Rampancy

Well, it appears that shipping separate CDs for Mac and PC games is SOP (standard operating procedure) for GOD (the Gathering of Developers). This is unlike Myth and Myth 2, Bungie's last two releases, which both shipped as hybrid CDs.

Oni Central has posted that the SKU for a hybrid Oni release has been removed from the systems of online retailer Amazon.com and been replaced by two separate SKUs for PC and Mac versions.

While this raises speculation that the release might not be truly simultaneous, and might even make Oni's launch more expensive, it does allow publishers to better track sales to each platform. Also, Amazon.com is listing the price for Oni as $39.99.

As of October 8, 2000, Halo Central has shut down its operations, the last in a string of site closings and consolidations that will no doubt continue in the long lull before Halo is finally released.

From the site:

When we began this site about a year ago now we were eager to provide news of an upcoming game which has since receieved overwhelming praise by all but the most restrained reviewers. However, over time our interest faded, and with the Microsoft aquisition of Bungie, our interest plummeted. We've since recovered from the shock, and --some of us-- are now eagerly awaiting the game. However, our interest is not enough to provoke us to maintain this site, and thus we must bid our farewell.

Another one bites the dust. Halo Central, we hardly knew ye. The staff of Rampancy.net wishes those at Halo Central the best of luck in their future endeavors.

Without prompting of any kind it seems, other than a recent article by Peter Cohen at Maccentral, Matt Soell of Bungie Studios offered some clarification on the status of the Oni Beta. The article from last week cited a January launch date for Oni, as well as pegging the project's status at Beta 2. From his post at Oni Central late last week:

...there was a bit of a lag between the time I said that and the day the story was posted. Currently we're at Beta 8. We may even have a newer build but Beta 8 is the one I was playing around with last night.

I wanted to pre-emptively address those of you who might be thinking They're only at beta 2?! No, we're not. Much progress has been made.

In response to another hey Matt forum post asking for info on whether or not there'd be any more Oni trailers forthcoming, The Matt had this to say yesterday in a post on Oni Central's forum:

They haven't made any new trailers, but they did do a bunch of in-game cutscenes. And they continue to work on them.

One can only hope this means work on Oni is coming down to the wire.

Found first at /., Daily Radar has obtained an interview with Michael Abrash of the Microsoft Games Group. He talks a lot about why the X-Box looks so good as a development platform for him and others. For one thing, he seems to addresss some of his comments at the crowd that expect for the X-Box to be nothing more than a watered-down PC. Here's a blurb:

DR: What are some of the amazing things Xbox programmers will be able to do with the system in, say, two or three years after launch?MA: I wish I knew--but I'll have to wait and see :) Basically ask yourself what difference it would make to have 10 or 20 times as many polygons per frame as on a PC today, with parallel processing for procedural modification of vertices and pixels and with the ability to use textures for lookup tables, plus a ton of particles--I think the answer is better looking stuff, but exactly how, no one yet knows. Xbox will be easy to develop for, because of the familiar tools and programming environment, but there will still be an interesting learning curve as developers learn to push the limits of the hardware.

He also stresses that titles that are designed to take advantage of the X-Box's features (instead of just being ported like Quake) should look pretty amazing, even on an NTSC display, and then makes some comments about NTSC vs. HDTV support. It's worth a look for those on both sides of the should I buy an X-Box? argument.