Halo 4

Why do the hands look disproportionately large compared to the rest of the body? Not so much on Halsey, but the Spartans and the scientist guy.

Also, when exactly did Halsey become a war criminal? She's ONI. Everything she did was green-lighted by ONI. I'm confused here.

 

Don't ask me about the Spartan Ops movies

With that said the ingame skeletons are probably shared between all characters, and the Spartan body is disproportionate indeed. Just look at the Master Chief on any screenshot, his torso is very short.

 

Yeah, I'm outside the US too and almost all my games are compromised by lag. I've looked everywhere but there's no way to try and filter out bad connections, and the game keeps making them. Even with 50k people playing the game can't find me a good connection. In this respect it's as bad as Halo 2.

There's lots and lots of teleporting going on, poor hit reg, grenades appearing half a second after I throw them, getting run over by vehicles that are still several metres away, failing to mele people who are not actually in range (they only look it), knockback on your gun making you repeatedly miss shots you think you've compensated for, auto aim going boners as people teleport around etc etc.

A less common issue is that the game makes me join matches that are in the closing minutes. Last night - after 3 minutes of match making - I joined a game 9 seconds before it ended (1 life, average life 9 seconds, no kills, no assists, no nothing!). A couple of times the entire opposing team quit out during map selection but the game still went on, started the match, then we auto won, went back to lobby, then had to start match making again.

When you do actually get a good connection and you join in time then the game can be a lot of fun though. There are balance issues - which are horrible to suffer from but fun to exploit - but balance always gets worked on over a game's lifetime so that's not unusual. It's odd that 343 chose to remove the connection filter though. I hope they'll think about us none US folks next time.

 

How do you adjust motion capture data to the skeleton skewed like this? Is this quasi-automated or manual work if you don't mind me asking?

 

Lots of manual work on the remapping, and then lots of additional animation on top, as far as I know. Basically as soon as your CG character's skeleton isn't a 100% match of the mocap actors you already have to do remapping anyway.
And all in all most mocap is optical, capturing markers that are on top of the skin of a human and not the underlying skeleton, so there's a lot of guesswork and loss of precision from the start.

Read up on Motionbuilder if you're interested, there are several methods to deal with these issues.

 

Just started reading, link is self explanatory

http://www.polycount.com/2012/11/20/the-environment-art-of-halo-4/

 

Now all we need is a Digital Foundry Tech Analysis featuring 343 Engineers and some GDC/Siggraph Presentations.

 

Yeah, hopefully this article means they're open to discuss tech and behind the scenes stuff. After all it's not like there's another 2 years left to develop an x360 title using their secrets

 

I think the material of Forerunner stuff in 4 detracts from apparent scale, even though if you stop and look around you can see that structures and spaces are in fact huge.

The style is a bit flat. Are the cows small and up close or far away.

 

Good point as I remember playing against some person who had a K/D of 4.75 which is a result of glitching/hack like you previously stated.We were playing Big Team Infinity Slayer on Exile and the guy was glitching all over the place.My K/D is a legit and very good 1.92 which I earned by skill.I've won over 235 games and have over 2,900 assists too..

 

Oh and I just had the disappearing weapon stuff happen to me, lost a complete plasma cannon in seconds. Bummer, but at least it was at 4% charge already so not such a big loss. Sticked the Elite beyond the next corner instead damn gold ones can survive one grenade even on Heroic...

 

started the campaign and it's quite good so far.

But i'll remember not playing this game right after a blops 2 session, because it makes halo 4 look choppy

 

Thank you very much for taking your time and yes it was great explanation .

Coming back to Halo 4, personally I am pretty disappointed .
It lacks almost everything that I liked about this series.Amazing music,beautiful animated skyboxes,big environments,decent story and atmosphere.It feels soulless to me - the exact opposite when it comes to the rest of the Halo series.
I really dont like the new art design along with new take on the forerunner architecture.It was so cold and simplistic in previous games.Big metal blocks looming over natural surroundings.I really liked it.Now with all this additional detail,bloom,lights and floating pieces it looks too busy and seems really generic to me.It's like their primary artistic focus was just turning up the eye candy to 11, trying to wow the masses.
I realise that it's probably mostly due to lack of hardware power but even the biggest environments here were still pretty small and in majority they were just dressed up corridors .There were still some decent battles and a lot of AI on screen though.
Music wasn't that bad but mostly forgettable. One track from the Shutdown mission really stands out.
New enemies are just alright, maybe outside of those dog like things,they were great.
Promethean weapons are nice but there is nothing special about them and they all look too similar.They have no distinctive features like it was with carbine, needler, plasma rifle etc.
The gunplay itself and the sounds (outside of the lack of that punchy carbine reload sound lol) are amazing though.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a pretty good game but playing a new Halo title was always something special and when I play this game I feel nothing. It is just a good first person shooter set in space.
In the end halo 4 shows just how amazing Bungie is.

 

This has got to be the best bug ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFr85gQ0nAg


Still loving the game BTW. About 1/3 of the final mission remaining.

 

ah hahaha

Game needs a big head skull and now a little person one. Where are game designer senses of humour these days.

 

Yeah it's so good it should be available as a skill.

Also, it makes the game more difficult because

Spoiler

the tiny enemies are so much harder to hit

 

I want to play a the Banshee/Phantom mission with that bug!

Le Sigh, no skull to activate that. F'nLD!

 

Try the last few missions of the latest Spartan Ops episode. It finally starts to have that large-scale battle feel from previous games. As I played it, I kept thinking "Why wasn't this a campaign mission?"

That's what worries me about 343 going forward. They have different priorities, and they seem to prefer small, linear levels over large epic encounters, probably because you can make nicer screenshots from smaller confined levels. It's that whole graphics vs gameplay thing. In this case, sacrificing gameplay for better graphics was not a good trade off imo.

Maybe they'll do better with next gen hardware. They clearly seemed to hit some limits with current gen hardware. I just hope it isn't an ideological thing.

 

They should definitely have that as an option!!