Halo Infinite [Fall 2021] [XO, XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

[Ike Turner]

Sony's got ICE, EA has got Frostbite.
What should MS's team be? SnowStorm? ColdSore? ChillSoftwareResearch? LowTemperatureThing?

Apparently Beyond3D truly lost the plot years ago.. Microsoft's Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG) has been a thing for years.

 

[BRiT]

Apparently Beyond3D truly lost the plot years ago.. Microsoft's Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG) has been a thing for years.

Were they used internally or sent out to dev shops targeting Xbox consoles? (Sort of like the dev groups from Nvidia and AMD sent to clients). Any info on recent notable activity?

 

[function]

Sony's got ICE, EA has got Frostbite.
What should MS's team be? SnowStorm? ColdSore? ChillSoftwareResearch? LowTemperatureThing?

Given Halo's development woes, I think MS needs to get R.A.D.I.C.A.L.

Really
Angry
Deep
In
Coding
Around
Legacy

Spoiler

Logo:

 

[orangpelupa]

Right, but perhaps better the devil you know than what you don't know.

Personally, I think there should have been a small core team among all the Xbox Games Studios which deals with game engines, experimenting with improving them to meet certain internal business needs, especially if vast majority of those studios are focused on one or two primary engines. It wasn't until just a couple years ago that Microsoft picked up additional studios and gained more overall experience outside the MS in-house engines. Maybe this is happening now, so future titles will be easier to create?

Similar to square enix with crystal tools / luminous? But they use UE for most of their games

 

[Ike Turner]

Were they used internally or sent out to dev shops targeting Xbox consoles? (Sort of like the dev groups from Nvidia and AMD sent to clients). Any info on recent notable activity?

ATG works internally AFAIK (alongside 1st party devs) . They are the ones working on & creating the SDK, integrating & developing new DirectX features (audio, graphics & I/O).

 

[Devious]

Apparently Beyond3D truly lost the plot years ago.. Microsoft's Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG) has been a thing for years.

Were they used internally or sent out to dev shops targeting Xbox consoles? (Sort of like the dev groups from Nvidia and AMD sent to clients). Any info on recent notable activity?

While they don't mention Microsoft's ATG, according to an interview on DF with Mike Rayner (Technical Director at The Coalition), they got some help from a variety of Microsoft tech teams for Gears 4:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-gears-of-war-4-tech-interview

Mike Rayner: We have worked closely with Epic Games and exchanged ideas for improvements and optimisations along the way. Parallel rendering was a new feature that was developed by Epic Games and was made available to us during development of Gears 4. This really transformed the rendering pipeline and was a massive power boost in terms of throughput. The Coalition then, working closely with Microsoft's internal D3D12 dev team, transitioned the engine fully to D3D12 on Xbox One - and this again boosted performance greatly for us, and there is still potential to push the engine even further under D3D12.

Mike Rayner: Gears of War 4 is a DirectX 12 title on both Xbox One and Windows 10. Working with Microsoft's Silicon, Graphics and Media team and Epic, we have transitioned Unreal Engine fully to DX12. DirectX 12 has allowed us to increase performance by giving us more direct control over the hardware, simplifying the driver layer, and allowing us to make fully informed and optimal decisions on how to manage graphics resources.

 

[disco_]

The engine is fine. Its a game that was designed for 2013 hardware and scaled up for the xbox one x. It was originally going to be released in 2018 but was delayed and imho was delayed because of the what SOT turned out to be and the looming xsx launch. But they were already in a process of making the game run well at 4k and decided to target higher frame rates for the xsx. They figured they would be able to continue to roll out improvements as the game aged. That is why the raytracing stuff was coming after launch of the game. We all know they wont be able to do 4k 120fps with Raytracing but they also want this to big a big competitve game like FN , Apex, overwatch. FN esp but also Apex will run well on a potato . So MS wanted the multiplayer to run extremely well on all the platforms it be on. The eye candy would be reserved for the higher end platforms and would come out later on.

To me i'd be perfectly happy playing what I saw in the 8 minute demo. It looked nice and the framerate was amazing. I could only imagine how smooth and stable it be on an rdna 2 or ampere card for the pc.

Is it? I don't know what modifications 343 has done to it but bungie still has issues with it. Even during destiny 2 development they were saying scene/areas took several hours to a day to import/alter in their dev environment. I'm sure they've reduced that by now but it seems the tools are still very much archaic by "modern" standards.

 

[BRiT]

Lets continue the UE Open world discussion over here: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/unreal-engine-vs-open-world-spin-off.61910/

 

[iroboto]

Pretty solid video here showcasing the same rendering issues between H5 and HI.

That being said I do agree just dropping things to 30fps would be a big win for XBO.
XSX will need to do more though.

 

[iroboto]

what timing:

 

[Xbat]

what timing:

I disagree with his use of the word insurmountable when describing 343 challenges in releasing Halo infinite for Series X launch. I agree that the pandemic definitely had an effect on them launching this year and that's ok, it's thrown a spanner into the works for most things.

But making it sound like designing a launch game with what sounds like a monster budget and 5 years as insurmountable is ridiculous.

 

[function]

I disagree with his use of the word insurmountable when describing 343 challenges in releasing Halo infinite for Series X launch. I agree that the pandemic definitely had an effect on them launching this year and that's ok, it's thrown a spanner into the works for most things.

But making it sound like designing a launch game with what sounds like a monster budget and 5 years as insurmountable is ridiculous.

I think perhaps the problems were insurmountable, but that many of the problems were of MS's own making.

The wrong priorities, prescribing a set of acceptable solutions regardless of the problems faced, and people above shouting about what they want with no consideration for what you can actually do.

 

[iroboto]

I think perhaps the problems were insurmountable, but that many of the problems were of MS's own making.

The wrong priorities, prescribing a set of acceptable solutions regardless of the problems faced, and people above shouting about what they want with no consideration for what you can actually do.

its really uncanny the pop in issues are exactly the same between Infinite and H5. The same shadow and lighting pop in issues as you get in close. I didn't notice them in H5, but once I saw it, yea, it's the same things in Infinite.

They really needed to fix the engine and give it a proper update to the latest and great methods, but it seemed like they were just heads down grinding through shit tools and just making content. A big mistake imo and as NXGamer says, the tech debt was never paid. They just kept trying to make it do shit that is now (likely) very inefficient compared to the newer methods.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

its really uncanny the pop in issues are exactly the same between Infinite and H5. The same shadow and lighting pop in issues as you get in close. I didn't notice them in H5, but once I saw it, yea, it's the same things in Infinite.

With regards to the pop-in, you have to believe that this is going to be better on Series S/X with a solid SSD subsystem. I feel like this is an area where the PC they used really isn't "representative" of what One X is capable of delivering.

 

[tuna]

what timing:

Is there actually any new info in that video?

 

[iroboto]

Is there actually any new info in that video?

no, none.. I just thought it was weird that all these Halo videos were coming out at once.

 

[Ike Turner]

I just thought it was weird that all these Halo videos were coming out at once.

Slow news month...them clicks and ad $$ have to pay the rent.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

With regards to the pop-in, you have to believe that this is going to be better on Series S/X with a solid SSD subsystem. I feel like this is an area where the PC they used really isn't "representative" of what One X is capable of delivering.

Yeah because as we constantly hear, the current PC can't do the things the XBSX can. It's not like PCI-e NVME running at over 2.4Ghz haven't been around for a long while now. Imo, the company doing the beta showing should have had the best PC out to show the best of the demo, I mean all that money they have and they can't run the demo as it's likely to be represented on the XBSX? That's what those little warning labels at the bottom of the demos they were showing was saying.

That said the engine is likely at fault for the pop-ins as iroboto said and nothing to do with the PC used.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

what timing:

Some of his analysis surely can't be right. I mean, he states that Microsoft didn't know the specs of Series X back when Halo Infinite was first announced in 2018 but you don't spend 5-6 years not knowing what your hardware is targeting, even if you do make some adjustments once silicon testing begins in anger.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Some of his analysis surely can't be right. I mean, he states that Microsoft didn't know the specs of Series X back when Halo Infinite was first announced in 2018 but you don't spend 5-6 years not knowing what your hardware is targeting, even if you do make some adjustments once silicon testing begins in anger.

Yeah I'm betting that speculation is just bad unless Xbox hardware team wasn't letting any of the MS Game Studios (especially 343i???) know any of the specs they were designing around. The 12 TFLOP number was basically set in stone 5 years ago. It was up to the Xbox hardware team to make it happen.

They've been investigating moving to alternative storage tech like SSD since 2007 (according to Hot Chips presentation). So that was likely locked down fairly early in the hardware design cycle as well.

Information on RT might possibly have come late, but certainly would have been known by 2018 (original release date for NAVI which likely was supposed to have RT...but something went really wrong at AMD and so everything got massively delayed and so NAVI got split into RDNA 1 and RDNA 2).

I think it's just more that 343i upper management just isn't very good at managing development of a game like Halo, especially when it's saddled with such a creaking engine.

Regards,
SB