Forums | MacLife

So, has anyone seen this piece of trash, where you can't save *anything* when you're offline? I mean, when I am not connected to Live, the game saves absolutely nothing, not even control sensitivities. I could understand the online dependent stuff (films, co-op) wouldn't be there, but GEEZ, I do not always have internet access.

You get that screenie from Rodflinger Bat? Or did it delete it? I could try to scrounge it up. I might still have it, not sure.

Think it was the one where I was on the grav lift bouncing and you decided I didn't have enough ghost in my diet .

When XBL goes down over much of the country when you're trying to get on, on a pre-Xmas evening to do some pre-holiday co-op... that's wrong.

1-800-4MYXBOX said it was a widespread and known issue they were already working on... tonight I stayed in to play long-delayed co-op w/ Icks & Kirtana. After half an hour or so they got disconnected... so much for Xmas Eve. Maybe it's not fully solved yet. Anyway, here's another thing wrong: the movie wasn't/hasn't been made.

Guillermo Del Toro Talks About Halo Movie

Aint It Cool News has a new interview with movie director Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) where among other things he talks about missing out on directing the Peter Jackson produced adaptation of Bungie's Halo game. ..snip:

Del Toro: It would have been beautiful and I must tell that’s a… of anything in my life that I look back and wish it could have happened is that project, because it is such a powerful experience. People talk about it and say “it’s ALIENS or it’s a retread of this or that,” I don’t think so. I think there are angle to that game that are far more epic and far more complex as a cosmology than that. It’s not just about grunts in space. It’s much more than that. It’s a whole epic.

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsart … chid=18902

It's been down for two days straight for me. No Xbox/Windows Live love for Gears of War PC D:

Booksley wrote:

It's been down for two days straight for me. No Xbox/Windows Live love for Gears of War PC D:

I was considering GoW PC if I got a game for Xmas, esp. with all the issues UT3 has been having, and the DVD case ed. still $30 at GoGamer thru today. Needed some DX10/next-gen goodness for your new HD 3870?

NAG wrote:

NightCougar_37 wrote:

No its not about grunts in space but grunties in space being killed by a cyborg with a chick in his head!! I smell a Fox sitcom!!

Yay!!

If Fox did it then MC would take his helmet off in the first episode and they'd find a way to put even less clothing on Cortana.

...and cast Jim Belushi as MC . He'd be married to Corty and the shtick would be issues in AI/cyborg sex, but too tame & dumb to be interesting. "Oh honey, you know I [etc]."

Maybe it would be retitled "All About John."

Last edited by Bat (2007-12-25 5:51 pm)

NightCougar_37 wrote:

Things are like roaches, if the world was glassed, the only ones left to repopulate the planet would be Fox writers.

"A single Fox writer spore can destroy an entire species."[/Shipmaster]

Last edited by Bat (2007-12-26 4:24 am)

Booksley wrote:

It's been down for two days straight for me. No Xbox/Windows Live love for Gears of War PC D:

More Xbox Live Issues Reported

It looks like at least some owners of Xbox 360 consoles are experiencing issues with the Xbox Live online service such as not being able to access three blades on the Xbox 360 UI and lag on the dashboards. These new issues resurfaced after reports of previous problems other users had with the service last weekend (although again other console owners, including myself, have not had these problems come up). The Major Nelson web site has posted up word on its Live Status post that Microsoft is aware of the Xbox Live issues, saying, "The engineers are fully engaged and actively working on this. Again, we appreciate your patience."

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsart … chid=18932

Another thing wrong (#78)- H3 bringing in too many n00bz needing bringing up to speed.

For the newbz: Welcome to Bungie.net, the Internet arm and outreach of Bungie as well as the storage, dumping ground and sometimes-information hub for what Bungie is working on, what we’ve worked on and probably what you’re most interested in – your Halo 3 experience.

For a lengthy manual on getting the most out of Bungie.net check out our Guide (The New and Improved Bungie.net).

When Halo 3 launched last September we published a lengthy series of documents to help players use Saved Films, Screenshots, Forge, Networking, Campaign Scoring etc. (The Halo 3 How-to Guide).

Halo 3, as it is the concluding third of a trilogy, plops players into the middle of an adventure that began back in 2001 with Halo: Combat Evolved. For folks just starting Halo 3, there’s a ViDOC (video documentary) on the story of Halo up to the events of Halo 3 available for your perusal here at Bungie.net.

Journey’s End
Quicktime (small)
Quicktime (medium)
Quicktime (large)

Windows Media Player (petite)
Windows Media Player (deluxe)
Windows Media Player (gigantor)

With the mid-week return to the Northwest for work, many Bungie folks are still polishing off Holiday treats, leaking Egg Nog from their pores and enjoying some well-earned Rest and Relaxation. For all intents and purposes, beginning next week, everyone will be back in the office and churning away on a Wintery mix of Stuff and Things.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx … ;cid=13135

...and #79, the absurd H3 attach rate. OMGBBQ, can't they sell one without?

Halo 3 Still Selling Like Hotcakes
VVM noticed a post at MajorNelson.com that updates us all on some sales stats. You might remember that the worldwide numbers at the start of December were a bit below 6 million copies of Halo 3 sold - according to MN, worldwide numbers are now at 8.1 million copies, suggesting that 2.3 million copies were sold in December. (Sounds like a lot of people got Halo 3 for Christmas.) Additionally, a worldwide sales total of 17.7 million Xbox 360s was announced - meaning that across the globe, the attach rate of Halo 3 is an absurd 46%. (That's not quite the 52% figure for the US alone, but still ridiculously high - almost one in two Xbox 360 buyers have also picked up a copy of Halo 3.) (Louis Wu 13:47:25 UTC)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=21544

For everyone, again the WU:

Updatus Automatica

Work continues on AU1, which is a fancy way of saying Auto Update 1 or “patch.” There’s a bunch of stuff we’ve been looking at ranging in various levels of complexity and we’ve been taking boxes home and testing changes pretty regularly. These fixes range from complicated to simple (for example: The known issue with the Elite Commando Shoulders). We’ll obviously have more on AU1 as we continue testing and we’ll detail the changes when we can. As of this writing, files in your file share WILL NOT be affected by the Auto Update, that was a possibility we mentioned in the near-immediate in the wake of Halo 3’s release and currently Files and things in the File Share aren’t being affected negatively by the Auto Update. At least for the moment.

Additionally, the Auto Update, like others for other games, will be required to play the game on Live, however if one console has the Update and another one doesn’t, system link play will still be possible between the two boxes.

Somewhere around here is a post from me with Bungie's mention of thanks to Rare for the loan of the "..ray!" sound and grfx for the Grunt Birthday Party skull. It's been mentioned.

And another thing... :shakefist: ... they changed the next Map Pack's contents.

Can't we believe in anything anymore?

After they left, we participated in a test of something quite amazing and unlike anything we’ve ever done before. That test was a glorious success. I wish I could tell you about it, but that’s for the distant future…

In the very near future, we will bring you a release date for the autoupdate, complete with a list of all the (visible and publicly consumable) changes. In the interim – it’s going to be “soon-ish” and will contain roughly, in order of bigness:

Melee Fix
Physics fix for “flying” dead bodies
Fixes to make future Forge-related playlists better.
Lots and lots and lots of tiny, neat fixes that will make everything better.

We’ll give you a detailed list later, since some things may be more important to you than others.

Map Flap

Some changes are afoot in our plan for the next batch of DLC. Although the next group of three maps is nearing some semblance of completion (don’t get too excited by that fact, since there’s still oodles of polish and testing to be done before they’re ready for the mainstream. But there has been a significant change since we last mentioned ‘em.

One of the maps, actually one of Luke and I’s favorites, the oft-mentioned “Purple Reign” is being held back after class, so to speak and will not make it into the next DLC pack. Booo! That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s being replaced by something potentially much more exciting – a map we haven’t really spoken about because it was a ways behind.

But things change. That map’s progress accelerated as Purple’s slowed a little. As we looked at the schedule it became apparent that we could probably leapfrog one to the advantage of the other. Now, I can’t tell you much more about this replacement map, beyond the horrible codename I just made up, “Moonlight Sonata” but I can tell you that it will be universally adored. Of that there is no doubt. Usually I am in the business of soft-selling new maps in case folks have adverse reactions to ‘em “it’s too big!” or “it’s not symmetrical” or “where’s XXXinsert fave map hereXXX” but this time, confidence is high. It will be beloved.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx … ;cid=13207

...OK, I'm better now.

Moar stuff revealed. Will it NEVER END?!

“The More You Know: Plasma Pistol

Did you know… that when you charge up your Plasma Pistol (for that noob combo you’re workin’ on) you can actually let off the analog trigger very gently and slowly – and the Plasma charge is extinguished safely. This doesn’t have many practical applications, but it does mean that you don’t have to give away your position to everyone in the map with an unwanted Plasma burst. Adrian Perez implemented this feature during the Beta on the request of Swah and Jaime Griesemer. The most interesting thing of all is practicing it – it’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds. Give it a try next time you play.

Who knew? And about screens and why they look better than the game as played, some tech stuff...

The More You Know: Screenshots

Everyone knows our hi-res screenshots get a boost in size and quality when they are uploaded to the website. But if you’ve ever wondered how and what, then read on.

Bungie graphics engineer Chris Tchou talked me through some of that technique.

Halo 3 screenshots are just hi-resolution renderings, direct from the normal game engine.

The initially rendered resolution is 3840 x 2160, but as you’ll see, that’s not what you end up with.

The 360 doesn’t have the memory to render at this resolution (especially while the game is running), so we render the image in 16 tiles and then crop and stitch them together.  The final image is converted to the standard PC color space (from our ‘special’ 360 color space), downsampled to 1920 x 1080 (with a simple box filter), compressed to a jpeg on your xbox, and transmitted to bungie.net. That downsampling is where much of the “anti-aliasing” comes from.

The only tricks that are played during the rendering are to do with that jumbo magnification. The bloom filtering switches to a smooth bspline instead of bilinear – this gets rid of a subtle blocky appearance of the bloom on super bright lights which becomes more apparent in a high resolution shot.

Some textures are bumped to use 8x or 16x anisotropic sampling – this makes some ground and wall textures more detailed at farther distances, though it also has the side-effect of making tiling patterns more obvious. All of the post-processing is simply designed to make the big uploaded images function, and not be janky messes of obvious tiling.

Almost all of our LOD (Level of Detail) is based on the size of the pixels in an object.  So when you are rendering at higher resolution, everything renders with more pixels, and will therefore use a higher LOD.

All of this will be old news to PC owners, who’ve been seeing roughly the same thing for about 12 years."

Damn cheatin' consoles! Tryin' ta fool folks inta thinkin' how greats they are...

Now I gotta go play me some and throw some glory onto BNet.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx … ;cid=13351