Halo day! (Halo 3 new pic, open beta and teaser info)

[22psi]

Some new leaked pics and very short vids:

http://carnage.bungie.org/haloforum/halo.forum.pl?read=773345

(hope this is allowed, they are not scans)

 

[PARANOiA]

Similar link to above, with working vids:
http://www.xbox360******.com/2006/12/31/halo-3-tested-in-iraq-by-our-soldiers/

Edit: haha, the link is filtered by the forum, but I'm sure all the f-boys here know what the missing word should be

 

[Dave]

Unfortunately the images are gone, by the myspace vids look very nice. Much better than anything we've seen so far for the enviroments, IMO, though it was only a *very* brief, low res look.

-Dave

Edit: found the images on the other link. Nicceeee

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Just tons of low-quality pictures/footage of the same levels (and probably same build) that EGM and various other publications saw months ago, around September or so. Did remind me of the second half of This, however.

Someone pointed out 1UP's analysis of the brute Vidoc, emphasizing that Luke had mentioned doing some digging and finding the footage to be at least 4-7 months old (One thing being that Jaime "30 seconds of fun" looked to have lost weight between the vidoc footage and when they saw him a couple months ago for the MP Alpha... and I imagine a build date they saw while there too). I said "well, whatever, if he says so..." I did become curious, however, and wondered what the oldest footage they had was. They started recording for a "making of," regardless of what format it would come in, back in March at least. Perhaps they had plans to release these vidocs every couple months, but being busy with development got in the way (and/or the people in charge of what is released/isn't released didn't give it the go-ahead, much like content for that HDR presentation....). That podcast they were going to have fell through as well, and the second one was done (as in recorded, but not edited together) months ago but still hasn't seen the light of day. But, being too busy to release this stuff is better than not.

 

[Deepblue]

Lighting looks great in those vids. Can't see enough to say much else.

 

[MasterDisaster]

Halo3 Pics And Video [56K Warning]

seems that a lot of 360 + Halo 3 was given to soldier in iraq....

Videos:


http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=1641823602
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=1641839735
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=1641839735

let's wait for some better media

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Should have waited for better media before creating a thread on it, IMO.

(I wouldn't count on new media coming out either; however, I am at times a pessimist)

I'd suggest a topic change to reflect the fact that, if anything here is noteworthy, it was taking the game over to troops in Iraq for New Years...

 

[SugarCoat]

its the new training sim.

That was actually really nice of Microsoft to do.

 

[AlNom]

already posted in the other thread.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=900605&postcount=181
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=900681&postcount=182

 

[pipo]

*bump*

Nice update: http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?cid=9444

Layers. Layers and layers of detail. That’s what’s going into Campaign now, and the speed at which it’s happening is astonishing. I now have a little bit of OCD about downloading the latest build. Sometimes I’ll check it out once a week, sometimes once a fortnight (Americans think that word is hilarious) but these days, I am checking it out maybe twice a day. Artists are checking in such amazing stuff, at such an amazing rate, that something you get at 6pm might be markedly different than something you picked up at 8am.

But they’ve been sneaking the atmospherics into builds daily and boy howdy does it make a difference. I can’t decide if the new blowing sand on one of the later levels is an atmospheric effect or not. Would be cool if our snow did something similar, huh…?

And lighting is still being introduced in new and exciting ways. There’s now dappled rays of sunshine beaming through the canopy, with tiny particles floating in ‘em. I would write a poem about it but you’d call me a pansy and push me down the stairs because you don’t understand how emo I am.

Performance is all over the place of course, from build to build. There’s seldom any visible reason why the build is suddenly really framey, or conversely, buttery smooth. It’s best to ask a grown-up before picking which version to play – although we do make alternate builds for alternating reasons – one might be to test frame rate, one some specific lighting function, another shader effects. An engineer is often the best person to explain which build is going to be “fun.”

Noguchi came over while I was playing Campaign and I said, “Hey, Gooch, when are you guys going to fix the bright green loading screen that happens every time the game loads the next part of the level? It’s hardly seamless you know.” He just stared at me. Then he snatched my debug keyboard and typed in three words. Something along the lines of “turn_off_crazy_green_indicator.”

Now my game loads in the next part of a level invisibly. Red faced, I asked how long that had been there. “Always, moran,” he says. That’s how he pronounces moron.

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Well, since you bumped it, I'll take advantage of this time to pimp the water they'll be implementing soon. For me, it'll definitely be nice for the water to become more interactive than it was in Halo 1/2.

(11-03-06)
I'm the biggest ever water-fan in the history of video games. It started with the compelling waves found in Pitfall 2 on the Atari 2600. I was hooked. From then on, I became a voraciously addicted connoisseur of video game aquatics. I just saw Hao Chen's new water tech. He's not there so I can't ask him about it, and I'm not even sure that's what we're using, but it was astonishing. Water flowing around objects and creating eddies and turbulence. A far cry from the shiny default placeholder in the MP demo EGM played.

(11-10-16)
So Hao wanted me to demo my new HD DVD drive, so I was all, only if you show me your new water tech, -blam!-! And then he was all, I can't show you it because it's just programmer art. And then I was all, I don't care, lemme see it properly. Do a demo!

So demo he did. The water tech is proprietary, Hao and his boyz created it especially for Halo 3, after looking at the varying ways water is used in other games. In some games, it's purely eye-candy and in others, it's fully interactive. In Halo 3, it's somewhere betwixt the two. Here's what ours will have, should it be implemented correctly (I always put these , IF caveats in here). It will look like water. If the waves reach a certain height, frequency and turbidity, foam (or other effects) will appear on its surface.

It will of course have waves and ripples. But the cool part for me, was the fact that objects passing through it will create their own wake. It's hardly an invention, since I distinctly remember seeing that in like Baldur's Gate 2: Dark Alliance, but this looks very real and it's going to look SWEET in levels like Valhalla when four or five vehicles go tear-assing through the river. The water is both translucent and reflective, so if you look from a distance, you'll see a realtime reflection of the sky. If you're up close, you'll see whatever's under the water. Right now it looks amazing, but to Hao's point, it's just programmer art. When an artist gets to play with it, this will be world-class agua. Can you sense how obsessed I am with video game water yet?

(12-22-06)
This week was fairly uneventful, as the office started to empty for the break. Screens, usually aglow with interesting stuff, were occasionally dark and sleepy. Hao's screen however, was awash with more water - he's been working on what I can only describe as some sort of fluid dynamics system, but he's too busy to interrupt, so I can't tell yet if it has physics or just especially clever animation - but put it this way - it moves like water, it looks like water and it's getting better.

(1-19-07)
Hao and co. are still messing with water, and it's getting better every day. They're going to be dropping it into the areas where our (perfectly attractive) placeholder water is right now. You've actually seen one of those areas in the pre-alpha shots of Valhalla. I can't wait, because I am Earth's most famous video game water geek. On the day it's dropped in, I am locking myself in the playtest lab with a pair of Wellington boots and an umbrella.

Water, lighting, atmospherics, decorators... I wonder just how much we'll get to see in the upcoming Beta. Questions, they twirl and twirl.

Besides that, Edge's January issue had an article on Bungie Studios, and recently released it in an online format on their website. Everybody quotes the inward-directed criticism, but I'll highlight this instead:

Inside Bungie - Edge Online

Art director Marcus Lehto, soft-spoken giant and veteran of the Chicago days, says free speech and inter-disciplinary freedom have always been vital to Bungie’s creative health. “From the very beginning when it was just three or four of us sitting in an old Catholic Girls’ School with mice coming out of the desks, to this, it’s been about keeping that open communication and the structure of disciplines – we don’t ever break engineering apart as a completely separate entity from art, from design.” He recalls the temporary offices Bungie occupied immediately after the Microsoft acquisition: “They put us in ten-foot-high cubicles. While we were all within the same vicinity, our team started to break down within just a matter of weeks. It was amazing how much we relied on line of sight, being able to talk immediately, not having to communicate through email.”

The flexible approach is about to become very important, because Bungie is looking to expand. The studio, currently standing at just over 100-strong including contractors, has just completed its biggest hiring year ever and intends to keep growing fast, partly to sate 360’s tremendous hunger for assets. Partly, but not entirely. With likely less than a year of Halo 3 development left, and the end of this monumental trilogy (though not necessarily of Bungie Halo games – Ryan at one point refers to “the next Halo game” and says it will likely be a shooter) in sight, the germination of new, original projects is already underway. Bungie is about to undergo its biggest change yet, bigger even perhaps than the Microsoft ‘merger’ (as Greisemer insists on calling it): the move beyond being a single-project, single-IP studio.

For that second paragraph, I might have to eat my socks (A new pair, of course). Halo 4 - shooter = Internal Bungie team. On the other hand, according to Dean Takahashi, they tried moving beyond single-project a number of times, and one of them led to major screw ups (also covered in this article later).