Rampancy

Kudos to Kalis for locating the weekly HALO update at HALO Players. Some bits:

- The turret is in the game now and works extremely well, unless you make the mistake of aiming it at the ground - at which point the turret becomes more of a vehicle than a weapon.

- Marty saw, and more importantly heard, a demo of the real-time Dolby Digital 5.1 sound capabilities in the Xbox, and was very impressed and eager to get it working in Halo. He and Jay are busy recording alien speech this week. According to Joe, the finished game will have seven or eight thousand distinct lines of combat dialog (that doesn't include speech outside of combat, such as the dialog in cutscenes), which works out to roughly 160 phrases per AI unit.

- The flamethrower is working in the game and looks good when it's spewing flaming death, though Marcus promises it will look even better when he's done with it.

You can find the rest at HALO Players.

Mumbo Jumbo, developers of Myth III, have setup a webcam so you can see what they are doing. At this time, they have got a huge pyramid of Diet Coke and an explanation of what it's all about. It might be difficult to read the text since the site keeps auto-refreshing, so here's a copy and paste of what it says:

Both Andrew and I figured that no matter how hard we try, we aren't going to beat John at coding. It took us awhile but we finally came up with something we could compete with. We asked John how much diet coke he drinks in a day. It came out to roughly 120oz, or 4.26 liters.

That fueled bad things. Through hard calculations we found that one 12oz can is equal to exactly 1/10 the amount of diet coke John drinks. Diet cokes are now colorfully reffered to as deci-carmacks . If Andrew or I drink 10 cans in a day, we are rewarded with a warm fuzzy feeling that we have become an equal to John, and we draw a little carmack on our whiteboard to keep track of past days.

One day I tried a whacky trick and actually tried to beat the JC record. I was going to drink 24 deci-carmacks ( or 10.2 liters ) in one 8 our period. To keep this pace I had to drink one deci-carmack every 20 minutes. That may not seem difficult, and it wasn't until roughly coke number 17. I was so wired I was having uncontrollable spasms and almost killed myself when I tripped walking for another one. So I never did achieve my goal. In the last 3 months Andrew and I have constructed a John carmack shrine in the corner of our office. It currently contains over 600 cans and stands 6ft high. Andrew and I have drank each and every one of these by ourselves.

Beat that John! :)

-- Joe Riedel.
-- Myth III Programmer, Mumbo Jumbo Games

Check it out for yourself.

GameSpy has acquired some new screenshots of the upcoming retail total conversion Myth II: Green Berets. The five new shots show some explosions, helicopters, and tactical movement.

Ever had a problem with a Bungie product not working correctly or mysteriously crashing? Of course you have! Even if you haven't had such misfortune (hi Mac users), you may want to check out the Bungie Support Database Site that went online earlier today. It's run by Bungie itself and is very thorough. If you have a problem or know of a Bungie newbie, be sure to keep that URL handy (support.bungie.com).