Halo 3 Alpha build screenshots.

[nintenho]

MULTIPLAYER BETA'S GRAPHICS.

MULTIPLAYER BETA'S GRAPHICS.

http://www.n4g.com/News-24753.aspx

• HUD is rounded (like Metroid Prime) so that's better.
• HUD in general look nicer.
• Reticles are smaller which makes it more accurate and will affect gameplay.
• Graphics look good enough to me.

Hope it's 60 fps.

 

[Acert93]

Back at E3 they noted that they are reserving their poly budget for "other things" than models. The spartans, guns, vehicles, and world all appear fairly low poly and I don't think this is due to the Alpha stage.

So what are the guesses on what they will be doing with their poly budget?

My guess would be for SP that it is on grass and foiliage and even interactive foiliage (as just announced, both grass reacting to explosions as well as small bushes), draw distance, and large open battlefields littered with foes and vehicles. Their lighting and shadowing system may also be poly bound as well.

For MP 4 way split screen eats into the poly budget some, especially if they aim for 60fps for online. With only 16 players online for MP I don't think the maps can be too big. My guess is the "environmental" details will be added.

Any other guesses? I am hoping for LP style particle system (LP has what, 30% less world poly detail than DR for this reason?), but no screenshots have indicated anything this crazy.

Halo 3 is shaping up to be what I thought it would be: A good looking game, but with better games graphically on the platform (but not many). Emphasis will be on the AI, story and gameplay. I hope the X button is sprint (and you cannot shoot or straif during sprint ala BF2).

 

[rounin]

Maybe they might have everything destructable and deformable as well ? Maybe physics too.

 

[nintenho]

stinkles (who seems to work at Bungie?) from GAF says this:

"Decorators" are things like ferns, plants, flowers, rocks, pebbles, dust - 3D stuff that turns say, ground textures into believeably 3D ground. Valhalla, the big tree filled level, for example, is absolutely festoooned in ground cover now.

In the case of the shots here, it's all missing, because the Alpha build is very, very old.
And not designed to be screenshotted. But rather to simply test networking and be enjoyable enough to keep folks testing networking.

So this is the beta's graphics, but no where near the final game's graphics.

If a mod wants to change the title to saying beta graphics that might be a good idea.

 

[rounin]

So this is the beta's graphics, but no where near the final game's graphics.

If a mod wants to change the title to saying beta graphics that might be a good idea.

I'm not sure if thats a good idea. I think in general Beta is further along than Alpha, so changing it to Beta would give the opposite effect that you intended.

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

[*]HUD is rounded (like Metroid Prime) so that's better.
[*]HUD in general look nicer.
[*]Reticles are smaller which makes it more accurate and will affect gameplay.
[*]Graphics look good enough to me.

Eh...

Hope it's 60 fps.

No. For the love of god, no.

I have something important riding on this

Back at E3 they noted that they are reserving their poly budget for "other things" than models. The spartans, guns, vehicles, and world all appear fairly low poly and I don't think this is due to the Alpha stage.

So what are the guesses on what they will be doing with their poly budget?

My guess would be for SP that it is on grass and foiliage and even interactive foiliage (as just announced, both grass reacting to explosions as well as small bushes), draw distance, and large open battlefields littered with foes and vehicles. Their lighting and shadowing system may also be poly bound as well.

For MP 4 way split screen eats into the poly budget some, especially if they aim for 60fps for online. With only 16 players online for MP I don't think the maps can be too big. My guess is the "environmental" details will be added.

Any other guesses? I am hoping for LP style particle system (LP has what, 30% less world poly detail than DR for this reason?), but no screenshots have indicated anything this crazy.

Halo 3 is shaping up to be what I thought it would be: A good looking game, but with better games graphically on the platform (but not many). Emphasis will be on the AI, story and gameplay. I hope the X button is sprint (and you cannot shoot or straif during sprint ala BF2).

Yeah, the "decorators" apply equally to the multiplayer, simply not having been turned on thus far. That also includes debris, not just foliage. Besides that, the considerations that went into choosing their HDR format lend credence to your speculation on lighting as well. Nothing much has been mentioned about how they do atmospherics, either, though some good guesses can be made.

Even single player will have to be able to handle 2-player splitscreen smoothly, too. More important than anything else, though, MP will need to stay smooth when there's half a dozen characters in close proximity, tossing 'nades and firing weapons all at the same time. Everything else will follow that.

My personal hope for the X button (whichever button it ends up as), however, is that it is a new class of objects: Neither nades nor weapons. Instead, you'd pick it up (with various such objects existing), much like the guns, and activate it with a button press. It would be a single slot deal, in line with choosing the right tool for the job 2-weapon system employed in the first game. The first such object being the ONI bubble shield.

BTW, Frankie over in the cesspool:

Well he's dead wrong. there will be plenty of notice and PR fanfare when the date is announced, likely followed by screenshots with things like decorators, lightmaps, atmospheric effects, and about 100 other graphic features not included in this freaking ancient Alpha networking test build.

You can all make up your minds about the graphics when it ships, but doing so based on this build is somewhat absurd.

Anyway, Mods. What's your policy on hotlinking to things our lawyers are actively shutting down?

hen he shouldn't have signed a contract saying, "Go ahead and fire me if I leak any of this shizzle"


"Decorators" are things like ferns, plants, flowers, rocks, pebbles, dust - 3D stuff that turns say, ground textures into believeably 3D ground. Valhalla, the big tree filled level, for example, is absolutely festoooned in ground cover now.

In the case of the shots here, it's all missing, because the Alpha build is very, very old.
And not designed to be screenshotted. But rather to simply test networking and be enjoyable enough to keep folks testing networking.

 

[ninzel]

I remember reading a Bungie article where some guy was comparing Halo3 to Gears of War. He commented on how Gears was using a lot of detail and that Halo3 was going for something different. I don't remember the exact words,but I got the feeling that he was already preparing us for the fact that Halo3 would not look as good as Gears in terms of detail.
Edit: So no ones going to pick these apart and let us know how it's shaping up?

 

[inefficient]

Oh dear...

Edit: So no ones going to pick these apart and let us know how it's shaping up?

They kind of speak for themselves.

 

[expletive]

Ok so it seems the thread and has agreed that these are Beta shots yet i see 'alpha build' splashed across all but two of the shots, what am I missing?

 

[Deepblue]

They are alpha shots, with graphics that are completely unchanged from pre-alpha (according to Frankie).

 

[DeathKnight]

And graphics that do not reflect the current state of the game. It's useless to draw conclusions.

 

[Inane_Dork]

Graphics look good enough to me.

I was expecting less, to be honest. But then again, cheap pictures of a TV screen can hide a world of problems. So we can't even clearly see what is clearly not final graphics. It's nothing to react to then.

Hope it's 60 fps.

Very, very unlikely.

So what are the guesses on what they will be doing with their poly budget?

Shadow mapping for outdoor shadowing can take quite a large poly/second number. Large numbers of enemies and allies can also tax vertex processors (see the Framework thread about Dead Rising). Also, particle effects on a system with frame buffer cache can have tons of polys. Kameo had 500,000-1,000,000 particles in its throne room, and each of those is probably rendered as 4 vertices.

 

[AlNom]

Won't tiling incur some careful management of poly's too?

 

[ninzel]

They kind of speak for themselves.

Not for people like myself they don't. That's why I'm here to gain insight from people more in the know.
They look real nice,but beyond that and without Halo2 right next to it to compare I can't tell what's changed.

 

[Tap In]

They kind of speak for themselves.

yep, they say "we're a bunch of blurry, not-near-completion, in motion alpha screens, taken with a camera phone off of a TV".

 

[ninzel]

Does anyone know if the are planning to "gritty up" the look of Halo3? This is one of the graphical details I would have liked to have seen in more next gen games.

 

[22psi]

Anyone else get butterflies just thinking about playing Halo 3? Strange that some games have this effect on me.

 

[ninzel]

No butterflies after Halo2 felt very similar. I play Halo games just for the music.
If there's one thing I've learned after playing Gears of War and Halo2 it's that MS is the best at creating hype.

 

[infinity4]

why is it that Halo 3 is unlikely to be running at 60fps??? don't bungie like 60fps??? if the game's not 60fps then it will give me travelsick if you know what i mean

 

[BenFranklinstein]

why is it that Halo 3 is unlikely to be running at 60fps??? don't bungie like 60fps??? if the game's not 60fps then it will give me travelsick if you know what i mean

For me it's the opposite. When I built my new computer Halflife2 ran so smooth it gave me vertigo. I had to turn the graphics options all the way up so the frame rate would come down and then I didn't get sick. Most games don't do this to me, I think it has to do with the field of view being zoomed in more than most games?