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February 6, 2004. Originally at Battleground: Halo.

Frankie's picture

Fri, 02/06/2004 - 22:12 by Frankie

It has been a busy week. We're going bananas building and designing the new website (more on that in the coming weeks) and generally having a ball seeing the game come together. Animation, sound, environment and gameplay are all frantically combining into a delicious soup. The Cananimators have also been working on very subtle transitions between walking, running and sprinting, so that the movements look fluid and natural. More impressive, bizarrely, is the animation for stopping and turning. The trick is going to be finding a balance between its usefulness and playability which is true of almost any game feature. Joe Staten and CJ Cowan have been very busy bees. Yes, the same kind of bees that Homer's nightmare dog spits out. They've been working diligently on game-engine cutscenes and transitions between levels. Using the game engine helps keep the player anchored more firmly in the game world. There have been some tweaks and modifications however, so the cutscenes will look sharper, thanks in large part to the use of the new graphic engine's features. Specular highlighting, mad bump-mapping etc. The cutscene I watched had been put together fairly recently, and was for timing and positioning of cameras, but looked pretty finished. The only way to know it wasn't done was the fact that none of the characters had walking animations, they just kind of glided around. None of the actor voices (unless you count Joes Staten yelling, "I'm fighting!" in a high-pitched voice) are attached to the cutscenes at this point more on that next week, hopefully. The cutscene in question is actually a tremendously important one. Email me months from now and ask me which of the many shockers it was and I'll tell you. "He got the POOPS working!" You'll be relieved to know that "POOPS" is not an acronym, rather just a term Chucky, one of the programmers, uses for "instance geometry." Instance geometry is a term that covers what Chucky describes as "low level" stuff. You might describe it as bits of the Halo world. Instance geometry "objects" aren't strictly objects at all, at least as far as we define them. They're things like columns, planters, basic world objects. As far as getting the POOPS working, Chucky simply got them all to behave the way they should in terms of AI reaction, shot ricochets, player collisions all that kind of stuff. The beauty of instance geometries is that while they're textured, lightmapped, bump-mapped the whole nine yards they seldom involve much work for the level and environment guys. Often they can simply be placed in the right spot and left to do their business. Normal objects have to be sealed and carefully implemented into geometry instance geometry is a whole lot easier to deal with. Normally these things are pretty ho-hum, but anyone who's been in a campaign firefight, or a game of rockets on Hang 'Em High knows that POOPS are pure gameplay. They're places to run, hide, dodge and take cover, and they often breathe life into a level.
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halo 2
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January 30, 2004. Originally at HBO.

Frankie's picture

Fri, 01/30/2004 - 22:15 by Frankie

Well, as you'll see all over the INTERNET this morning, this has been a very big, very busy week for Bungie, and the building excitement in the office is almost tangible. There's so much momentum at every level in the building - in the graphics department, in the sound studio, everywhere you look, people are working on solid, playable, great-looking bits of Halo 2. So here's a quick glimpse at what folks were up to this week.
  • Brian, me, Lorraine , and a bunch of other lucky staffers have been impossibly busy this week, basically taking a kickass SCREENSHOT of Halo 2.
It's really important to point out that this screen is straight from the current game engine. The resolution is a little sharper thanks to the way screens are dumped from the frame buffer, but this is entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects. There's no trickery or BS here. And of course, this is early stuff, so things will change and improve between now and launch. We basically played the game and took a ton of shots until we finally picked the one that rocked the hardest, and best represented what playing that level was like. Of course this is a multiplayer level, and no doubt you'll be scanning the shot for details, clues and hints about what to expect from the game. We did deliberately try not to give too much away, but sharp-eyed Halo fans will see plenty. Working with the multiplayer build opened us up to a lot of the cool technology that it's built around, and just about every step revealed some amazing new facet of the game - everything from the animation on the Warthog wheels to the bump-mapping on Master Chief's gloves. We barely even begin to comprehend the labyrinthine depths of this software and its associated tools. And special thanks to Chris, Ben, Mat and the guys for helping show us what's possible and how best to use it.
  • Over at the environment department, where tree-love is all the rage, Paul "Evil Paul" Russel and crew are working hard polishing up two specific levels. One is a "Really incredible, massive space" and Paul is busy fixing and polishing elements that have already been tested for gameplay. That means, for example that a big cube that once said "rock" is now a sand-textured monolithic boulder that's being properly tweaked and textured and lit so that it looks perfect.
In testing, artists and designers will often place approximations of the required geometry in an environment, so instead of a broken-down car, you'll see a box at the same position and angle, with the legend, "Broken down car" written on the side. These pre-textured levels are actually pretty surreal. Because of the timing for the pieces they're working on, the environment guys have been pulling pretty long hours, often here until midnight, where they amuse each other by arguing the pros and cons of Marmite versus Vegemite, without the decency to include Bovril on the list. It should be noted that Chris Butcher has suggested that Vegemite is more manly and coarse than the effete syrupy consistency of Marmite.
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halo 2
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