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Here is a direct link from Microsoft. WMV format (you do have FlipForMac don't you). Recommend you let it DL then save out as QuickTime movie; then play it from HD via player. Turn the sound up! WOW!

Last edited by DoctorB (2006-05-09 3:58 pm)

And read about what you are seeing here. (Bungie) Also QuickTime versions available on the Bungie site.

Last edited by DoctorB (2006-05-09 4:11 pm)

That was cool! I'm looking forward to taking on 500 brutes all at once...

Bat wrote:

(letterbox, 2.35:1).

it was poorly letter boxed

Bat wrote:

...'Cepting Windoze drivers accelerate WMV better than QT normally on PC if that's where you're viewing...oh, yeah. Get the A/V settings right, and when the 'shees and Cap ship[s] come in...

I think Halo really did just meet the essence of Marathon. This IS where the world ends.

It played for crap using the FlipForMac stuff in Safari but after saving it out to a mov it was great.

It is unbelievable on a 60" HDTV with 5.1 surround. (dl from XBL)

Orion wrote:

So it seems that Cortana is going Rampant?  She is babbling like Durandal did in the Marathon series.  Or am I just out of my mind? 

that would be awesome.  his speeches were the best

Zander wrote:

Bat wrote:

(letterbox, 2.35:1).

it was poorly letter boxed

The initial non-XBL release was cropped to 1280x544. Later that night Bungie put up full 1280x720 files- 98MB .wmv, 150MB .mov. The .wmv has more sound options on XP WMP10- heaphone stuff, enabling the LFE apparently even in the stereo mixdown etc. The visual quality is comparable.

goandeatsomestuff wrote:

horrible trailer, imo.  a huge download to see an even shinier MC walk across a small distance and a handful of ships fly towards the horizon with faux-philosophical interruptions from some kind of all-seeing cortana?  And if they were trying to impress us with visual appeal, they should have at least thrown in a respectable amount of capital ships instead of a futuristic polish navy. 

This leaves me feeling like I did when H2 ended: like I've been had.  At least the trailer was free.

We're so far apart on this I haven't time to begin to address it, except to wonder if you were in a really bad mood mood when watching, and what you wanted or expected from an Announce trailer, which will of necessity be vague; but it fits the expanded story and plotlines to a T. And if that's the Polish navy, we might as well surrender to Poland now... as to visual appeal, this new engine impressed me tremendously. MC has more detail and better lighting rather than 'more shiny' (armor pitting etc) via Precomputed Radiance Transfer, it all looks a great deal more 'real' than any Halo engine prior in a trailer from a game and game engine 6-12 months from shipping, and Frankie says in what 'Louis Wu' (Claude Errera, Mr. HBO) termed perhaps the most fact-filled Weekly Update ever)

What is your personal favorite feature (graphics or otherwise) in Halo 3 so far?

And for Mister Chief this week: can we see mister chief with HDR lighting?


Personally I am fond of the draw distance and the detail PRT lighting on the Chief. But then I'm party to some graphical features that you haven't seen yet, that sort of blow that stuff away.

Jeezus. This almost tempts me to get a 360 now, so as to be sure to have one when H3 ships and play high-res H2 until H2 Vista ships. If the 360 worked with my m/kb adapter it'd be that much closer.

This was closer to good CGI than anything I recall, excepting MC himself, and there's plenty of time to tweak that. (and be sure to look for the Easter Egg. )

http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.asp … atemay1206

I know you to be a thoughtful guy, GE, so I'm puzzled. Maybe you can email me at your leisure and I can respond when I've time.

=========
EDIT: GE, re: Polish Navy... you didn't expect the entire Covy Fleet there, no?

Just Another Fan asks,

In the trailer I'm only seeing capital ships, what happened to the old covenant cruisers, will they make an appearance in the final product?

What you're seeing is an excavation force. Its makeup is purely practical.
=========

ibid.

(Seems to have been silently updated, or I didn't register it all last week).
===
(Which is still short, btw. Hope to have the new rig up by the weekend, but April's work spilled into May and May is chock full of needful work- thanks again for the help, Levi . Speaking of, if it's ready maybe this Sunday might be a good day to come out..? And there's more work I could use help with, not far off. Car maintenance maybe today?)

goandeatsomestuff wrote:

Orion wrote:

So it seems that Cortana is going Rampant?  She is babbling like Durandal did in the Marathon series.  Or am I just out of my mind? 

that would be awesome.

Some have thought so, but if so it's different. Without spoiling too much for those who haven't played H2, remember Corty's circumstances at the end of 2... and yes, there are strong Marathon parallels I can't go into. But remember Corty's not with MC but half a galaxy away, these are somehow transmissions, they are meant to reflect her 'state of mind,' and the first line sounds eerily like "I have defied gods..." go look up some Marathon history and start pondering the Flood & certain pronouncements in H2.

While I'm editing...

SlimJim0045 asks,

Please have Cortana's lines pronounced so that I don't see 36 threads about it.


"I have defied gods and demons."


"I am your shield, I am your SWORD."


"I know you, your past, your future."


"This is the way the world ends."


But there's obviously something terribly wrong…

Oh, and Icks- XBL puck pleeeeeeez?

Last edited by Bat (2006-05-17 10:06 am)

The thing that impressed me the most was the story told in just the brief time of the teaser. The single opening note. The fade black to white to picture of a ravaged landscape. The ghostly appearance of the lone figure in the distance. The spooky voice/image over of Cortana. The reveal of something amazing beneath the Earth of Africa. The final white to black fade. The note again.

Drama! Chills down the spine!

Just on a side note, In the Big Quitime Movie... about 56 seonds in when the smoke is moving and MC is emerging... you can see a face in the smoke, very ditinct... Upon closer examination, I count 3 faces total, but I may just have an over active imagination...  the one face though for sure... step though it frame by frame at 56 seconds... the mouth is almost centered over MCs right knee (that would be our left since he is facing us).

Just somethign i noticed kinda spooky and errie...

-9mm (ouT)

I saw some things that could be faces, but it's a little too ambiguous and smoke also has a tendency to do that sort of thing.

Not only is there a 6th screen now up at in the Weekly Update, but there're a couple of other things...

1) Scale. We're told the crater is three miles wide, but Covy Assault Carriers are over 3.3 miles long themselves. It could be they used that ship model to minimize slowdown and resources devoted to getting it out, and we're told it is an excavation force... if the artifact were to scale with ACs, the horizon would be beyond the engine's 13-14 mile draw distance. Something to ponder.

2) Anyone DL the Press Kit? It has some interesting stuff- not only the 5 original 1280x720 'low-res' .jpegs, but ginornous, 6400x3600 TIFFs in the 10-16.2 MB range and other cool stuff (102MB total). Detail in those is incredible; crank up the res. Go to an Apple store and view 'em on a 30" CD!

Leonard Nimoy wrote:

Saw that too. Not sure if that was on purpose or not though..

Anyone see the grunt?

Not at first, but it's a nice Easter Egg. New Mombasa's Public Works Dept. was very efficient even during the Covy Invasion. And Capt. Spark came back a few months ago; he and Hellhawk have been enlarging the H2 dialog batabase considerably since then.

Anyway, stories with teh links:

Screenshots for the BIG screen.
So... if you like the screenshots over at Bungie.net, but feel like they're not hi-res enough (they're only 1280x720, after all), or you're unhappy with the Bungie watermark... swing by the Xbox.com Press site, and grab the official press screenshots (70 mb, zipped). What do you get for those 70 megs? You get the 5 images in uncompressed TIFF format - 10-16 mb each - at the absurd resolution of 6400x3600. Wonga.(Louis Wu 13:28:35)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=15682

Lots of Trailer Versions Online
There are a whole bunch of sites offering mirroring or re-encoding of the Halo 3 trailer; I really don't see a need to list them all, because the official sites (Bungie.net and Xbox.com) are doing an admirable job of keeping up with demand. (Bungie.net has actually re-released the WMP9 versions, because the original ones had some odd aspect stuff going on.) The one link that's probably worth passing on, though - at least if you're on a Windows box with a pretty fast processor - is the official press release of the 720p WMP version - 5.1 audio and all. It weighs in at 132 mb, and is USELESS for Mac users (it's encoded with Windows-only codecs), but it's as high-res as you're gonna get on the web. Thanks, MC Smoke. (And I'll mention the Halo: Portable versions, too, because there aren't a lot of places out there to grab versions for your PocketPC/iPod/PSP.)(Louis Wu 13:12:19)

http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=15680

Last edited by Bat (2006-05-21 2:55 am)

Nothing impressive... say what? What do you find not impressive? Overall this is about the most naturalistic game engine I've seen, it also has wow factor out the wazoo where called for, and the only problem I saw was that MC didn't quite blend with the rest somehow (not sure quite how yet- highlighting, animation in the latter half..?), but even that's subtle, it's a long ways from release, and the environment seems almost tangibly real. The closeups have nice depth of field. Shadows are precise and realtime; the issue I see is with MC from a distance.

So how do the graphics look bad up close?