Halo 3 Announcement trailer on Marketplace!

[kyleb]

Or quite likely they just wanted the cinimatic look of a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

 

[Nesh]

I thought it had some nice wind effects, the broken sign moving around, the snapped wires floating in the wind, to give the impression that the world was alive.. despite the fact it was essentially a wasteland.

True but with everything else looking dead, and the character emerging from the unrealistic smoke all of a sudden (almost out of place) it mostly gave the impression that these wind effects were just scripted for the trailer.

The detail was astounding though.

 

[pipo]

i have to say, after having seen both the live version of the trailer, and one of the various web hosted ones, the difference is quite suprising.


the live version has a much higher visual fidelity, so watch that version if you can.

Probably because it's big (~104MB).

It's good, but I'm not blown away. Fine for a teaser I guess.

 

[AlNom]

True but with everything else looking dead, and the character emerging from the unrealistic smoke all of a sudden (almost out of place) it mostly gave the impression that these wind effects were just scripted for the trailer.

The detail was astounding though.

Actually, if you look close enough at the beginning, you can see him walking. Of course, the moment he comes through the smoke means he must have run and then started walking again (Would be funny to see ).

 

[czekon]

Not unlike the Halo 2 announcement trailer, no?

yeah..too bad, but if this is how halo 3 will look like so i can wait for next, better trailer. I think it's just they haven't enought of time. Maybe MS was scare so bad of sony move that they desperately need Halo3, to show something at least, to get more attention..i do't know just guessing

 

[AlNom]

This is what Bungie had to say:

The trailer was built to have minimum impact on the development process, and while it required long hours and hard work from many, many Bungie staffers, it utilizes real-game assets, fiction and locations from parts of the "real" game.

http://bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?link=Halo3Announcement

That pretty much explains the brevity. I'm guessing we'll see more videos at TGS or GDC before the next E3 other than screenshots or promo things from the weekly updates.

 

[Tap In]

The demo shifted away from the crater to the part of the level you see the Master Chief walking in from. He was controllable, which means that the trailer indicates just how good the game will look. Lehto was able to zoom in on the Master Chief with the camera, and you could see the many different ways light reflected objects onto him. For example, you could see light reflect off the ground and onto his armor. A new materials system shows the difference between his armor and the rubber undersuit. It's so detailed that if you bring the camera close to the Master Chief's visor, you see everything in front of him reflected in it, right down to the ammo counter in his rifle.

this was more than a movie.... Real time controlable demo

A new materials system shows the difference between his armor and the rubber undersuit.

this sounds very sweet and describes the amount of detail. bungie is very detail oriented in their games

 

[czekon]

and it's amazing how huge the terrain was just HUGE

 

[overclocked]

Not unlike the Halo 2 announcement trailer, no?

I think they looked the same almost but set in different spaces, the H2 teaser impressed me more while unfortunately the game didnt because of the damn covenant parts.
I hope we get to play Master Chief troughout the whole game in the final part.

 

[kyleb]

Yeah, I didn't care for the switching back and forth to the Abiter either. It would have been cool as an unlocable extra to play though sperate but then that would have made the main game too short. All in all I think the single player shamefully got rushed though to push out multiplayer.

 

[AlNom]

I wasn't particularly fond of Arbiter's missions either, but some had their moments. I expect we'll play as him again. Perhaps "we" fight our way back onto a cruiser or capital ship and take Johnson, Miranda, and GS343 back to Earth...or deal with the Gravemind on that side of the galaxy. I hope he gets out of that awful armour (although nicely detailed) and into one of the regular suits (black,white, gold...whatever, he looks tougher in it IMO); I just can't stand how his armour's camo lasts only a few seconds.

 

[Platon]

Halo 3 has a new global lighting system that now lights everything uniquely from the same source, which explains just how that setting sun looked that good as it illuminated everything in the trailer.

I guess this must be some kind of fake thing, surely not real global ilumination. That is not supposed to be possible this gen.

I have now cheked the trailer a few more times and I have to say that I have become more impresed with it. It does indeed have nice lighting but once again the scale of it all. I don't think we have seen something similar before. Sure there have loads of games where you are able to see some faint greyed out mountains in the distance, but that is it, this was huge but most importantly active. You had some activity going on somewhere far far away, and those paralax mapped clouds do look good...

 

[scooby_dooby]

Watching the trailer off Live is pretty sweet, you can see lots of nice details like sun rays streaming down that I didn't see in the web versions.

 

[Tap In]

I think people might be underestimating what this title will bring graphics-wise.

It is doing a lot for being so small

the clarity, the colors, the particles, the lighting, the textures, the sheer size

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Hmm.....

Halo 3's graphics will include the features seen in the real-time trailer and more, these are rendered using a new graphics engine, making the most of next-gen features like HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting, pre-computed radiance transfer, and much, much more.

Hey.... PRT.

 

[scooby_dooby]

What's this easter egg he's referring to?

I spotted an Easter Egg in the trailer after I watched it a few times. How do you explain that?
A

The New Mombasa City Council had an incredibly efficient public works department until and even during the tragic and devastating Covenant invasion.

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Look carefully at the sign.

 

[heavenlyglory]

I think people might be underestimating what this title will bring graphics-wise.

It is doing a lot for being so small

the clarity, the colors, the particles, the lighting, the textures, the sheer size

Agreed.
Especially after looking at the hi-res shots on bungies site.

 

[Hardknock]

The music in this trailer sent chills through my spine. And I'm loving the overall scale of the environment. Can you imagine having huge 50+ multiplayer battles online with this engine??

The hype for this game come 2007 with a movie and all is going to be insane.

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Halo 3--The engine, and the antics

Over at Bungie.net, Frankie and co. have put up a feature noting that they have returned to Washington (and missed most of the cool stuff we got to watch from E3)
Here

Apparently, they were worried enough about crashes and accidents, since they were running real time, to do this:

We actually had six debugs all told. Three for the E3 briefing at the theater and three for something we did later. The three at the conference were the main unit - Harold Ryan our studio manager sat patiently backstage, waiting to press "A" after Bill Gates' speech. A dirty little secret was that he pressed "A" on two controllers simultaneously. That way if one of the boxes was accidentally unplugged, or broke, or gasp - crashed, the projector would switch seamlessly to the second Xbox and hopefully nobody would notice.

On the engine side of things:

Marcus showed off the new engine's lighting system, the self-shadowing and realtime reflection on the Chief, and the fact that we can draw geometry out to about 13 or 14 (game) miles. There was other stuff, but we'll talk about that later.

And posted earlier in their FAQ, for those who missed it on the previous page:

Halo 3's graphics will include the features seen in the real-time trailer and more, these are rendered using a new graphics engine, making the most of next-gen features like HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting, pre-computed radiance transfer, and much, much more.