Umbra Software, makers of Umbra 3, have put up a blog post about how their middleware is being used for world creation and rendering in Bungie's Destiny. They'll be doing a presentation on it at GDC this year as well.
In response to some problems people were having with the in-browser podcast player, I've made some changes to the individual podcast entries as well as to the podcast page.
From Marius.net comes the rather unexpected news that a new, native port of Myth II v1.7.2 is coming to Linux, produced by ProjectMagma. It scores over the older port produced by Loki Software in that it is intended to be network compatible with the existing Windows and OS X versions currently available.
For those interested in helping beta test it, check out this forum thread.
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.
A small database glitch caused us to restore from a backup made a few days ago-- if you've submitted something to the site, or registered an account in the past few days, you may want to check and either re-submit or re-register.
Now, I'm not saying the whole Keep It Clean debacle doesn't deserve a couple thousand more words (which it surely will get) but I felt I couldn't let E3 week go by without comment on one of the announcements that Microsoft did feel was important enough to show-- namely, the impending renovation of the Xbox 360's dashboard interface in the fall of this year. Besides, I took a straw poll in HBO's irc server and this is the topic that won.
Then words begin to fail me and I long instead to wax poetic about publishing deals and PR tactics.
What to say, what to say...
I wrote a review of the Aeon Flux theatrical film a few years back on my own personal blog, and as a fan of Peter Chung's original cartoons, I was extremely disappointed. I wrote at the time that:
It is as if Paramount took a group of writers, locked them in a dark room with copies of the animated series, but gave them enough time to view only a small portion of them all, and then required them to write their notes about the series in crayon on the back of index cards. These index cards, out of order, were then handed to a completely different group of people, who then went on to make this film.
I can't help feeling that Microsoft has taken a team of interface designers, a Wii, and an Apple TV and done the same thing here. From the cartoony avatars you can see they're aware of the Wii. From the clean, white, sliding 3D interface you can tell they've seen an Apple TV, or at least Apple's Front Row program. Somehow, however, they either didn't quite grasp how or why those things worked and what was good about them, and managed to come up with something that bears only a passing resemblance to those two products, and are in the process of abandoning an interface that-- in classic Microsoft fashion-- after seven years has finally reached a "good enough" level of functionality.
If I'm lucky enough to have anyone at Microsoft involved in this project reading at this moment, let me emphatically state: please do not do this. As a last resort, I'd exhort you to make this interface optional. I know this to be a fruitless request since making things options rarely solves anything. All I can say, though, is that if this is the interface the 360 will be using in the future then I can see myself using it a lot less, and at least putting my console back to booting from disc on startup and bypassing the dashboard as much as possible.
If you haven't seen this thing yet, drop on over to GameTrailers, they have HD and SD versions of the walkthrough. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Just playing around with a few toys. One you might want to try out: collapsible blocks.
Clicking on the title of a block, either one of the three across the top of the page, underneath the header, or in the left or right hand columns, will collapse the block down to just its title.
Collapse all three blocks across the top, and the entire region will collapse, bringing the page content up closer to the top. Blocks should remember their states from page to page (although it may take until the entire page loads before the blocks collapse).
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A new article on Xbox.com shows how to transfer the software licenses from an old console to a new one. Finally!
Hey every1,
How do ya submit comments and posts, i wanna submit some cool shit but it wont let me, wen i click my subjects and then submit, it wont let me type anything, its gettin freakin annoying!!!!!!!!!!!!
In response to a reader request from heuertag I've reworked the sheet music page to work like the forgemap database, the gamertag database, and the movies database. Now you can search and sort the sheet music entries just like you can on those other pages.
This really doesn't have anything to do with Bungie or gaming, per se... but former Bungie employee Pete Parsons just received $1 million in financing for his new tech startup, Fyreball, pitched as an "alternative to email" for tracking web messages and discussions.
For the full story see the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Texas TV station KIITV has a story on the implementation of realtime signal processing by audio firm Waves in Halo 3, as mentioned by Bungie audio director Marty O'Donnell in his interview on Major Nelson's podcast last week.