He was able to hold of 3 other very determined players for an entire game of 25 kill slayer and won just by driving around in a tank. They really need to fix this in my opinion. Oh yeah, and in our build there was no re-load time for the main gun. Maybe a quarter of a second but that was it.

- Power-ups. Capt\'n did they have any power ups in your build? We had two that we could identify. One was a standard over-shield. Pick it up and your shield bar turns pink and starts to slowly drain back to blue. Then there is what I call the "super-man" power up. It appeared to give you an overshield, active camo, and extra speed. What I really didn\'t like though is that when you got it you could no longer see the models of your guns in your hands. I\'m hoping this is just something they haven\'t finished drawing yet. Because it\'s really annoying to be holding a rocket launcher and think your holding an SMG and blow yourself and your adversary away at point blank range. Oh btw Capt\'n this particular power up was on the "Gas Giant" level and not on any others so it might not be in the BETA. It was a yellow square box with a rotating pink and blue circle inside.

Ok I\'m done comparing notes with Capt\'n now and I\'m down to my last big revelation.

SINGLE PLAYER WAS ENABLED.

Let me say that again in case anyone missed it.

SINGLE PLAYER WAS ENABLED.

Bob told us that while it was enabled it was buggy as hell and would likely crash the XBOX if we tried it. He said he had played through the first three levels but about widway throught the fourth it would crash his machine and he\'d have to download a new build because it wouldn\'t work at all after it crashed. We looked at the single player levels and counted 17. It looked like there might be even more because there were a few slots that just said NULL[/b]. We decided that night not to try our luck and decided to stick with multi-player.

So my question for all of you is. If we can beg "Bob" to bring us back a build with a more stable single player on it would you want to know anything about it or would you rather be completely surprised on Nov. 9th? I know I was very excited that night to try the single player and tried to convince them to take a chance but they didn\'t want to. But looking back on it now I have mixed feelings. I know this isn\'t the final build and I\'m not sure I want to have the story spoiled for me before I get to play the finished product. So let me know what you guys think. I\'m not making any promises whatsoever as I don\'t even know if Bob can sneak the dev machine out again. But let me know what you guys think IF it\'s possible.

Allright that\'s all for me now. If you can think of any questions and if I have any answers I\'ll be happy to reply.

- Over and Out -

looking to kickass...must resist hype...ahhhhh!!

Certaintly seems to get better and better.IMO this one guarantees a hit

Speaking of hype:

http://www.xblgamers.com/story.php?storyid=105

Interesting article done by Curll, talking about the amazing amount of hype HALO 2 has generated, how it\'s raping his bandwidth, and how it\'s detracting attention away from other big titles this fall.

While it is true that the hype has got a bit out of hand, especially with ilovebees.com... It\'s not going to overshadow every other title this fall. It\'s not like HALO 2\'s going to outsell any of the PS2\'s big hits this fall. But I guess I should look at it from his perspective, person managing a website such as that... Heh.

what was this ilovebees.com thing all about anyway?

A marketing/hype generating thing for fans to have fun with. Pieces of information are hidden throughout the site, fans visit it and disect E V E R Y T H I N G... Sound bites, hidden story pieces, whole bunch of stuff is hidden in there. It may or may not have much to do with HALO 2 in the end, but there are lots of people having fun with it. Bungie did something similar before HALO\'s release through "Cortana Letters", but it wasn\'t quite as deep as this. I mean, Bungie has been having fans take roadtrips to various phonebooths just to record messages related to ilovebees.com

Personally, I think it\'s a waste of time since there\'s a pretty high chance it won\'t help me appreciate HALO 2\'s story any more than I think it will. So, I\'m staying far away from it.

And I thought japanese are weird

New screenshots:

Some HALO 2 images that have been posted earlier(through magazine articles \'n\' such), now available in hi-res goodness:

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen184.jpg

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen183.jpg

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen175.jpg

http://www.xblgamers.com/media/Halo2/screen179.jpg

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen176.jpg

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen182.jpg

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen181.jpg

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen180.jpg

http://www.halo.fr/images/screen2/screen177.jpg


There are also some beta images and a 120+MB video floating around that shows off a lot of neat stuff. I\'ll get to that in a bit.

Hey Nu, do u have a server me and a freind can play on??, he doesnt have the Custom edition so im having to use the normal PC version of halo, also he borrowed it for a freind - any idea if he will even be able to play online. Thanks

dammit, now its saying "My client is newer than the servers", when i try and connect to mine and he cant connect to mine at all - any ideas?

The server you\'re trying to connect to hasn\'t updated to version 1.05, which was released Tuesday(just a security fix, nothing new).

If you\'d like a server to play on, you can try Asgard 1 or 4, which are usually on the top of the lists.

Address for Asgard 1 is game.asgard-halo.org:2302

Asgard 4 is... game4.asgard-halo.org, if I remember correctly. Try \'em out.