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How did that happen?

Mon, 02/16/2004 - 12:29 by Deadly with Warthog

im sure u all have seen in level 343 guilty sparks not only a downed pelican, but also a downed dropship. i thought that the flood had just been released, so y would there be both dropships destroyed? and if it was that the flood got to them both, wasnt there 2 pelicans in the area? then what happened to the other one?

halo
xbox
bungie

February 6, 2004. Originally at Battleground: Halo.

Frankie's picture

Fri, 02/06/2004 - 22:12 by Frankie

It has been a busy week. We're going bananas building and designing the new website (more on that in the coming weeks) and generally having a ball seeing the game come together. Animation, sound, environment and gameplay are all frantically combining into a delicious soup. The Cananimators have also been working on very subtle transitions between walking, running and sprinting, so that the movements look fluid and natural. More impressive, bizarrely, is the animation for stopping and turning. The trick is going to be finding a balance between its usefulness and playability which is true of almost any game feature. Joe Staten and CJ Cowan have been very busy bees. Yes, the same kind of bees that Homer's nightmare dog spits out. They've been working diligently on game-engine cutscenes and transitions between levels. Using the game engine helps keep the player anchored more firmly in the game world. There have been some tweaks and modifications however, so the cutscenes will look sharper, thanks in large part to the use of the new graphic engine's features. Specular highlighting, mad bump-mapping etc. The cutscene I watched had been put together fairly recently, and was for timing and positioning of cameras, but looked pretty finished. The only way to know it wasn't done was the fact that none of the characters had walking animations, they just kind of glided around. None of the actor voices (unless you count Joes Staten yelling, "I'm fighting!" in a high-pitched voice) are attached to the cutscenes at this point more on that next week, hopefully. The cutscene in question is actually a tremendously important one. Email me months from now and ask me which of the many shockers it was and I'll tell you. "He got the POOPS working!" You'll be relieved to know that "POOPS" is not an acronym, rather just a term Chucky, one of the programmers, uses for "instance geometry." Instance geometry is a term that covers what Chucky describes as "low level" stuff. You might describe it as bits of the Halo world. Instance geometry "objects" aren't strictly objects at all, at least as far as we define them. They're things like columns, planters, basic world objects. As far as getting the POOPS working, Chucky simply got them all to behave the way they should in terms of AI reaction, shot ricochets, player collisions all that kind of stuff. The beauty of instance geometries is that while they're textured, lightmapped, bump-mapped the whole nine yards they seldom involve much work for the level and environment guys. Often they can simply be placed in the right spot and left to do their business. Normal objects have to be sealed and carefully implemented into geometry instance geometry is a whole lot easier to deal with. Normally these things are pretty ho-hum, but anyone who's been in a campaign firefight, or a game of rockets on Hang 'Em High knows that POOPS are pure gameplay. They're places to run, hide, dodge and take cover, and they often breathe life into a level.
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Xbox 2: Somebody's On Crack

Mon, 02/02/2004 - 02:31 by narcogen

I don't know who it is or where they are, but the rumored Xbox 2 specs are clearly evidence that somebody is ingesting dangerous quantities of some mind altering substances.

Let's take this "information" apart piece by piece.

The first point is the lack of a hard drive. The article says on this point:

The current Xbox has an eight-gigabyte hard disk drive. That drive is useful for online games and storing game art, but many developers chose not to make use of it. As a result, Microsoft seems to have decided that saving the $50 the hard drive costs outweighs its benefits.

This makes no sense on its face, the only question is whether this is a bit of bogus information that just proves that the media will snap on any scurrilous bit of rumor they get, or evidence that after a fairly good showing with its first gaming console, Microsoft is headed for a sophomore slump of Biblical proportions after having failed to learn anything, even from its own marketing hype.

The killer advantage of the Xbox was supposed to be the ethernet port, for online gaming and downloadable content. Unless this thing is going to have a built-in optical drive with write abilities, the removal of the hard drive means no online updates, no downloadable content. Perhaps that experiment has been abandoned, although it was only a few short weeks ago that the company was talking about the success of the program with MechAssault, the first Xbox game that offered downloadable content.

Even with the platform a static development target, console games are reaching a point of complexity where bug-free games are hard to make, and the only way to fix them is online patches. No hard drive, no patches.

The speculation that this move is to control console costs and reduce loss makes no sense. All the console makers take a loss on the hardware and profit on the games. If you can't do that, you don't have a console business. Also, targeting Sony for the next round of competition is premature. Microsoft largely failed to position itself as a clear #2 in the market, in many places running neck and neck with Nintendo, except in Japan, where they got trounced. If anything, they should continue to offer superior value and a good price point-- even if that means significant losses on hardware-- and use their ability to subsidize their gaming studio with their other businesses to drive Nintendo into a software-only role like Sega. It's unlikely that will ever happen completely, as Nintendo virtually owns the portable gaming space, but still, the nearest target for Microsoft in the market is Nintendo-- not Sony If Microsoft thinks that a photo finish for second place in a three-horse race is good enough to start worrying about being a market leader, they've got another think coming. Perhaps someone should look at the Sony sales figures again.

And lastly, it isn't clear if Microsoft will include the current DVD video technology or Blu-Ray, its successor. Blu-Ray will hold much more data, but it's unclear when it will be ready for market.

This also makes no sense at all. Both the Xbox and the PlayStation 2 have DVD drives; the GameCube uses a proprietary media format that stores less space. Halo, which shipped for the Xbox on a DVD and for the Mac and PC on a single CD, is still the console's best-seller. There's absolutely no indication that the limits of the DVD format are being approached, storage-wise. There's also no indication that there's any correlation between the amount of storage space a game requires and how good it is; if there were, then companies would still be making FMV games. To top it all off, this tidbit is in direct conflict with the goal ascribed to Microsoft elsewhere in the article, which was supposedly to control the hardware costs of the box. A Blu-Ray drive would almost certainly be more expensive than a normal DVD drive; even if is equal to the price of a current-spec DVD drive by the time the Xbox 2 is being produced, a standard DVD drive would still be cheaper. So let's sum this up: there would be no point in decreasing the cost of the Xbox 2 $50 by removing the hard drive and then losing that advantage by including a more expensive optical drive that is in no way necessary or demonstrably better.

Compatibility with the original Xbox, which is based on Intel and Nvidia chips, isn't guaranteed. Microsoft is concerned it would cost too much money in hardware or in licensing fees to enable the Xbox Next to play old Xbox games. This is risky in part because Sony's strategy has been to maintain compatibility with its old consoles.

I'd like to just dismiss this as bull as well, but unfortunately there might be a basis for this. In burning its bridges with Intel and Nvidia, it may very well be true that whatever licensing they'd need to do to make the Xbox 2 backwards compatible with an older console based on a different processor architecture and a different GPU vendor might be prohibitively expensive. The original deals for those technologies might not have included future hardware, allowing them to put the squeeze on Microsoft as punishment for abandoning them as vendors. Of course, any x86 compatible processor vendor would probably do as a replacement for the Intel chip in the original Xbox, so it's not likely that Intel's position is a factor, unless there are specific new technologies in the Xbox that were licensed separately. The GPU might be an issue, but this also seems unlikely: as the Nvidia chip in the Xbox was supposed to support a special new superset of DirectX as well as OpenGL, it would simply remain to ATI to make a chip that supported the same instructions. Millions of PCs around the world play the same PC games (with varying results, of course) on video cards designed by these two manufacturers, because they're using the same APIs.

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