Halo 2 Weekly Update

[Stumanji]

Link to Original Post (http://www.forumplanet.com/3DActionPlanet/halo/topic.asp?fid=1729&tid=1284527)

BUNGIE WEEKLY UPDATE, Feb. 6, 2004

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.

Mat Noguchi is up to something pretty special too. He just perfected a neat technique/tool/trick that allows the player to hear all the important game dialog in a completely natural way. No longer will you sprint by an event and miss a vital clue from an NPC (Non-Player-Character). We can't tell you exactly how it works, suffice it to say that when it happens, it'll make perfect sense.

Marty O'Donnell and co., have been tooling around with footsteps, trying to make sure that when Master Chief walks, runs, sprints crouches and creeps, that an appropriate footfall is heard (or not in the case of creeping). Right now, thanks to some experiments with Dolby surround, it's occasionally possible to think your own footsteps are someone else's. That little "feature" is very easy to fix – but one issue with surround sound is that there's no "down" so Marty's feeling is that footsteps should cue from the front and center speakers since they handle "close" sounds better. But you will be able to detect a subtle difference between left and right footsteps.

Of course, all these sounds are based on the surfaces you're moving on – so different sounds and effects are going to be applied for metal, indoor environments, echoey spaces, gravel, you name it.

A big meeting this week happened to get the manual process in gear. One thing you might not know about Bungie, under the auspices of Microsoft, is that this studio gets an amazing amount of control over every detail of the project. That includes action figures, poster art, Grunty Thirst mugs and of course, the game manual. The Halo 2 manual will be awesome. Maybe, dare we say it, a heck of a lot more awesome than last time? Working on a manual is pretty brutal too, since you have to cram so much information into a space small enough to fit in a DVD case. If it were up to us, it'd be 500 pages long and bound in holographic Mylar. With an LCD panel on the front. So far, the only section finished is the list of multiplayer levels which are…no wait, I can't put that here.

Finally, I would like to thank Alta, the Bungie Princess for hooking us up with food all the time – people here are putting in crazy hours at both ends of the day (except for Parsons, who rolls into the parking lot in his Ferrari around noon on a good day) and totally kicking ass. Anyhoo, enjoy the new objet d' horror and we'll see you next week! For more! Bungie! Update!

[Stumanji]

The First Halo 2 Multiplayer Pic:

[Ender]

:rup: Nice!

[Stumanji]

It sure is......

FYI: If any of you have questions about Halo or Halo 2, I possess a pretty extensive knowledge on both, and I can answer 97.389% of your questions...

But don't let this turn into Halo Trivia...

[Stumanji]

Ooh, ooh, ooh...

:dance: Another update is expected SOON! :burst:

It's exciting!!!:faint:

[Stumanji]

The Original Post (http://rampancy.net/node/view/6770)

Frankie's Halo 2 Update:
I get a lot of mail here. Some of it asks perfectly reasonable questions, about multiplayer Halo 2 features, or what it's like working at Bungie, that kind of thing. A lot of them are explicit or implied death threats, or impossible requests to store outlandish objects in uncomfortable places. I tackle it all with gusto, like a red-faced optimistic German tour guide. "Ha, ha, I am so jolly to enjoy your correspondence!" But a lot of the letters ask things like, "Why don't you put movies in the updates?" or, "Why don't you run this column on the front page of IGN?"
Well it's simple – the weekly updates are (and always have been) designed to be a window on the process and people here at Bungie. It is not some official geyser of Halo 2 information – for that very reason, we post in occasionally obscure Halo and Bungie fan forums. If we went up on the front page of Gamespot or MSN every week, people would have warped expectations of the weekly update. Of course, the update gets mirrored immediately, and that's cool – we want lots of people to read and enjoy the updates, but they're here for folks who're curious about the process not so much the product. Nearer the game's release, there will be fountains of really gritty Halo 2 stuff, but until then, the Bungie Weekly Updates will continue in the vein they have been.


--The Web Team is entering a phase that can only be described as ballistic. Long hours and brutal deadlines are just part of the process in our plan to bring you a new-improved Bungie.net, without sacrificing any of the charm, community or functionality you've come to expect. A lot of programming work has been completed (and we're excited to unveil some cool new features in the near future) but a lot of the time consuming work at this point is graphical, as Zoe and Lorraine work hard to create pages that look fully Bungiefied.

Brian is heading out to LA on one of the biggest community events ever to happen in the Halo universe – it's the finals of the World Halo Championships, with participants from all over the world battling it out for ultimate Halo dominance. We'll bring you a full report on the events next week.


--One of our readers decided to make an HOMAGE (http://www.geocities.com/damistercheif/) to Mister Chief, which is as I had feared, another reason to flesh out the Mister. You can check out the fully playable, 3D, Mister Chief's Mayo (do NOT want to know what Mister Chief's "mayo" actually is) and pick up ammo, blast Covenant only slightly better drawn than Mister Chief himself, and eat ribs to refill your energy bar.

--The marketing guys take a lot of flak, but they really do work hard in some of the most unpleasant circumstances in the gaming world. This week for example, Cam and the guys had to make a trip to Manhattan, to choke down Martinis and steaks with ad execs on Madison Avenue, while discussing Halo 2 tie-ins: You know, like, "Viagra and Halo – the Two Biggest Things This Year" or, "Halo 2 Toilet Roll: Wiping the Galaxy Clean!"

They are actually working on some cool tie-in promotions, and later in the year you'll start to see the fruits of that labor. This time around Halo is very well known quantity, so other products want to get a piece of the marketing action.


--Tyson has been working on animation and AI issues on a giant piece of geometry. Since the geometry has edges and drop-offs, the trick is getting the AI characters – in this case Grunts – to fight and dodge successfully, without actually falling off, or getting confused by the boundaries of the object.

--They don't work for Bungie, but two guys are racing those Minimoto bikes around the parking lot. We're very jealous. If only there was a Miniwarthog.

--Marty and the audio guys are always a wealth of information. This week they've been tuning the script – a lot of the lead voice over work is being recorded in LA next week and everything has to be super tight. There will of course be some returning favorites, like the Chief and Cortana, but there will be lots of new actors and talent too, so Marty's going to be working with a lot of new people, explaining things to them like, "No, Grunts don't sound like James Earl Jones, squeak it up more…"

He's also been trying to pin down final sounds for objects. The Warthog, for example, is being continually tuned for gameplay – so they're making teeny adjustments to acceleration and RPMs – problem is that Marty's sound effects are all tied into that, so anytime a tweak is made to gameplay, some slight overhauls of how sounds work have to be done. Marty's concerns are slightly different from gameplay – his Warthog has to sound satisfying while still accurately describing what's actually happening on screen. That's a careful balancing act.


--Adrian, who I am basically related to thanks to an in-law in New Jersey, is working on lightmaps for the game. Specifically, he's fixed the "incident radiosity vector." Halo 2 has a ton of real time dynamic lighting, but a lot of basic stuff, like big stretch of open city or grass, can be lit using lightmaps – basically a way of applying "fake" light sources by coloring and shading objects rather than wasting pointless amounts of processor overhead doing it on the fly. If you know how an area is always going to be lit, there's little point doing it on the fly – especially when you want to save CPU cycles for more interesting stuff.

Lightmaps are rendered an object or an area at a time – the color and light information isn't just painted on, it's carefully and painstakingly calculated (to be real-world correct) by a bank of (currently) 20 servers. The room they're housed in is a balmy 94 degrees right this second (and under constant supervision), but Adrian's very pleased by the exponential increase in rendering speed over the original Halo. A lightmap that once took three days to render can now be calculated in a couple of hours. On the last game, that meant that if a lightmap wasn't exactly perfect, good enough would have to suffice. This time there's opportunity to redo anything that isn't perfect.

The lighting decisions also affect how bump-maps look – so Adrian's looking at what direction a bumpmap should "shadow" when the final light passes are made. In short, the lighting in Halo 2 is a heck of a lot more convincing than that seen in the first game.


--Rob McLees was busy in his corner – too busy. When asked what he was up to, he looked up, barked, "More guns!" and went back to his screen.

--Pete Parsons claimed that he couldn't tell me what he was doing this week because it was so top-secret. However, he later admitted it was because it was boring.

--Bill O'Brien is in tunnel-vision mode, animating a new type of Covenant soldier. Can't tell you much more about what kind of Covenant it is, but you know it's alien and you know it's bad. This guy has actually been partially-complete for a long time in design and AI respects, but now Bill's challenge is to get his transitional animations, when he stops, slows down or changes direction suddenly.

This particular varmint/critter/monster is presenting a number of fairly unique challenges for animation and AI, as well as some tricky problems for the player to contend with.

[Stumanji]

Did anyone read the new update? (above)

I checked the "views" and the number didn't seem to change. :eek:

[DiscoDave]

I glazed over it. Is this to be a PC game, or X-Box Exclusive?

Halo's okay, I guess, but Battlefield1942 has better multiplay in every way imaginable.

[M4LFUNCT10N]

Xbox initially.... then probably a PC port in the future.

[Stumanji]

What ^ he ^ said.

As far as console games go, I'd put Halo down as 2nd best FPS multiplayer. Perfect Dark would be #1.

[DiscoDave]

I couldn't really argue with you, beings as a first person shooter on a console is against my religious beliefs. ;)

[Stumanji]

Halo 2 Weekly Update: Feb 20, 2004

Hello, and welcome to the February 20th edition of the Bungie Weekly Update, where we open the window just a crack, on the antics and shenanigans going on at Bungie Towers. The weekly updates are designed to illuminate Bungie and Halo fans on the game development process - not the product per se.

* The team has a big milestone coming up. A milestone is a thing invented by a grown-up about twenty years ago to make sure that programmers (in those days, fragrant hippies with bits of cheese and mice in their beards) quit sucking on bongs long enough to actually finish programming a game. These days of course, a programmer is a very different animal. Taut, lean and ripped, with cat-like grace and deadly martial arts skills, they'd be Special Forces infiltration operatives were it not for their l337 haxorz skillz.

The object of a milestone is to first, prove that a team of 60 people hasn't simply been sitting around watching Spongebob and winging Twinkies at each other, and second - to produce a reasonably complete section of the game. In this instance, it's a very important level from later in the game (don't read too much or too little into that kidz, we don't always build levels in order).

The best thing about a milestone (apart from the fact that I just get to observe the process from the safe distortion of a beer glass) is that when it's done, we get to watch it and play it. Some of the biggest Halo geeks I've ever met are sitting right here, making it, and every time a milestone is complete, the guys here enjoy it every bit as much as you would.


* Poops are back. Well, not that they've been anywhere, but now they're behaving properly and playing nice with the non-player character AI. Poops, if you didn't read the prior update, are pieces of "instance geometry" like columns, planters, just things you might encounter in a real space. Poops are much easier to position, edit and move around than the more complex building structures and other objects – but populating a world properly with poops can really bring it to life. Damian and the guys have been implementing them in the levels, but with little attention to how they affect AI and physics until now.

Of course properly implemented poops mean that characters now behave differently than before, and this will give both testers and designers something to think about as they see how the AI responds to the new pathfinding challenges.


* Greg and the animators have been working hard to get Dual Weapons properly implemented in Multiplayer – the problem of course isn't putting them in, it's making them balanced. Early implementations basically turn Master Chief into an unstoppable force of evil and matches can end far too quickly – as if everyone suddenly had rocket launchers. The fine tuning and balancing required to make dual weapons an advantage, but not a ridiculous advantage, is a tightrope the designers will be walking for months.

For me the coolest part is seeing how the two weapons interact – control schemes are being fiddled with there’s a whole bunch of stuff I would love to tell you here, but can’t. I can tell you that Master Chief right now holds each type of gun in a totally convincing way. The other animations – for reloading, crouching with two weapons and switching them, look buttery smooth. I want to PLAY this.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with suddenly becoming a horrifyingly powerful superplayer…

* Gaze Tracking, or the, "What the hell are you lookin' at pal?" system is in, and it looks great. In multiplayer games, the characters will now turn their heads to follow either you, or the object in their reticule. That means that you can probably start to feel rightfully uncomfortable if some jerk on your team starts to stare at you. It will also have a very subtle effect in multiplayer battles, where you can see what else a multiplayer opponent or teammate is looking at, literally by following their gaze.

You may not even have noticed that in the original halo, characters simply pointed their faces straight ahead. Not a big deal until you see how it compares with this new alternative. Little things like that sound small in isolation, but put all these tiny factors together and they weave quite a tapestry. Of death. A tapestry of death.


* The scripts are finished and the first round of dialog is almost all being recorded this week. Joe Staten, the cinematics guru, lets Bungie folk pore over the scripts and make suggestions or changes – you'd be surprised how tightly thought out the Halo universe is. A staffer could for example note that a bit of military terminology is being used incorrectly, or that an Elite would never say, 'Ooh, Master Chief gave me an owie!"

Seeing the script, the writing and the dialog are among my favorite aspects of the job – but it does kinda suck knowing what happens at the end. I mean, who'd ever have suspected that Master Chief was a ghost? And a chick. A ghost chick! Seriously though, it's hard to know whether to be disappointed or excited by scripts. Part of you is like, "Holy crap, this is so amazing!" and the other part of you is like, "Aaw man, I just read 20 pages of spoilers."

Most of the dialog is being recorded in California but a couple of actors are based up here, and a couple more in Chicago so Marty and Jay and Joe are juggling that aspect too. I wanted to be a voice in the game, but my best baritone still sounds like a wasp farting through a harmonica.

* Paul Russell just showed me a hole in the ground between two parts of a level, and pointed out that thanks to the sheer scale possible in the new engine, he could literally fit all of the geometry from the first game, inside the hole. Of course, scale is relative, but that's the general idea.

* Lorraine, resident Bungie artist, has been porting over reams and reams of content from the old site to the future Bungie.net – a job as necessary as it is tedious. Lorraine actually created a lot of the art, and is very protective of Bungie's graphical assets. More interestingly, she just approved the base for the Flood Carrier Form action figure that was debuted at last week's Toy Fair in New York. We'll all get to see the action figures next week so they can be approved for production.

Lorraine has also commissioned artist Eddie Smith to create hi-res images that we'll use for "assorted promotional purposes." Eddie's stuff is fantastic and he works fast, so we can't wait to see the results.

Link to Original Post (http://www.clan18plus.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=537&sid=9c542b6a457db1030d44c6c29e257476)

[Stumanji]

Bungie Update for Friday, February 27th


About the Fake Weekly Update

Some Halo fan put up a reasonably convincing fake update this morning on a forum and caused a minor tizzy– needless to say, it wasn't us. Basically, if you're suspicious, just check out www.bungie.net – if we don't link to it from there, it's probably fake. Here's this week's short and sweet update.

Working on the lightmap farm.

Zach just told us he's been working on the lightmap farm. Maybe it's because I've had a brutal head-cold, but I suddenly imagined him, sleeves rolled up, ruddy-cheeked and up to his elbows in the dirt, reek, and good honest work of a lightmap farmer. Of course, what Zach actually does is build a utility to make some computers share a tedious workload. It allows numerous machines (mostly Compaq rack servers) working diligently, to do some boring, time-consuming, but ultimately vital lightmap rendering, so that all that geometry is properly lit when it gets spat out at the other end. Some of the better lightmaps are starting to trickle onto current Halo builds and the results are very pleasing. The biggest difference I see, apart from an overall improvement, is really convincing bright sunshine, and therefore better transition into shade. You almost want to cover your eyes when you step into the light.

So I peek into the lightmap farm, just because I'm curious and Harold, who's the cigar-chewing Teamster-type who runs all of test said that I should get the hell out of the lightmap farm; "Toasted buttercake like you wants to be careful around these here computers. Wouldn't want to get your face elctrificuted, wouldja?" He's working on porting over old Marathon web content to the new Bungie.net. We're kind of doing that in reverse order – moving Halo 2 stuff, then Halo, then Halo PC stuff, working our way back through gigabytes of ancient materials. There's some really cool old pre-Xbox Halo stuff hidden in there, that even people here hadn't seen. We'll let you look at it one of these days…

Mat's Secret Sound Stuff

Mat Noguchi says he's been having some fun with the chaingun. I gotta go find out what he's been doing…

…back. He HAS been having fun with the chaingun. Along with Jay and the other sound guys. Basically they've been tuning surround sound effects so that when debris kicks up around your feet and scatters, the sound effects are parsed correctly into 5.1. The effects will apply to any surface for ricochets and debris – dirt, snow and so on, but even cooler is the sound of flybys. In Halo, when a bullet whizzed by your head, it was actually a stereo effect, so you couldn't use the noise to tell exactly which direction it had come from – that's fully fixed for single and multiplayer this time.

There will be different effects for each weapon, and some of them are artistic rather than realistic. A real sniper bullet for example, would make a very short-sounding noise if you were lucky enough to hear it miss. In Halo 2, for the sake of gameplay – they actually chose a longer, louder noise so that you'd be able to associate that sound with that weapon. Much more detail later!

Chris Creates Life!

Chris Butcher has been tweaking and refining the controls for dual-wielding. As you can imagine, coming up with a scheme that doesn't alienate Halo players is tough, since every button was used in the original game. Suffice it to say that so far it works great and gives you plenty of options for swapping weapons, going back to single-wielding and tossing grenades. Naturally there are limitations – Master Chief can't dual-wield everything – why for example would you want to use two sniper rifles simultaneously? Anyhoo, of all the major game changes – I think this one will be the most smoothly implemented, based on what I've seen and played. It'll be second nature after one or two games.

He's also been playing around with implementing – gasp – ambient life in the new levels. And I mean ambient, you know, bugs, birds, that kind of thing. As opposed to rampaging herds of Triceratops. Small elements like that can really bring an area to life – and combined with the ambient sound effects, it'll make for a much richer environment. But as about thirty people mentioned to me, ambient life would be the first thing to get chopped if it didn't help the game, or if it became problematic for the schedule.


Lorraine in Toy Shocker!

Most of the Bungie team are perversely Halo nerds. They love Halo T-Shirts, mugs, posters, stickers and other junk. No surprise then that their favorite Halo memorabilia is the toys from Joyride. They're cool-looking and actually fun to play with. A few Halo art peeps contribute to how the toys look, but Lorraine McLees is the point person – and hse takes it very seriously, which is why it was a relief when she was delighted by the final prototypes of the new Chief, Grunts and Warthog.

The characters are the three-inch tall variants, and Chief gets to sit in a correctly scaled (and therefore giant) Warthog. Best of all, it's the LAV version, with the triple-barreled rocket launcher. The new armor is fantastic looking, and seeing it in real-life is kind of startling. Makes you realize just how imposing the Chief really is. Plus, he's carrying the battle rifle!

New Multiplayer Map!

Obviously there are lots of new multiplayer maps, but I just tooled around in a big, new, cool one that I predict will be as beloved (by me at least) as Blood Gulch. Of course, I haven't actually played against anyone in it yet, but it's my favorite kind of map – huge, and full of surprises. Just for context, my fave current maps are, Blood Gulch, Death Island (for PC) and Hang 'Em High. I think this new one has the coolest elements from each. If anyone gives a crap, I'll say which one it was after the game ships.

Original Post (http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=247748)

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update March 05

Busy, busy week at Bungie! Tons of stuff going on! Number of deadlines all converging! No sleep for many! I managed to stick my head in the middle and glean some goodies though. Check it out:

* Michael and the other environment artists have been tooling around with some very human geometry. A gorgeous bridge, worthy of a glossy spread in any architecture magazine, has been profoundly torn up by Covenant attack. The futuristic surface of the bridge is composed of bonded interlocking panels of a space-age material, and the damage is being carefully honed so that it reflects the rending blasts of Covenant energy weapons and the warping of the structural panels and concrete elements.

The bridge can be driven on too, so the gaping holes have to be both obstacles and gameplay elements, so some of the bent panels can be used as ramps. That means there is a profound danger that you could eat it and plummet into the sparkling waters below either through the gap itself, or as the result of a poorly aimed jump.

And on the subject of water (a personal favorite of mine) the placeholder water I thought looked pretty freaking good, is being replaced with what the graphics guys say is a much more convincing wave-based shader system. It's so far below that most of it will go unseen – but the designers know that players will go take a closer look when they get a breather, possibly with a sniper scope, so they're making sure everything looks good from any distance.

Why bother with realistic placeholder water at all? The designers could make their job a bit easier by simply inserting a big blue sheet of nothing. It's so that when designing levels, and tuning graphics, everything has the correct context for color and geography.

* Over at the Cananimators' lair, things are progressing shockingly well. Looks finished to me boys! Ship it! But no, tons of work still to do, although you wouldn't know it to look at the brilliant new dual-wielding animations. Nathan has been tuning the idle animations and aiming stuff – and he's made a few subtle, but vital changes.

Two identical guns now look wholly natural, instead of just kind of stuck out in front of you. They reload convincingly, Chief will make slight turns and angle changes as he's blasting, and it's kind of hard to describe how much more realistic the difference in animation between hands makes it look. Just more organic, I suppose. The same thinking is being applied when you hold two different weapons, but that always looked more natural anyway.

An even more subtle thing is the way Chief raises or lowers his arms when you look up or down, respectively. This lets you see more of the screen so that your arms aren't blocking what you're trying to swing and aim at. It's a teeny, teeny change, but it's going to make looking up and down much more natural – rather than simply improving how it looks.

He's also been working on a Covenant weapon that has been shown before – but never discussed. The first person animation looks great, and the weapon has a zoom mode too. Nathan wants to see a really cool alien interface for the zoomed view, but that's something that's still being discussed.

* Rob (who does the designs for almost all the Halo weapons and vehicles) has been working all this week on the same weapon Nathan is animating. He's changing little details on the way the gun looks, and also building in the geometry for the collision detection – so that the gun can bump into walls, or if it's in the way when the Elite holding it gets shot, the gun itself is struck, not simply the creature wielding it.

You know, getting to design weapons and vehicles all day – that's a pretty freaking cool job.

* The sound guys have been working on alien Covenant noises. And alien voices as a matter of fact. Expect to hear a lot more artistic nuance in the voices of all sorts of alien scumbags, including a very cool surround based effect for a particularly epic encounter.

Mat Noguchi has been working on "an intractable problem, the equivalent of proving or disproving the existence of God." He wouldn't elaborate, claiming that the very revelation of the problem would destroy any possible solution. Which is pretty esoteric, to say the least. Maybe he's been trying to give kitty treats to Schrödinger's Cat.

Mat is also pondering some kind of amusing "promotion" for the escalation of grenade explosions. That may or may not happen, but you might want to try playing around with ridiculous numbers of grenades when the game ships, just in case something cool is attached to a cataclysmic escalation of explosions! You know, apart from the epic amount of destruction.

* Marketing guys have been going bananas with packaging issues all week – one of the items being designed right now is the box. I've seen a mock-up with one of the proposed illustrations and it's very cool and when you see it on the box, it looks even cooler.

* Chris Butcher chatted about the Live stuff that we're planning and it's all pretty cool. Some of it is secret, but some of it simply takes full advantage of Live's already stellar features. The way your Halo games will find the best and closest servers (for Quickmatch) is going to have some excellent options attached to it, especially for groups of friends who want to play together.

The Xbox Live datacenter is actually located here in Redmond, so all of the matches are filtered through here – even for European, Australasian and Asian gamers. But naturally that's not ideal for connection speed – so once you've found, filtered and started a match, the connection is much more direct. In fact, Live will check for the closest geographic location, and often try to match up service providers – so if two guys are using a Comcast cable modem in the same part of town, there's a higher likelihood they'll find each other in a quickmatch. That's stellar news for ping times and of course, the dreaded lag. That matchmaking isn't totally unique to Halo 2 of course, but the game is going to do some cool and radical things to take advantage of it.

* Faxing is stupid. As a technology, it's right up there with square wheels and turd-filled pizza crust. So not only can you never be sure that what you just faxed ever went through, the recipient actually has to go look for it. Imagine if to check email you had to drive to a bad part of town and stick your hand down a dark hole? That's what faxing is like. Kinda. Anyway, while I was faxing something this week, I wandered around the corner from the fax machine and discovered heaven. For me anyway. The Microsoft Game Studios TV Lab. Drool.

It's literally set up like a museum. There are rows and rows of TVs for testing and reference, with little cards that explain the technology and the purpose. They range from an RF-only--capable black and white set, to a giant Sony Plasma display. There are also TVs from other countries – a Japanese NTSC HD set – a UK PAL set with digital capabilities. They just go on and on and on. I tried to sneak out of there, but the receptionist knows that I don't have a 42 inch rectangular physique.

Link to Original Post (http://carnage.bungie.org/haloforum/halo.forum.pl?read=391946)

[Ender]

I was looking at some pics of this game the other day...all I have to say is wow. It looks totally cool. :rup:

[Stumanji]

You want to see "totally cool" then download the Hi-Res E-3 In-Game Demo of Halo 2...

I drool like a champ when I see that.

[Stumanji]

The most recent Halo 2 multiplayer picture....

The quality is low, because it's a scanned magazine photo uploaded onto the net. A hi-res copy of the photo is expected online soon.

As Halo.Bungie.Org puts it:
Just a quick heads-up: the multiplayer screenshot that can be seen in the latest issue of XBN (and which is floating around the net, in various mediocre scans), is the real deal; another new multiplayer map. We can't release the scan here yet (our policy is that no scanned print media is posted before the issue leaves the shelves; we do NOT want to contribute to the loss of sales for magazines), but Bungie will be posting a full-sized version on their website in the not-too-distant future. This note is purely to squelch the speculation that the image is faked - it's a real shot, released to several print sources simultaneously; XBN simply seems to be the first out of the gate with it.

[Stumanji]

Here's the same picture, but much larger and clearer. It was only a matter of days until this size of a picture made it online.

Again, this is only a scan of a magazine (you can see the page seperation in the middle). But it's still a pretty cool picture.

[Bishop]

These screen shots are pretty tight, but i heard that Microsoft got a hold of the multiplayer and sent it back to bungie to be redone. Is that true? I personally am afraid that some of these screen shots are real. First of all i feel as though these new levels are going to be huge, just as in Halo PC, which takes away from the strategy and lengthens game play. Also as commentated "just begging for a Scorpion to come rolling down" that is horrible. Vehicles are useful, but only for transportation, skill with a tank is completely benine. I pray to god that few changes are made to the size and styles of the maps, and hopefully Halo 2 doesn't become this Vehicle and blow em' up style of play. No offense, but i hope it doesn't become the next Unreal Tournament, i would rather die less than run/die/run/die/run/die, as i see many do in UT. Hey stu, where abouts is bungie located, and how long have you been working for them and what is your job? I've read your weekly updates and it sounds like you guys have a lot on your plates. Maybe me and r dizzle could take some multiplayer experimenting off of your hands haha, jk. maybe, unless we really could. lol. the dual weapons sound so frickin sweet, i'm just wondering if this Halo 2 is gonna be filled with millions of weapons and vehicles, i personally hope not. in halo the weapon control is vital, i'd rather have 5 completely thought about weapons, rather than 45 extreme ones. thanks for answering some of my questoins i have so many that i'm not asking, well, we'll just have to wait and see what happens when it comes out. peace. (seriously, i'd love to test that halo 2 out for bungie. talk to you later. )

[M4LFUNCT10N]

Stu doesn't work for Bungie. He's just relaying information posted on other sites.

[Stumanji]

Bungie is located in Redmond, I believe.

No, I don't work for them, but I do keep my fingers on the Halo 2 pulse. As far as trying out MP for Bungie, there'll be no public testing of the game... sorry.

I agree with you on the vehicles thing. The banshee has to be the cheapest vehicle EVER. People get in those and get kill after kill... they don't even care about the objectives of the game (CTF, Oddball, KotH), and it's quite annoying. In fact, all those kind of players are annoying. They'd rather just kill the enemy instead of accomplishing the objective of the game.

The dual-weapons thing does sound pretty cool. What's heavily rumored is that you'll be using "L" to fire the left gun, and "R" to fire the right gun. You'll have to lower one of your guns to throw grenades though. Also, you'll only be able to wield two "one-handed" weapons at a time... but those could include two Plasma Swords.

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update: March 12th, 2004 (http://www.halobabies.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156)

Short and sweet this week, just the way you like it.

Nightmare Armor Guys!

Two of the guys from Nightmare Armor, Justin and Sid popped in to show us their latest build of the Master Chief Halo armor. They nearly caused a mass conniption. First we gave them a hermetically sealed tour of the office – where they get to see our microwave oven, Laffy Taffy stash and no Halo 2 whatsoever - and then Sid (who's pretty intimidating in the flesh) suited up and went on patrol.

With his giant Frankenstein shoes and vast hulking mass, Sid really looked the part. The suit was almost perfect, and we couldn't have been more pleased with how it looked in real life. The overall effect was awesome. Bungie old-timers giggled like sissies as he stomped around the office, posing for photos like some lethal Mickey Mouse. Sid was a great sport too, stopping to corpse-hump a fallen BentLlama.

We then took him into the Microsoft Game Studios Cafeteria, where he nearly caused a riot. People actually cheered when a seven foot Master Chief ringer unexpectedly popped in for a Pesto Wrap and a smoothie. Sid, sweating it up a storm inside the (un-air conditioned) helmet, continued to be patient as Justin begrudgingly adjusted a dangling crotch strap. The gun he's carrying is a one-off 3D model of the battle rifle we conveniently had laying around.

Seeing the detail and lovingly crafted accuracy up close, was kind of mind-blowing, right down to the brilliant blue LEDs glowing in the leg parts. Makes us wonder how they got that through airport security.

Magazines!

We've been preparing for two separate visits from two big gaming magazines. Each will run a story some time in the near future on different aspects of the game. We've got a lot of work to do preparing assets and taking screenshots (yes, it's laborious and sloooow) and as the game progresses, the people who can help us are getting busier and busier. The upside of that is that Brian, Zoe and I are able to get our hands on versions of the game with everything turned on.

Currently we tend to play single and multiplayer builds with bits missing – like textures that are turned off while an artist tweaks them, or levels with Joe Staten yelling insane inanities in place of real speech. But pretty soon, we're going to have very polished versions of the little bits we'll be taking screenshots of. Multiplayer we're used to, but I can't wait to get my hands on plot-ruining sections of the Campaign mode.

We also have to round up some very busy, very stressed animators, programmers and designers, so that they're available to chat and well-prepared when these crack (smoking?) journalists show up and ask them supertough questions, like, "What's your favorite color Marty?" and, "Will Master Chief fall in love this time?" Luckily they've been "media-trained" so they don't accidentally give away playable builds and hard drives full of source code. Because that's what they'd do you know.

Drama!

Joe Staten has been polishing and editing cinematics. The new game engine looks glorious when it's applied to the cinemas, and one, the intro to a mid-game level, looks astonishing. Although some pieces of the cinemas are missing, like certain animations, they're very polished looking and now they have the actual actor dialog instead of Joe and Co talking.

The cinemas are tricky for animators, because they contain a ton of animation that isn't in the game, so that has to be custom-created. In the game – the characters have a (huge) set of animations that they cycle through as the AI demands, but in cinematics, two characters, say, shaking hands, has to be hand animated. It's time consuming, but rewarding.

A lot of that work is done, and Joe is busy editing the cinemas for style and impact. One scene was cut yesterday – a cool, but ultimately redundant interaction between two Elites. Must be pretty heart-rending to chop out a week of work, no matter how much smoother it makes the scene play out. But Joe's job is to keep the story bouncing along, and that's exactly what he's doing. Readers complain a lot about the lack of specific information we give here – but I can tell you for certain that Halo 2 is exactly 183% more dramatic than the original.


Idiot! (Me)

Zach set me up with a web server, now I can see my horrific mistakes on the new version of Bungie.net (still coming soon etc) before I post them.

Genius! (Everyone Else)

Aaron and Luis have been automating the stress testing. That means they have about 35 debug Xbox systems running overnight, with Master Chiefs running around pretty much randomly, tossing grenades and jumping around blasting aimlessly. In theory, if he gets near a vehicle, he could jump in and drive it around too, but since the system is automated, nobody's actually around to witness the insane nocturnal antics of 35 Master Chiefs.

The purpose of all this is some very useful data gathering. The guys can come in first thing in the morning, see if anything crashed, look at a newly compiled database and see exactly what caused the crash – or at least what master Chief was doing when the crash happened. In the long run it means that testers are getting more stable builds of the game and reducing test time is a big deal. A similar reduction in lightmap rendering time is also saving time – time that will be filled up making the game better and better.

Flying!

Just watched a cool aerial dogfight – Banshees, turrets and a bigger Covenant ship.Big buildings, cool textures and some genuine surprises. Upside is that months of playing PC Halo mean I should be better at flying Banshees next time around.

[Stumanji]

BUNGIE WEEKLY UPDATE!!!
By Frankie (Bungie Employee) on 3/19 at 04:21 PM

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.

They've also been fiddling around with the way Chief holds the flag. That's right, the flag is being improved! The animation for his run while clutching the flag is being tuned, and the way he grasps it is definitely improved from Halo. Perhaps more interestingly (not that the gripping's not, wellgripping) the flag has improved cloth physics! Har, not exactly mind-blowing, but since you're going to see an awful lot of the flags in CTF, they may as well look cool, right?

One of last week's tasks the dual wielding animation is now getting close to perfect. The change we mentioned in a previous update, to show more sky or ground, depending on where you're pointing, is complete, now the guys are tightening up his arm movements. I have to be honest; it looked pretty much perfect to me already. He also, I should point out, throws grenades in a much more convincing way this time around.

Testing!

Harold and the test teams he heads up both Halo 2 test AND the new Bungie.net re-launch test teams, have been attacking bugs on both the game and the site. The test team basically checks both the game and the site for bugs, checks those bug into a system called Product Studio and passes them on to the appropriate person to get it fixed. A bug can be anything from a typo to a hard crash, and the testing process is really the blood of the production cycle. Without hours and hours (literally man-years) of testing, nothing could ever really get fixed. Wrangling that process is an epic task of cat-herding proportions.

Other Stuff!

Jaime has been working on enemy AI, tuning the aggressiveness primarily to make them melee-attack a little more. My efforts to prevent this fell on deaf ears. I'm scared of Elites you see, ever since that one jumped out at me on Truth and Reconciliation. I nearly filled my pants

Jaime is also working with the team on honing weapons, including the Battle Rifle and the Rocket Launcher, the latter of which has been improved upon in a number of significant, but non-jarring ways. Basically you should enjoy using it more, without knowing exactly why. The Battle Rifle is of course brand new, so you'll probably just enjoy the experience. Right now it's my second favorite weapon. Can't say what my favorite is. But I can tell you that the Battle Rifle makes one of the best noises ever. Brap!! Blapp! Blam!!!

Sound!

No sign of Marty, probably drunk, but Jay let rip with some cool new stuff. The cinematic dialogs have all been recorded and the actors' voices are being implemented and processed into the engine. But cooler yet, the sound dept. are working on a new way of doing surface/object interactions. In the first game the noise of tires on gravel was one sound in Halo 2, it is, appropriately enough, two sounds. One is the tires and one is the gravel. And they interact. The result is not only better sounding, but technically more realistic. A similar thing is happening with DSP effects for noises. Picture the scene you're in a massive pitched battle and you quickly duck into a building the sound of the continuing battle outside, is processed correctly so that your building muffles it. Not just turning down the volume, but adjusting the acoustics on the fly so that the shift is realistic. The noise of an ongoing battle outside is really atmospheric, instead of just quieter.

Link to Original Post (http://www.bungie.net/perlbin/blam.pl?file=/site/0/forums/default.html&fid=1&page=0&rootid=49141&rid=49141)

Link to Hi-Res Multiplayer Pic #2 (the magazine scan from above) (http://halo.bungie.net/images/site/halo/screenshots/halo2/h2_mp_02.jpg)

[Stumanji]

Halo 2 Update - March 26th, 2004
Welcome mah friends, to another weekly look inside the machinery of Bungie Towers. Enjoy. Or be mildly distracted. Whichever.

Mon Frere!

Michel (who's a handsome French Canadian and a huge hit with the ladeez thanks to his combination of Gallic charm, sexy accent and excellent nationalized health care system AND the angriest 23-year old in the world) talked to me about moving BSPs today. A BSP is a Binary Separation Plane, or in other words, a great big chunk of level. The thing about a BSP is that it's all one giant piece (they can be small too) that's interconnected and joined at every seam. That means it's all rendered in one go, and can be manipulated at will – if there's enough processor power. And that's been one of the things the team has been optimizing – big moving BSPs.

The BSPs in question contain some future surprises, but a good example would be say, a drawbridge (nope, the bridge we talked about a couple of updates ago is NOT a drawbridge) with like, a tollbooth, some gun emplacements and a bouncy castle. It's one thing to draw those objects as a Static BSP – quite another to move them around. Optimizing things like that frees up more processor power for AI and other tasks, so it's important to get it done before the gameplay is tuned on those levels.

It's also a weird mix of programming and design – since in a way, a moving BSP acts more like a character or a vehicle than a building or a level. Often the various departments can just get along with polishing their bits, but in an instance like this, close-knit cooperation is a must.

Michel has also been working out the nuances of the weather system with the environment guys. Mmhmm. Weather system. It won't be a big surprise to say that there's going to be rain and snow (it is Earth after all) but weather isn't always wet and cold. One level is set in a dry climate where dust, wind and sand all play a part. Filling out the levels with weather makes a tremendous difference to how "alive" the spaces feel. The snow and swamp levels in the original game are still some of my favorite levels. Rumors of a lava and minecart level are to be ignored.

Parsons, our Studio Manager, hates making big promises (except about how he's going to crush me to death in a rat-filled refrigerator), so I won't tell you what Michel said about how much better the weather effects were this time around, I'll just say they're a "bit" better and leave it at that. To avoid the crushing.

Needlers!

Crack-Cananimator Nathan is pretty much happy with the dual wielding on SMGs, and not much, if anything is going to be done to those, but he's particularly pleased with the way the dual Needlers work. The gameplay subtleties that are going to be introduced as a a result of dual-wielding totally boggle my mind.

Actually, the gun models themselves look super-cool too, and tuning has progressed on the look and feel. One Covenant gun has been altered subtly to make it look better in first person mode – there were some complaints that part of the stock "looked like a shark fin" and was obstructing the view too much.

Sweet Crimeny Jeebus!

David Candland sent around a "virtual" version of the user interface for testing and feedback. It's actually a little PC app that lets you play around in the Halo 2 interface without actually playing the game. You can scroll through the various options (you can change your control setup in mid-game now! Woo-hoo!) and best of all, check out all the Live options.

Scrolling through the various Live functions – regular old Live functions - but in the Halo environment, was weirdly thrilling. I was almost literally dumbstruck just seeing a game invite icon and a Friends List in the Halo interface. The visual look and feel has been hugely overhauled, and everything is tight and together, but it still seems like Halo, straight off the bat.

It's going to be one of those days when the game ships – do I play through Campaign right away? Or do I dive right into a new multiplayer map for some rocket action? I honestly don't know which one I most want to play.

The interface is being tightened up so that it’s always easy to get where you want, from anywhere in the game. Sketch was saying this morning that it's nice we're thinking of the user interface as a part of the game, rather than an afterthought – navigating to a game choice or an option shouldn't be more annoying than playing through the Library with a depleted energy pistol.

Scorpions Rock!

I got a look at some new vehicle models today, including the Scorpion tank. Few things I'd love to tell you about that but can't. I can probably tell you about the new Pelican model however, and it's a doozy. It's fully bump-mapped, impeccably detailed and features a real 3D cockpit, complete with joysticks. You can't fly it of course, but it looks so much better than first time around. My favorite feature, apart from the detail added by bump-mapping everything, is the new glass shader. When you pan around the cockpit glass, it shimmers and reflects convincingly. Adding the extra depth makes it look much more like a working vehicle than in the first game. When I saw it, it was having damage applied to it, so expect to see one or two of them smashed up in Halo 2.

There's also polishing work on grass, water and other objects. One test area featured big clumps of spiny, fleshy plants – Earth plants though, and they'll be featured as decorative bits of Earth City. That test area also showed off some of the new ground and "lawn" texturing, all of which is going to be brought to life in new and interesting ways. A big reflective pond showed off some calm water with convincing transparency (based on the depth of the water) – and I've already seen an impressive wave/reflection effect for the choppier bodies of liquid.

Manual Madness

What do I do over here, apart from observe people with actual talent and ability? Well, one of my tasks is to liaise with the UX (User Experience) group on the Halo 2 manual. And we're working on it. It'll be cool. Full of instructions! And ESRB info. Hurrah for me! But seriously, the UX group is wicked smart, and planning a manual every bit as cool as the game it describes.

Jaime Griesemer's Patented Brain-Bending Cranium Tonic and Bum Lotion!

Jaime, as ever, blew my mind with the usual stream of stuff we can't talk about, but he's also working on something we CAN talk about. The tutorial! Jaime liked it the first time around, but for the new game he wanted to concentrate on stuff that you need to know to play the game, instead of the usual – this is your shield, this is how you crouch – kinda stuff. The example he used was that flanking is important, so the tutorial should "force" you to learn how to flank, without interrupting the flow of gameplay or narrative. Then you'll learn and know how to apply that the next time you find yourself in a similar circumstance.

Jaime is also pleased to announce that they've beefed up both the Battle Rifle (in an unspecified way) and the Needler. The Needler will now be a gun you look for, instead of one you use as a big purple boxing glove in melee situations.

[Stumanji]

Tomfoolery

Yesterday's April fool's shenanigans were met with a mixture of delight, mild amusement and abject fury. One reader, posting, perhaps ironically, on the fake website he was mad about, was incensed that we were cavorting and gamboling through the fields of whimsy, when we should have been taking screenshots and movies of Halo 2. Even though he went on to say that all of our screens so far are faked. He also described me as the "unfunniest person on Earth" so while he's wrong about screenshot fakery, he's clearly no idiot. That said, screenshots have been a big deal for us this week.

And I know this week's update is teeny. So don't hassle me, man. I'll make it up to you next week.

Screenshottery

Brian, Zoe, Stephen and Lorraine have been fiddling around with some cool new tools that make taking screens a bit easier. That and the fact that the recent builds of the game look better and better, means that future screenshots are going to look even more glorious than they did before. The combination of our new lightmapping and dynamic lighting gives stills an unearthly, painted-looking quality, yet still weirdly photorealistic. I love that aspect of the game's look – reminds me of how video games used to carry their own distinctive "look," like Capcom SNES titles, or the PC version of Doom.

The new Jackal model looks fantastic. His plume is actually composed of individual strands of vaguely insectoid barbs. Zoom in close enough (use your sniper rifle) and you can see that the plumes even have "joints." You'll also get to see how ugly and bump-mapped he is. They really do look manic and ferocious.

And not to dwell too much on Mr. Jackal, but since they invariably carry shields, you might be pleased to know that the shields are more detailed and transparent, so you should be able to hit that little shield notch more easily to take out the ugly cretins.

Musicisciousness

Marty stopped by to talk about the new music and Dolby stuff going into the game. Marty usually works with the (near) finished product exactly like a top movie composer (he says) so he will be sitting down with finished game and cinematics to score it properly. "Sometimes I'll hear the audio in a game, and just know, right off the bat that it was composed and scored before the game was finished. I can't work like that."

If you remember the Star Wars Episode 1 "music video" with John Williams conducting a live orchestra in front of a screening of the movie – that's how Marty works, only with a smaller screen and more computers.

Marty's been concentrating on the Covenant musical themes for Halo 2. The Covenant, as you know, is overtly religious, very formal and very serious. Expect to hear all that wrapped up in a ball of alien noise.

Marty has also built a bunch of Dolby surround mixed ambient sounds – instead of having them be processed on the fly. That means he can build an ambient creepy noise in a room, imagine tinkling metallic alien technology, mixed with a constantly swirling noise of rushing air. Having that kind of control over the ambient sound means that "live" sounds, like a generator your walk by, or a whooshing elevator nearby, can be processed on the fly. Marty says that serves no purpose other than to sound "sweeter."

Butcheration

Chris Butcher sorted/is sorting out a problem with melee combat that lets you use one BRAND NEW weapon and improves other NOT SO BRAND NEW weapons. He's also making melee combat "much more satisfying" in multiplayer modes.

Chris also has a stack of bug to deal with, as high as an elephant's eye. Trawling through this is par for the course at this stage of development. Everyone has bugs to sort through and fix, even the web team. Stupid bugs!
Lightington

Our new lighting guy, Hao, who actually joined us from the Amped team in Salt Lake City (and if you've seen the lighting in Amped, you know how cool an addition he is) has been lighting BSPs (Binary Separation Planes) and I just saw one with everything turned on – bloom lighting, bump-mapping, ordinary lightmaps and dynamic lighting. It was the single biggest shift I'd seen from Halo 1 in terms of sheer contrast. The way light changes from inside to outside buildings now is perfect, and the effect of running from inside a structure to outside is akin to that feeling you get when you leave a movie theater on a sunny afternoon. Only, it doesn't make you need to pee.

That's all for this week folks, and apologies for the shortness. We'll make a longer update next week, with any luck.

Go to Original Post (http://www.forumplanet.com/3dactionplanet/halo/topic.asp?fid=1729&tid=1336751)

[Stumanji]

After last week's miserable performance, we're happy to announce a more interesting Weekly Update. This time we'll chat about dialog, sound effects, animation and Xbox Live!

Bungie Depot

Next week, we're doing something cool on the site. Tune in Tuesday for a small surprise. It should be cool – a little thing that the community team has whipped up.

The Griespit

Jaime has been very busy, finalizing Ghost and Warthog handling so the sound guys can work with confidence. The need to make sure that sound ties in correctly with motion is obvious, and all of the sampling, including the gravel on tires recording done with the poor Subaru Outback we abused, is ready to be applied and processed. The Ghosts in particular (in my opinion) are starting to sound brilliantly "alien" and cool.

Jaime has also been finishing up the connections between rooms for one of the early levels with Paul and Dave. He wouldn't elaborate on which level, BUT I can reveal that you might have seen something like it already.

Jaime is also figuring how CENSORED will work on (gasp!) a new CENSORED!

When he wasn't doing that thing we can't talk about, he was working on new triggers for combat dialog. So that Marines and others will say cool stuff when they're supposed to, and won't just blabber away when they're not supposed to.

But one of the coolest things Jaime was doing this week was adjusting the scale, type and shape of damage done by a new weapon. I've tried this one before Jaime's ministrations and it is BRUTAL. And no, that's not a pun on the word Brute. It's just a vicious bone hammering bastard of a weapon.


The Animation Station

John Butkus has been animating his ass, or perhaps more properly, his elbow off. Monday and Tuesday he was going through older (Halo 2) elite/marine animations and just making sure they worked with all weapons when sitting in various vehicle passenger seats. Weird stuff happens with weapons in different scenarios, and as new ones are introduced, it's important to make sure that they look cool under all circumstances. John had a busy week, though...and probably created somewhere in the region of about 80 unique moves. His aforementioned elbow is killing me and he says, "my eyes feel like someone has thrown sand in them, but I wouldn't have it any other way."


Our Princess is in another Castle

Alta, the Bungie Princess, is working on secret goodies as well as a certain annual tradeshow, as she tells it herself, "This week has been chaos! In addition to taking care of the boys as usual, I have been busy working with some different people on some cool things that will start showing up as we get closer to launch. Fans will love what we have in store."

But back to the tradeshow, as Alta continues, "E3 is right around the corner…so I have been dashing around making arrangements for that. We have some cool stuff planned and I am wrapping up details for a mystery guest at Fanfest. There is definitely a buzz around the studio with E3 coming up and the countdown to Halo 2 launch. In the mean time I am just going to get as much time in the sun (yes sun in Seattle) as possible before the true chaos hits. That’s all for me this week. Cheers!"

Alta, please, for the love of all things holy, don't put me in a room with a snorer.

Max Power

Max Hoberman is an exercise in frenetic activity, as he explains, "Sure. I've been swimming furiously, trying to keep ahead of the enormous tidal wave bearing down on me! We got a new multiplayer map playable for the first time yesterday, though the programmers decided it was a convenient day to make some major physics changes so we didn't get a stable build to test. Since this map is dependent on big moving geometry that pretty much screwed us. Everything is fixed now, so we're going to play the map for the first time today. I'll let you know when we do."

"I've also been experimenting with a rocket warthog that tracks, fun (but deadly!) stuff. Oh, and planning for the in-game UI and HUD, something that has been a long time coming! Adrian and I are psyched and he's already started coding for it. Besides that more gobs and gobs of planning for the rest of the summer," says Max.

He continues, "At the same time Dave is working on polish to some of the riskiest, but coolest aspects of our Live UI, our new guy Steve is putting close to finishing touches on textures and lighting for another multiplayer map, and I'm trying to not let anything slip through the cracks. That means lots of meetings about Xbox Live features and a ton of thought into how we're going to finalize some of our most complicated features."

Grudge Be-atch

The Kiosk is back! You know those Xbox display units you get at K-Mart and EB? With the Xbox under a plastic shield, usually demoing recent games? We've got one, and of course, it's got a debug with Halo 2 installed on it. This is where, at any time, staff members can throw down for grudge matches on any of the new multiplayer maps. One such long-running rivalry is between John Butkus and Chris Carney – animator and multiplayer designer respectively. The smack talk is as voluminous as it is colorful.

The most recent match between Carney and Butkus ended in what was described as "an ass-beating" by another staff. Butkus lost badly, but that's hardly surprising. Carney DESIGNED the levels, and rumor has it that he secretly hides geometry imperfections all over his maps called "CarneyHoles" and that he can pop up from these at any time, like an evil wack-a-mole to snipe otherwise superior players. Word also has it, that Carney fills these CarneyHoles with health kits, shield power ups, invisibility and weapons. That's the rumor, anyway.


Staten Station

Joe Staten, cinematic guru and friend of the poor, has been making story stuff happen, saying, "This week revisited Earth-City. I finalized the storyboards for a super-duper, "event" intro, and CJ began creating the videomatic."

On other fronts, he's begun to work with the level-designers to organize and flesh-out their “mission-dialog” (basically, all the interesting things that get said in first-person that isn't part of the combat-dialog system) as well as help Jaime and Damian finalize the combat-dialog spec.

Marty, Michel and Joe have also begun to plan for the second dialog-recording session (late May) that will cover cinematic pickups and all mission and combat-dialog. This is going to be a whopper of a session, and will likely necessitate a week or so of hotel-time with Marty (lucky Joe).

MartyMania

Marty claims "lots of things are making noise." Little metal pieces of things get blown off of other things and drop in the mud, grass, or sand make little sounds like metal dropping in mud, grass, or sand. It’s cool. The tires sound like they’re rolling on gravel, mud, water, you name it and sound like they’re skidding at just the right moments. Basically everything is beginning to sound like you think it should sound, which means you won’t really notice it. Cinematics, combat, and mission dialog are coming along nicely. We like our cast – a lot.
Music is bringing up the rear as usual. More on that later.


So, that's all for next week, until then, Mister Chief appears to be away...

Link to Original Post (http://www.sector7-halo.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=5928#5928)

[Stumanji]

The New Bungie web page is up...

A NEW HALO 2 MULTIPLAYER PICTURE

[Valusek]

kick ass! you rock stu!

[Stumanji]

Hey, Halo fans!

Here's another NEW picture from the Halo 2 world. These are the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST)'s made popular by the Halo novels, which make them out to be total badasses on the battlefield, and the best thing BESIDES Spartans, for the UNSC.

http://www.bungie.net/images/Games/Halo2/Gallery/Renders/ODST.jpg

[Stumanji]

ANOTHER new picture added!

http://bungie.com/images/Games/Halo2/screenshots/H2_ChiefvsJackals.jpg

[Blitzkrieg84]

That looks awesome! Can't wait till the game comes out so I can stomp your ass over XBL!

[Stumanji]

Welcome to another Bungie Weekly update, hosted right here on our brand new forums. Things are getting busy around here. The pace is quickening, the late night Indian food is flowing and our completion date looms on the horizon (whatever you want to write here). But here's a glimpse at what's going on in-studio.

BS-Please!

A week or two ago, I went on and on about BSPs, describing these alleged "Binary Separation Planes" and their effect on the world. Turns out I was misinformed, and after programmers galore rolled their eyes at me and snorted when I passed them in the hallway, one approached me with the same embarrassed care of a co-worker explaining that I might have BO. Thanks Cuban.

So a BSP, as it turns out is actually a "Binary Space Partition," which is a whole different egg. Not only that, it's an incredibly complicated algorithm that has no simple analog to a real life situation, so after toying with descriptions of coat hangers rotating inside a glass cubes, or Imperial Star Destroyers parallel parking in Manhattan, I gave up. Suffice to say, Halo 2's got 'em and they're cool.

BS-Trees!

Although I've grown quite fond of the placeholder trees in one of the environments, I spied a "real" tree on an environment artist's monitor just a day or so ago. It was the best tree I've seen outside of RalliSport 2, so let's hope it finds its way into the game somehow. After all, the Ewoks we're introducing into the game have got to live somewhere…

Cinemagic!

Joe Staten is very pleased with a new technique he's incorporating into cinemas for the game. Thanks to some code-wizardry, he’s able to render a camera-image to a texture,. In this case, it was a view of an epic conflict through a window of a human ship. Joe says the engineers claim the technique can be applied to any surface, and one programmer told him he could do it on a biped. So, like, we could display an entire cinematic on a Grunt’s eyeball!

Anyway, the point is that instead of flat-looking video outside the window, or on a video screen, we’ll be able to show the actual, alternate 3D scene.

What was the dramatic scene in question? Well, Parsons calls it a pant-filler, I personally would call it a diaper-bulger..

Animatrices

John Butkus, animator-deluxe, has been working on Elite animations, so that when they throw plasma grenades at you it looks totally convincing. Even cooler is their melee attack animations, which John is making weapon-specific rather than generic. That means that when you run into a crowd of Elites, they'll smash in your visor with total realism using a Plasma Rifle or a Needler.


The turret animations are also being honed so that a player manning a turret looks even more badass. Right up until he gets sniped, that is. If you want to see what John's up to now, there's a webcam, slung low in the animator's pit, so you can make sure they're working (without seeing what's on their screens) and luckily, none of them wears a kilt.

Ghosting

Jaime Griesemer, always a beacon of hope for the weekly update, didn't disappoint, and tells it best himself, "The Ghost handling is final. Eamon made it bank into turns, so it feels more like a physical vehicle and less like a magic floaty one. It’s also much lower to the ground than Halo 1, which increases the feeling of speed, makes it react to the ground more and makes it easier to run people over. Shiek also added some ground effect lights which "connect" it to the ground even more."

Woot! Ghosts rule! But Jaime has more to say, "We’ve almost got a final list of combat dialog triggers in preparation for recording in a few weeks. I’m pretty excited because we’re pushing the system a lot farther than we did in Halo 1.

And he continues, "I’ve also been spending time with Dave and Paul working on one of the human-themed levels. We’re trying to make a real, sensible human space with a believable structure, instead of the ant-hill type environments you usually see. That means that rooms and halls fit together to fill the interior space, all the walls have reasonable thicknesses, all the hallways lead to actual places, all the rooms have purposes and are connected to the other rooms logically.

Soundscrapes

C Paul and the audio fellas have been doing some very, very, very cool stuff. Fun with real audio, if you will. C Paul and the guys have been tuning the sounds for Ghost and Warthog. Lots of crashes, smashes, explosions, scrapes and sizzles. The vehicle damage is a noisy business!

C Paul has also been thinking about soundscapes, noises to put in one of the new multiplayer levels. To illustrate, the Lockout multiplayer level you've seen has some of my favorites; wind whistling through narrow walkways, really eerie, lonely sounds. They mute of course when you enter a building, but that simply makes you feel more exposed and afraid when you're out in the open. It's a subtle but brilliant touch, and a lot more organic and natural than the sounds in the original Halo. And of course there are simply more of them.

Other than that, the sound guys have been drinking too much coffee and talking about Marty's plans to become a legendary wedding march composer – a reader sent in a brilliant movie of he and his gorgeous wife being introduced at their reception – to the stirring choir and strings of Marty's Halo intro.

CP Use

Butcher hooked up some new multiplayer code, and as usual, has been toiling away at bug fixes to make networking for Live more stable and robust. One really tough project this week was to finalize a "budget" for how much CPU time each game system is allowed to use. As you can imagine, it's essential that little detail gets nailed down properly…

Web-blastas

We relaunched Bungie.net, to some acclaim, a few complaints and lots and lots of visitors. We don't kid ourselves that they came to see me and Sketch, we know they came for the new screenshots and the slick new look. I have to say though that the amount of work the web and test teams put into the site is incredible. Brian and the guys put in sick hours to make the site look and feel the way it does. The designers and the art team made it look fantastic and the test team made it work! Mostly! After all, I did just about everything you can imagine to break it. Including the only ugly page on the site. The Weekly Update archive.

That's all for this week folks, but there's plenty of other junk to check out on the site, and check this nasty crap out...
http://www.bungie.net/images/Games/Halo2/WeeklyUpdate/birdiesoundscapeer.jpg

[Stumanji]

Loads of Halo 2 Pics Scanned from Game Informer!!

My name is my passport. Verify me. (http://www.freewebs.com/laballerz/halo2.htm)

[Blitzkrieg84]

That is just getting too complicated...I bet if they released that game right now...It would still kick major ass being only 50% done...that's so awesome...I really feel for any PS2 owner right now.

[Verbal]

^ obsessed :D

[Dr. Deezee]

PS2 owners get Xenosaga Episode 2.

I feel for XBox-only owners... I own an XBox, a PS2, a GameCube, and a gaming comp!

BUWHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Hah. Ha.

[M4LFUNCT10N]

/\ /\
And no life!!!

[Dr. Deezee]

I criez...

because it is truth! >_<

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update April 23rd, 2004

I've only been here a few months, but I can honestly say this is the busiest, most spastic week since I arrived. Everyone is grinding – programmers, artists, designers, marketing, everyone. Going bananas. There's lots of activity everywhere you look and best of all, every screen you look at has something cool on it that you never saw before. Might just be a pretty tree, could be some spectacular bloom lighting, and might even be some in-game object that moves around in a fun way. But the level of graphic polish seems to be "sudden."

Things that had previously been flat untextured objects, or textured, but unlit, are now springing gloriously to life, with multiple effects being applied. Those range from bump maps to reflections, to simple lightmapped lighting or the occasionally startling dynamic lights. Actually, you probably saw some of this in the E3 demo last year, but our dynamic lighting isn't necessarily static…

Animation Alley

Nathan has been crunching on tons of multiplayer "triage" which is basically the prioritization of bug fixing, and this week that includes first person weapons (we thought you might want these back) as well as a new melee animation system "that is gonna rock the cheese off a 20” submarine sandwich…" Nathan's dietary habits aside, it's a jammed week in animation.

He's also been tightening the vehicle boarding animations, and I can tell you, they look very cool. And the control system for that is pretty nifty too.

As for characters, according to Nathan the Grunts look way better, courtesy of “Billmation” (Bill’s animation).

"Billmation is the process where bill takes 100% sass and curdles it with dynamic motion to create lickable content…better than 80’s scratch n' sniff stickers I say…" says Nathan.

John Butkus, also animating like crazy, is fixing bugs and polishing existing animations for an upcoming milestone. He's been tweaking and tuning Elite animation, and you're going to see a far more articulated, convincing Elite this time around. They look much more distinct and animalistic this time around and his melee attacks (duck!) look terrifying, and the way the Elites reload now is almost too much detail.

John claims it wasn’t anything too earth-shatteringly exciting this week, just a matter of making sure that everything is working right, while Mike has been working on the animations for an updated Elite model, and created a totally sick rocket launcher melee attack for the Chief. And as Nathan pointed out, Bill has been hard at work on the Grunt, and it definitely shows…the Grunt is looking awesome. Did we say how awesome the Grunt was?

Print Shop

Lorraine is cranking on an Art book project, collating old concept art from Halo and trying to organize and account for all the Halo 2 art that exists, or is still being pumped out. Grind! She's going through literally hundreds of pieces of art and picking out the coolest of the cool.

Lorraine ran into a snag with the Halo 2 action figures (had to figure out what to move to where when a piece was changed in the game) But good news is, a new bad-guy action figure is done and ready for manufacturing. And she's figured out which next three to do…

Lorraine actually saw the final version of the first stage of the Halo 2 logo. Second and third stage needs some tweaking, but time is running short.

Lorraine received samples from another company to do a different kind of action figure and the possibilities are intriguing. Maybe it's kung-fu grip with a one-two punch!!!

Oh, and she hung her Banshee up over her desk to catch tall people in the forehead. Blam!

Oh, and this week (and some of last week, but I guess I can cheat about it), we also found out that Zoe can do wonders with Halo 2 3D models.

Lorraine, in short, is swamped.

Parsons' Projects (sorry)

Parsons thinks his combination of number crunching and marketing speak is boring, but really, Bungie is a rock band, and Parsons is the bass player. So, he might have a point. But he's been busy, no doubt, here's his breakdown:

1. Fun with numbers! Budget is in the air and the bean counters are scurrying around asking stupid questions like, "Do you really need the four-person mini-sub to get your job done?" …Always remember. The 52’ Plasma TV for Parsons' palatial office suite goes under "Misc Product Development – Other."
2. Robt and I are working on something pretty cool for the mkt guys (I think it’s pretty funny to use Robt and mkt in the same sentence – funny until he kills me that is).
3. Really busy this week doing a whole bunch of mildly unpleasant things that nobody else would want to do

Environmental Protection

"I’ll give you the whole run-down on the environment side. I’ve been working with Paul Russel on the *CENSORED*. The *CENSORED* bay where the *CENSORED* was, specifically. Mike Zak and Frank C have been slamming away at *CENSORED* and have some real beautiful combinations of indoor and outdoor spaces. Justin, Michael Wu and Chris Barrett have been doing some real nice work on *CENSORED* including some real nice gardens as well as some cool interiors. Don’t know how helpful that was."

Dave *CENSORED* Dunn


Down in the Engine Room…

A letter from Chucky in the boiler rooms.

Hmm…

We’ve been making new multiplayer maps and game-types work and polishing everything to a nice golden shine. Cuban’s new HUD system is in place (but what it looks like is a secret!) – it uses all our graphics goodness now instead of being a hard coded custom rendering path.

Michael’s working on something that will help build the kind of community for which we’re known. Eamon’s been working with Carney and Steve to get a bunch of sweet physics stuff. Butchy did a bunch of profiling and performance work so that we’re way closer to where we need to be. Bart is testing and tweaking all kinds of MP code he wrote and he did some performance work as well. Ben and Hao are pounding away on under-the-hood rendering infrastructure that’ll allow us to cash the crazy checks the designers are writing.

Luke’s been making a bunch of features like breakable glass work over the network. Greg’s closing out animation and boarding bugs. Bernie’s fixed some old bugs with the first person model rendering. Stefan’s slaving away on Max’s mad UI plan. Mat’s closing out sound features and fighting fires. Damian’s off in the corner talking with his AI. And of course I’m management overhead, and doing a #%#&* fine job of it. :P

Love,
Chucky
==================

And that's all for this week folks, hope you take a moment to check out the host site, and we'll chat again, real soon. Bye! Oh, one more thing, they even censored Mister Chief this week…

http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/tigertankcensor.jpg

[Stumanji]

Short and largely pointless this week, as the team crunches, the marketing guys are swept into the maelstrom of E3, and just about everyone this week, not coincidentally, is working on a secret part of the game that they can't even really hint at.

Nathan's Animation Station

Nathan's on a roll this week, saying, "I think I saw John’s knuckles bleeding this week. He was talking to his knuckles too…it was either to give them congratulations from really hard work on the Elite, or gently spoken murmurs of encouragement before John pops me one. I am unsure which is true, but I do know that the Elites’ animations are very tight.

Buddman has been working on another top-secret character while taking some time out to calm the Jackal…quiet and collected, Mike Budd trudges through the toughest characters to make them awesome. I wish we could say more about his secret character, since it will rock harder than a quarry when you see it in-game.

The Billmation studio is still going strong. While working on Grunt animations we occasionally get blessed by poorly done Christopher Walken impressions coupled with a nice rendition of “Can You feel the Love Tonight” as sung by Nathan Lane. The scariest part is the Nathan Lane as Christopher Walken impression. I wanted to run away but couldn’t since I had just soiled myself from laughter and slipped on my own feces.

I have been tightening the multiplayer Spartan animations, addressing bug after bug. I am thinking of changing my name from “bentllama” to “Orkin Man”, though I don’t think I will need the hardhat. I also have blisters on my palms from those damn S controllers. They have this plastic seam of razor along side them that really dig into your hands while clutching the controller in anger. When the multiplayer maps get to a stage where everyone is getting angry, then you know they are fun. Mark my words Jaime, I will get you back…you and you pony named 'One trick'!"

David's Bells and Whistles

David Candland, User Interface master and all around superhuman, says, "This past week or so was devoted to experimenting with new elements into the Heads-Up Display. Right now in the HUD, there are new bits mixed alongside old bits. We’re trying something different with the look of the health and shield system people knew in Halo 1, so eventually that is the biggest difference people will notice. We’re also toying with an icon system instead of text to warn you about low ammo, reloads and no grenades. Cuban has been huge in getting these working slick. We’re also bringing back a favorite feature that has been missing in Bungie games since the Myth series.

In UI land, we’ve been getting all the half-built, work in progress menus to look un-broken. And- as Frank knows, I’ve been going back and forth with Parsons (I’m winning) about what we should reveal about our secret Xbox Live plans that will change the way people play online forever. Not only have we got a system that fixes the bad things about playing on Live, but one that makes the experience even more fun. We’re shooting to make playing on Live as close to the amount of fun as playing at a friend’s LAN party. This plan will put an end to war and poverty. It will align the planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life." From extra terrestrials to common household pets… OK maybe not. But it will be cool. You saw it first here, kids."

Engineering

No update from engineering this week, except to say that they've been fixing bugs and tuning something you'll see in a week or two.

Butcher's Block

Chris Butcher has been working on performance fixes. Framerates are pretty smooth right now, but Chris has been finding and eradicating "stupid little things" taking up valuable CPU time that shouldn't be.

Chris and the guys have been arguing a ton over the balance of vehicles versus infantry, but points out that it's really fun now. Other big arguments going on right now on exactly how a level should be lit. The way it is now is fantastic (says me) and it captures the blazing yellow of a mid sunrise, complete with the bloom and glare you get when the sun is still low in the sky. Better yet, you look straight up, and there's the pale moon, still visible before full daylight. Very atmospheric.

That level (on Earth) also has tons of cool structures that obscure and reveal the glare of the sun as you run around. Looks coooool. Don't know what they could possibly be arguing about, to be honest.

Warholes

The bump-maps in Halo 2 are really very clever. The stuff in the original Halo was pretty cool – you know, the big metal bulkheads with their ridges and extrusions, but the art and the tech for that stuff has come on a long way since then.
For example, I was just taking a close look at a yellow/black warning decal on a barrier, and it was very slightly bumpy, just like painted cast-iron, with a gorgeous specular highlight. I can stare at that crap for hours. I also find myself "skimming" close to wall surfaces, pock-marked, cratered pavements, trying to "beat" the optical illusion a bump map creates.

Even the Chief is nicely bump-mapped, with the not coincidental side-effect that this frees up more polys and memory for enhanced animation. As a matter of fact, the new Chief actually uses fewer polys than the old one. Which to me, is kind of a mind-BLAM! Because he looks about seven console generations better. To me.

Another funny thing about our bump, texture and light maps is that every time I load up a build, something I thought was finished and gorgeous has been replaced by something better, and I invariably find that an old texture I thought was finished, was a placeholder. The upshot of that is that the environments are a lot more varied and organic than I expected.

Until next week, which if anything, will be even more mental than this, enjoy Mister's pop art debut.

http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/warhole043004.gif

[Stumanji]

View them quick, before they're pulled!

New Scans from OXM!!!
Pretty juicy info in this one, including more information on "Hijacking" vehicles... CRAZY!!

Halo 2 OXM Scans!!! (http://s4.invisionfree.com/Turbogamers/index.php?showtopic=238)

[night3218]

Originally posted by Dr. Deezee
PS2 owners get Xenosaga Episode 2.

I feel for XBox-only owners... I own an XBox, a PS2, a GameCube, and a gaming comp!

BUWHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Hah. Ha.

same here. i have all systems so if one game comes out for one sys and not the other i dont have to miss out.

[Stumanji]

:grumpy: Take that talk to Console City! :grumpy:

This is HALO 2 HEADQUARTERS!!

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update May 7th 2004
What a week. OK, we can finally admit it, since you'll find out next week anyway. We have been working on something neat for E3. And we sincerely hope you like it when it's unveiled. And as usual, it's been a juggling act between making something cool, and trying to interfere as little as possible with the game's ship date.

Harold and Mods.

Harold Ryan has been a busy chap this week, listing among his accomplishments the following:

• Making movies for marketing (his favorite thing)
• Releasing the HEK (Halo Editing Kit) into the wild, so that users can now make their own Halo-PC multiplayer maps.
• Quadrupled the IP address space of our network, to handle the gigaplex of Xboxes we need to test Halo2 multiplayer. (Though the change won’t take affect until after E3)
• Caught a bass.
• Killing people for not updating their security stuff.


Harold says that at E3, he's looking forward to seeing Worlds of Warcraft, and finding out what Sega's been up to.

Candyland

David Candland, our User Interface maestro has been doing what he refers to as "boring stuff." Which includes getting stuff fine tuned for E3 and attending meetings planning really cool things that dare not be uttered yet – Which again he alleges makes his comments boring. On a personal side, his Dev Kit contracted a serious terminal ailment, so David had Harold take it out back and shoot it. That Development Kit was responsible for about 90% of the Halo imagery on Bungie.net. Now it’s headed to the glue factory.

As for what he's looking forward to at E3, David reads a big list: "Of course, everyone’s looking forward to Doom 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Half Life 2 –myself included. What I want to see are some unexpected surprises: Duke Nukem Forever in retail boxes; the announcement trailer for Wizard of Wor 2004; seeing games based on movie licenses like Sky Captain, Casshern, or I Robot –and them not sucking; seeing someone announce a good side-scroller on the Xbox; I love getting surprised. Last year I was yawning."

Cuban Bazaar

Adrian "Cuban" Perez describes his week: "I’ve been building up my Halo rage a bit as we’ve been working hard ‘testing’ a new build. Also I was doing a slew of small little bugs that will make the experience even better. The multiplayer spawning rules (which trust me, are much more nuanced and hopefully much less exploitable than Halo 1) were tuned a bit, to work better with the changes we’ve made to how vehicles are put together. The logic that governs when the timer freezes in a timed CTF game works well enough that, combined with Carney’s excellent map design, make almost every game end with an orgasmic, euphoric triumph or a spirit/bone crushing defeat.

We’re pretty happy with the changes we’ve made to the in-game waypoints; you’ll know much more about your teammates and what they’re up to in the field, but without any of that annoying text cluttering up your screen. There’s this annoying thing you get in FPS’s where you can talk where people just panic and can’t adequately describe their position. No more “help! I need cover!!” “where?” “over… over here! By that thing! With the glowy – shit I’m dead”; the game will take care of a lot of that for you.

As for E3, I’m looking forward to seeing how all the big guns are coming along – Doom 3, Half Life 2, Killzone; I hope that we get to find out a little bit more about MGS3 than that weird enigmatic trailer from last year. I’m also really excited to see what the Fable guys have been up to – of all the games trying to cash such novelty oversized checks, Fable’s hey-I-think-I'll-get-a-haircut-and-a-Frappucino-then-slay-a-dragon check, is really on a whole different level. I’m really looking forward to it."

Parsons Knows

Parsons, Studio Manager and Whoremonger extraordinaire has been working on final E3 preparations, to make sure what we have to show there is cool. He's also been practicing total sensory and sleep deprivation by not going to bed, or even going out in the sunshine. He amusingly left the lights on his nasty-looking Ford hooptie on all night with predictable results. His car is so old and busted that not only is there no warning chime for lights-on, there's also no safety equipment. In fact, for a passenger side airbag, Parsons simply stuffs his glove compartment with bubble wrap and donuts.

Parsons says he's looking forward to seeing more on Half Life 2, Conkers, WoW, and Doom 3. For strictly non-competitive reasons, he says.

Task the Cananimators

John Butkus' odyssey of animation continues, as he explains, "Okay, this week I’ve been bouncing between three characters…Hunter, Marine, and CENSORED. I think the CENSORED will be a lot of fun because he’s like this big CENSORED on a stick, so he’s very top-heavy and CENSORED. I’ve also been working on kicking Carney’s ass on an Earth-based MP map, although we have teamed up and become quite formidable at guarding the flag. As long as everyone remembers to ‘do their job’, then playing defense on that map can be quite fun and I would say it’s easier than being on offense. Steve has also started on the new iteration of what was a fairly finished map, and we had a great lunchtime match yesterday with Carney and Ryan…you know you have a great Slayer map in the works when it’s just a bunch of flat-shaded cubes and planes, and people are already screaming ‘F***!!’ after they lose a close-quarters SMG shootout. I think this new one will be a rage-inducing map indeed.

Back on topic, so I’m on the secret character, Mike has started on a new Marine, and Bill is back on the Grunt. We haven’t really broken stride from the E3 crunch and I think we’re going to have to keep this up ‘till the end. It was good to see new people coming into the studio (and downstairs at the meeting) and playing the game and really enjoying it…it kind of gives you that extra kick in the ass to sit down and work extra hard to put more great stuff in the game. Oh F***, I almost forgot we were doing some cool shit with transitions between animations this week…so instead of a marine standing still and then suddenly popping into a run cycle, he now has a transition animation where he’ll drop his weight and then get up to speed and vice versa when he’s slowing down to a stop. It’s working pretty well so far, and it’ll definitely help add that extra bit of realism to the game. I did some for the marine, and Mike did some for the Jackal and the Elite.

So what am I looking forward to seeing at E3? Well, I’m not able to attend this year and I was really looking forward to telling G4TV’s Tina Wood that I have a massive crush on her…next year, I suppose. Oh, you meant games. Well, of course I want to see how Half-Life 2 and Doom3 are coming along, and I hear Viewtiful Joe 2 might be making an appearance. I always like seeing what the new crop of hockey games are looking like (please NHL, let them include realistic fights…pleasepleaseplease), and I like seeing how the projects my friends at other studios are working on are coming along."

Bringing the Payne

Cam Payne, our little-heard from marketing guru, has been swearingly busy this week, as he explains: "This week’s too CENSORED busy and crazy and CENSORED nuts to CENSORED even take the CENSORED time to CENSORED talk about it. Somebody please shoot me.

Last year I had tons of fun playing Conker on the floor, and can’t wait to play the new build. There are also a few “big” 3rd party titles I’d like to see, whose names I need not mention here."

Butcher Bray

Butcher has been making sure we can do all the stuff we're committed to doing! One problem he pointed out with Halo One is that when you're the Master Chief, you face your head, point your weapon and turn your feet in the same direction when you run. The end result is that from a distance, a sidestepping player appears to "slide." This is especially noticeable after a player death, when you view the action from the brief "afterlife" cam.

So Butcher has connected Greg's cool animation system to the player control system, and now that little animation problem is all but eliminated. It seems like a small thing but it makes a heck of a difference when you're watching a lot of characters on screen at once, and it works brilliantly when Chief transitions from walk to run.

And for this E3, Butcher's looking forward to Full Spectrum Warrior and Riddick.

Fan-Tasm

It's FanFest time again. And this year, the Bungie faithful are assembling once more under the hot glare of a closed E3 convention center. What will they see? Who will they meet? Who will faint first? Only time will tell. But we'll try to bring you a full FanFest report next week.

Expect a giant update next week, with lots of the stuff I can't tell you about this week. Until then, here's a preview of what's REALLY happening at E3 next week…

http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/misterchiefe3050704.gif

[Stumanji]

8 New Screenshots!!! (http://www.bungie.net/Games/Halo2/Gallery.aspx?Gallery=Screenshots&page=3)

Bandwidth is pretty tight, since 9.2 billion Halo fans are trying to view the pictures... just be patient.

Halo 2 Release Date Announced!!!

Stumanji begins crushing you on Live, November 9, 2004!

Expect some great new info later this week. E3 is upon us!

Also, be sure to read this article, (http://xbox.ign.com/articles/513/513152p1.html) a write-up by one lucky bastard that got to spend an hour playing 4-on-4 CTF in Halo 2!

[M4LFUNCT10N]

Umm... wow.... From those pictures.... it looks like it's safe to assume...

A) You can now play as aliens in multi-player
OR
B) The co-op mode will allow for 4 people this time around


AND

Master Chief will be able to use the Sword this time around!

w00t!

[M4LFUNCT10N]

Just read the review.... yes to playing as elites, and using the sword!!

[Stumanji]

I know what I'll be doing at the November/December/January/etc LANs...

Hay-Row Too!

[Stumanji]

As if there wasn't enough excitement on the day...

Take a look at the Limited Collector's Edition of the Halo 2 box, available to those who preorder it (Bungie suggests you contact your retailer to let them know you'd like this box or the other).

Sweet-Ass Angle Shot: http://www.bungie.net/images/News/InlineImages/metalboxshotz/anglemetalbox.gif

Baby Got Back:
http://www.bungie.net/images/News/InlineImages/metalboxshotz/backmetalbox.gif

Also, here is the link to 4 videos (about 2 minutes each) of multiplayer tutorial at the E3 Microsoft Press Conference that took place TONIGHT (May 10, 2004). Some really spectacular footage in there. Halo fans, this is a must see!

The Halo 2 Multiplayer Tutorial (http://previews.teamxbox.com/xbox/720/Halo-2/p1)

[M4LFUNCT10N]

It's..... so.... :sniff: ... beautiful.

[Stumanji]

I've been watching them over and over... and over...

Can't get enough!

[Stumanji]

Two new screenshots for ya:

http://nikon.bungie.org/screenshots/halo2.com.051004/image08.jpg

http://nikon.bungie.org/screenshots/halo2.com.051004/image01.jpg

[Stumanji]

I didn't think this was worthwhile as far as posting... but I'll let you decide.

Supposedly it's the box art for Halo 2, as the "For Display Purposes Only" Box (you see these at game stores). That makes some sense, but every single picture on the box has already been used/released, so I don't really buy it... you decide.

http://arsenic.geekshelter.com/image/halo2small.jpg

[Dr. Deezee]

I don't think that'll be the final box art at all.

Maybe the front (maybe) but certainly not the back.

On a completely unrelated subject... I try not to follow games too much. (Ones that haven't been released that is.) In the past, I've found that I get sucked into the hype, and then when I play the game I get really disappointed...

However.

Halo 2 is shaping up to be awesome. (Judging from the stuff you've collected + posted, Stumanji.)

[Stumanji]

An Interview with Bungie Studios Manager Pete Parsons, on Halo 2 (http://xbox.ign.com/articles/512/512807p1.html?fromint=1)

This is from Halo 2's Sound Engineer (not sure if that's his REAL title) Marty O'Donnell, concerning the "accidental death" in the Halo 2 Multiplayer Demo:

"When Joe hits the hog with the rocket from the stairs, Max usually gets blown down the beach a bit. This time luck wasn't with him. He got accelerated at high speed into a parked Ghost which then blew up good. Result - premature death; thus proving that nothing in this demo was scripted, other than the fly through".

[Expunge]

Those aliens look uber dorky holding those tiny assed machine guns :P

[Stumanji]

This is a screenshot of the Elite's HUD in multiplayer. You'll notice it's the same as the Spartan's HUD (in the following post) except it's purple... I'm hoping they decide to get a bit more creative with it in that respect.

Also, notice the messages after this Elite's most recent kill:
"You beat down Mendoza."
"You ended Mendoza killing spree."

[Stumanji]

Here's the Spartan HUD.

[Stumanji]

And here's a picture of the Game Lobby for Halo 2. It looks pretty cool, and unlike Halo:CE, it actually gives you information about the match you're about to join, like "Single Flag CTF", "Normal Weapons," and "Time to Win".

[Excessive]

Halo 2 demo video is on file planet. File planet (http://www.fileplanet.com/files/140000/140536.shtml)

[Stumanji]

I downloaded all four parts seperately, and then pieced them together on my computer. I did all this before the full video was available for download. I'm THAT cool.

Here's another nugget I came across tonight. It's the teaser poster as seen at E3:

(note: the text on the poster reads: "Earth will never be the same.")

[Stumanji]

Hope this link works for ya... Opens up in Windows Media Player, and it's about 20 seconds long of actual multiplayer gameplay from E3.

Enjoy!

Halo 2 Multiplayer in Action (http://c.streamingmovies.ign.com/xbox/article/514/514235/halo2_e32004_clip_wmvlow.wmv)

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update E3 Special

So as you probably know, a bunch of the Bungie guys have been at E3 this week, showing off a level of multiplayer action to press and a few lucky members of the public. The good news is that the vast majority of the Bungie guys stayed right at home, working hard on halo 2 so that it ships on November 9th, the finally announced launch date.

We also showed off a few other things this week, like the metal box for the special edition. This update comes to you live from the show floor. Well, live from a back room at the show floor. Right now I'm sitting next to a generator and a pile of boxes.

The demos we've been doing are really cool. We could have had the game on the show floor and let swarms of players at it, but it would have been a mess. The game type we chose to demo was turn-based single flag CTF - just imagine the chaos if we'd let people on the floor jump in and out. It would have been a team-killing flag losing, warthog crashing catastrophe. So, instead, we built three rooms with ten machines each, playing five-on-five, Covenant Vs. Elites.

Just to give you some info - and no doubt some of you have read bits of this on the various game sites - we showed off one level - Zanzibar. In the year 2552, it's a small East African industrial town, 20 clicks north east of New Mombassa. At its center is the fan assembly of a giant wind powered generation facility. It fronts a long, rocky beach, strewn with debris from the initial Covenant assault. Inside its fortified sea walls are a large empty courtyard, abandoned control facilities and plenty of battle damage. The main base, where the flag is located, is a twisty maze of ramps and corridors. Rooftop turret emplacements help defend it from attack, and the creaking groan of the fans and the sound of heavy industrial equipment gives the place a menacing air.

Inside the base, turbines spin endlessly, flickering with electrical discharge. Plate glass windows surround its central hub, and its warren of tunnels exits and entrances make it tough to secure. A breach in its outer walls makes the job almost impossible. In short, I reckon this level is one to rival Blood Gulch - but that's something only time will tell.

Although the quality of play varied throughout the show, we were surprised how quickly people picked up the new features - like dual-wielding and boarding - one guy even figured out how to blast out the struts on a corrugated iron storm window - the iron panel swings back down, protecting base occupants from sniper rifles - but players can still poke their heads out, moving the panel on its hinges.

One guy realized that he could roll the explosive fusion cores off the base rooftop and drop them on incoming rocket hogs - basically a homemade bomb. People really seemed to be having fun with the game's intricacies, and almost every player used or made an effort to use the Covenant Energy Sword.

Apparently things in the game are pretty self-explanatory - even the waypoint icons in the HUD. It's possible for example to see from anywhere in the map if a player has the flag, or if one of your buddies has been killed - the waypoints even show you where he died.

Destructible environments were a big hit. The bulkheads in the Flag base are fully destructible, and we found defenders blasting away at their own base just because it blew up so prettily. We also had to tell defenders not to open the gate to their facility - they just seemed to enjoy activating the control panel and watching the gate slide open and unfold - but that of course left them wide open to attack.

Although the demo stations were set up for ten players - the game actually supports 16 - great news for LIVE, but even better - it supports 16 players for System Link too. Finally! Everyone gets his or her own screen, one way or another.

The multiplayer stuff is going to rock. We think that through a combination of Tijuana Mama-infused secret Bungie sauce and some collaboration with the bitchin' Xbox Live team, that we're going to be able to recreate the social experience of a System Link game. We'll tell you more about that later.

The game is going to have all the stuff you'd expect. It'll support voice communication, you can even leave voice messages when you're trying to set up a game. You can form clans - your can customize emblems - sharp-eyed gamers might have noticed a Spartan supporting a Ninja on Fire emblem, a blue metal suit, with yellow secondary colors. Being able to customize your player is kind of awesome. Naturally, Covenant Elites can do the same thing.

Speaking of Space Jerks, the Covenant Plasma Sword was a massive hit. You can use it with normal melee attacks, but if you get close enough to a player and your reticule turns red, you have a lock-on. Press the right trigger and you leap forward, as if pulled by the sword, and instantly kill anyone unlucky enough to be in front of you.

Other little changes impressed too, like the destructible vehicles (you can shoot off the Rocket-Hog's hubcaps) and the interactive environments. Basically, if it's not nailed down, you can move it. We watched players roll barrels around, blast piles of debris skyward with grenades, and basically mess around with the environment. One player bounced up and down in a corridor, head butting a light fixture and making it swing wildly, casting light and shadow in a crazy pattern.

People who crashed vehicles in the fan assembly often got a nasty surprise. As the fan turned, it would scoop up wrecked vehicles, lifting them 80 feet above the ground. Then, when the blade reached its apex, it would spill its cargo of explosive partially wrecked Warthog or ghost onto the heads of unsuspecting players.

New article effects kicked up dust and sand on the beach. A grenade flung into the ocean would raise a cataclysmic explosion of water, and the new decorator system blends beautifully with the textures to create realistic organic environments.

Multiplayer battles looked vastly improved thanks to the new animation (which actually has a lot of improvements to be implemented post E3) and as the Spartans or Elites took off in group formation, they looked totally natural and realistic (or as realistic as eight foot tall aliens can).

The players also figured out the new tracking rocket system. A locked on rocket can follow a speeding vehicle in a vicious arc, It's pretty depressing when you think you're safely out of range and you hear that "WHOOOOOSH!"

But boarding was a hoot. It makes those close up vehicle skirmishes all the more frightening. If you try to smash another player against a rock wall, there's always a danger he could jump up, board you and kill you with your own ride. We also watched a new phenomenon - the Rocket Hog parasite. Since you can board any part of a vehicle, a red player can board the rocket turret of a Blue-driven Hog. The blue player's only recourse is to abandon the hog, or drive the enemy rocket jerk somewhere he can do less damage - then of course they have to square off against each other. Results can be hilarious.

Fans of Warthog jumps will be pleased to know that they can roll explosive fusion cores into a pile, park a Hog and basically light the fuse (with a few well placed Battle Rifle shots). Results may vary...

And speaking of the battle rifle, people seemed to enjoy its intricacies. When in normal mode, it fires short bursts of fire, but zoomed, it fires single rounds, reminiscent of the pistol. One weapon with two distinct modes adds more strategic stuff than you'd expect.

FANS

At Thursday night's fanfest event - we surprised the assembled group by letting them into the back rooms to play for a half hour each. Since these were the hardest of the hardcore, we basically didn't have to explain anything. A surprise guest at the FanFest was Char - he of Halo 2 Alpha fame. Naturally he OWNED. I watched him play for a bit. He could throw a grenade into the tailpipe of a speeding warthog as he jumped backwards through a plate glass window (there really is breakable glass in the game of course). But most uncanny was his reload timing. I never even thought about that too much but he was reloading with the same efficiency most people snipe.

Sgt. Johnson made a guest appearance, getting big laughs from the crowd as he continually messed with Sketch's intro. Lorraine McLees made custom drawings for raffle winners, creating original Halo art on the spot. She probably has carpal right now.

Hamilton Chu signed autographs, Jay mingled with the peeps, and everything was going swimmingly until a stern-faced officer of the law showed up asking to speak to Marty O'Donnell. Fearing that Marty's 8-track smuggling business had finally caught up with him, Jay led the officer to the Bungie maestro. "Mr. O'Donnell?" asked the policeman. "I'm a HUGE fan of the Halo soundtrack..."

The fanfest ended on a high note, as everyone got the chance to play the game, enjoy some cool sodas, bask in actual air conditioning, and were there to witness the discovery of the worst pizza known to science. It is bad enough that it might end up becoming a tradition.

THE CREW

Hard to express enough how awesome the small but perfectly formed Bungie crew was. Everyone chipped in and we mean, carrying boxes, gluing crap together, doing endless game demos standing on their feet for ten hours straight - they're all troopers. Sketch organized things so that fanfest went off without a hitch, Harold and Ryan made sure all the Xbox systems were working and the flat panel displays were calibrated, Parsons and Hoberman got their hands dirty with the demos, Lorraine showed up and helped run things behind the scenes, Jay was all over it, and Michel showed up to kick ass with the demos too. Alta, Bungie Princess and house den mother ensured that nobody had to worry about anything but feeding his or her face. I'm sure I forgot some peeps, but basically everyone rocked.

MISSING CHIEF

No Mister Chief today - thanks to limited resources - but I'll update this next week with a deluxe Mister Chief.

[Stumanji]

An Article on Bungie's E3 FanFest (http://www.xbox.com/en-US/halo2/bungiefanfest.htm)

A quick read. Little tidbits about the FanFest, Halo 2, and Bungie.

[spankybsm]

On G4's e3 live I was watching some stuff about halo 2. They showed like how you can steal ghosts from enemies, and how they can steal them back. (The two players were having a ball kicking eachother out of the ghost) Then they showed how you can destroy the ghost, then they showed how you can have dual weapons.

It looked pretty cool =X

[Stumanji]

You should check Page 4 of this thread. There's tons of information, plus some ACTUAL multiplayer footage (about 20 seconds of it) and loads of pictures from E3.

[Stumanji]

Some nice tidbits about the Halo 2 gameplay, and some downloadable shakycam footage of the game in action (AVI) can be found right here. (http://opa-ages.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=10241)

The first post and the following post have good info. Check it out.

[Stumanji]

New Screenshot released today.

Here ya go:

[iFrag]

^^^^^ Can you say.. Mommy?

[Expunge]

Originally posted by iFrag
^^^^^ Can you say.. Mommy?
"Mommy"

[Stumanji]

A lot of good E3 FanFest information here... (http://www.subnova.com/library/?aid=20040518.174537)

Below is the Halo 2 information from the write-up

There's been a lot of confusion and misguided deduction over the movies released on the net, so let's just get one thing straight first: It is fun. It is damn fun, at least as good as Halo 1 (unfortunately we got so little experience with it I don't feel qualified to say more than that yet). The new features add a ton of new wrinkles to the gameplay, but the core Halo action is still there. The groups of 20 were divided into 2 groups of 10 and each given a separate room for 5v5 games on Zanzibar, playing the same one-flag CTF game as the demo. There were 2 types of stations available: Comfy chairs and small LCD monitors, or simple stools and huge plasma displays- guess which one I picked :) Max Hoberman spent a good deal of time watching over my shoulder and giving me advice; while I usually didn't have the opportunity (or skills) to actually follow it he had some interesting tidbits about the map. As we've seen, Zanzibar consists of 3 general areas:

A beach, where the attacking team and their vehicles spawn. This beach also contains the flag return point; I was not aware of this and had to have it pointed out to me by Max while carrying the flag. It's necessary to hold down X to interact with the flag now, either to grab it out of the base or to return it if dropped. This is an interesting change, since returning the flag is no longer a matter of simply getting close enough to it, it requires attention to the task and timing. This new delay also applies to entering vehicles (it's "Hold X" instead of "Press X"), which is probably meant to cut down on accidental boards when trying to do something else the X button is usually for, but I've never noticed that being so common as to be annoying. There are 2 ways (that I found) to get from the beach to the interior: a small staircase leading up onto the sea wall and through a short hall, and a large opening suitable for driving vehicles through. The short hallway makes the battle rifle and sniper rifle available, for long-range attacks on defenders manning the gun turrets. The large opening leads directly into the huge, slowly turning fan in the center of the map. This fan turns fast enough to have an effect on maneuvers but not fast enough to be annoying or to make it worth avoiding altogether; it's easy to slip through it, but if you fight around it the sweeping blades add a nice element of chaos as they shove players, corpses, and debris out of their way. The beach also has a wave effect similar to the one of Silent Cartographer and Death Island.

The central area is where most of the action on the level takes place, as the attackers are engaged by defenders on the ledges surrounding the base. In here,I saw how the rocket launcher is meant to absolutely dominate vehicles when they go head-to-head: with Max's help I took out the Warthog and 3 Ghosts while they all attacked at once. The ground is littered with "fusion cores" which are pretty much booby traps; if they take enough damage they will explode, and they can be moved with the new physics engine by walking into them. If anyone managed to spot a small cluster of rocks near the door to the base interior, there are some extra rockets in there. There's also a shotgun available among the pillars in the center. If you bring in a Warthog, chances are it will explode in this area, so there's plenty of open space for it to send its debris flying around. The energy sword is also found in this area, but it takes so much time to run up and grab it that it didn't see much use. According to Max, it's possible to blast it out of its hole with a rocket.

The interior of the base has a large open area containing the flag, along with a ramp that spirals around from the back and ends at the turret ledges in the front. There are several glass windows overlooking the flag room, and has been observed from the screenshots they can be broken in sections. It took me 4 shots to completely destroy a glass window, unfortunately I didn't get time to try any different patterns of fire. The turret ledges are pretty exposed, vulnerable to both sniping with the rifle or battle rifle and rocket fire from the Warthog. Explosives will destroy most of the decoration on the edge, but it seems you have to score a direct hit on a turret to take it out as well. There is a side passage that allows you to go from the exterior directly to the gate control, opening up the main gate to let your teammates rush the base. Driving a vehicle into the base, however, is suicide, since there's no room to maneuver.


The polygon counts around this map are significantly higher than those in Halo 1, and the texture design seems to have a rough, weathered appearance that Halo 1's spotless sci-fi surfaces often lacked. This is definitely a war zone, and it's been through a lot.

More weapons are available on the level than were showed in the demo, and the old weapons have been tweaked in significant ways.

Each player, on both sides, spawns with a single SMG. I've seen the SMG compared to HPC's flamethrower, and that's not all that far from the truth- the SMG is very effective at close range but loses most of its power as the target retreats. However, this can be offset by picking up a second SMG, which makes for a devastating attack. The SMG fires very, very fast, faster than the AR from Halo 1.

The new Needler is, as promised, actually useful in multiplayer. Its needles fly far faster than before, although I couldn't determine if they still tracked.

There is a plasma rifle present on the level, and it seems to be relatively unchanged except for the ability to dual wield it. When used in combination with an anti-armor weapon like the SMG, you can see how dual wielding completely changes the strategies one needs.

The battle rifle seems to be designed to replace the pistol (at least on this level), and does a pretty good job of it. As we know, it fires three-round bursts (and, yes, you have to release and re-pull the trigger after a burst, it's not automatic) and single shots when zoomed, so it can be both a decent close combat weapon and a passable sniping weapon. When I tried to use it to take out a turret operator, I didn't manage to do it, though, which could mean that the turret was blocking my shots or that the BR is tough to aim. Whatever else you can say about it, the BR doesn't seem to fulfill the same role as the AR, so the AR may still be in the game (or the SMG is its replacement).

The shotgun, found in the center of the level, is also relatively unchanged, but due to the added features of the rest of the game it's been kicked out of the catbird seat of close-range combat, and can easily be defeated with dual SMGs or the plasma sword.

The sniper rifle has one important change in its behavior: It will kick up after each shot, requiring you to re-aim. Getting a headshot is now of the utmost importance, since you won't be able to easily squeeze off 2 or 3 shots and hit the same target each time (at least, not without a lot of skill and practice, which I'm sure is the idea).

The rocket launcher has had two changes, one minor and one major. The minor change is that rockets now accelerate as they fly, which is closer to the behavior of real-life rockets. Leading a target is now significantly harder, especially when you have to un-learn the behavior of Halo 1's rocket launcher. But it doesn't matter that much thanks to the controversial tracking feature. When asked personally, the Bungie guys were very clear: The rocket launcher is meant to pwn vehicles. Some of the arguments for a vehicle-pwning weapon can be seen in HPC: The Ghost and the Banshee. The Banshee is extremely difficult to kill unless it's diving straight at you, and even then you'd better have very good aim and hope he isn't good at dodging. As for the Ghost, a popular strategy on Blood Gulch (or other vehicle maps) is to jump in a ghost, zoom over to the enemy base, grab the flag, get back in the ghost, and zoom back to your base before the enemy realizes what just happened. Unless there's a very, very skilled enemy sniper, you're pretty much home free once you get up to top speed and head downfield. In Halo 2, this will no longer be possible; you'll need to ensure that nobody with a rocket launcher is covering your escape route. Preventing a single person from accomplishing an objective that's meant to require a team effort is an admirable goal, but this of course would require that your teammates all be willing to work together on a plan at the same time, which in most FPSes is quite rare outside the organized clan realm. It remains to be seen how Xbox Live, with its voice chat and guaranteed broadband performance, will affect this. One other minor tweak to the rocket launcher is that the player now holds it on his shoulder at an angle, which lets both barrels be seen from the first-person view.

The plasma sword is extremely difficult to reach, so it was rare that it was put into play. I only picked it up once, and didn't get a chance to kill anyone with it (even the plasma sword won't help you when charging 2 people with 2 SMGs each). One thing I did notice is that the recovery time for the lunge attack is very, very long; after test-firing it I was afraid that I would encounter another player before I was ready to attack again. Of course, once you are killed carrying the sword, it drops on the ground and now it's in play and can be used by anyone who finds it, so you'd better be good at using it if you're going to grab it. As above, the sword can apparently be blasted out of its hidey-hole with explosives, but no one tried this and I suspect it would go bouncing unpredictably all over the courtyard, turning it into a wildcard instead of an advantage for your team.


There's so much that can be said about dual wielding that it deserves articles all on its own when the game ships. In Halo 1, much was said over potential combinations of 2 weapons to carry and switch between; now you have the ability to fire 2 types of attack at once, and can mix and match many of the weapons in the game for a huge number of damage type combinations. The dual-wield weapons on Zanzibar are the SMG, the needler, and the plasma rifle, so that's 6 configurations right there, and there are likely additional dual-wield-capable weapons in the game that we haven't even seen yet. The behavior of dual wielding is a bit unclear, so this is how it works: When you are holding a dual-wieldable weapon, standing over a second dual-wieldable weapon pops up a "Hold Y to dual wield" message. Holding Y will indeed pick up the second weapon in your left hand (or you can hold X to swap as in Halo 1). From now on, you can't throw grenades or use a melee attack. Pressing X will apparently only reload the weapon in your right hand; this may change in the future. There is no ammo display for the left weapon, another possible target for change. You can fire the weapons independently with the two triggers, but when you fire both at once your aim will start to drift up, as if the increased recoil is overwhelming even the Chief's strength. You can stop dual wielding by pressing Y; this will make you drop the left weapon and return to using the single right weapon. I'm not quite clear on what happens to this weapon (whether it gets dropped back on the ground or simply disappears). If you are standing over a weapon, holding X will drop both dual wielded weapons and give you the new one. While all this is happening you can still carry a second weapon in your second weapon slot (what you normally get when pressing Y), but you can't get to this weapon without giving up your left weapon. If you take the ammo from a dual wield weapon (walk over a weapon identical to one you are holding), an empty weapon is left on the ground to be dual wielded. In the end, dual wielding is going to make weapon balance pretty interesting, and a lot less "weapon X beats weapon Y" formulaic, although Halo was already pretty good in that regard, and definitely a place to look for behavior to change before release.

The three vehicles available on the level (a rocket hog and 2 ghosts) were also significantly different from their Halo 1 equivalents. I did feel that the level was rather cramped for vehicle use; it was difficult to get up any real speed without crashing into something. The ability to damage parts of vehicles wasn't actually that important, as most players spotting a vehicle would attack with explosives, and either miss completely or total the vehicle (killing everyone on board and rendering it a smoking hulk). You can't simply steal a vehicle from the enemy by attacking willy-nilly, you'll have to aim carefully to hit the driver without damaging the vehicle if you want it to be available after he's dead. But why would you need to kill him anyway, since there's boarding? Sadly boarding was very rare; I didn't spot it being performed at all during my games. I suspect the reason for this is that, for an experienced Halo 1 player, the response to an attacking vehicle is virtually a reflex: If you are properly equipped, attack at range, otherwise retreat. Getting in close to an enemy vehicle is suicide in Halo 1, so it will take a while to get used to boarding. Hopefully, the single-player campaign will have some good boarding opportunities, to introduce and the concept and provide opportunities to practice. The warthog has 2 new controls: An emergency brake on the left trigger, and a horn on the right. The emergency brake is useful because the hog has picked up a lot more traction since Halo 1; it's much less likely to go into a skid unless you hit the brake. Driving the vehicles should now be less a matter of simply pointing the way you want to go and bouncing off rocks and trees until you're clear, especially since vehicles now take damage, and more a matter of actual steering and skill. The horn is just a bell and/or whistle, but I can't wait to honk out a warning just before turning someone into a hood ornament (or, more likely, to hear that taunting hoot fading in the distance as the camera spins out from my tumbling corpse). Incidentally, a few people have complained that it sounds a bit lame, and one of the Bungie guys (Max?) admitted that he also wasn't happy with the current sound, so perhaps it will get better by release. Boosting in the ghost looked really cool, but wasn't that useful since the available space on the level was rather small to get up a good speed before crashing into something.

There are a few other miscellaneous changes worth mentioning. You can see your legs and shadow in first-person view, but that's all you can see- the legs extend off the bottom of the screen and there's no huge chest model blocking your view as there is in most other games that attempted to do this, so the effect is more like bowing at the waist than simply looking down. The legs animate to roughly match what the other players are seeing as you move, so it's easy to catch sight of your bent knees while jumping. (Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that I had Chief legs while playing as an Elite. Bug!) I noticed that the shield effect for the players looked subtly smoother than in Halo 1, and more rounded, and I wouldn't be surprised if the shields are being tweaked by the artists as unique models this time instead of just being generated from the character they are surrounding. The death camera still focuses on your character's ass if you die in an enclosed area; it's strange to see an Elite there instead of the usual player model.

One last thing to make clear before we move on to the rest of the fanfest: Halo 2 still has 5 months of development left on it, and much of that time will be spent playtesting. Many of the things I mentioned may change, and many of the things people are currently complaining about will be tweaked or removed entirely. Bungie isn't stupid, and they are constantly playing the game and they are probably thinking the same thing you are about any problems the game has, and they will almost certainly come up with a solution. They pulled it off for Halo 1, didn't they?

[ghrogels]

this won't come out soon enuff

[iFrag]

Sounding pretty cool so far.

[Stumanji]

Here's an article titled "The Secrets of Zanzibar" (http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=secretzanzibar&p=82603)

Zanzibar is the multiplayer level they showed off at E3.

[M4LFUNCT10N]

The June issue of OXM is out. :D And the Chronicles of Riddick is defintaly going to be a big hit. Same with Psi-Ops. Both demos kick butt!

[Stumanji]

The Chronicles of Riddick looks okay from the demos I've watched, but I think the coolest looking FPS besides Halo 2 would have to be Star Wars: Republic Commando.

The HUD looks awesome, makes you feel like you're in the freakin' helmet. Nice reload animations as well, and some pretty good atmospheric touches too. Looks like it'll be Rainbow Six 3, Star Wars style.

[M4LFUNCT10N]

Well, the cool thing about Riddick is there isn't a hud. It actually looks like you're in the game. You have to watch your bullet count by the counter on the gun(kinda like the AR in halo). And you can see your own shadow as you move. You can walk up behind guards and snap their necks. It's pretty awesome.

[Stumanji]

When I first read the preview for TCoR, I thought it was going to be 1st person and 3rd person (depending on the situation). But, looking at the demo video, it looks like the 3rd person moments are all animations (climbing boxes, flipping switches, etc). That kind of turned me off to it.

But, it does look cool, still. The demo I viewed was probably an early build, it didn't have all the sound effects, and it was lacking music. If they can get an atmospheric John Williams-esque soundtrack for this game, then it will totally kick-ass.

[Valusek]

what about F.E.A.R. ?

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update May 21 2004

What gives!!?? HBO two weeks in a row? Not really. Last week's came off sounding fake, and there was no Mister CHief. So we OWE HBO this one.

I can't even tell you how excited everyone was after E3 – a mixture of fatigue, elation and excitement meant for varying degrees of glassy-eyed wonder when the small contingent we sent there arrived back. As planned, the E3 demo was a minor speed bump, hardly interfered with production at all, and in fact helped tremendously with some feedback from players and reaction to new stuff. Personally, I had a great time. People love Halo, and I got to bask in some of the reflected glory. But back at the ranch…

SONIC THE GRIESEMER

Right after E3 Jaime went to work tweaking the physics on vehicles.

Mostly he has been building on what we showed at E3. Some of this involves tweaking, including the addition of an extended camera shake for all the grenades so you can feel them from farther away, reduced the number of needles requires for a super-detonation, that kind of thing. He's also added some new weapons to the mix, which of course we can't mention here, but both are VERY different from each other. Once you have a solid balance, like we did for E3, you have to add new elements very carefully so you don’t throw it out of whack.

Jaime and the team are also working on a final calibration of some of the fundamental systems like time, damage transfer, gravity and collision damage. These are broad, sweeping systems that you have to nail down fairly early. Jaime says he feels like we know enough about our missions and gameplay to do this now, which is important because we won’t be able to re-visit them later. He says it’s hard work but it will form a solid foundation for the rest of the game.

Jaime says we recorded a ton of combat dialog. And he says that our combat dialog plan is basically insane. Jaime argues that the combat dialog in Halo 1 still holds up well, but that Halo 2’s dialog will make it look primitive. He says that the AI is so much more aware of what is going on around it, we couldn’t help but take advantage of that with more dialog. He's pretty sure we recorded more unique lines for one character than we had in all of Halo 1.

Jaime's also been spending a lot of time this week setting up a brand new Covenant vehicle. He thinks it is the coolest-looking Covenant vehicle so far and he can’t wait to get it into the game. He wouldn't tell us if it was single, multiplayer or both.

BONUS QUESTION: Jaime – what was the coolest thing you saw at E3?

For the first time in 5 years I didn’t get to go to E3. I was too busy writing combat dialog and wrangling the character behaviors. The new Zelda looks damn cool though. Link is a total badass.

SUPER BUTCHER BROS.

Chris has been working diligently been working on time control for PAL vs. NTSC builds... he says that sounds lame but it might let us do some cool in-game slow-mo features if we so chose, but only if they were implemented in some cool, non-clichéd way. And he's been planning for an epic Halo 2-related project, which is going to be fricking insane. Australasian, European and other territories will be pleased to hear that we're doing cool stuff with the PAL versions to make them look good AND play nice with NTSC over LIVE. PAL time control is very important to Chris so that he can play against his 56-year old father on Xbox live. He lives in New Zealand, so the ping might be a bit hard to take, but Chris will let him host. :-)

Other stuff... Chris says not much else that’s really that cool, other than the fact that we’ve been doing flythroughs of some of our levels over the past few days and they’re beautiful. Why are they so beautiful? Chris says the artists have had a lot more time in Halo 2 to concentrate on things like line of sight and vistas, and in Chris's own words, "Zanzibar can’t have any truly gorgeous visuals because it has to be a multiplayer map, there is stuff coming down the pipe that makes it look like hang ‘em high by comparison."

And on E3: "Coolest thing I saw on the web as e3 coverage was God of War. Beautiful, beautiful animation. Makes me wish we could show off our new animation system with a third person fighting game... I miss Konoko."

BUBSY THE BUTKUS

We asked John Butkus, the tallest animator, what cool stuff he'd been up to (this was Thursday night, Hockey fans…):

"If you consider re-doing all the Elite animations with him holding a Brute weapon cool, then yes I guess that is cool shit. Let’s see, since we spoke last I’ve finished up a large, intimidating alien, given the elite a Brute weapon, given him animations for that and for the driver and gunner of a new Covenant vehicle, and another Elite's first-person animations for the Brute weapon as well.

The pace has been kind of frantic for the past few weeks and I didn’t really let up last week during E3, so I kind of feel like death warmed over right now. You know when you’re so tired, that you forget what day it is and you can’t even form coherent sentences? Yeah, it’s like that. I’ve been trying to work extra fast so that tomorrow I can get all the details on the cinematic I’m hopefully going to be starting some time tomorrow afternoon. I’d like to get it started tomorrow so that I can plug away at it on the weekend a bit. It’s the first cinematic being done for the game, and it has Master Chief approaching a bridge…and it's going to be so friggin’ cool, it’s not even funny.

Sorry, getting a little sidetracked because I’m monitoring the Lightning/Flyers NHL game right now. I’m a diehard Flyers fan, and if they lose tonight they’re out of the playoffs…so if that happens, I will be ‘sick’ tomorrow i.e., hung-over from drowning my sorrows, so I hope they win tonight and force a game 7.

As for your bonus question, I didn’t go to E3 so I didn’t see anything cool. Oh okay, I did read the internet a bit and the PSP looks hot as hell and I will probably buy one even though I’ll only end up using it like three days out of the year."

STATEN THE TIME SWEEPER

Joseph Staten, our very own director of cinematics has been a busy, busy bee!

"The last few weeks have been all about combat dialog. I have some favorite lines, but I don’t want to give anything away. OK, maybe just one…

(One of the marines’ responses to being stared at by the player for a long time)
“Most people don't like having a gun pointed in their face. Me? I love it.”

Our cast is pretty locked-down. They’ll be some returning favorites, as well as a whole bunch of new very exciting, very talented folks (most of whom are big ‘ol Halo fans – an unexpected benefit!).

CJ and I continue to crank away on the videomatics. This week we’re revisiting some of the moments in the Halo2 announcement trailer, and putting them into their final context. I’m only authorized to say three words: ride the pickle. Let the fans chew on that!

And the coolest thing I say at E3? Well, since I was only there for the press-briefing it’s a toss-up between the really cute Edelman PR woman manning the power-point presentation (her blue sweater, in particular), and Muhammad Ali.

Clearly, I have priority problems."

- Joseph

AERO THE WALPOLE

Nathan reports from the dark precipice of the animation station:

Mike Budd is still trouncing on some great animation of a secret character and it looks damn good.

Billmation is giving the Grunt some glory. You will respect the little ones this time around guys.

*Frankienote: Yeah – Butcher showed me the grunt animation in slo-mo and it was totally badass.

John has finished off a secret character that will be great fun to play around. I wish I could say more. Oh, he has been doing some more Elite stuff with a new vehicle…

I have been working on the Brute this past week. After the recent E3 crunch it is nice to move back onto a vastly different character. I have been working on some animations for some cool AI behavior that is guaranteed to have players pooping themselves, changing their underpants only to poop themselves again… I have been watching some biker movies and National Geographic films for reference. Mr. Brute, may I introduce you to your cousins Black Rhino, Silverback Gorilla and Brian Bosworth?

As far as E3 goes I am excited over a few games. Full Spectrum Warrior is a game that I will either love or hate, but I would definitely give props to the dev team. There is lot of great detail in Full Spectrum Warrior. A few titles like Rise of the Kasai and God of War have me yearning to do some fun animation like that and may see me picking up a PS2 to play them. They are beautifully animated games!



So that's it for this week folks, and we'll lead you out with something so horrible, Mister Chief refused to be a part of it...

http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/ridingthepickle.gif

[Stumanji]

You can find the press scans for the Game Informer article on Halo 2 here. (http://halo.bungie.org/pressscans/display.html?scan=gameinformer.0504)

And you can view the XBox 2004 Spring Guide article featuring Halo 2 here. (http://halo.bungie.org/pressscans/display.html?scan=2k4springuide_xbox.com)

And, for those who haven't read it, and don't want to dish out $9.99 for the OXM featuring Halo 2, you can view the scanned article here. (http://propel.to/theda/)

Enjoy!

[Stumanji]

A 3D Screenshot for you, can be found by following this link:

Lo-Res and Hi-Res Shot Available (http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=3Dscreenshot)

================================

Bungie Weekly Update

Smallest, lamest update in weeks, thanks to missing staff, deadlines and the crazy 3D shot we put up today. Sorry.

The community team has been swamped this week – the net guys put up some new forums, and expanded the number of avatars available and basically got dragged into anything that wasn't related to actually programming or designing the game!

One cool thing that I got to do was look at Joe Staten's awesome dialog for single player "events" like what characters say when they get in and out of vehicles, or when they retreat from Covenant, or even, sniff, die. Gripping stuff, but going over Joe's scripts also serves to illustrate how complex the AI reaction to events is. There are like six different possible lines for a character getting into the passenger seat of a vehicle! Crazy!

Joe's dialog is very cool too, and just skimming over the scripts gives you a sense of how epic some of these encounters are going to be. Joe's researched this stuff pretty intensively, and let me borrow one of his research tomes – a fat book devoted entirely to war slang. My favorite line? DILLIGAF which is an acronym for, "Do I Look Like I Give A…" and I got cut off before I read the last word…although I'm pretty sure it was probably "fudge."

Parsons' Crazy Theory

OK everyone. Deep breath. Studio manager Parsons has a theory, that the unkind might refer to as crackpot, but he's thought it out, so we'll go along with it for a bit. So his theory boils down to this fundamental premise: "If you want a flying car, you must buy a Roomba." Now it gets more complex than that. Parsons thinks that the Roomba's tech is cool, but relatively inconsequential, but its social impact is of paramount importance.

Now a Roomba, for the uninitiated, is that robotic vacuum cleaner. He thinks that if you're cool with leaving a Robot, or SuckBot as I call it for short, to rampage around your house while you're out, then you'll be cool with all sorts of AI in your house and life. Like a fly-by-wire robot-driven car.

I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. I would counter that obviously Robots are good at one thing: Rampaging. And there are further problems. For starters, they never have hands, always claws, gaping sucking maws, or lasers. None of these implements is useful for hugging, massaging or any other things you think you might want in your house.

Nathan and John's Tower of Tweening

Not much from animation this week…but Nathan reports from the side of animation with the best hair situation, saying that John Butkus has started the first cinematic! Which also means that the animation team will move to cinematics very soon, collectively! Which means that most of the regular character animation is done! Kinda. They'll be going back and forth for sure, but obviously this indicates that the bulk of that work is over. Cinematics of course require lots of NEW animation – often more complex too, since the cinematic scenarios are different from the gameplay ones. That said – the cinematics don't have the same capacity for cluster***** that game animations do.

John's first cinematic features everyone's favorite angry officer, Sgt. Johnson – who delivers a very powerful line in this scene, and it has nothing to do with "God's own anti-sonofabitch machine"

Nathan also mentioned that Mike is beavering away on animation for one of the secret characters, and will be bringing a fun, and previously unmentioned weapon to life next week. Bill is finishing up on the Grunt…his food nipple is laden with steroids, whey powder and Creatine now…

Nathan himself, has been working on Brute animations and listening to the horrible sounds from the local country music station to get in the proper rage mindset and transferring those feelings on over to the Brute. Nathan angry! Nathan smash!

Bigger news should happen next week…

John's Perspective on the same thing….

"This week I was working on the Earth City intro cinematic with Chief, Johnson, and a couple of marines. It’s going pretty well, and it’s a big effing help to have CJ lay out the characters in the scene and lock down the camera moves before we even touch it. I was on another project where I had to do all that stuff and it was really time-consuming, so the cinematics guys are my heroes right about now. Other than that, I’m working on bug fixes and miscellaneous elite moves that I haven’t had time to do because making unique animations for vehicle seats for five different weapon classes on the same character sure is exciting stuff compared to cinematics work….but it needs to get done, so here I am."

Carney!

Carney, while not hiding Carneyholes in multiplayer maps, has been doing some very cool stuff to everyone's favorite sequel. Well, my favorite sequel at least. He's currently working on an Earth City-based multiplayer level with cool geometry, lots of hiding places and plenty of tall, futuristic architecture. It's part of a group of four maps that Chris is concentrating on right now. In addition to that, Steve Cotton, the new multiplayer artist, has been working on what Carney calls a "small Team CTF-type map" that has much more of a Covenant feel.

Here's Mister Chief. Fearing progress:
http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/doomba.jpg

[Ender]

Stu I hate to tell you this - but we're going to have around 20 or so xboxers...wish you could be here. :(

[Stumanji]

I really wish I could have been there.

I'm going to do my darndest to make the June LAN, even though I may not be living up here this summer.

Unless...

Can anyone score me a job?

[Stumanji]

http://www.cheatcodes.com/graphics/articles/halo2_start.jpg

[Gomerking]

whats that?? Is it a demo?

[Stumanji]

That is the title screen for the E3 Halo 2 Multiplayer Demo. It looks pretty slick, but I wouldn't count on that being the ACTUAL title screen once the game is released in November.

[Stumanji]

http://media.gamespy.com/columns/image/pfargo_06032004_plasmasword_1086304935.jpg

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update, June 04, 2004

Creepy. Now when I ask people what they're up to this week, they're like, "finishing this" or "completing that." Nobody is actually starting anything. Which is both exciting and frightening. Although it's five months 'til the game is on shelves, it's only three or four months 'til we're complete. Scary! So naturally, everyone's swamped. Here's the deal this week:

Cam's Castle

We never talk to the marketing guys, because all they do is drive around in black Porsches, buying martini lunches with their expense accounts, while their Armani suits are tailored and cleaned of weird white powdery residue. That said, without the sharks, there'd be no mystery in the deep blue ocean of Halo 2 development, not to mention metal boxes, TV campaigns, magazine ads, cool storefront displays – in short just about everything related to getting Halo 2 in your face and into your Xbox. So we asked Cam Payne (seriously, that's his name) what's been going down in the world of mktg., for short. This is what he said:

"Do you consider lots of meetings and hundreds of e-mails as something cool? Mainly this week was a lot of the day-to-day stuff for a game coming out in five months: Coordinating with agencies, reviewing advertising and POP (Point of Purchase) creative, planning and generating assets, working out the details of specific PR (Public Relations) tactics coordinating with the dozens of subsidiaries (countries that is) across the world that will market and sell Halo 2, and so on and so on

I do get to fly down to LA today for a Friday night meeting with Joe, Marty and one of our agencies. A quick 15 hour trip, as I come back tomorrow morning at 6:30 am to go see the Dora the Explorer (hyperviolent Japanese anime) show in Seattle with my kids (elite squad of Ninja assassins).

In order to save time, effort and transportation costs, I’m staying tonight in the same hotel where Marty and Joe are staying. Well, you know Marty and his need to be well pampered and taken care of—this means I get to stay in a nice fancy place where every room is a suite that’s bigger than my last apartment. In fact, I mentioned I was traveling with Marty when making the reservation and they called back and wanted to know if I wanted the peeled grapes and hand massages when I arrived or Saturday morning."

Environmental Impact

Dave Dunn didn't have much to say, but what he had to say was tremendously important. The environments and the geometry are done. That is to say, there is a building, a door, a wall and a floor everywhere it's supposed to be, you can run through the entire game without finding any gaps, and now he and the guys have moved on to polishing. They'll be tweaking textures, futzing with lightmaps and tweaking things here and there, but now they're on a different type of schedule.

The geometry and environments guys have been pretty much left to their own devices for a long time, but now they'll have a lot more to-ing and fro-ing with the designers as they tweak bits of environment to suit gameplay requirements. Dave says that while it may seem like they're cutting it close; this is a lot further ahead than it was on the first game, by comparison and with a whole heck of a lot more environments!

Cuban's Casa

Adrian "Cuban" Perez describes his week: "This week I’ve done a bunch of stuff, some might be more interesting to the outside world than others…"

* The damage handling code now pushes around the cause of the damage (i.e. what weapon it came from, what vehicle you were hit by, which sniping weapon you were just headshot with). This is something we’ve been meaning to do for a while, now enough people at the end of the damage code pipeline (multiplayer messages, stats) want to know said info that we’ve taken care of feeding them.

* I made a few changes to the lightmapper that will let the artists iterate their lighting faster. The fact that the lightmapper is much faster than the Halo 1 lightmapper is irrelevant since the artists have made much more detailed geometry with much higher res lightmaps, completely nullifying any speed advantage and making the iteration times just as long. The kinds of spaces that the artists are lighting are so different than what we were trying to do in halo 1 that I’ve had a hard time making the lightmapper keep up with them.

* I did a couple of small changes to the weapon/damage code to handle a bad guy too nuts for the existing systems. Nuts in the sense that he has CENSORED where death comes out of and two separate CENSORED. Oh yeah and he’s big and mean, kind of like a Tyrannosaurus.

* The new HUD is in and working well enough to do all of the new weapon huds. We’ve been arguing back and forth a lot over the best way to integrate dual-wielding into the HUD; I think the system we have is supasweet and will be both discoverable and useful, kind of like a Tyrannosaurus.

Butkus' Barn

John Butkus explains this week's bizniss: "Nothing too exciting this week…mostly miscellaneous bug fixing and making sure that the elite and marine work as vehicle passengers with all weapons and that their hands are properly locked on the warthog and scorpion hand rails. I know. Fascinating.

I also animated the first-person CENSORED (both single and dual shot), so that should be in the game and working now…it looks pretty cool, but it’s definitely a lot weaker than CENSORED and it has CENSORED now, so people are probably going to CENSORED and CENSORED. Oh well, all’s fair in the cruel world of gameplay balance."

Walpole's World

Rival Canadian Nathan Walpole gives another Cananimator view: "Not much has gone on this week that differs from the regular attachment of animation excitement. All of us are still working hard and resisting the urge to bust home early to play Full Spectrum Warrior. We do have some current news to report. Two new animators are coming on board to help us bring the fans some incredible motion. We have a mercenary animator on loan for 2 months from a sister Microsoft studio, FASA (By the way, thanks for sharing your peeps with us - feel free to make a giant Robot in Mechassault that looks like a Grunt...). He will be helping us pound out some riveting storytelling in our cinematics. We also have a new contract junior animator starting out next week that will be helping make the in-game animation tighter than a walrus’ butt hole. Oh, and the FASA mercenary happens to be Canadian too, so 50% of the animation in Halo 2 will remain Canadian made. Go Canada. Go Halo 2!"

Hoberman's House

Max is typically reserved this week as he gives a hint of what to expect from Halo 2 on Xbox Live. I know specifically what he's talking about though, so I can tell you he's understating its coolness!

"Not a very exciting week for those on the outside, but I'm incredibly psyched. For the past several weeks we've been reviewing all of our UI and Xbox Live plans. This is the hard part, polishing the design and solidifying the final specs. Should have happened sooner, but we've always known we were on to something cool, and now I'm even more certain that Halo 2 on Xbox Live is going to be incredible. I'm mainly referring to the whole LAN party over the Internet experience, or as we sometimes refer to it the Halo 2 "virtual couch". It's going to take some getting used to because we're doing things that have never been done before. But once people are used to it I'm confident everything else will seem broken."

Butcher's Bivouac

Chris Butcher, watching over all manner of programmy shenanigans lets us know what code craziness went down:

Luke Timmins has voice communication working in game for real, and has done some very neat stuff with player CENSORED and team voice stuff.

Bart is busy doing automated take home networking tests, it’s cool, we all take the boxes home and plug them into our networks and they just play games over and over all night, silently recording the results to our data mine server (unless they crash or get stuck).

Chucky and Ben went to a technology conference yesterday, which should be important for future Bungie games.

Cuban did the damage type reporting so the game engine can have different messages appear for Melee kills vs. Sniper kills vs. Needler kills, plus we track them as separate stats which is cool.

Jason Major is back from paternity leave and immediately did some cool distortion particle FX.


And to finish, here's a pic of an early Spartan technology:
http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/markonemjolnir.jpg

[Stumanji]

"I also animated the first-person CENSORED (both single and dual shot), so that should be in the game and working now…it looks pretty cool, but it’s definitely a lot weaker than CENSORED and it has CENSORED now, so people are probably going to CENSORED and CENSORED. Oh well, all’s fair in the cruel world of gameplay balance."

Here's my translation, which is getting pretty good support from the XBox.com forums:

"I also animated the first-person PISTOL (both single and dual shot), so that should be in the game and working now…it looks pretty cool, but it’s definitely a lot weaker than THE ORIGINAL PISTOL and it has NO ZOOM now, so people are probably going to BITCH and MOAN. Oh well, all’s fair in the cruel world of gameplay balance."

[TheBigShow]

Good guesses... I am definately one of those people who will be "bitching" and "moaning" as you so nicely phrased it.

[iFrag]

Originally posted by TheBigShow
Good guesses... I am definately one of those people who will be "bitching" and "moaning" as you so nicely phrased it.

Me too.

[Stumanji]

If you don't feel like buying or borrowing the Halo 2 OXM, you can view the press scans. Nothing that hasn't been reported or covered in this thread though. Good pictures, however.

OXM Press Scans (http://halo.bungie.org/pressscans/display.html?scan=oxm.0604)

[Stumanji]

Living up to the hype?

Here are some awards that Halo 2 has received so far...

Best of E3 2004 Game Critics Awards
-- Best Console Game
-- Best Action Game
-- Best Online Multiplayer

Gamestyle's Best of E3 Awards
-- Best of Show*

Gamespy Annual E3 Awards
-- Editors Choice Award
-- 7th overall of Top 25
------ bested by Rome: Total War (PC), God of War (PS2), Jade Empire (XB), Sony PSP, The Nintendo DS, Half-Life 2 (PC).

TeamXBox's Best of E3 Awards
-- Best of E3
-- Best XBox Live Title
-- Best First-Person Shooter

IGN's E3 Awards
-- Overall Best of Show
-- Xbox Best of Show
-- Xbox Best Graphics
-- Xbox Technological Excellence
-- Xbox Best Shooter
-- Nominated Overall Best Graphics, Overall Technological Excellence

----------------------------------
*Gamestyle gave Halo 2 Overall Best of Show, but somehow Halo 2 did not get Best Xbox Game (award went to Jade Empire). Double-U Tee Eff, mates?

[DiscoDave]

Originally posted by Stumanji
*Gamestyle gave Halo 2 Overall Best of Show, but somehow Halo 2 did not get Best Xbox Game (award went to Jade Empire). Double-U Tee Eff, mates?
A lot of times they'll do that...if a game wins best overall, then it's disqualified from the specific category so as to let other awesome games get to be in the spotlight.

[Stumanji]

From Gamesmaster Magazine:

[Stumanji]

And page 2 of 2...

[Shadow]

Cool...I like:D

[iFrag]

Originally posted by Shadowmaster
Cool...I like:D

Oh yeah, Halo 2 looks so sexy

[Stumanji]

BUNGIE WEEKLY UPDATE - June 11th

Can you feel it? Getting closer? Halo 2 is in the home stretch, just a few short (or long) months to go, and the game code is fatter, phatter and finished-er. Every week that goes by brings it closer to completion, and Bungie staff are playing it in earnest as you'll see below.

ANIMATE!

Nathan Walpole, lead poutine-wrangler, Flyers fan and all-round baldness champeen, is bursting with excitement and information. Let him inspire ye:

"Animation is abuzz with the addition of two animator mercenaries. Stacey Moore joins us from sister MS studio FASA to aid in polishing the brilliance of cinematic animations while Jeremy Fones comes to us to help in tackling remaining in-game animation with the zeal of an assassin. While their time here is short, on the force for about two months, the effects of their firepower will be felt with shock and awe.

In other animation news, all in-game animation is getting closer to complete and cinematics are revving their engines for the Rally ahead. All first person animations will be finished this week, allowing us to focus on the effects of that arsenal on the Master Chief and his supporting cast.

TEST!

Harold Ryan, king of testing has been hot and bothered this week, as he imported and setup 300 Xbox kits for Halo2 automation, blew the power in several rooms of the building and raised the temperature of the earth by 5 degrees.
http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/300xboxes.jpg
(note: Those are 300 xboxes stacked in one room -- Stumanji)

COMMUNICATE!

Brian Jarrard, Community Manager, master of your future Halo 2 stats and all round Frankie-killer, has had a cool week:

"The best part of my job, besides interacting with so many great people in our community, is obviously getting my fill of Halo 2 hands-on play. As many of our Bungie.net members know, Frankie and I have an ongoing rivalry (of which I now lead 9 to 0). Yesterday's highly touted match was another great battle and though the score doesn't reflect it (20-11), it was actually a closely fought game. And, to those of you who voted against me in the ( http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=159192 ) poll. asking who you thought would win, don't think I didn't notice that. You're on my list.

During the weeks surrounding E3 I've only been playing the Zanzibar build that we brought to the show. While that level and those elements were being polished, the rest of the game continued to move forward and yesterday was the first time I got to see what I've been missing out on. Some of the original maps that I played long ago are now barely recognizable due to a big overhaul in the graphics and design departments along with the addition of refined HUD elements, additions to the UI and even some new goodies that I dare not mention. For months now we've been taking boxes home at night to play and test online but now, as we enter into the final stretch, I can really start to see everything in its full glory. Wow. That's all I can say. I can't wait to strap into the real deal and experience the online goodness with all of you! In the meantime I will continue to hone my skills by beating up on Frankie. "

COMPLAIN!

Mat Noguchi complained, "I got to work on yet another thing that no one outside of Bungie will ever care about, namely, improving our tag system to allow for smaller Xbox tag builds and faster load times."

Well Mat, in defense of your deal, I had the pleasure of playing a tag build last night and it loaded quickly and efficiently and in a way, Mat is my hero.

VOMIT!

Poor Lorraine, sick as a parrot, and busy to boot:

"I got sick. Spread germs around that I chased with some disinfectant wipes and yelled “I got cooties. Nya nya.” And threatened people with germs."

Lorraine continues, "But other than that, the art book is wrapping up (at least the assets dump is dwindling – until I found the STACKS of storyboards from Staten on my seat on my day off, even.) I had to wade through the two-ton folder. Took hours to get to my seat to check my e-mail and see if a file-transfer worked. I put a shelf up on my desk early in the week to help me declutter and prettify my now ‘cozy’ desk, but only to find I’m probably moving in a couple of days. But that’s okay, if I guess correctly, I can shoot spitballs out towards the environment artist pit whenever I want now (darn, I should have taken advantage of the perfect line of sight I have now at the back of Frankie’s head!)

Oh! I helped a bit with combat dialog for um… a set of characters that cannot be named, I think? And am trying to get another big project started that involves cool art and words and will probably be found at bookstores… (I’m really excited about this project!!)"

JUICE!

Chris Butcher is always good for some juice, and he fails to disappoint this week:

"Luke (Timmins) has our proximity voice in which is awesome. my favorite uses of it are in order:

1. To thank dead foes for giving me their shotguns
2. Next time I’m fighting them, to ask them if my weapon maybe looks a little familiar
3. When I’m stalking someone with a shotgun, call out their name and watch them stop and look around in puzzlement
4. To run up behind someone, yell “BOOM!” and then a second later pull the trigger."

AUTOMATE!

Ryan Hylland's been busy too:

* We’ve gotten about 100 of the 300 automated boxes delivered, networked, re-imaged, re-named, live accounts created, and in automation. We ran out of power in our room otherwise we would have had more!

* We’ve been running playtests every night in the multiplayer lab testing out voice (my taunting skills have elevated now that proximity voice is in), new maps and game variants and their settings.

* Take home tests have begun!

* Testing matchmaking (see above) and leaderboard ranking"

COMPOSE!

Jay says that a fan got into his head a couple of years ago that he would catalog every single piece of combat dialog, he got to 1000, before Jay took pity on him and admitted there were 6,000. Well, that guy better get his pencil sharpened, because in Halo 2, we're looking at about 15,000 lines of combat dialog. There are lines of speech for every eventuality

C Paul's favorite line is for when other Marines are pissed at the Chief for betrayals. "Don't shoot him in the head, you might hit Cortana. She's hot. She's blue, but she's hot."

So that's it for this week. One other snippet of news is that we got our rating from the ESRB. We'll tell you what it really is later, but this is what it could have been…

http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/halohighseas.jpg
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click for original post (http://www.forerunners.org/phpbbinst/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=1853#1853)

[Shadow]

That's a lot of Xboxes. *drools*

[scm007]

As far as console games go, I'd put Halo down as 2nd best FPS multiplayer. Perfect Dark would be #1

What are you talking about? Halo is by far the best console FPS, unless your considering that such and such is groundbreaking, and if you are doing that, then Goldeneye is the rockz0r by far.

[Shadow]

Originally posted by scm007
What are you talking about? Halo is by far the best console FPS, unless your considering that such and such is groundbreaking, and if you are doing that, then Goldeneye is the rockz0r by far.
Goldeneye was great. But now I haven't played it in years.

[Stumanji]

Note: Other than the titles given by Frankie himself, I've bolded some of the cool info in this update. You can find the original Frankie update post HERE (http://www.raiseyourgame.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2538). -- Stumanji

Bungie Weekly Update!!!

Short and sweet this week, since I'm cranking on the manual and some other stuff.

Ryan's Slaughter

Ryan Hylland, test freak and well-known spawn camper has been working on my favorite thing in the universe. Take-home tests. Where Bungie employees take home Halo 2 and playa against each other, enjoy social interactions and learn colorful new swears. This is Ryan's week in brief:

A bunch of game variant settings. Slayer specifically. Ah, the CENSORED and Scorpion on Waterworks, such a beautiful thing.

Had a couple of “take home tests” to check out how our fragile child-game performs in the high school play ground. I think we only got one black eye…

CENSORED and CENSORED tests.

User Interface pass for the next build of the game.

Tons of test case workbook house cleaning (thanks to Joe).

I think we took some names too

Are you ready to get your ass kicked tonight in our take home test?

CJ Cinema!

Been cranking along on the videomatics...We're closing in on having all the cinematics of the game videomatic'd out. Which means most of the game's cinematics now have timing and camera work that is locked down, as well as basic animation for the animators to work off of. Even better, most of them actually work in engine, which is a miracle in many different fields including nuclear science, landscape architecture, and dominoes. This week I finally started blocking out the videomatics for one of the last levels of the game that we haven't worked on previously. It's cool to start on these, because we know these cinematics will be seriously building the story tension towards that glorious climax when CENSORED finds out CENSORED! Joe and I also went in and cleaned up some silly issues that we hadn't gotten around to. Like re-exporting the Phantom's cinematic animations with the NEW Phantom that has a different number of bones than the OLD Phantom. Weeeee! Other than that I spent the week unleashing my Chris Christmas video collection on the unsuspecting Bungie crowd. Vote Chris Christmas instead of Santa this year, boys and girls. He's the man.

PARSONS NOSE

So Parsons comes over, says he has something for the weekly update, eats his lunch noisily, lets fly with an eye-watering air biscuit and takes off, saying, "That's a sushi fart."

Thanks Parsons. That's great.

LORRAINE'S ODDYSSEY

Since we're expanding, and new faces keep popping up, it should be no surprise that desks are moved around to accommodate. Lorraine was forced to move and entire desk over, and quickly set about rebuilding her unassailable tower of anime, weapons and robots.

Jaime Jams

Jaime says they've finished adding "boarding" seats to all the vehicles. That means that quite apart from the vehicle-jacking stuff, every vehicle that can be boarded, sat on or otherwise utilized, now has functioning seats for real-life multiplayer and AI single-player modes. One thing hardly anyone at E3 noticed, was that when you board a Warthog, instead of taking over the driver seat immediately, you simply yank the driver out – you then have to hop into the Warthog manually. A two-stage process designed to create interesting encounters on the slightly more boardable Hog.

Jaime also showed off the largely complete HUD which has moved everything around dramatically, but should still be recognizable to Halo folks. Obviously adding dual wielding makes this challenging, but the new HUD handily shows off the ammo/charge left in a gun, and more importantly, it tells you what your reserve, or third weapon is. THIRD WEAPON!!!? WHATCHOO TALKIN ABOUT FRANKIE? Well, if you're holding a weapon in one hand, and you have another "holstered" you can dual-wield a third. That means the reserve weapon simply stays put when you pick up the dual-wield weapon. Effectively that lets you have three weapons at one time.

Of course, that means that for newbies at least, it can be tricky keeping track of what you've got. To be honest though, after an hour or two of play, you stop thinking about it.

There's also been something of a separation for church and state as far as the shield level and health meter are concerned. You'll see in good time how that works, but it makes a big difference.

WATER!

One cool new graphic feature being played with right now is water. The briny deep demoed at E3 is not the final water. In fact, several techniques are being experimented with, but I saw a cool one yesterday in a Zanzibar test level. Only it was deliberately broken. So when you jumped, the level literally filled up with water. It was kind of funny to go inside the control room part of the level (where the defender's flag normally sits) jump once and flood the place with sparkly, gorgeous, reflective wet stuff. Did I mention I loved video game water?

Alta's Rival Princess

Look, Alta is awesome, obviously. And the Bungie Princess is even more attractive than Nathan! However, Alta has help. New-girl Amanda is a princess-rival. For example, we now have a keg of beer. Now I'm not saying that Amanda is responsible for this new beer-status, but it IS a big coincidence no? Anyway. Beer. Keg. Kegstand. Most practical way to consume beer.

Max Rules

Seriously, Max Hoberman rules. Here's why:

"A bunch of the artists, including of course our multiplayer SWAT team, are just finishing up a 48 hour "lovefest", time dedicated to polishing a handful of multiplayer maps. It's amazing what 48 hours of relentless man love will do to a level. Steve Cotton, the newest member of our multiplayer art team, was just showing me the purple underbelly of a CENSORED, one of our multiplayer levels for the upcoming milestone. I can hardly believe this is the same kooky level I sketched over a year ago in Illustrator, it looks so damn good. Right smack in the middle of the map is an area that I'm convinced, once combined with a little magic that Adrian snuck in for me waaaay back, will be the ultimate King hill. Not for those with weak stomachs though. Too bad we're not working on King of the Hill right now, I can hardly wait! In the meantime Carney has taken our very first ever Halo 2 multiplayer map (also the map that's gone through the most complete revisions ... lovingly dubbed "Space Toilet" in its youth) and turned it into a real treat. Our goal from day 1 with this map was to capture some of the fun of an old favorite Marathon map, Mars Needs Women. It's looks absolutely nothing like that map, but people keep telling me that it feels like it. Awesome! Not only does it play great, once they get the "neighborhood" in this map is going to look incredible!

Dave has the new HUD in and looking mighty fine. It's a change from what people are used to, but there's good reason for the change and we're confident it's the right decision. In fact, Jaime just got back from a usability test and is standing at my desk telling me just that. Oh, and of course we have the new multiplayer scoreboard in as part of the HUD! Woohoo! Dave and I are also working on cleaning up a whole slew of UI in time for the milestone. Mat Noguchi is just now checking in the magic code that makes players on Xbox Live look like more than just a name, I'm psyched! Our Xbox Live UI is going to make people jump with joy, and I don't think I'm exaggerating. Once you try it you'll never go back. Anyway, way too much to do, currently 38 bugs on my plate for this milestone. Gotta get back to work!"

=========================
Anyway, CJ's obsession with Chris "Christmas" Rodriguez (google it) has rubbed off on the chief.
http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/christmasvschief.jpg

[Stumanji]

Bungie Weekly Update

Lorraine's Sordid Shower Scene…

This week was full of back-to-back deadlines and “Your Attention Is Required Right Bloody Now” matters. The two big things were the POP (point of purchase) art for big stores like Toys R Us and box art. Needless to say there is never enough time. The YAIRRBN matters beyond those big pieces of art were more art or things regarding the game manual, Halo and Halo 2 action figures, the Making of Halo DVD, the art book, and some, uh... sensitive matter with Marketing and the advertising team. I didn’t get to go home last night – hey, lookit that, the file is now actually writing to my hard drive – but that meant I get to eat a hearty breakfast from the cafeteria. Now if my hubby can get over here soon, I’ll get to eat it too. The buttermilk pancakes smell awesome and the scrambled eggs are quite good (I had to give a taste!). Oh, and last night I discovered that the towel service in the shower room is being discontinued next month. Bummer. And the other thing th – oops. The file is saved and the screen has redrawn the image. Gotta go.

- L

Michael Wu's Long Panoramic Shot

In general the enviro pod has been hammering away from late morning (recovering from night before) till late night (when the security guards come over and play Street Fighter) on texturing and lighting their levels. I’m working on New Mombasa (with short forays into Old Mombasa to help on the single-player milestone). I’m actually working on a lot of geometry finessing before I get to texture and light the city. In general we feel like we have just enough time to finish, but I mean barely!

John Butkus' Tight Close-Up

Well, I figure I might be the only animator chiming in today so I’ll throw you a bone and let you in on what we’ve been doing. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the CENSORED cinematic. I think it’s the second longest one in the game at somewhere around CENSORED minutes or so… it has CENSORED different characters in it so I’m basically animating my ass off every day. It has two CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED the CENSORED into the CENSORED chamber to face CENSORED and CENSORED. It’s coming along pretty nicely and I should have CENSORED's part mostly finished by the end of the weekend. It’s nice to have the final dialogue in the game, but when you’re animating it you have to listen to it frame by frame or scrub through it quickly both forwards and backwards so after a while you go a little nutty. In fact, I’ve lost it. I’m gone. No I’m not – yes I am! Stacey has been working on a cinematic with the chief jumping across these huge beams as nasty shit is going down behind him and then there’s this sick-ass explosion and CENSORED. Mike and Bill have been troopers and are putting the finishing touches on a lot of vehicle and character animations, and Jeremy has been a massive help with finishing off a lot of stuff for the Chief.

In other news, it’s Friday and that is so sweet. I’ve also discovered that 2 out of 3 Americans do not appreciate the taste of ketchup flavored potato chips, which I find odd since they are so damn tasty.

Ryan's Artsy Short

"Bunch of testing for the internal-only beta."

Brian's Gotham Flick

This week I was recruited for a top secret mission to escort Halo 2 Zanzibar discs to a special event taking place in the Big Apple. As you've read in other updates, Bungie is uber focused on security our builds are never made available to anyone or any group outside of our Studio. So, when the marketing folks stumble across an opportunity to promote Halo 2 and a build is needed, we're called on to deliver the goods and make sure not a single trace is left behind. Duty called and I endured 11 hours of cross country air travel for what amounted to about 1 hour of actual Halo 2 involvement. I can't reveal the specifics of this mission but if it works out, the fruits of our efforts will be revealed sometime in CENSORED. Ask me about it then and I can share some stories! Equally exciting was just strolling through Times Square and getting stopped by dozens of people who noticed my Halo 2 t-shirt. "Halo 2 is going to rock!!" "When is Halo 2 coming out!?" "Can I have a free shirt!?" “Sweet soul patch dude!” It's cool to see so many random people familiar with and fired up about Halo 2. And no, you can't have my shirt.

Marty's Stirring Score

I still remember the first Halo Weekly Update. I was just a wee lad of 64; none of the others who are here now are old enough to have been around back then. That is the advantage of being “The Elder”. In those early days I was making music for Halo on a ukulele. Now for Halo 2 I have the power of a Mac SE and an Electronic Casio Keyboard. Progress is a wonderful thing. The dialog files for Halo were around 27 unique vocalizations, all by just one actor (Joe’s father) and now we’ve recorded over 112 different sayings by up to 4 different actors (including Joe’s father’s son Joe)! All the weapon sounds for Halo were made by pitch shifting one mouth noise I had recorded by accident in the bathroom (…don’t ask). Now for Halo2, we’ve been able to recorded, pitch shift AND filter mouth noises made by not only me, but Jay and C Paul! Who knows where we’ll be by the time we celebrate Halo2’s 200th Weekly Update?

Marty The Elder
(I’m not losing it,,,)

Butcher's Auteurism

I’ve mostly been working on weird boundary cases and stabilizing for the beta. Our matchmaking system is coming up and it’s almost playable which is the suckiest period, because you are really excited when it works and very sad most of the rest of the time. In other news, I was excited to see that the first ever New Zealand game developers conference kicks off this week! http://www.nzgdc.org.nz/

My favorite bug this week: One that allowed a player who was booted from a CTF game, but was able to rejoin with his old score intact, and the mysterious and useful ability to see any player, friend or foe, from clean across the map – through objects, buildings, whatever. And as a bonus, he could see both flags, no matter where they were.

Only 24 hours remain for us to fix bugs in the beta.


--
Frankie's Autobiographical Epic

What have I been doing? Well, apart from neglecting the site content, I've been crunching with the UX guys on the manual, which is half-joy, half-horror as we struggle with how to describe dual-wielding in a way that a mom can understand, or explain the difference between a game-type and a game rule and then just when we think we have something finalized, the team points out that they added an entire game feature that you didn't know about.

Describing the new weapons is fun too, since it means I know pretty much every weapon, vehicle and device that's going to be in the game, how they work, which ones boost, which have secondary fire, what the zoom levels are and what it is exactly that shoots out of them. This doesn’t necessarily mean I know how to use them…

We also went and did a Zanzibar demo at a Microsoft job fair thing. J Allard was trying to hire the cream of the crop from all over Microsoft plenty of them whooped and cheered when the Halo 2 demo started.

Anyway, that's it for this week, more next and until then, enjoy the awesome poster for the Mister Chief movie, When TriSquids Came to Eat Earth Because it Smelled of Prawn Cocktail

http://seventhcolumn.bungie.net/images/site/fanclub/mistersquid.jpg

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Link to Original Post (http://www.mlgpro.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=1863#1863)

[Battousai]

jade empire scored higher than halo 2 on gamespy for e3. nintendo had some good games and products. ps2 got shafted imo ps2 is the worst system because of that fact =p. if u have a ps2 buy an xbox and gamecube trust me.

[Stumanji]

Weekly Update July 02

So, this week was a mighty important week. We finished and started to manufacture the internal Halo 2 Beta. That means that lots of lucky Bungie and Microsoft employees (and we mean lots) will be playing a few multiplayer levels from Halo 2, for a few short weeks. Like the Alpha, we'll be using this to test things like networking and data speeds, but unlike the Alpha, it's also our first major gameplay test for multiplayer.

We'll be grabbing data and opinions on gametypes, weapons, even the few level designs that are out there. The main part of the test though, is to see how some of our Xbox Live features – voice, matchmaking, all of that, work in the real world, with real players and real situations. All of the data and information that comes back from this beta test, will be used to make the game as close to perfect as we can before we ship it on November 9th.

We also have the mixed blessing of playing the single player game. Why's that a mixed blessing? Because it is RUINING the plot! Wah! Still, Brian and I keep interrupting each other to say things like, "Ohmygod did you see what that Elite just did?!?" Anyway, on to the short and sweet update:

Stefan's Stiff Resistance
Stefan tells us he created the first ever Halo 2 clan. They're called BMF. I cannot tell you what that stands for. We also can't tell you anything more about the clan or how it works, but if he says it's the first one, then so be it.

Coolest thing Stefan saw on the Halo 2 Beta this week was: "Consecutive "Running Riots" with the plasma sword on FORMER SECRET LEVEL NAME, err, CURRENT SECRET LEVEL NAME... glorious."

Butcher's Kiwi Fruits
Chris Butcher is a busy, busy man, but still found time to illuminate us just a bit: "Damian got CENSORED with AI working, it’s fun, but we run the risk of having CENSORED turn into a CENSORED. A CENSORED with attitude, but it does make CENSORED less CENSORED which isn’t really a good thing."
Coolest thing Butcher saw on the Halo 2 Beta this week was :"The coolest thing I’ve seen so far is that I got to play with some guys from Australia and kick their asses. Score one for Kiwi pride!"

Lorraine's Brain Drain
Lorraine says, "Zoe and I double-teamed on the Halo 2 Point of Purchase and box cover. I’m also getting the Halo 2 action figure packaging done too so I can’t say much more…

But despite how busy it got, I managed to take home a build and play 1:1 with Robt. He said he was panicky in spots, even though he won 25-16. The two coolest things that happened while playing in the SECRET LEVEL NAME. Robt was jumping from one alcove onto a platform, I was running sideways and backwards, keeping an eye on the motion tracker and the screen. I made a big guess and tossed a plasma grenade and stuck him in the ankles while he shot downwards with the rocket launcher. He missed, but my little blue friend did his job and all that nice ammo came raining down. Robt also swears I’m psychic – that or I have virtual eyes on the side of my head. I was running on the mezzanine, trying to figure out where he was. I hear the sound of the rocket launcher and I immediately jump. I hear it again and I jump while running and trying not to fall off. Apparently, both times I jumped, I avoided certain SPNKR death. Ha!

Hylland's Hy-Jinks
Test team created and handed off the beta disk and are now working on testing and building the auto-update.

We didn’t do anything cool.

Coolest thing: watching Butcher as last man standing on our team of three in an elimination game kill all three of the other team after the other two of us had been killed.
Or perhaps being surprised (unpleasantly) by Jones crouching with a damn sword as I rode to the top of the elevator on SECRET LEVEL NAME. Needless to say, I was diced.

Cuban's Conundrums
"This week I’ve been doing a slew of stuff, up to and including:
* Resurrecting some of the Halo 1 gametypes to work in the Halo 2 engine. I forgot how much fun Oddball was; Our streamlined implementation needs a few more features to flesh it out but otherwise it’s sittin’ pretty. King of the Hill is almost back from the dead.
* Optimizing the lightmapper. I’ve been working with the artists a lot this week addressing problems they’re having lighting their spaces (if someone had told me that one of our levels would take place in a miles-wide valley I probably would have made decisions a little differently). The lightmapper is generally about 30% faster than it was last week, which is neat
* Working on player training. We have a much more elaborate training system than we had in Halo 1 – but elaborate hopefully doesn’t mean annoying. The objective with this system is that any seasoned Halo player won't get bogged down by player training (except maybe for the one that teaches you to press and hold the action button to enter vehicles) but a newbie player will be gently led through the paces
* Fixing a ton of little nits.

The coolest thing I’ve seen in the beta this week is the design of SECRET LEVEL NAME, one of our new maps. The more I play in it the more I like it."

Jay's Audio BaconWrap
Jay has been working through a lot of dialog. He also handed off the entire dialog to the localization guys, who can now turn all of the combat dialog into seven other languages. That's Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Italian and German. Times seven. That's a lotta crazy foreign guy talk!

Jay also did some last voiceover sessions with Seattle, Chicago and LA actors, some pickups and just a little bit of new stuff.

So far, there are 15,107 lines of combat dialog recorded and implemented, with just a little more to go in.

Staten, Stat!
Joe spent the entire week fixing a… [HEY! Wait Joe, I can't even TYPE what you just said to me. That is the MOST SECRET thing I ever even heard of. I ain't even typing that, I'll get my ass fired for even thinking about it too hard. -Frankie]

Joe also got into a knock down drag out Dynasty-style bitch fight with Marty O'Donnell over something so feminine, that neither dude would tell me what it was. I figure either make-up or tampons.

Joe also mentioned that John Butkus finished the animations for one of the longest and most complicated cinematics in the game and more importantly, running in the game engine. And the animation DOES feature the thing that I censored Joe on, two paragraphs ago.

Robert's Rebuttal
"You are already at least partially aware of what I've been doing this week (editing manual text), but did you know that I was also writing difficulty-level-sensitive level dialog, supplying environment artists with broken down couches, rusty dumpsters and generic box vans, slaving over bug fixes (recognized and un-recognized) and robotically grinding out LODs?

Bonus: Female marines. Because I've been trying to get women (as active participants) into a Jones driven game for almost ten years now! (I had one minor success: the Fetch. But they had to wear the skins of men in order to get snuck in.)

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And until next week, here’s Mister Chief, celebrating, and blurring the line between deliberately bad art and regular bad art.

http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/chiefbetasm.jpg


Link to Original Post (http://www.forumplanet.com/haloplanet/topic.asp?fid=1729&tid=1409919)

[Shadow]

Sweet! Now to look forward to a demo in the not to distant futrue. I hope. They better have a demo!::)

[Stumanji]

There's supposed to be no public demos or testing... But, who knows, maybe they'll surprise us.

Here's an article on Gamespy that claims to have Everything We Know About Halo 2! (http://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox/halo-2/528851p1.html)

While I'm not an official source on this information, I do know a lot and there are some points that annoyed me in this article (seriously, are these writers paid?)

1. "Now, while the assault rifle (or the battle rifle, as it's called in Halo 2)..."
-- The guns are different in appearance and name... yet they're the same gun? Nah. I think the Assault Rifle is either in the game but not mentioned yet, or it's just gone completely.

2. "While the [Halo:CE's Warthog] had a powerful machine gun, Halo 2's version of the all terrain vehicle has a rocket launcher that blasts out an unlimited supply of quick moving rockets. In the single player demo from E3 2003, this came in very handy against the heavily armored Covenent flying tanks that were swarming all over the city."
-- They seem to imply that the Rocket Launcher Hog is completely replacing the original Warthog... but, that's not the case, since two completely different Warthogs were shown at E3 last year (the Gauss Hog and the LAAG Hog of Halo:CE fame...). Also, the Hog they mention from E3 2003 is not a Rocket Hog, but the Gauss Hog.

3. "The only weapons that can be dual wielded, from what we've seen so far, are the Needler and the submachine gun, although I wouldn't be surprised to see the pistol and plasma gun added to the list."
-- The dual-plasma pistol has appeared in screenshots on bungie.net, and the plasma rifle has seen some dual-wielding in gameplay vids from E3 2004. This article was written WELL after E3 2004, by the by.

4. "It's not known yet if you'll be able to carrying four dual wield weapons, as opposed to one single wield weaon and two dual wield weapons."
-- This was made pretty clear in one of the Bungie updates. "THIRD WEAPON!!!? WHATCHOO TALKIN ABOUT FRANKIE? Well, if you're holding a weapon in one hand, and you have another "holstered" you can dual-wield a third. That means the reserve weapon simply stays put when you pick up the dual-wield weapon. Effectively that lets you have three weapons at one time."

5. "In fact, in the single player demo shown at E3 2003, a Covenant Elite hopped on the hood of a Warthog and knocked the driver and passenger out before jumping off himself."
-- Um... that was a Brute. In fact, just before the Brute landed on the Warthog, you could hear Cortana yell "Brutes!". Seriously, these guys get paid?

The article is not a complete waste of time though. There are a couple cool pictures included:

http://xboxmedia.gamespy.com/xbox/image/halo2feature_board3_1089334788.jpg
An Elite straight jackin' a foo!

http://xboxmedia.gamespy.com/xbox/image/halo2feature_dual1_1089334508.jpg
Note: When you create a player in Halo 2, you can customize your primary color (white) and your secondary color (light blue) as seen in the above picture. Also, you can put on symbols, logos, etc to further customize your Spartan (perfect for clans). Unknown if you can create your own logos and upload them, but how cool would that be? -- Stumanji

[Shadow]

So would I be in trouble for breaking tradition by me putting up the latest update?
*hint hint stu*;)

[Stumanji]

Sorry. Couldn't find the time to get to it... -- Stumanji

=============================================
Weekly Update: July 9th, 2004

Mammoth update this week kids. So enough with the intro - dig into all this good stuff:

Greg Snook

I’m going to go out on a limb and say we have too many animations in this game. Most people would consider that a good thing, but when your job is to make sure all those animations fit in memory and play back silky-smooth; having this many animations just sucks. Perhaps it’s a problem with Canadian math skills, but Butkus has authored some 881 animations for the Elite alone. We have more characters than the original Halo, and each one performs far more actions than the previous game. The end result is a fine looking game which requires the memory of three additional Xboxes :) So, this week was spent looking into new animation compression schemes and devising a system to cache animations off disk while the game is in progress. Luckily, much of this work was already in place to handle the metric ton of geometry and textures we have, so caching animations slipped right in. The end result is that the levels now fit in memory and look fantastic. W00t!

CJ

Joseph and I killed three videomatics this week, which could be a new record for us. The first one was the intro to CENSORED, which has a touch of grunt comedy, and should get some laughs. The second one is also in that level, and has nearly every major character in the game in it, which was...uh..."fun"...to set up. The last one is the cinematic that proceeds the final CENSORED, and should nicely build the tension before that fine piece of gameplay. We are also starting on a short one this morning, so maybe we'll try to get four done this week! Woohoo!

We are starting to get cinematics back from the animators all polished up, and they look GREAT! It's really cool to see these cinematics come back, because we've gotten so used to seeing them in their basic animation form. The final animation makes all the characters really come to life, and makes them much more fun to watch. Now if we can just get some lighting in there…

Nathan Walpole

Wow, what a week. I have been putting out fires, starting new ones, making friends, making enemies and eating crappy food...ain't crunch-time grand?

Animation this week has been working on a variety of things. John is still going strong on cinematics, Mike is pounding on what could be one of the coolest characters ever known to man – and taking boarding to the NEXT level. Bill is hard at work finishing the Grunt and the CENSORED and will be pitching in his great timing sense towards Brute animations. I am hard at work on the Brute, and the CENSORED…both of which are shaping up to be formidable and unforgettable. Nat King Cole ‘Unforgettable’ it will not become, the Brute could never be that smooth, but they should be unforgettable nonetheless. Jeremy is trucking away on varied bug fixes and miscellaneous animations in the game.

So we have a god amount of work ahead of us. Yes, I said a ‘god’ amount of work. Normally we would need to be Gods like Vulcan to be able to pound out this massive charge. Gods we are not, but Cananimators and Amanimators we are…

Oh, just one more thing. I would like to publicly remind Paul Bertone to stop pinching my nipples.

Chris Butcher

Been working on the beta... the data mine gives us the tools to analyze our users’ play patterns, see which bugs they’re encountering and whether they brushed their teeth in the morning.

Tyson Green

The Living Room Simulator is now open and ready for business, and many of the single player missions are to the point where we are getting polish level feedback.

Aside from grinding on my levels, in the past week I’ve been picking up some odds and ends. The Pelican received an update, and can now do more than just look intimidating when it enters a hot drop zone. Ditto for its Covenant counterpart. Both dropships are now moving around entirely of their own accord thanks to Damian and Jaime (and a little Eamon), which means we’re updating our levels to make use of that ability.

During some downtime, I spent a bit of time making a human vehicle more drivable, and even more destroyable. Happily, it behaves almost exactly as you’d expect when someone takes one of its wheels off. Before the day is done, I hope to have it a little more stable when taking hard corners—it rolls like an SUV right now.

Adrian Perez

* Been working with the graphics guys on lightmapping the ‘sets’ that will appear in some of the cinematics. They’re not BSP level geometry, they’re made as objects (so it’s easy to use them in multiple levels). Also I’ve been working with the artists on specific problems with the lightmapper and fixing them.
* Did some more work on the player training; the user testing we’ve been doing has been really encouraging. We had a gamer who had never played an FPS the other day, and after half an hour the game had taught them enough that they were ready to smack down Marty. After another half an hour they were ready to start tackling the game on normal.
* A bunch of nitty little bugs and features for single player were implemented this week. Example, if you pulled the trigger back during your ready animation the plasma pistol wouldn’t start charging when it was done with its ready animation, things like that.
* In between all that I’ve been working on the gametypes and the game engine in general. King of the Hill is back in, just need to get the rendering of the hill re-done with the new shader system. Started work on re-doing one of our new gametypes, Also been sneaking in little multiplayer polish things, like when you get into a vehicle it shows the names of the other passengers over their heads for a second.

Adrian

Jaime Griesemer

I am convinced that the primary reason Halo 1 was a success was that it was extremely approachable. Many games are almost sadistic in the way they abuse novice Players. They throw you into a confusing high-pressure situation with almost no guidance and then punish you with long load times and loss of progress when you inevitably fail. Halo, on the other hand, was a greased slide that took novice gamers, hooked them, introduced them to the controls and the game mechanics and taught them how to have fun with the game. When they die, Halo gets them back in the action within seconds, without losing any progress or abilities. It doesn't punish them or make them feel incompetent. That means that Halo was played by a lot of people that would be turned off by most game experiences.

The way we made Halo into a greased slide for novice gamers was user-testing. Lots of user-testing. We brought people in, put them in front of the game and watched them from behind one-way glass. We recorded them, analyzed them, questioned them and then we took all that information, changed the game, and did it all over again.

So that's what I did this week. Adrian got the first version of our training system working and we brought in a bunch of people to try it on. I'm not talking about hardcore Halo fans. We brought in a 40 year old mother who only plays games to make sure they are appropriate for her young children (guess what, Halo isn't) and an 18 year old RPG gamer that doesn't like anything that isn't turn based and a 55 year old City Councilmen who only uses his console to play golf games during the winter. Then we threw them into a free-for-all deathmatch game and see how well our training system worked.

It's painful to watch. You want to go rip the controller from their hands and show them how to play. You want to ask them why in the world they aren't reading the help text for dual-wielding. You want to shake them and force them to use the look stick and the move stick at the same time. But you can't because if they can't figure out how to have fun on their own, then nobody else will either.

Luckily, our tests went really well. We had some rough spots, but the 40 year old mother was gunning folks down with dual-smgs within 20 minutes. The RPG gamer was intentionally giving the enemy his Ghost so he could board them and take it back. The City Councilman decided that leaping down on someone and shotgunning them in the head was better than putting for birdie. We've got a long way to go, but Halo 2 is on track to be as user-friendly as the first one. Next week we put the tutorial in the labs, and since it's only half done, I guess I know what I am doing this weekend...

Roger's LA Oddyssey

"12 Hours in Los Angeles"

Last week, when Harold, our Test Manager, asked me to make a quick trip to Los Angeles to prepare for our upcoming internal-only Halo 2 beta, I was perfectly happy to go. The plan was, I would pick up the master data tapes from Microsoft’s lab on Wednesday afternoon, hop on a flight to LA, drop them off at the DVD manufacturer around midnight, get a little sleep, pick up a sample batch a few hours later, give them a quick test to see that they worked, and escort about 200 DVDs back to Redmond after about 12 hours in L.A. It would be a nice way to wrap up the week before a holiday weekend, right?

Hour 0
Got the rental car at LAX, along with fairly flawed directions on how to find the highway. After driving for about a half hour and getting the feeling that this wasn’t the way I was intended to go, I turned around to head back. (When I finally got to my hotel, morbid curiosity had me pull up Microsoft MapPoint with the data overlay of crime rate; I wasn’t too pleased so see where I had just been. It reminds me of that time I got turned around in Dallas last summer, where in the course of the time it took me to make a U-turn in a gas station, I saw three drug deals...)

Hour 1
Found the highway

Hour 2
Got to the manufacturer, about 50 miles away, and dropped off the tapes around 3AM. Found a hotel with Internet; spent an hour on the phone with tech support helping them analyze their packet flow to trace a connection problem before giving up and using a modem. Found out that the DVDs wouldn’t be ready as early as we thought, so I changed my return flight to a later one.

Hour 8
Got a call that the DVD process would take a little longer than planned. Changed my plane ticket to a later flight, again.

Hour 12
Decided to spend the afternoon in Santa Barbara, since the weather was nice, and the DVDs were delayed, again.

Hour 18
You know you should have packed a shaving kit when a street bu... ehem, "person on perpetual vacation from employment," tells you that you need a shave. (I was supposed to be home 3 hours ago, ok!?) Got a call that there was a delay, so I changed my ticket a third time.

Hour 20
Another delay, until the morning. Changed my plane ticket for a fourth time. Went to Target for shaving supplies.

Hour 32
Got the test batch of 250 DVDs, but found out that our delays had pushed us right into the middle of a maintenance window for the beta Xbox Live network, so I still couldn’t test. Changed ticket a fifth time.

Hour 36
Live came back online and I started testing. It took just a few minutes to find out that something was wrong, and just a little longer to find out that it was a problem in the way one of the game files was signed for Xbox usage. Which means, the master tapes were useless and we’d have to start over. At least they only made a small test batch of DVDs so far.

Hour 37
Found out that due to the previous day’s delay, they had already made all 8000 DVDs without waiting for us to give the OK. Changed my return flight a sixth time, with a slim chance that the problem could be fixed on the server side. I needed an internet connection to test from, so I returned to my hotel and asked if I could get a room for just an hour. The manager gave me a funny look, and I explained that I need to test some computer equipment and needed the internet connection. She referred me to Kinko’s, but I added that I actually needed the TV, too, which got me another funny look. I ended up taking the room for the full night, and as I left the lobby, I heard the manager say to another guy at the desk, "So, you think he’ll have a girl with him?" Actually, I was quite pleased to hear that as much as I had protested that I was traveling on business to test computer software, she still saw me as a lying guy on a tryst rather than a computer geek. Or something like that.

Hour 44
Heard that the problem couldn’t be fixed server-side, so I arranged to meet Frankie at the Burbank airport in the morning to pick up a new batch of master tapes, and stay in town to test those. Changed my return flight for a seventh time. Went to Target to buy some fresh clothes, etc. Heard from Bungie that we need those 8000 DVDs by Tuesday morning, and if they couldn’t find a shipper, I’d have to buy luggage and get them on the plane somehow (!)

Hour 56
Got the new tapes from Frankie and headed back to the manufacturer. Round trip, 140 miles of driving before 10AM!

Hour 57
Delivered the new tapes, but found out that the DVDs wouldn’t be ready until 1AM. Changed ticket an eighth time. But at least they found a shipper, preventing me from having to tote about 700lbs. of luggage and discs back with me.

Hour 72
Picked up the new DVDs for the test pass - they work!

Hour 81
Much to my surprise, I actually boarded a plane out of LA! It’s been a long 12 hours...

Hour 84
Mission completed, 250 DVDs delivered to the office, and time to sleep.

Frankie

So Parsons sticks his head out of an office at around 7pm on Friday night, just before 4th of July weekend and says, "Frankie! Is Mrs. Frank in town this weekend?"

I was all, wow, the bossman is gonna invite us to his BBQ! Career advancement here I come!

So Parsons instead tells me he has this "Great opportunity." Which as it turns out is the "chance" to wait around until 3am for replacement code to be ready, stay up all night and then fly it to Roger in Burbank at 5am on Saturday morning. I was then trapped in Burbank airport from 9am til 2pm. And the airport's single espresso machine was broken, so I couldn't even get a coffee. Thanks Parsons. Still, 12 hours of screwing around with tapes, DVDs and no sleep is still better than a Parsons sushi fart.

Michael Wu

OK, so something magical must have happened to the lightmapper or the lightmapper farm – you’d have to ask Adrian and Zach to find out – but my lightmap jobs are flying through the farm these days. Now, I changed a couple settings, so maybe it was as simple as that, but I haven’t had a failed job in a week. This is how Boeing must’ve felt when their test planes stopped crashing and they just flew. I mean my jobs went from all night long to about 4 hours. This compares very nicely to Halo 1’s 12-36 hours per BSP. Plus our BSPs are much bigger than Halo 1. So this is very good.

Could be better though…

Work is progressing on Earth City very nicely, but there’s still so much stuff to do -- it’s a little nerve racking when the guys you’re counting on to help you are stuck on their previous levels debugging features with the programmers.

Alas,
wu

Ryan Hylland

Shipped the beta
Posted the autoupdate
Kicked some n00b asses

So one last thing: Check out THIS LINK (http://www.bungie.net/News/Story.aspx?link=8E57B7FA-EE8D-4E1A-A445-41CAFA58B404) for an amazing opportunity to win a Halo 2 LAN party.

And check out this hideous vision of Mister Chief enjoying his time in LA. Sorry bout the Speedo…

http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/misterspeedo.jpg

[Shadow]

Originally posted by Stumanji
Sorry. Couldn't find the time to get to it... -- Stumanji

=============================================

I figured so. I was just messin with ya.:D

[Stumanji]

Halo 2 trailer to hit Loews Theaters this summer! (http://www.xbox.com/en-US/press/0705/halo2.htm?level1=enushome&level2=newsticker&level3=xboxsolution)

To bad there are no Loews theaters near me... :(

[Shadow]

Isn't there the Loews cineplex down in Burlington?

[Stumanji]

Yes, there is.

But I'm in Hoquiam, WA, as designated by the star on the map. ;)

[M4LFUNCT10N]

Trailer is already out!!! I just saw I Robot tonight at the Lowes Cineplex down in Burlington. AWESOME movie I might add. I was just a little surprised to see the Halo 2 trailer at the theater... But a good surprised.

[Stumanji]

Originally posted by M4LFUNCT10N
Trailer is already out!!!

Well... it is summer, after all...

Here's a complete list of movies the trailer is attached to:
Spider-Man 2
The Village
King Arthur
I, Robot
Catwoman
Alien vs. Predator.

===========================================

Bungie Weekly Update: July 16th, 2004

Short and sweet this week? Why? Because by comparison with last week's update, anything will seem short, but more importantly, many Bungie team members were lost at the mouth of hell, the delightful location where we had our first company photo in ages taken. At least it wasn't Snake Village. Then nobody would have returned. But that said, there's plenty to chew on here as Bungie staffers discuss matters as diverse as water, physics and yacht club etiquette.

Tyson Green's Autobiography

Tyson started this week asking for a pair of shoes to borrow, since he'd arrived for a top-level meeting in his bare feet. "Fortunately, Michael Wu was kind enough to loan me a pair. Unfortunately, this cost me the opportunity to walk around a ritzy yacht club in my stockinged feet.

Still grinding on levels, with a bit of weapon experimentation on the side. Most of these side projects will never see the light of day, but sometimes one slips through and gets some schedule love.

Biggest thing this week has been getting a huge new vehicle up and running. I was pretty worried about some animation issues, but Eamon stepped up and made some code changes that help mitigate that. Today and over the course of the weekend, the related encounters will finally begin to take on a final form."

Chris Butcher's Collected Shorts

The game becomes steadily more fun. Jaime mocked up a fake multiplayer game with some Master Chief AI that just stands around and lets you shoot it – so I spent about half an hour exploring some new physics in-depth.

The beta is a lot of fun, we’re getting the chance to do a lot of in-depth playing of a single fixed build. This is a really important part of the process – in order to understand your game in a deep way, you have to have a lot of continuous time with a build that isn’t changing. We’re coming out of the beta with a ton of changes that we want to make to the physics and weapon balance for the final game.

Adrian Perez's Masterful Tales

* We have a big milestone this week so I spent a lot of it crushing through the last few bugs I had. One neat one is now the artists can specify random damage to get applied to objects when they spawn; they can just say “I want 3 busted warthogs in this area” and the game will determine an appropriate and different level of bustedness for each one.

* The new hud has finally grown to the point that we can remove the old hud. This frees up some data and memory to the rest of the game. The shader that renders the Halo (1 and 2) shield meter (a fancy 1-texture 1-pass mux shader) will be studied by archeologists thousands of years from now as evidence of the insanity of the early 21st century; maybe they’ll understand it better than I do.
* We were >this< close from cutting one of our new gametypes. But I implemented it in six hours and now it’s essentially finished (read: harder to cut). It’s a gametype explicitly designed for those people who have friends but not live; something fun that 3-4 people can play. One other type didn’t make the cut, unfortunately.

* Worked with the graphics guys to generate better lightprobes out of the lightmapper. Hao has this crazexy precomputed radiance transfer system he built to help light our BSP’s, and to make them mesh into the world correctly we render little lightprobes. That way if a bright red object moves past it, it'll look the part, with a nice red hue on one side of it. It’s a really hard problem to solve right, but it’ll really help make the spaces seem more real. It’s a hell of a long way from how we lit objects in Halo 1.

* Gave some more sweet love to the training system. The more people we bring into test the game, the more stuff we find that needs training. For example, if people have never learned how to zoom they can accidentally click the right thumbstick without knowing it, then not know how to get out of it.

Nathan Walpole's Dubious Diatribe

Tensions were high in the animation pit this week, but were quickly lifted in anticipation of our visitor. Christopher Walken is a really great guy. He taught us how to pause our animation gently between words this…week. He was damned…that he…would help… us out. So after Walken was tired from giving us great reference for animation we went to dinner. At the dinner table the waitress did not know who Christopher was, so we had a little bit…of fun…with that. All of these shenanigans led to a fun night on the town. We drank some Kokanee. Seattle is a crazy place with a Hollywood star and a bunch of rowdy animators on the loose.

So in short, it was just a normal week for animation.

Lorraine McLees' Largely True Tales

Just busywork this week – but lots and lots of it. I’m finding art book materials can double as images for the manual. The Brute looked pretty enough for me to take shots of though. Conceptualizing covers, marking up and approving stuff; art book, mini Warthog that comes with a Master Chief and a Marine (that looks strangely like Matt Segur)….

Ryan Hylland's Penny Dreadful

Beta, beta, beta, beta, beta update

We’ve been testing the update and honing our test cases for the code complete
We are now up to 22 CS testers and 4 FT testers, getting 7 more next week I think. That will be a total of 34 testers I think, and that is not including Harold or the SDET team. The army is filing into their ranks, anticipating the death march.


Michael Wu's Meandering Fable

Water and weather – we’re messing with Hao’s new systems for getting environmental effects in. You’d be surprised how much more complex these systems are compared to Halo 1. Earth City uses 3 types of water so far. Fortunately some of the improvements in our tools makes it easier to propagate our settings from one scenario to another. So generally one of us has to figure out the settings for a given type and then the rest of us can copy it and then tweak it until we’re content.

If the lightmap farm ever crashed, we’d be sunk for a day, because that means we wouldn’t have an accurate representation of our previous day’s work. Unfortunately it happened this week so that set us back a bit. Zach figured out what caused the crash and put it down, so hopefully we won’t crash again. At this point every hour counts.

Xbox development and our engine changes so often that if you don’t keep up you’ll have no choice but to wipe your dev kit and resync – a process that can take almost 2 hours. Yesterday it took 4 people to identify and fix one such dev kit in our art pit.

Somebody documented Paul Russel’s Halo 1 “Michael Wu don’t like it” Easter egg on the web and now you hear it in the environment art pit whenever somebody doesn’t like something.


Max Hoberman's Dusty Tome

We just got CENSORED working and it's da bomb! No wait, that's a different game. But this game is going to be damn damn fun, especially for people with just a single box and no Xbox Live, but a bus load of controllers and lots of willing, friendly, yet competitive friends. And to think, we almost cut it! We also got CENSORED working earlier this week thanks to Adrian's magic coding fingers, although that game takes a larger group and larger maps to test, and everyone has been so busy with this Beta and with other looming milestones that we haven't really had time. Yes, it's possible to have too much cool stuff to do at once.

This week and last we started playing on our final two multiplayer maps. One is in some ways the wacky love child of Battle Creek and Hang 'Em High, but so much prettier than either. The other has no comparison from Halo. It's asymmetrical like Zanzibar, but big like Waterworks, and it's going to knock your socks off! Anyway, we're going to take a break on these maps and playtest them for a bit, and in the meantime Carney and Cotton are sneaking a little work in on CENSORED AND CENSORED. It's amazing what one can do with a shovel, a bottle of sun tan lotion, and perhaps a little too much time spent in the sun.

Ooh yeah, this one's good. Stefan got clan support working in the UI this week. Clangina? Or was that Clan Mangina? Whatever floats your boat, Stefan. We simplified the system a while back, but let me be the first to say that sometimes simplification is a good thing. A few quirks here and there, but overall the UI for this thing is very user friendly and very much at your fingertips. Speaking of UI, we can't forget about Dave. <looks over at Dave> Looks like he's working on what is absolutely the most boring part of our whole UI. But hey, it looks damn good, way to go Dave!

Cam's Bucolic Recollections

It's been a hectic week. Spent 3 days in London (+ 2 days traveling) meeting with the product managers for all the European subsidiaries to talk about how the global marketing plan translates into their markets. Lots of great ideas for those markets, and the global launch of Halo 2 is going to be very cool. Now that I'm back, I'm way behind on everything, which sucks since Sketch and I are headed to NYC for 3 days next week, which will put me further in the hole. However, it's exciting right now because a lot of stuff is all happening, with regards to marketing. The cinema teaser trailer starts today in 1500 Loews cinemas. The final packaging for both the metal box and the standard SKU are all nearly done. The next set of print ads is nearly complete. Most of the pre-launch POP is locked and loaded for retailers. Our global PR event calendar is looking good. A cool hardware licensing deal is moving along. There's still TONS of work to be done, but we've gotten a lot done. The hard part is carving out enough time to play the beta. "Enough" would be all day long, every day, but right now it's just a couple hours at night if my wife and kids fall asleep early. Plus being out for 5 days hurt my stats.


Until then, here's Mister Chief, expressing this week's mood in graphic form.
http://www.bungie.net/images/games/halo2/weeklyupdate/goatrodeo.jpg

[Shadow]

Originally posted by Stumanji
Yes, there is.

But I'm in Hoquiam, WA, as designated by the star on the map. ;)
Funny your location says Happy Valley. Lol.

[Shadow]

Originally posted by M4LFUNCT10N
Trailer is already out!!! I just saw I Robot tonight at the Lowes Cineplex down in Burlington. AWESOME movie I might add. I was just a little surprised to see the Halo 2 trailer at the theater... But a good surprised.
Details Details! Did it show anything new?

[Jobe16]

lmao hoquim, jeez, long ways.

[Shadow]

Jaime mocked up a fake multiplayer game with some Master Chief AI that just stands around and lets you shoot it
Could this mean there is AI Mulitplayer?:rup:

[Stumanji]

Originally posted by Shadowmaster
Could this mean there is AI Mulitplayer?:rup:

I really hope so. I want bots... just like Perfect Dark (maybe smarter and more effective than that, but y'know...).

[Shadow]

Originally posted by Stumanji
I really hope so. I want bots... just like Perfect Dark (maybe smarter and more effective than that, but y'know...).
Bots would be great for me considering i Have no high speed net and live in the middle of nowhere so not many friends nearby to play against.

[Stumanji]

Originally posted by Shadowmaster

Bots would be great for me considering i Have no high speed net and live in the middle of nowhere so not many friends nearby to play against.

It looks like they're taking the effort to make it fun to play offline, once you complete the campaign:

--- "We were >this< close from cutting one of our new gametypes. But I implemented it in six hours and now it’s essentially finished (read: harder to cut). It’s a gametype explicitly designed for those people who have friends but not live; something fun that 3-4 people can play. One other type didn’t make the cut, unfortunately."

--- "... this game is going to be damn damn fun, especially for people with just a single box and no Xbox Live, but a bus load of controllers and lots of willing, friendly, yet competitive friends. And to think, we almost cut it!"

[Shadow]

Those qoutes could hint to bots in the game....But they can also hint to just a new gametype. I think he's realy tryin to tease us.

[Stumanji]

I was saying that they look like they're keeping the players w/o LIVE in mind...

At any rate, this appears to confirm:
1. Splitscreen is a go.
2. Splitscreen over LAN/LIVE is possible? (the bottom left, has an option for "Friends")

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta8.jpg

The middle says (I think) "Note: Only two people may sign in this version".

The bottom says "Beta Build Update 1"

[Expunge]

Invincible master chief that you shoot around with RL'ers and laugh as he flies 40 feet into the air and you juggle him with your 3 pals? I wish lol :<

"Chief juggle" Best gametype ever. lol

[Shadow]

Originally posted by Stumanji
I was saying that they look like they're keeping the players w/o LIVE in mind...

At any rate, this appears to confirm:
1. Splitscreen is a go.
2. Splitscreen over LAN/LIVE is possible? (the bottom left, has an option for "Friends")

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta8.jpg

The middle says (I think) "Note: Only two people may sign in this version".

The bottom says "Beta Build Update 1"
Cool, where'd you get the pic.
Nice gametype there Fear. Maybe it'll be in Halo 3. Lol.

[Stumanji]

That picture, along with all the following pics, were leaked to the net...

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta7.jpg
Upper Right Corner: Ammo and Secondary Weapon (Plasma Rifle)
Upper Left Corner: Grenades Available
Bottom Left Corner: Radar and possibly the shield?
Bottom Right Corner: Real Time Scoreboard for the Slayer Match

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta6.jpg

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta5.jpg

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta4.jpg
--- "You lost the lead." -- "______ took the lead".

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta3.jpg

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta2.jpg

http://img67.photobucket.com/albums/v205/HHQCaveman/beta1.jpg
--- I wonder what "saved films" means...

[Shadow]

Sweet, Maybe the film thing is you can film your game then watch it in a diff view or the same gameplay view.

[TheBigShow]

Would the split screen be listed as a sub-category to Xbox Live if you could play it over Xbox Live, rather then its own category?

[Expunge]

I bet the put the game recording in there because of the popularity of all the warthog jump videos :)

You all need to see SD's warthog jump video... rofl

[Shadow]

Originally posted by FeaR
I bet the put the game recording in there because of the popularity of all the warthog jump videos :)

You all need to see SD's warthog jump video... rofl
Probably, I hope it's in the final version.

[Stumanji]

Originally posted by TheBigShow
Would the split screen be listed as a sub-category to Xbox Live if you could play it over Xbox Live, rather then its own category?

I'm not sure I understand your question completely.

What I'm assuming is that when you select the XBox Live option, you get that four-controller screen (posted above) and you can select your controllers and such. The other options (System Link, Splitscreen) are offline multiplayer options.

I'm just going to assume that they decided instead of having "Multiplayer" with four sub-categories (XBL, Co-Op, Split Screen, System Link) that they just split it into those categories on the main title screen (this would mean that Campaign probably has a similar four-controller screen for Co-Op).

Does that come anywhere near answering your question?

[Valusek]

November is quickly approaching...its already halfway through July...that only leaves four more months!

[Stumanji]

Originally posted by Valusek
November is quickly approaching...its already halfway through July...that only leaves four more months!

My girlfriend got this "The Day After Tomorrow" countdown clock, that can be reset to any date of any year... She's like, "You want this? I"m just going to throw it away."

So, I took it... and naturally, I set it to Halo 2's release date...

112 days, 9 hours, 4 minutes and 21 seconds til it hits (according to the clock).

[Shadow]

Originally posted by Stumanji
My girlfriend got this "The Day After Tomorrow" countdown clock, that can be reset to any date of any year... She's like, "You want this? I"m just going to throw it away."

So, I took it... and naturally, I set it to Halo 2's release date...

112 days, 9 hours, 4 minutes and 21 seconds til it hits (according to the clock).
Oh yeah I have one of those....It's my brain. :tongue:
Havion a clock numbering the days would be depressing to me. Knowing how much longer it is till Halo 2 comes out. I like to forget about it for a few dasy then remember "Oh yeah! It's that much closer"

[Stumanji]

I discovered that I can set my cell phone (Samsung a650) to have a countdown as well... Neat huh!?

109 days - 22 hours - 33 minutes.

[Stumanji]

No need to go to a Loews Cineplex... (http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=164795)

Follow the link to watch the Halo 2 teaser...

[Shadow]

Originally posted by Stumanji
No need to go to a Loews Cineplex... (http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=164795)

Follow the link to watch the Halo 2 teaser...
I hate 56k. :(

[Stumanji]

At the end of the Halo 2 teaser (apparently, I haven't checked myself) there's a link to XBox.com... but in the last few frames, it switches over to www.ilovebees.com (http://www.ilovebees.com).

Visit the site... and all the links on the site. Refresh often. It's quite creepy.

[Stumanji]

About the "ilovebees.com" link:
Bungie has a history of crazy things like this, most recently (and famously) the Cortana Letters that preceeded Halo:CE. So, many believe there are hints of the story and what not on the ilovebees.com website. Try and find some.
-- Stumanji

==========================================
July 23, 2004

It's been a busy, busy week. So busy in fact, and so crunchtacular, that basically nobody is really available to chat this week. Sorry. Don't yell/flame/freak out.

Sketch was out in New York being a muckety-muck all week, and I got roped into another classic Parsons travel-trap. It involves a passport, and some international shenanigans. Think sauerbraten. Anyway, lots going on in the studio, and I've been playing through a very nice-looking build of the game. I noticed the skyboxes are looking amazing. Skyboxes are basically the sky (duh) designed to look 3D with flitting clouds, translucent fog and a feeling of real space and height. One in particular made me actually gasp as I looked up. 'Gasp!" went I.

The skyboxes are often fixed later in the polishing process and a bunch of the placeholders have had big holes in the center for a long time. Probably the ozone layer or something. Anyway, placeholders are becoming rarer and rarer. There's even a placeholder sound. A startling, yet melodic tinkle accompanies any footstep on an undefined texture – that is to say, a texture that hasn't yet has a footstep sound associated with it.

I kinda miss the tinkle on multiplayer maps, since it loudly announced when somebody was walking in certain areas. Which you would then blast. With a Brute Shot. "Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. Whump, whump, whump. Blam! Blam! Blam! Ow."

Marty also let me hear one of the new pieces of finished music from the game. It was perfect. Totally inspiring, a soaring cavalcade of angelic ecstasy, tempered with just a hint of mournful longng, and all this to a totally danceable Euro-technobeat….I'm just kidding Marty. It was great.

Last week's experimental foray to the Penny Arcade forums was a roaring success, if that is, you judge success by the number of flames, death-threats and pictures of distended sphincters you get. The Penny Arcade guys (who fear to tread there themselves and are super-nice) actually warned me, but by then it was too late. I read about 40 pages of angry flames before I realized that I had no idea what they were mad about. They were complaining about the arrival of the "noobz" yet only a couple of percent of the posts were actually by "noobz." It was a self-powered nightmare, but we all had a good laugh.

I've actually been playing more and more of the single player campaign, but last night, playing multiplayer, through my own crappy connection, I noticed nothing. No slowdown, no lag and no garbled voices. It was like playing on a LAN. Wonders never cease. I hope that's typical of how it will be in the retail game.

In single player, I'm being distracted by the lovely environments of course, but also by the amount of interaction there is in the levels. There's a lot more use of cover, by both good guys and bad guys, but there are other ways you interact with the environments that are both novel and old-school, simultaneously….

And on that graphics whore note, I noticed two new types of water. One shallow, one deep. Both lovely. Splish splash. I sure do love game water. My favorite all time non-Halo game water? The icy pool in Dead or Alive 3. Brrrr!

Adrian Perez

Adrian's bug-fixing has reached something of a crescendo.

"Every week we get closer to finishing, which means that every week the bugs I’m fixing are less and less critical. This also has the unfortunate side effect of making them less and less interesting to talk about. I added a few gravy features to the HUD so that Dave can work his magic, fixed a few lightmap problems that have been plaguing us since the beginning of time, and fixed a couple dozen miscellaneous bugs. One cool thing I did was allow the designers script control over the damaging of specific sections in a model. If they want some scripted event where the left tire of a warthog explodes and goes tumbling away, they will have a lot more control."

Chris Carney

Our multiplayer maven is tweaking, tuning, fixing and hammering on the multiplayer levels.

"Concerning updates, Steve “Land of “ Cotton and I have been spending our waking moments trying to finish up all of new content by next Friday (i.e. content complete). Included in this last mad dash is some familiar lands, and yes, I can not be more specific. But let’s just say that we have been spending some serious time with some old friends. In addition, we are going through all of our maps to try and finalize any outstanding game play elements, and are also deeply involved in polishing the art in the environments to a fine glossy sheen. One of our major goals in Halo 2 multiplayer is to have at least one or two of the new maps look as shiny as Butkus’s car."

Bam.

David Candland

Our User Interface maestro is getting seriously down and dirty with icons, iconography and iconification.

"This was the week of icons, icons, and more icons. First off, I updated the Xbox Live icons in the friends, clan, and players menus. We needed a special icon to represent a specific team member. Max suggested adding a large sombrero or foam cowboy hat to the friend icon. Although I laughed initially nothing better popped into my head. Fine, sombrero it is…for now.

Next, another throwback to the Myth days. Our player level system is getting icons based on the Covenant caste structure. You will soon be able to see how good a player is just by looking at his rank icon.

Lastly, I’m working on refining some of the custom player emblems that don’t read well at small sizes. Sorry, but I’m afraid the shrunken head has got to go. Event horizon is borderline. Flaming Ninja has won the battle of emotional attachment over legibility. He’s in.

So, that's it until next week, when I'll recount my mysterious trip. I know it was short, and a bit limp, so I'll make it up to you next week. Until then, here's Mister Chief reacting to a skybox. It's more of a scream than a gasp…

http://www.bungie.net/images/News/InlineImages/misterchiefscream.jpg

[Shadow]

Originally posted by Stumanji
At the end of the Halo 2 teaser (apparently, I haven't checked myself) there's a link to XBox.com... but in the last few frames, it switches over to www.ilovebees.com (http://www.ilovebees.com).

Visit the site... and all the links on the site. Refresh often. It's quite creepy.
Yea, There's several theories on the count down timer on the main page. SOme say it's the time till Halo 2 is due to be completed. The idea I like is there's one acroymn that shows up alot on the site. SPDR . People believe it stands for Single Player Demo Release.

[Stumanji]

You can find the Bungie Weekly Update here. (http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=eurodash)

I'm not going to post the entire thing, since much of it is not exactly "Halo 2" related, as it is "Frankie's Adventures Around Europe"....

[Stumanji]

A german print ad for Halo 2... pretty cool.

[Shadow]

Anyone speak German to translate the text?

[Stumanji]

http://server6.uploadit.org/files/devilmingy-pic1.JPG
I think this is the Covenant Carbine the Elite is holding... but it's hard to say for sure.

http://server6.uploadit.org/files/devilmingy-pic2.JPG
Promising new gametype: Plasma Swords Only

http://server6.uploadit.org/files/devilmingy-pic3.JPG
Screenshot directed by Michael Bay (Bad Boys II, Pearl Harbor)

http://img15.exs.cx/img15/7408/01ivory.jpg
First look at a new Covenant Weapon

----------------------------------------------------------------------
The pics do hint that we'll be able to play as Spartans and Elites in Free-For-All matches, which up until this point was just assumed.

[Stumanji]

A "First Person" look at the newest version of the pistol. Rumor is: weaker shots, no zooom while firing...

[Stumanji]

A look at a new gamemode...

[Stumanji]

Another look at a new gamemode...

[Stumanji]

One more new gamemode, and a first look at a new weapon: "The Brute Shot". Notice the huge blade for melee attacks? The size of the weapon is also a good indication as to the size of the Brutes. They haven't been seen since E3 2003, so chances are they've changed quite a bit...

[Stumanji]

A nice pic of the MC dual wielding those human pistols...

[Stumanji]

So, there's lots of talk about Halo 2's multiplayer going around. One of the questions has often been, "Will there be AI Bots in multiplayer?" The primary concern here was that the casual gamer, who doesn't want to (or cannot) get XBL will still get the multiplayer experience. Some people just don't have access to a broadband connection.

In the Bungie FAQ, the response to the bots question was always, "We have not made a final decision regarding bots yet. The team has heard the cries of fans and we're exploring ways to make multiplayer games more enjoyable for gamers with only 2 controllers and no Live access."

But, Frankie over at Bungie, dropped this little nugget in a GameSpy reader feedback article:

Will there be bots in Halo 2?
No. There will however be tens of thousands of real life players to challenge you at any time, day or night. On Xbox Live. And we still support split-screen and system link multiplayer. Up to 16 players can use their own Xbox and TV on system link this time around.

Judging from the answer, it looks like they've given up on "gamers with only 2 controllers and no Live access." Sucks.

[Stumanji]

Here's a couple pictures from the Tokyo Games Show in Japan. The first one is a more recent look at the HUD. You'll see the radar on the lower left, with the Shields bar directly over that. In the upper left, you get a look at how many of each grenade you're holding, and which ones you've got equipped. The upper right is what weapon you're carrying, and the lower right is the running scoreboard for the match. Notice the little logos with the scoreboard? One is 343 Guilty Spark (a character from Halo:CE) and the other is the 7th Collumn logo. The tiny arrow on the far right indicates who has the oddball.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Picture two is a splitscreen game set-up on a widescreen TV. The widescreen TV is split down the center vertically, instead of horizontally. It makes for a pretty cool look. Of course, the focus of the picture is the shaved guy playing, so you only get a LITTLE bit of the other half of the screen. Looks to be a team slayer match.

[Stumanji]

I can honestly say that there's no more updating on the progress of the game, since the game is done. Finished and shipped to a nebulous region known as RTC (Release To Certification) where it will be dumped from eight digital tapes onto a DVD and go through some final testing.

From Bungie.net.

[Shadow]

I can honestly say that there's no more updating on the progress of the game, since the game is done. Finished and shipped to a nebulous region known as RTC (Release To Certification) where it will be dumped from eight digital tapes onto a DVD and go through some final testing.

From Bungie.net.
In other words Halo 2 has gone Gold. :woot:

[Stumanji]

Picture comes courtesy of Halo2.com, and it's our first real look at Cortana from Halo 2.

[Ender]

What?! She's not nude?? Or even topless?? Bungie I'm VERY disappointed...clearly you need more horny developers. ;)

[hockeysnipermlg]

like a few of the guys who made DOA: XBV

[Ender]

yes, oh yes indeed. :yes: :D

[hockeysnipermlg]

you have to admit, that game had some amazing... erm... physics... yeah, thats it. physics :tup:

[Gomerking]

have you heard about the pirated version that came out? It has french language but has english subtitles. I went and played it at a friends house, its a fun game. I only played for an hour tho.

[Stumanji]

have you heard about the pirated version that came out? It has french language but has english subtitles. I went and played it at a friends house, its a fun game. I only played for an hour tho.

Yeah, that was discussed in another Halo 2 thread. My friend's friend (seriously) got a copy of the pirated game, and my friend (the friend of the friend's friend) got a chance to play it. He says it's 99% better than Halo - and he made it all the way through the campaign, but really didn't know what was going on, with all the French dialogue.

I instructed him (AND YOU) to not give any single player spoilers - because the story is a huge part of the game, and I don't want it ruined (seriously - trying to be funny and posting information: NOT FUNNY).

I'm going to go over to my friend's house (the friend of THE friend) and play some multiplayer with him this weekend.

[Shadow]

Yeah, that was discussed in another Halo 2 thread. My friend's friend (seriously) got a copy of the pirated game, and my friend (the friend of the friend's friend) got a chance to play it. He says it's 99% better than Halo - and he made it all the way through the campaign, but really didn't know what was going on, with all the French dialogue.

I instructed him (AND YOU) to not give any single player spoilers - because the story is a huge part of the game, and I don't want it ruined (seriously - trying to be funny and posting information: NOT FUNNY).

I'm going to go over to my friend's house (the friend of THE friend) and play some multiplayer with him this weekend.
*goes off to tell Bungie* BUSTED!!




jk

[Gomerking]

yah, i didn't play the campaign much, i want to wait until it comes out so that i can play, but im gonna go play some more multiplayer next weekend, so that i can get used to everything even more.

[Gomerking]

do you guys have live?
when h2 comes out i wanna start a clan, anyone interested?