Halo 3 Beta: May 16th - June 7th

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Edit: Bah, nevermind. Too much for the day. 'Night, all

 

[archangelmorph]

Other than being super-sampled, what?

Is it me or does it look too close to Halo 2 to come off as graphically astounding?

Maybe it's just because Halo 2 looked so good for its time that the visual improvements made, although probably vast, seem to look rather minor..

I would have preferred an overall change in art direction for this game to make it look closer to the gritty look of the CGI trailer they released a while back (which first showed off the bubble shield).. I'm not an artist so maybe that would have purely been an issue of lighting (and granted without the capability of doing the high volume GI shown in the trailer on real-time hardware it may not be possible..) but then i'm sure some form of artistic hack (similar to the ones used to get the King Kong games looking so artistically polished) could be used to bring it closer..

In any case i'll be staiving off judgement until I see the final build of the single player... I'd imagine this would be at E3 probably..

PS - Now i'm a bonafide Xbox360 owner I'll be looking forward to this little douzy when it's released in the Fall..

 

[aselto]

and granted without the capability of doing the high volume GI shown in the trailer on real-time hardware it may not be possible.

But the trailer was rendered in real-time on Xbox 360. Though I see you question 360 being a real-time hardware, but it would be too much of philosophy and theoretical physics to discuss here.

I recommend you to plug a Halo 2 disc into your 360 and see how horrible it looks nowadays.

 

[archangelmorph]

But the trailer was rendered in real-time on Xbox 360. Though I see you question 360 being a real-time hardware, but it would be too much of philosophy and theoretical physics to discuss here.

I believe you're confusing the trailer i'm refering to (bubble shield, CGI) with the one shown at E3 last year (showning MC and the huge tech-structure in the distance, supposedly rendered in real-time or offline using in-game assets, I can't remember which...)
And I don't understand your comments about the 360 being real-time hardware... Sorry, its not very clear what you're trying to say...

I recommend you to plug a Halo 2 disc into your 360 and see how horrible it looks nowadays.

I have and it's not THAT bad..

I'm not saying the game doesn't look great now since, if I compare some of the more recent pics against those shown of other 360 titles it sits quite comfortably beside the best of them (gears included).. However I think the similarities between the look of the game and that of Halo 2 (obviously due to the consistency of the art) means that those screenshots don't imidiately jump out and me and make me say "wow!!" like the E3 trailer (real-time?) did.. The fact remains that what Halo 2 did it did darn well and so far I haven't seen any indication that the visual improvements of Halo 3 will be as drastically improved as Halo 2 was over Halo 1..

However like I said, If they can get closer to the look of the CGI trailer or even of the E3 trailer for the final release then I'm sure my eye-balls will be popping out for it.. Otherwise I'd be quite comfortable with what has been shown so far, although from a technical standpoint it would worry me significantly that an in-house premier developer with possibly the biggest available budget a publisher would ever provide couldn't build an engine (from the ground up) designed entirely around the hardware, that could out-class the rendering quality of a game which was built using a multi-platform engine (UE 3.0) that significantly limited the hardware leverage of the 360 due to the fact that the code was design with portability in mind as opposed to specialisation and focus around the specific hardware config...

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Gears of War

Halo3.com was updated today with a bunch of content, including screens only seen in mag scans:

http://www.halo3.com/images/screenshots/downloads/hg_int1.jpg

Looks properly next-gen to me, and that's an alpha shot.

That shot is very dissappointing for me my friend. I was hoping it will be like Gears of War but this is like high definition Halo2. Maybe for final version they will have good lighting, shadow and models. I feel maybe this is "place-holder"(?).

 

[Qroach]

You guys are looking at Halo 3 multi-player screen shots taken from unfinished builds. perhaps you should save judgement until we see some actual single player screen shots?

 

[22psi]

That shot is very dissappointing for me my friend. I was hoping it will be like Gears of War but this is like high definition Halo2. Maybe for final version they will have good lighting, shadow and models. I feel maybe this is "place-holder"(?).

Do a side by side to this:

http://www.bungie.net/images/Games/Halo2/screenshots/H2_chiefandodsts.jpg

The difference is clearly there and clearly beyond Halo 2 even in alpha. This is not a hi-def Halo 2. You are right, alpha = lots of place-holders.

 

[dobwal]

That shot is very dissappointing for me my friend. I was hoping it will be like Gears of War but this is like high definition Halo2. Maybe for final version they will have good lighting, shadow and models. I feel maybe this is "place-holder"(?).

My disappointment revolves around the settings of the Halo games versus their technical merit, graphics wise.

For a full blown war, the games seem to pretty much place you in pristine locations. The games always look too clean and neat, which ruins the atmosphere for me.

 

[NRP]

That shot is very dissappointing for me my friend. I was hoping it will be like Gears of War but this is like high definition Halo2. Maybe for final version they will have good lighting, shadow and models. I feel maybe this is "place-holder"(?).

Other than the aliasing, what's wrong with that shot? I think it looks great, especially given that it's a multiplayer map.

Some of you guys need to come back to reality.

 

[kyleb]

What do you mean by "the aliasing"? That shot is butter smooth compared to any other console game out there, let alone Gears.

 

[AlNom]

Interesting that this shot (uber res warning) has what looks like 2xMSAA. Check the tracer fire, the guard railings, or any near horizontal polygon edges against the sky to see it.

hm... I just thought it peculiar since you'd think it'd be trivial to go all the way to 4x if they're grabbing such a ridunkulous resolution anyway.

 

[kyleb]

Well then I'd say it is a safe bet not to expect anything more than 2xAA in the final game, though obviously at 1/9th the resolution of that shot. 60fps would make my day.

 

[NRP]

What do you mean by "the aliasing"? That shot is butter smooth compared to any other console game out there, let alone Gears.

I meant the unzoomed image. I didn't realize it could zoomed when I first saw it. I agree the zoomed image is very smooth. If MP looks that good, that would be awesome. Not sure what some people are going on about.

 

[kyleb]

Oh, yeah, browser resizing tends to make for some really nasty aliasing. I agree though, it looks stunning, me want!

 

[nintenho]

new videos from a playtester.

this is EPITAH, a new map and it looks like one of the coolest in halo. It's a youtube recorded with a LIVE vision camera but the HDR and the lighting still looks good. He gives a commentary on the weapons while he plays.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQA2...en-gamer.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=92853

in this one he shows what looks like the zanzibar remake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DymK...en-gamer.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=92853

this one has the new blood gulch/coagulation (valhalla I think?) and doesn't have anything new as far as I can tell and it has fallout boy music instead of sound effects or commentary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpdH...en-gamer.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=92853

Information that I got:
-the bullet clips seem to be smaller but reloads are faster and guns are much deadlier such as SMG which seems 1.5 times more powerful.
-pistol has no zoom, can be dual-weilded.
-seems all previous halo weapons returned.
-it seems like a cross between halo and halo 2 where now both team skill and individual skill matters.
-valhalla has 3D grass and flowers. Lots of cover and walls to sneak behind.
-I think I saw a grenade like the one in Lost Planet where it sucks power from you. Might be a special equipment?

has bungie talked about what they'll change with matchmaking?

 

[iceberg187]

The video with Zanzibar, he called it beautiful

 

[Tap In]

New Bungie Weekly Update (5/4/07)

snip...With Halo 3, as with halo 2 and 1, we’re using the actual engine for cinematics. It’s a conscious decision based on a simple philosophy – don’t yank the player out of the game, and dazzle them with graphics that are alien to their gameplay experience. Don’t get me wrong, some of my favorite cinematics ever do exactly that, and in my opinion, successfully – Final Fantasy, DOA, Tekken even, all use high quality CG renders to display their cinematics. And the results are fantastic. They propel narrative and they’re a reward for completing gameplay tasks.
In Halo 3 though, we made a deliberate and difficult choice. Believe it or not, it would in some ways have been easier to just storyboard this and hand it off to someone like Digital Domain to render into CG. Instead, we took the harder and seemingly counterintuitive route so that our Cinematics will blend, as seamlessly as possible with our gameplay.

Now for confession time: In Halo 2, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to make the cinematics the way we wanted them to be. They were compromised by deadlines and resources and while the results were heroic and herculean achievements of hard work and talent, they simply weren’t as polished or pretty as we wanted them to be. This time, no hurdles got in our way. Cinematics has had all the lovin’ it needs.

For starters, there’s a bigger team, a team that has had the final cinematic script for much longer, and now has access to vastly more tools, resources and technology than ever before. These range from new tools for rigging facial animation, to better lighting and camera controls. Most of the improvements are a solid blend of technology and manpower this time around, and we hope the fruits of that labor end up as succulent as they look now. ...snip

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Some of the cinematics in Halo2 had pretty good direction and cinematography, and of course music; the things I'd list as problematic are animations, particularly characters, and most models/textures did not quite hold up in extreme closeups.
But overall they were pretty good, so I'm looking forward to Halo3 in this respect too.

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Tap In snipped one of the more interesting quotes in there.

Well this time the emotions and lighting are being handled by a team of 35 animators and cinematics guys only. And they’re not scrubs. We have folks who’ve worked on movies like Shrek, King Kong, Gollum from LOTR and more. So, no compromises. It will still look like game engine (with the aforementioned enhancements, like depth of field and higher levels of detail) but it’s just going to be better.

Going by the size they speak of and the credits for the guys, I wonder if this is one of the fruits of their collaboration with Peter Jackson. AFAIK, their normal team is around 100 people as of a couple months ago. That high a fraction of their guys being animation/cinematics seems too high to me.

There were also a couple vector outline pictures, and my favorite is probably this one:

 

[archangelmorph]

Edge detection filter..