March 19 2004
We have a couple of important guests coming in today, so the update is tight and taut, not to mention shorter than usual.
Environment!
The environment artists comprise my favorite area at Bungie. Why? Because they speak in a language I can completely understand. "Look Frank, a building is kind of like a square with holes in it so people can walk in and out." Sure, they're patronizing me, and even making fun of my accent, but they still do cool stuff. Why just this morning I was admiring a building on an Earth level when I noticed that there was ivy hanging from it. It wasn't hanging there last week, and here it was, green and leafy. One of the artists pointed out something neat too the ivy only hangs on one side of the street, the shady side. That's because ivy won't grow in ferocious, constant sunlight, which is just one of those details that makes a place feel more real. Actually the shadows on one side of the street make for a compelling gameplay experience too, since your foes dart in and out of the shade, making themselves more difficult targets. Jerks!
And that's just one example. The ivy in this case is just one of the things that are placed carefully in the world to make it more "organic," like shrubs and grass and plants and stuff. The ivy is actually a BSP (Binary Separation Plane) with an alpha channel to make the gaps between the leaves transparent, but not all decorators will use this technique, some will be 2D sprites, some shader effects and others simply textures. Basically whatever looks best in any given circumstance, or causes the least impact on processor overhead.
The levels shown featured very nice lightmaps, but look even more impressive with the addition of dynamic lights, everything that's turned on improves the big picture.
Animation!
The Animators have been going through lots of different animations, tweaking, tuning and adjusting some for purely aesthetic reasons and some tied directly to gameplay. The short struggle that happens during vehicle boarding is just such an example. It has to be clear what's going on, and the animation has to be tied in directly with the pace of the game. All Bungie animations are hand-animated, and that's a time-consuming process. Motion capture has its advantages and disadvantages, but hand-animated stuff gives Bungie animators much more control over the process, and motion capture doesn't help when your character is a three foot alien with back problems.