Not that it would surprise anyone, but an ex-Bungie employee recently posted in their online resume (not saying who or linking, sorry) that they worked on Bungie's as-yet unnanounced Next Project, and that it used a "modified version" of the Halo engine.
Given that even Halo itself could be said, broadly, to have been prototyped in a "modified Myth engine" and that every Halo game used a modified version of the engine of the game before it, there's nothing Earth-shattering about this, but... for what it's worth, it would appear that Bungie's next game at least has some connection to the work the company has done on Halo in the past decade, and isn't a complete technological departure.
- You can't post comments
Comments
Claude Errera
Re: Bungie's Next Title To Use Modified Halo Engine?
Dang, meant to get back to this a couple of days ago.
This doesn't seem to jibe with the information here:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/35837/Bungie-building-new-engine-for-...
I guess a 'modified version' could be the same thing as a 'built from the ground up new' engine... but I personally wouldn't have described it that way. :)
(Interestingly enough, that link [url=http://forums.bungie.org/halo/archive34.pl?read=1011639]orginally came from you[/url].)
narcogen
Re: Bungie's Next Title To Use Modified Halo Engine?
In reply to: Re: Bungie's Next Title To Use Modified Halo Engine?Hey, I can't make things make sense, I just find what I find.
Honestly I think that within a given studio, there's probably rarely such a thing as a completely "built from the ground up" engine in the sense of no code or tool re-use. It's probably too expensive in terms of time and resources.
Sure, there might not be a single line of code in common between, say, Halo: Reach and Marathon 1. But Marathon 2 had a lot of Marathon 1 code in it, and Myth probably had some Marathon code in it, and Halo probably had some Myth code in it, and there may even be some code that survived from Halo 1 through the series.
Based on that, is Halo Reach a "brand new engine" that was "built from the ground up"? In comparison to which previous engine? Where can a line be drawn?
Bungie spent a lot of time putting in features that are only tangentially related to gameplay: online interactions and statistics, game films, filesharing, custom game attributes, etc etc. Would it make sense to abandon all of those features? Would it make sense to code them again if it's not required? If the new game is an entirely different genre, with a new rendering engine, but it has those ancillary features, is it really "new from the ground up"?
It is worth noting that the "ground up" phrase in the develop online article isn't a quote or paraphrase. Sure, there's a "new" engine. Does it contain some code from Halo: Reach? I'd guess, probably some.
Rampant for over se7en years.
Claude Errera (not verified)
Re: Bungie's Next Title To Use Modified Halo Engine?
In reply to: Re: Bungie's Next Title To Use Modified Halo Engine?I found the site that gave you the quote for this newspost - and I think the key part of the claim was left out of your newspost: he designed and built gameplay prototypes in a modified version of the Halo engine. The very early prototypes for Halo were built in the Myth engine - but the end result bears very little resemblance to Myth.
narcogen
Re: Bungie's Next Title To Use Modified Halo Engine?
In reply to: Re: Bungie's Next Title To Use Modified Halo Engine?[quote=Claude Errera]I found the site that gave you the quote for this newspost - and I think the key part of the claim was left out of your newspost: he designed and built gameplay prototypes in a modified version of the Halo engine. The very early prototypes for Halo were built in the Myth engine - but the end result bears very little resemblance to Myth.[/quote]
Assuming we're looking at the same thing, which I think is pretty safe...
Then yes, it could be that the Halo engine was used to make prototypes of a game that will use a completely different engine, but again... I'm not even sure what "completely different" means in this case.
If I take a thousand line program and change five lines at a time until all 1000 lines are different, and the program does something that's only generally similar-- like, play a video game-- is that a "modified" version of the original? Or is it something completely new? If so, when do you start calling it "completely new"-- when it has more than half new code? When the last five lines of old code are removed? That's a pretty small change to go from "modified version" to "completely new".
Sure, Halo is not much like Myth, but in terms of the job the code has to do, there are similarities. The Halo engine was made to be the next-generation engine for a game that should have ended up being like Myth. It just ended up being Halo instead.
Epic's unreal engine, for instance, powers lots of different kinds of games, some of which don't remotely look like Unreal or Gears of War. They still use the Unreal engine, though-- with modifications and additions.
Rampant for over se7en years.