Halo 3 Pre-Release Discussion

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Halo 3 video documentary coming tomorrow.

Something’s going to happen. Something wonderful.

Tomorrow morning, on December 20th at 2am PST (Pacific Standard Time) the US English version of our next “ViDoc” will go live. What’s a Vidoc, you ask? A Video-Documentary. What’s it about, you ask? It’s about Brutes in Halo 3, but before we say more, read the following caveats just so there’s no confusion:

· There are no finished graphics in the documentary, and everything you see is a work in progress.

· This will be available initially only on Xbox Live Marketplace.

· The first version of the Vidoc, US English, will be live at 2am, PST.

· The rest of the localized language versions will be parceled out afterwards, hopefully within 24 hours. Please be patient.

· We will make another, non-marketplace version available relatively soon.

· It runs for seven minutes.

· Standard definition and high definition variants will be available.


The documentary will run for almost exactly seven minutes (coincidence? UNLIKELY!) and contains a first peek at the bad guy you will grow to love and hate in Halo 3. Well, mostly hate, but you will love fighting him.

You’ll see what amounts in a way to the first glimpse at Campaign content, but don’t get too excited. Everything you see here is a work in progress, and I’m afraid you won’t be seeing anything like finished graphics. This is just a chance to talk about the design philosophy and production behind what’s going to become a very important part of the next game. But don’t worry, I’ll answer lot more questions tomorrow.

http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?cid=9340

[luv_mist]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

They have Halo 3 documentary up on both IGN and 1up. On 1up, it's in real high definition for free while on IGN, not so much.

Ziff Davis--->> http://gamevideos.com/video/id/8081

IGN--->> http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/7...17/vids_1.html

[Miles_Yuhas]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

The new brutes are sick. Some of the animations they should are awesome. I love the one were he's holding the guy from behind and rips his arms of and teh guy falls limp.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Bungie Weekly Update

We have some really nice grass, moss, rock and dirt textures. If you detach the camera in Valhalla and go zoom in on the ground, it looks like a photograph. But if you detach the camera and simply pull back, the illusion is lost completely. Suddenly it looks like video game ground. The trick to softening those glossy, glassy, eminently polygonal surfaces, is to add decorators. Small objects placed strategically to give the appearance of reality. In the case of Valhalla, that means a lot of shrubs, ferns, gorse and grass.

In the screenshots you’ve seen so far, not one single stem of organic stuff is in there. It’s a plain more barren than any steppe or fen. Without those things, without depth of foliage and undergrowth, a level can look a little lifeless. Right now, the artists are at the stage of implementation. Most (if not all) of the creation and experimentation has been done. The tools to implement these things are complete and the artists can begin to “paint” their levels with this loamy, grassy stuff.

The first examples I’ve seen so far are Valhalla, and one of the Campaign levels. Ironically in the case of the latter, most of the growth was placed on buildings, rather than sod. Weeds spreading through an abandoned and ruined facility, and vines twisting and strangling their way in from an encroaching forest. And lots of moss.

Moss in particular is one of those things that add real character and familiarity to a building. Ours generally “grows” in the right place, too which, as Bryophytaphiles will know, is in very moist, shady areas and often on the north sides of tree trunks (in Northern latitudes at least).

But our grass is prettier than our moss. It animates, for one thing. Wind blows it, and it’s affected by other things. Like explosions. In Halo 2, if you shoot (our admittedly very sparse) decorators with a rocket, they just sit there, glibly ignoring the explosion. Our new decorators are actually destructible. And they cast shadows, and can be lit correctly, like everything else in the game. This isn’t stuff we’re inventing – lots of folks use similar techniques, but when you see how they’re implemented, it really starts to color and enrich the game. Poor old multiplayer has looked sterile and lifeless for too long – and this (among other things) are going to add vast levels of graphical loveliness.

And that’s before the nearly-ready-for-primetime water and atmospherics are implemented. It used to be that adding fog to a 3D game actually saved you processing power since it meant that less geometry was being drawn. The way that fog and atmospheric haze are added to Halo 3 actually cost processor cycles, since the geometry is still visible, but realistically obscured by varying levels of particulates.

We do have plain old fog in the game, but vastly more impressive are the levels of haze designed to simulate pollution, weather, smoke and other “normal” atmospheric occurrences. It’s subtle, but in a vast landscape, it adds a spectacular depth of realism to a scene. Seeing mountains in the distance gradually become more “blue” can make some vistas look photo realistic at times.

[ex carrabba fan]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Halo 3 video documentary coming tomorrow.

http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?cid=9340

Holy heck. The animation where the Brute ripped a Marine's arms out of his sockets was and same with a Marine getting crushed by a giant mallet. Hopefully they keep the animation where Brtues sprint and shoulder charge Marine's into walls and such, that was just not right. Wow. Glad to hear they are re-doing thier characters, since I'm more into the single player than multiplayer.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Inside Bungie
Does it take military discipline or gamer enthusiasm to make an Edge 10/10? We talk to Bungie’s finest about working inside Microsoft and playing beyond Halo...

http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2007/01/inside_bungie.php

Excellent read.

Bungie is about to undergo its biggest change yet, bigger even perhaps than the Microsoft ‘merger’ (as Greisemer insists on calling it): the move beyond being a single-project, single-IP studio.

Butcher has a much more specific, prosaic theory for what made Halo great – and, it turns out, what disappoints him so bitterly about Halo 2. “We had about four to five weeks to polish Halo at the end. No more than that. And that last five per cent is responsible for 30 per cent of the success of the game, or more. That’s the period in which we really had a perfect storm. The team was all there, everything was working great, the Xbox hardware was finally there and good, and we just were able to relentlessly execute on that. The entire game came together within that four- to six-week period.

“One of the things that stuns me when I think about it, and I can’t believe this is true – we had none of that for Halo 2. Take that polish period and completely get rid of it. We miscalculated, we screwed up, we came down to the wire and we just lost all of that. So Halo 2 is far less than it could and should be in many ways because of that. It kills me to think of it. Even the multiplayer experience for Halo 2 is a pale shadow of what it could and should have been if we had gotten the timing of our schedule right. It’s astounding to me. I ****ing cannot play Halo 2 multiplayer. I cannot do it. And that’s why I know Halo 3 is going to be so much better.”

Bungie staff won’t talk specifics about the game, but it’s not difficult to goad them into generalised gushing. Greisemer says “it feels more crafted” and hints at some radical new ideas, while O’Connor reckons the strength of Halo 3’s singleplayer will be in its sheer scale. “Even now, you can go into the most primitive, poorly-polished encounter in any of the levels that are actually populated, and it feels better than the way you remember how awesome Halo was. On that first level there’s a moment when you’re in combat in an epic encounter, and also you can see over a ridge to another epic combat waiting for you to arrive at it. You can do something more amazing over there that you can see being set up for your arrival.” Adds Greisemer: “In Halo, there was a lot of smoke and mirrors to make it feel better, but it was not epic combat, really. Now when you play Halo 3, it is.”

[ThaGenecyst]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

The latest Halo 3 update over at Bungie.net has revealed that, for the first time, the massively anticipated Xbox 360 shooter is now "playable from end to end."

Layers. Layers and layers of detail. That’s what’s going into Campaign now, and the speed at which it’s happening is astonishing. I now have a little bit of OCD about downloading the latest build. Sometimes I’ll check it out once a week, sometimes once a fortnight (Americans think that word is hilarious) but these days, I am checking it out maybe twice a day. Artists are checking in such amazing stuff, at such an amazing rate, that something you get at 6pm might be markedly different than something you picked up at 8am.

Joe and I were tooling around in a huge indoor environment and admiring the light shining softly through the dirty skylights above. I was getting up close to a chain link fence and enjoying the rusty steel texture visible on the quarter-centimeter wide chain link. We were playing on separate machines, I should add, and not in the same “session” so don’t read anything into that. Joe clambered up on top of a ventilation duct and was bobbing up and down as he raced over its regular sections. He was also demanding that Marty insert a hollow-metal banging sound for that action.

I noticed that there’s a lot of extruded detail – that is to say, 3D objects on what would normally be flat surfaces. Think at the simplest level, a real drainpipe against a wall, but more impressive were these brilliantly done, and wonderfully conceived things like taut steel cables, the aforementioned chain link fencing, realistic electrical and communications wiring and just the random garbage that covers the world – all lovingly recreated with a futuristic bent.

Hao and co. are still messing with water, and it’s getting better every day. They’re going to be dropping it into the areas where our (perfectly attractive) placeholder water is right now. You’ve actually seen one of those areas in the pre-alpha shots of Valhalla. I can’t wait, because I am Earth’s most famous video game water geek. On the day it’s dropped in, I am locking myself in the playtest lab with a pair of Wellington boots and an umbrella.

But they’ve been sneaking the atmospherics into builds daily and boy howdy does it make a difference. I can’t decide if the new blowing sand on one of the later levels is an atmospheric effect or not. Would be cool if our snow did something similar, huh…?

And lighting is still being introduced in new and exciting ways. There’s now dappled rays of sunshine beaming through the canopy, with tiny particles floating in ‘em. I would write a poem about it but you’d call me a pansy and push me down the stairs because you don’t understand how emo I am.

I also noticed that pretty much every level is not only in the build, and for want of a better word, populated, but that the levels actually flow together pretty well. It’s playable enough now, from end to end, that we’ve started testing properly for difficulty and length. Performance is all over the place of course, from build to build. There’s seldom any visible reason why the build is suddenly really framey, or conversely, buttery smooth. It’s best to ask a grown-up before picking which version to play – although we do make alternate builds for alternating reasons – one might be to test frame rate, one some specific lighting function, another shader effects. An engineer is often the best person to explain which build is going to be “fun.”

And fun it is. I am starting to limit how often I play because if you’re enjoying yourself, you’re probably not working. And we’re swamped.

Noguchi came over while I was playing Campaign and I said, “Hey, Gooch, when are you guys going to fix the bright green loading screen that happens every time the game loads the next part of the level? It’s hardly seamless you know.” He just stared at me. Then he snatched my debug keyboard and typed in three words. Something along the lines of “turn_off_crazy_green_indicator.”

Now my game loads in the next part of a level invisibly. Red faced, I asked how long that had been there. “Always, moran,” he says. That’s how he pronounces moron.

Lots to do this year. I’m spending the next two weeks with my head buried in combat dialog. We have a lot more characters this time around, with more Marines, Grunts, Brutes, Elites and more to write dialog for. The acting roster is being filled out now, and the people involved are going to be amazing folks to work with. True talents, old and new, famous and obscure. It’s going to be a riot.

We have more behaviors to accommodate for combat dialog now, and one thing I noticed is that the sheer number of characters on screen, talking simultaneously, affects the flavor of combat. Hearing three grunts panic while two charge you, yelling, makes combat feel way more intense. Grunts are still funny, but it’s not so funny when they’re winging plasma ‘nades at you like The Big Unit after a bad haircut. The number of times I have been taken by surprise by a gang of angry Grunts – I can’t even tell you. And don’t even get me started on Brutes and Jackals.

Marty also keeps teasing me with names of some of the actors who might or might not make it into the game. Some of them will be kept as a surprise even after they sign on the dotted line. And speaking of spoken surprises, I got to see the script for the Multiplayer voice announcements. It is awesome. It’s awesome because all your favorite announcements are returning – you know, Killtacular and so on, but we’re adding more, so you’ll be aurally rewarded or punished for various multiplayer antics. And there are easter eggs in the script right now. Should be interesting to see how folks discover them.

With any luck, we should be bringing back the incredible voice talent of Jeff Steitzer to threepeat his epic MP vocals. That recording session is coming up pretty soon, and the actor is going to have to say some pretty bizarre lines. And you guys are going to have to do some pretty bizarre shizzle to find them.

You might be surprised to learn that the difficulty levels are actually implemented. Nothing like ready, or finished, but they are there, and are more or less indicative of easy, normal, Heroic and Legendary. Tuning is going on simultaneously for all four difficulties, partly because that’s the smart way to do it and partly, I suspect, to avoid the nightmarish logjams that happened in a couple of places in Halo 2’s Legendary setting. It won’t be easier, per se in Halo 3, but you will have more options and fewer encounters where you just get jammed.

We also have more resources and time to devote to testing Legendary, and we’re also going to be implementing new ways of testing Legendary. I’m actually really excited to try it. By the time the game ships, I’ll have played through it dozens of times, but I will save the Legendary session for the finished retail product. And there’s going to be more to that than meets the eye.

Oh and just to prove a point, I loaded up the latest build. Full of new stuff. Including animated tree canopies I had never seen before. And a working, controllable version of a brand new vehicle.

[videobastard]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

^^ Good read

[Beantown]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Very good read.

This game can't come soon enough.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Good Update this week.

Bungie Weekly Update

What a week. Bungie has been hit by the lurgy, hard style. Flu, Bronchitis, Pneumonia and one case of Mono! Spectacularly however, all of the sick folks continued to work irregardless, with one brave trooper hauling home an entire Desktop rig to work on, and many others using laptops. Nothing can stop the sexy monkey juggernaut that is Bungie, not even viruses, bacteria or crazy stomach parasites. The people on TV continue to claim it’s just a normal flu season, but I am gonna go ahead and say what everyone is thinking. SPACE GERMS.

Actually, we asked Jen what she thought of the “new” state of Cortana in Halo 3 and she said, “There’s a lot more drama and a lot less technical jargon this time around. I actually just finished a couple of lines that nearly had me in tears. For an actor, more drama is always good.”

Jay Weinland agrees, “We had chills.”

And an old weapon looks significantly more powerful now, thanks to a couple of new animation and graphic effects. The trusty rocket launcher now features a fiery blowback from the exhaust port, and an accompanying Spartan animation that you’ll enjoy watching (or not) in Multiplayer games. It looks cool, as hot exhausts spews out in a cloud of flame, followed by wispy smoke.

A subtle touch, but an important one – much like the inclusion of moving vegetation I just spotted in an early Campaign level – walk through a low-lying leafy plant and have it react physically to your presence. Radness.

Anyone who’s played MP on Xbox Live knows the following is true: Teenagers, plus anonymity, plus microphone = idiot. Xbox Live already gives you powerful tools to mute, well, tools on a case by case basis. The “A-Hole Button” in Halo 3 lets you exact instant, silent vengeance. These kind of vocal buttmunches, as it turns out, are exactly as fun to play against as normal people, as long as you can’t hear them. So now, you simply press a button (back button, for the moment anyway) and up comes the score list with everyone’s tag on it. The right stick lets you highlight the miscreant and you can then instantly mute them for the rest of the game. These morons continue smacktalking anyway because they can’t help themselves, but if you don’t have to listen to it, you can simply enjoy killing them over and over again, knowing that as their Ritalin wears off and their frustration builds, it’s less and less fun for them. Aaaah. So satisfying.

[vinny]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

^^That last paragraph is like heaven on earth. I might actually play online now.

[Candyman5]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Good Update this week.

Bungie Weekly Update

I LOVE HALO

[Beantown]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Man, I can't wait for this game.

[Dispatch]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

For those of you that played Halo 2 online what was the highest level you ever got too?
During the summer I got up to a 38 in team slayer. But now I just play Team Hardcore and I'm around a 30.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3: Behind the Scenes

Bungie Weekly Update

Halo 3 Teaser Revealed!

Several folks on the Bungie team have been working with our MGS partners and external agencies to make this imagery and subsequent pieces look really awesome. Soon you will start to see this popping up all over the place. We’ve seen comps of this plastered on bus stops, billboards and even the sides of skyscrapers. We hope you like it because you’ll be seeing a fair amount of it in the weeks ahead. Eventually we’ll graduate to phase two which will feature new imagery that’s in development right now – and it’s shaping up to be really sweet.

Teaser

In that same location, there was a Covenant grav-sniper platform, which I instinctively chucked all my grenades at to clear it of Jackal snipers (it was below my clifftop perch at the time) – so imagine my surprise when it exploded, and broke into sparking debris, which rained down on the ground below at speeds dictated by the still functioning grav lift beneath it. The temptation is to blow the things up immediately now, but you never know when you’re going to need to use those platforms yourself. I found this out to my cost when another, better hidden jackal sniper took me out, and I had already assploded my best tactical platform. Doh.

I read a bunch of “X Button” drama on the interwebs this week. The “X button” will indeed be used to activate a new gameplay feature in Halo 3, but its location in the control scheme is yet to be finalized. Everything you’re about to read is subject to change, but we’re getting close to a final default layout.

Here’s what the control layout is on the latest internal builds, just for reference. I personally think it’s working pretty well, and wouldn’t change a thing, but we’ll see. Besides, you can pretty much remap the control layout to suit whatever you like, but here we go: