Halo: Reach

[Laa-Yosh]

Heh, technically a normal mapped model is already an impostor - for the high poly original model...
Also, when they talk about freeing up memory and switching to extreme detail up close, it also has to mean that they have some sort of advanced streaming tech to support this.
Sounds very interesting though, makes it look like they've concentrated a lot of effort on serious optimization.

Sparks, skies, lots of lights, weather all sound like nice additions. No word about the framebuffer though... well, we can wait. Also, they still have a dedicated sandbox designer so it sounds like we haven't heard all there is about the gameplay. The article hasn't really described the actual mechanics, right?

Image Metrics isn't much of a guarantee though, the quality of their work varies a lot. GTA4 was mostly okay, for example, but Assassin 2 had some very creepy stuff going on. As far as I know they outsource most of the mocap processing so it's going to be only as good as much they're paying for it...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Described as "imposter tech"
Level of Detail (LOD) system allows building of bigger and more populated spaces for exploration
Distant objects are rendered at low poly with cheaper shaders, ie "imposters"
Imposter look great at distance and detail increases the closer you get to them
Less chance of pop-up and stippling as environmental geometry, plants, buildings, enemies or anything else can be placed into the visual field at the same extreme distances without profound hit to system performance
At extreme close range items can be rendered with incredible detail, ie, a wall was shown from inches away with tiny rivet features in the metal popped on the screen with perfect clarity
Imposter system indirectly frees up memory which can be devoted to other technical aspects
Lighting being one of those aspects
From Halo 3's 3 or 4 light sources, Reach's engine presents 20 to 40 dynamic lights at the same time

Really sounds like they "might" be using dynamic LOD Tesselation. Which as stated would help with additional lighting due to less polygons needing to be lit as the distance increases. And greater detail as you get closer. Some of which you can see and experiment with in the Unigine demo on PC.

Considering Halo Wars (granted not done by Bungie, but would assume they would have access to it) used limited tesselation, this isn't out of the realm of possibilities. And some comments that Bungie made (was it at GDC? Or another convention?) hinted at the use of something like Tesselation or their investigation of such, my memory is somewhat blurry about specifics.

Would help to explain the relatively large increase in IQ between Halo 3 and Reach, over and above the obvious explanation that it's their first purely X360 engine.

Regards,
SB

 

[scently]

My point being that the Battle of Reach, from the moment the Covenant landed to the point they nuked it from orbit, was a matter of a few (2-3) hours. Far too short for the game itself.

Likewise, the fact that a Spartan II is in a squad with Spartan III's. Up to that point ALL Spartan II's operated in purely Spartan II squads. And at the Battle of Reach, 3 (or was it 4) Spartan II's including the MC were sent to the oribital dock to destroy the ship with coordinates of Earth. ALL of the other Spartan II's at the time were sent to defend one of the ground power and control stations for the orbital guns (and died in less than an hour).

Basically, the only thing this means is that unlike say Warhammer 40k, the books aren't considered canon. And Bungie aren't particularly concerned with maintaining consistency between the books and the game. IE - Bungie's vision of Halo as a game comes first and foremost when making their games.

Regards,
SB

You need to read Ghost of Onyx. Kurt 051 was listed as MIA but he was actually taken to train the spartan IIIs. Jorge's case could be something similar. Also if you've read first strike you would know that the battle for reach took quite sometime, it took longer than 2 or 3 hours, and the story of the game starts from a stage when it was a mild invasion to a full blown invasion.

I still haven't seen anything here that contradicts the canon, instead they are complimenting it.

 

[(((interference)))]

The physics enabled spark tech is very similar to Killzone 2.
Seems like a nifty gimmick though, something that you notice once but doesn't affect gameplay in the least, also isnt it quite expensive? why would they waste processor cycles on something like this. It's not like the PS3 where you can have an SPU doing the processing.

I think it's going to go down the way of Halo 3's visor reflections which were also demoed and then cut from the final game as it was a waste of resources

That article really has me looking forward to Reach though, I like how even small things like their reasons for removing the extra grenades and replacing equipment with armor abilities which match perfectly with my observations and are welcome gameplay changes.

I'm also curious if this new LOD system is tesselation or just a highly optimised variant of existing LOD/streaming tech. Anyone know if the 360's tesselation capabilites would rule it out?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

You need to read Ghost of Onyx. Kurt 051 was listed as MIA but he was actually taken to train the spartan IIIs. Jorge's case could be something similar. Also if you've read first strike you would know that the battle for reach took quite sometime, it took longer than 2 or 3 hours, and the story of the game starts from a stage when it was a mild invasion to a full blown invasion.

I still haven't seen anything here that contradicts the canon, instead they are complimenting it.

Ah, so it appears even the books can't keep things consistent. In the Fall of Reach book, covenant forces only landed after they'd mostly decimated much of the Humans fleet in space then retreated to draw away defense forces.

From the point of landing to the time MC was preparing to leave the system was only about 2-3 hours.

As to the Spartan II's, I may have to reread that section again, but I'm almost positive that it was mentioned that all remaining Spartan II's were about to head planetside (other than the ones accompanying MC) to defend the obital defense battery control/power stations.

So it appears First Strike is already rewriting the events of the battle of Reach. So as suspected, the Halo books aren't canon in the same way as Warhammer books are considered canon.

Regards,
SB

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Really sounds like they "might" be using dynamic LOD Tesselation.
Which as stated would help with additional lighting due to less polygons needing to be lit as the distance increases.

Tesselation can only add polygons, it can't remove them. And to get your models to work well with tesselation, you need to use higher base polygon counts and displacement maps, which will just use even more resources. Particularly with all the hard surface stuff typical in a Halo game, as none of the characters are organic, except for the faces. Even the warthog wheels aren't smoothly rounded because of the all-terrain tyres.

The only thing they can reasonably use tesselation with is the terrain.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Tesselation can only add polygons, it can't remove them. And to get your models to work well with tesselation, you need to use higher base polygon counts and displacement maps, which will just use even more resources. Particularly with all the hard surface stuff typical in a Halo game, as none of the characters are organic, except for the faces. Even the warthog wheels aren't smoothly rounded because of the all-terrain tyres.

The only thing they can reasonably use tesselation with is the terrain.

Wait, with LOD tesselation, isn't the whole point increasing poly count the closer it is to the camera and reducing (removing) poly count the farther it is from the camera?

Regards,
SB

 

[Laa-Yosh]

With tesselation, you take an existing model and start to add polygons to it. If it's adaptive and view dependent then the change is continuous and without 'popping'. So far so good. There are many possible tesselation schemes, some will also smooth out the newly created vertices (eventually turning a cube into something close to a sphere*) some will leave the new vertices on the plane of the starting triangle.

If you have smoothing going on, you need to add extra vertices to your geometry to accentuate sharp edges and control the newly created curves. So for example with a car model where you have lots of smooth surfaces and sharp edges, you need a LOT of extra geometry. Your base model will have to be more detailed and thus if you only rely on tesselation, the simplest 'LOD' - the untesselated version - is still going to be faaaar to heavy.
Since most of the vehicles and character armor are such sharp edged hard surfaces in Halo, tesselation with smoothing isn't going to be beneficial there.

In order to add detail to a tesselated model, you need to also use a displacement map, preferably with a higher bit depth (16 int or float) and nice resolution. Because relative triangle size (in terms of final pixels) can't really be reduced on current platforms, it can only add mid frequency geometry detail and will also have to keep the normal map. Also, not enough geometry means that the details are quite rough and you can't create sharp edges and smooth surfaces this way. Again, completely useless for hard surface stuff; it's much better suited for creating muscles, folds, spikes etc. on creatures, or rough surfaces for rocks, terrain and trees.
So Bungie can't just build relatively low polygon models and use tesselation and displacement mapping for closeups because they'd look quite ugly.

What Halo Reach needs is to replace their carefully crafted and highly optimized highres models, textures and complex multi-layer shaders with less polygons, smaller textures and simpler shaders. Tesselation cannot help with either.

* like this

 

[scently]

Ah, so it appears even the books can't keep things consistent. In the Fall of Reach book, covenant forces only landed after they'd mostly decimated much of the Humans fleet in space then retreated to draw away defense forces.

From the point of landing to the time MC was preparing to leave the system was only about 2-3 hours.

As to the Spartan II's, I may have to reread that section again, but I'm almost positive that it was mentioned that all remaining Spartan II's were about to head planetside (other than the ones accompanying MC) to defend the obital defense battery control/power stations.

So it appears First Strike is already rewriting the events of the battle of Reach. So as suspected, the Halo books aren't canon in the same way as Warhammer books are considered canon.

Regards,
SB

Sigh, please just buy First Strike and Ghost of Onyx, read it before you say something like "is already rewriting the battle of reach" because its not.

You do know that the REAL battle of Reach was detailed in First Strike. There were originally 75 spartans but only about 20 something were "alive" during Fall of Reach. What do you think happened to the others.
Anyway, this is the last time I can comment on the matter. If you want to more, if you actually want to know more, then please atleast read the books before you jump to conclusion. You do know that some of the books were written by bungie staffs themselves ( clue: Joe Staten) he wrote Contact Harvest.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Bungie's pretty much ignoring the books IMHO and that's the right approach. No need to lock themselves into any situation design wise just because someone several years ago has thought differently about a fictive situation.

 

[dragonelite]

Sigh, please just buy First Strike and Ghost of Onyx, read it before you say something like "is already rewriting the battle of reach" because its not.

You do know that the REAL battle of Reach was detailed in First Strike. There were originally 75 spartans but only about 20 something were "alive" during Fall of Reach. What do you think happened to the others.
Anyway, this is the last time I can comment on the matter. If you want to more, if you actually want to know more, then please atleast read the books before you jump to conclusion. You do know that some of the books were written by bungie staffs themselves ( clue: Joe Staten) he wrote Contact Harvest.

This will help some people to understand the haloverse much more.

Read the story summaries.

Fall of reach. Tells the story about the origin of the spartan 2 project
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Halo:_The_Fall_of_Reach

First Strike. Tells the story about the spartans 2 on Reach (aka red team). And how MC got back to earth after Halo:CE.
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Halo:_First_Strike

Ghost of Onyx. Tells the story about the spartan 3 project.
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Halo:_Ghosts_of_Onyx

I've only read Fall of Reach and First Strike.
But for the people interested in Halo:Reach i would suggest reading First strike and Ghost of Onyx those two are the most game related novels.

Some extra information.
A better prediction for the game.
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Reach

 

[aselto]

Bungie's pretty much ignoring the books IMHO and that's the right approach. No need to lock themselves into any situation design wise just because someone several years ago has thought differently about a fictive situation.

I don't think that's true. In fact, they're acknowledging the books' existence more than ever before. Spartan-IIIs, ONI and whatnot are direct references to the fiction introduced in Halo novels.

I hope they'll leave Grunts speaking in English. They're one of trademarks of the series for me with their comedy lines.
Here's a really funny one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d7IiiyukTc&feature=PlayList&p=4D0254AD6FB5EDE1&index=5

 

[liolio]

When I read about the new LOD system and how it allowed to save memory which in return allowed them to up the number dynamic lights to an healthy amount I wonder more about the possibility of a pre light pass deferred renderer than about a possible use of tesselator (not that I would not want it to see some use...).

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Sigh, please just buy First Strike and Ghost of Onyx, read it before you say something like "is already rewriting the battle of reach" because its not.

You do know that the REAL battle of Reach was detailed in First Strike. There were originally 75 spartans but only about 20 something were "alive" during Fall of Reach. What do you think happened to the others.
Anyway, this is the last time I can comment on the matter. If you want to more, if you actually want to know more, then please atleast read the books before you jump to conclusion. You do know that some of the books were written by bungie staffs themselves ( clue: Joe Staten) he wrote Contact Harvest.

Yeah, First Strike is on my list. But if what you have said is correct, it's pretty much at odds with the version presented in the Fall of Reach.

Regards,
SB

 

[AlNom]

First Strike occurs before and after John leaves. I won't spoil much more what happens, but it's a lot longer than a few hours.

 

[scently]

Bungie's pretty much ignoring the books IMHO and that's the right approach. No need to lock themselves into any situation design wise just because someone several years ago has thought differently about a fictive situation.

Can I ask you a question? Have you heard about spartan IIIs before? Before you answer you should be aware that any answer you give would only prove my case.
My point is that they have not stated anything that contradicts the haloverse.

 

[scently]

First Strike occurs before and after John leaves. I won't spoil much more what happens, but it's a lot longer than a few hours.

Exactly, finally somebody who has read the books.
Even in the Halo reach teaser, some of the dialog was extrapolated from Fall of Reach.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Bungie probably has a large source document like a 'Halo Bible' that they hand out to people who work with them on various projects, be it a commercial, an RTS game, or additional fiction. It's a common thing with large franchises.
It does not however mean that whatever those other people create will also get back into the bible.

 

[dragonelite]

Even the VGA trailer had more lore in it then the whole master chief trilogy.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

First Strike occurs before and after John leaves. I won't spoil much more what happens, but it's a lot longer than a few hours.

Yeah, I'll have to read the book. As in the Fall of Reach, the book is pretty specific that the battle on the ground only lasted 2-3 hours at the most before MC jumps out of system. And the impression is that the Covenant were in the process of "glassing" the planet as they were preparing to jump out of system.

Anyway, may have to read First Strike before I finish the current book series I'm reading.

Regards,
SB