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Well Cold Storage is little more than a walk in freezer with guns. Kinda small. Shame they didn't bring back another classic that was better. Oh well, least its free. Guess they just worked on it on their weekends or something. Wonder if we'll see anymore freebies like this in the future.

NightCougar_37 wrote:

Well Cold Storage is little more than a walk in freezer with guns. Kinda small.

Stuntmutt surfaced to comment, just for you.

The bad news, significant aliasing still present (and visible at 720p). The good news...

Halo Cutscene Library in HD - All In
Well, demand looks controllable, so we talked it over - and decided what the heck, we'd just turn on ALL the Halo 1 cutscene HD downloads. Swing by the Halo Cutscene Library and grab the ones you love! (And with that, the entire trilogy's cutscenes are available in HD.) Thanks once again to HaLo2FrEeEk, of Clan Infectionist, for the rendering of these scenes! (If you run across a download that's mismarked, please send mail; there's been some confusion about the ordering, and I'm not 100% sure I've gotten it completely right.) And... that's it, for the day. Gonna be spending the next 8-10 hours in a car. Whee! (Louis Wu 11:38:38 UTC) (permalink)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=23445

(Maybe someday I'll get vidcap stuff of my own, and then...)

NightCougar_37 wrote:

Well i'd expect some aliasing if it was being rendered in a game engine. Never did totally get aliasing to work properly on some rigs.

You mean antialiasing, and the H2/H3 vids do benefit. H2 is especially sharp, being capped from H2V. All are captured as played, 'in-engine.'

Halo PC doesn't have an inbuilt setting for FSAA, nor would it work when first released, because it uses MRTs (Multiple Render Targets, multiple render-to-texture effects in OpenGL terms). It was the first major DX9 title, the next after Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness, which ran slowly in DX9 mode despite showing almost no graphical improvement therein. Hardware of the day didn't support both. By the time Fall '05 and the Radeon 1800 came along, which did support FSAA with MRTs, the game had passed back to MS for support and no further patches/improvements were forthcoming.

It should be possible now to force it at the driver level. I look forward to trying.

Bank shot into the corner pocke- um, skull
Hawty McBloggy found a video where someone picked up an astoundingly lucky snipe - three bounces, and then the head of an unsuspecting (and totally unseen) target. Should sniper bullets bounce this much? Tell Hawty what you think! (Louis Wu 19:35:23 UTC) (permalink)

Shucks, I did that alla time!

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=23492

This one?

It only counts if you call it.
Red vs Blue: Reconstruction Chapter 8 has been posted over at Rooster Teeth - this series just keeps getting better. These guys are taking machinima to a whole new level - I'm not sure how long I can say that about each new episode, but I really am impressed. Go watch. (I'll echo BlueNinja's "wow".) (Louis Wu 10:19:42 UTC) (permalink)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=23474

...near

What are YOU playing these days?
Major Nelson posted his standard LIVE activity list last night, for the week of July 14... and Halo 3 tops the list for the first time since the week of January 21. Folks have been discussing this (on our forum, among other places), and nobody has a really good explanation as to why (well, why NOW). Time will tell if it's just a blip, or if Halo 3's staying power is greater than CoD4's (or something else entirely)! (Louis Wu 12:31:56 UTC) (permalink)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=23483  and

Lots of explodey things. (Louis Wu 15:24:34 UTC) (permalink)

If there's anything I like more than ricochets, it's explodey things.

NightCougar_37 wrote:

They got Church finally hitting someone with a sniper rifle but thru a long series of bounces.

Off the rock, thru the bush, nothing but Jackal?

Last edited by Bat (2008-07-24 1:52 am)

Which Firefly guy (it's not Fillion) does the "Oh no- round explodey things!" & "This gun is so much better than the one that I traded with you, that you now have." lines?

Altho it's Marine Aussie with, "They were all 'We're gonna take over Earth' but we were all 'eat these grenades!' Bastards," I'm pretty sure it was you with the knock-off

NC37 wrote:

Did you see me in that fight? Oh my god it was like pow, pow, and he's like no, no, and I'm like yuh huh! Pow pow! Pew pew pew whoa-ho-how! I'm good.

That was like beating up children. I mean, not that I've ever beat up children...

...as well as

So, uh, yeah - I have awkward personal space issues.

That was touch and go. He touched me... and then I went. I gotta change.

, and I gotta humbly own up to

This is not where the American idles! 

There's no such thing as too many grenades.

...bringing us back to square one. I wuv circularity.

Fillion's voice is pretty distinctive, and he's also a Sgt., so I have little trouble with his. The other two are closer, and I don't have enough experience from elsewhere to tell them apart as easily, let 'lone know whose is which... er, whose... which... that you now have.

One seems to've done more good lines, the other got many of the 'pander to the 16-year olds' ones, like "We totally owned those fools." Those are nearly the only Halo lines that make me cringe, tho some get tiresome. Wonder how many were improvised.

I wish the database were more complete for 3. If I had the time I could easily double it.

343 Guilty Spark wrote:

Perhaps you should play on 'Easy.'

ed sp

Last edited by Bat (2008-07-25 12:28 pm)

Tons of Sparks - no Guilt
Pretty interesting article over at Gamasutra - Bungie's Steve Scott gave a talk at Microsoft's GameFest 2008 on the importance of effects artists for today's videogames. Lots of cool Halo 3 details. Give it a read! (Louis Wu 15:25:37 UTC) (permalink)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=23501

Fire Particles

The artist gave some specific examples of implementation lessons learned. "We found if you just ramp down the alpha at the end of a [fire] particle's lifespan, it just looks bland; it doesn't have the volume or the life we wanted," he said. "We solved this by writing a shader which we black-point faded. It crushes in the blacks and makes more interesting shapes. It's richer. We ended up using this pretty much everywhere in Halo 3: water, dirt, explosions. But bitmaps had to be authored with this purpose in mind."

Muzzle Flashes

Scott summed up the difficulties of balancing budgetary and time concerns by pointing to how the team approached needing muzzle flashes for 30 different weapons.

"The easy thing to do would have been to take a common bitmap and globally tint it. There's a possibility you could get away with that in the last generation but we would not have got the quality we wanted," he said. "The other option we had was to author dozens of unique muzzle flashes, but that would have completely consumed our effects budget."
...

Major Engine Challenges

Though Halo 3 came in under its texture budget (to the delight of the engineers), it had a 256 simultaneous effect limit, and that limit was frequently strained (less to the delight of the engineers).

At one point, a demonstration was being given to a gaming magazine, and as a result of hitting that limit, a Scarab simply didn't draw its effects, making the scene look terrible and causing Scott to realize it was time to tackle the budget issue seriously.

Performance takes a big hit once multiple layers of transparency start overlaying on screen, Scott explained. Part of addressing that problem is simply managing content.

Good stuff. Days old; the direct is  http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i … tory=19546

Last edited by Bat (2008-07-28 11:48 pm)

This one's important.

Harold Ryan discusses creativity and success
Very interesting read over at The Cut Scene - it's a pre-E3 interview with Bungie's Harold Ryan, discussing how Halo has fit into the functioning of the studio for the past few years. There are tons of little tidbits that should be fascinating to anyone who wonders how Bungie does what it does, or why it left Microsoft, or when it started planning that move. Thanks, mendicantbias00. (Louis Wu 19:10:38 UTC) (permalink)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=23560

Scams.

There’s been an excessive amount of hair, soap and grime clogging Sketch and I’s inboxes of late (he created this thread to remind folks); the result of a couple of different “Internet scams,” where folks imbue words with falsities and then faithful believers blight our Inboxes with messages at the behest of the deceiver.  The recent “Watch this video on Youtube, send a Bungie staffer a PM and get Recon,” craze has been like watching Lemmings throw themselves off of a cliff and fantastically crash into the craggy shores of the Cannot Have Recon list.

These are some hard and fast safe bets you can make while you’re out there Internet-ing it up, or running amok on Xbox Live.

A Bungie Employee will NEVER ask for your LiveID or password
A Bungie Employee will NEVER send you a URL to a web site
A Bungie Employee will NEVER offer Recon in return for something via an XBL message
Beating a Bungie Employee at Halo 3 or challenging them to play you will not get you Recon.
Unless it’s announced on Bungie.net, completing a Forged obstacle will not get you Recon.
Sending harassing messages to users who have Recon will not get you Recon.
If they aren’t someone you don’t know personally, it’s probably not worth having them on your Friends List
If someone sends you something that seems too good to be true (go to this URL for free Xbox points), it is too good to be true. Don’t go.

And yet, there is goodness...

We’ve just updated the Bungie Publications with some presentations that you folks will probably be interested in. They are a sultry mix of very recent, semi-recent and classic presentations.

Halo AI Retrospective: 8 Years of Work on 30 Seconds of Fun
By: Damian Isla, AI Engineering Lead
Presented at: Develop ’08
Download here

Isla examines the iterative changes made in the Halo trilogy’s AI. From Halo: Combat Evolved’s Elites, to the ferocious Brutes of Halo 3 and a look what must improve in our AI looking forward.

Decision Making and Knowledge Representation in Halo 3
By: Max Dyckhoff, AI Engineer
Presented at: MALAGA Workshop, NIPS ‘07
Download here

Dyckhoff exposes the major representations used in Halo 3’s AI systems, and the algorithms behind the complex decision making which drives the industry leading AI.

Evolving Halo’s Behavior Tree AI
By: Max Dyckhoff, AI Engineer
Presented at: GDC ‘07
Download here

An analysis of the improvements to the behavior tree AI system from Halo 2 to Halo 3. Presented as part of a three-part session at GDC ’07 in collaboration with developers on EA’s Spore.

The Technology of Halo 2
By: Chris Butcher, Engineering Lead
Presented at: Gametech 2004
Download here

At its heart, the Halo engine is a world simulation engine. Engineering Lead Chris Butcher describes the evolution of the “Halo” engine from its traceable origins in Pathways into Darkness and to its 'present' state in Halo 2.

For those with an inexplicable interest in the 'old stuff' {uki }.

The Illusion of Intelligence: The Integration of AI and Level Design in Halo
By: Chris Butcher, Engineering Lead and Jaime Griesemer, Design Lead
Presented at: GDC ’02
Download here

An investigation of the intersection between design and code as it relates to combat behavior in Halo: Combat Evolved.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx … ;cid=15069

You don't want a flaming helmet to mark you as a target?

ScifiterX wrote:

Bat wrote:

You don't want a flaming helmet to mark you as a target?

Only if it incinerates the round before it reaches me.

[s]Don't bother[/s] Make sure you spend lots of time looking for that cheat code ...meanwhile, this just smacks of desperation. Must be dying or sumfin'...

Play Halo on the big screen
If you live in Vancouver, BC, you've got a chance to play Halo on the big screen, whenever you want. Apparently, Cineplex Entertainment is going to be offering two-hour blocks of time in their theaters, outside of normal movie viewing showtimes, when a full surround-sound theater can be rented for $179. Get 16 friends together, that's less than $11/person, for two hours of giganto-screen Halo 3 goodness. (Louis Wu 13:29:34 UTC)

OK, maybe not. How long 'til Books makes the pilgrimage, and inwites some of us?