HALO and sm2.0

No, it's not at all. It's lazy. Gearbox took ages porting that - they could have spent some of that time redrawing higher res textures. I bet they could have even gotten the original, uncompressed textures from Bungie and worked with that.

The PC version came out in 2003 and it's expected to at least look something like games of that time. Heck, it only came out 6 months before Far Cry. Saying "Well, the XBox version came out in 2001..." means nothing.

 

Do you actually have any evidence of their laziness? I think we've had enough threads here of people bitching from the usual "higher ground" than the people who make the games. I hate baseless hate and stupid, ignorant arguments.

 

Personally i love Halo primarily for its design aesthetic. Sure the level design is a bit repetitive, especially the library level, and the flood are quite possibly the most annoying game creatures to grace the screen, putting the graphics asside [which i beleive a pretty good] you can't fault the games production design and it far surpasses a lot of the monkier crap hollywood produces.

 

They shouldn't have to remake them, though. If they just made the original source samples of a sufficient quantity then they could down-sample the textures to fit the requirements of each platform. Shouldn't be difficult at all.

 

To get the best results at the resolution you plan to use, you have to create the textures at that resolution. Otherwise you loose detail in the downsampling and wind up spending more time creating less optimal textures. However, Gearbox did replace some of the most widely used textures like the ones for grass with higher resolution ones.

 

Really? Unreal Tournament is much older. . .

 

Gearbox probably spent a lot of the time building the internet capability for the game too. The Xbox version had nothing but lan capabilities for multiple box connection and that is probably a heck of a lot easier to do. *shrug*

 

I understand your point, but I'm simply expressing an opinion. Saying "It was an originally an XBox game, so we should forgive the low res textures" just doesn't fly with me.

As far as I know, using a high res source and then downsampling for your platform (even in PC games) is pretty much the standard operating procedure.

Either way, justification does not change the end result: Halo PC looked below par compared to any PC game released around the same time. At the very least, I'd have been much more forgiving of its graphics had it run significantly better.

 

Some do it that way, but as I explained it leads to less than optimal results. To get the most of of a texture at a particular resolution you simply have to work on it at that resolution.

 

Halo was in development for a long time. I think what we saw were textures designed for slower PCs. They didn't develop the game for GF3+ powered PCs. It was being developed for '99-00 PCs (about) (Voodoo3/5, Radeon 256, Geforce 2 I'd say). Then they got MS'ed and it became a title for Xbox, which is a fairly low-end PC. Especially in 2003.

So Bungie tailors their game entirely around it being a Xbox exclusive. They probably continued using some of their game assets from PC development as to not just throw away money and time. I imagine with pre-release Xbox hype all the buzz at the time that nobody even expected it to hit PC. Although maybe there were still some PC hopes at Bungie. But PCs at the time sure as hell could not have run it worth a damn.

So, I doubt there really are "high res" assets. Gearbox probably didn't see a large enough market for a PC port of a 2 year old Xbox title.... Can't blame them really. I mean, think about it. Redeveloping all the assets to optimize for newer PC tech would be a MAJOR undertaking on the level of new game development. This is for a has been title. I think what we got was good enough. It definitely looks better than the Xbox version, if simply due to higher resolution.

It's also arguably one of the most advanced PC titles of its day.

 

Didn't try it out with Cat 5.6

 

I believe in an interview Gearbox stated they completed the port in about 6 months and spent half the development time at strip bars, and it was Microsoft's fault that the game came out so late.(something about microsoft not wanting the PC sales to compete against the console sales)

 

think you can dig up that interview? or at least the website?

It's certainly not something I'd expect the developer to say about a publisher in "public".

 

This was in 2003. If the performance has improved 2 years down the line, it kinda doesn't matter.

 

Funny you guys should bring Halo PC up. I had played through about half of it a year ago and then just stopped playing, never uninstalled it. I noticed the performance improvements mentioned with the 5.6 release and out of the blue decided to start it up again and finish it about a week ago.

While its graphics certainly aren't anything special by todays standards I think Halo was ahead of its time, both in gameplay and specifically shader effects. It does have very plain textures, which I noticed to be the case with Halo 2 as well. Though the worst part are the repetitive levels as others have said; they are all exactly the same just slightly rearranged, over and over. To make matters worse they aren't very well designed, quite plain and unimaginary. Other then that it's a decent game.

 

Well, it is interesting that problems go away from driver enhancements rather than game code for once. A lot of the performance issues just point to the amount of overdraw as also evidenced by ATi's description for what they improved in the driver.

 

What kind of crappy hardware/settings are you guys playing with to say that Halo had bad textures? Are you just buying into the myth that the game doesn't work with AF? The textures look sharp and clean on all my hardware with 16xAF. And Gearbox only had 1 year to work on the port. MS/Bungie didn't contract them to work on the translation until a year after it launched with the Xbox, and nobody had been working on the PC version in all that time.

BTW, Far Cry began development some time last millenium. They had forever to test the engine (remember Dinosaur Island and X-isle?) before the game ever shipped. I loved Halo on the Xbox and couldn't really get into it on the PC (no F'in coop!), but I could see a huge improvement in graphics and performance over the Xbox version. The framerate never stuttered when I was running at 1024x768 on my 9700 Pro back then, which is more than I could say about the Xbox version at only 640x480. With the exception of coop, I can't say I didn't get anything less than what I expected and hoped for in the PC translation. The all-new shader engine was head and shoulders above the Xbox version, and I was amazed that they were able to get the full installation size (with more content and assets) down to less than the Xbox disc's total file size. And you wanna call them lazy?

 

One thing I remember that I really liked about Halo, after all this talk about bad textures, was that I could READ the vending machines on the starship in the beginning.

 

Weapon/ammo textures are pretty high res and you can zoom in quite a bit and read the finer details. Actually it's kinda funny because Halo 2's weapon/ammo textures are lower resolution by quite a bit.