Halo: Reach

It was something that the fans clung onto for the dick wavery

 

Yup, Halo CE had that long before KZ2 implemented it ..Nothing new but still pretty cool to see..Anyways, none of us can be certain if Bungie is or isn't using tessellation for Reach since they haven't even talked about that.If guys see the graphical comparison between Halo 3 and Reach in the new issue of GI, Reach is leagues ahead of Halo 3 graphically speaking.Also, if Reach runs at a true 720p HD resolution, is it possible that could give the game a nice IQ bump?

 

Well, I'm not saying it was doing anything super accurate, but they bounced maybe once or twice before disappearing into nothing. Quite basic compared to now, but it was adequate.

Just take the assault rifle or warthog chain gun for a test fire on some metal surface (Halo CE).

Well, the difference between 1280x720 & 1152*640 is probably not going to be noticed as much as using MSAA. Just imagine that other seemingly popular shooter that has an even lower res but with 2xMSAA. Of course, the other issue is MSAA & non-linear tone-mapping or other post-processing...

AF would go a long way as well...

 

wow, thanks for the interesting info (and thanks for explaining it in a way that even I understand it ...and many thanks that you show me that B3D is still a tech forum )!

 

I cannot believe people are ooohing and aaaahing over bouncing sparks that interact with the environment. Those have been around forever. iirc there was a PS2 demo that did exactly this before any last gen software even shipped.\

Next up: billions of polys stored in a texture and, gasp, lense flaring from light sources!

 

I do believe you're correct - There were no less than a dozen PS2 tech demos - Right off the top of my head there was the FF8 ball room tech demo, the FF the movie tech demo with "Charles", the Rubber Duckie tech demo, the "Feather" tech demo, the Spark Fountain demo, the Kings Field tech demo, the Dark Cloud tech demo, the Ridge Racer tech demo, the Bouncer tech demo, the Tekken tech demo, the Lagoon tech demo, the "Floating Heads" tech demo, the "Flock of Birds" tech demo, the "Metalic Forms" tech demo, and I'm certain I've left out a few. It's been a long time since I've looked at all of them.

Atleast one of those demos made the jump to the PSP when it first debuted - The Rubber Duckie demo. There was also a demo showing off NURBS handling, displacement mapping on a model of mars I believe, I think another fluid simulation demo, and a city simulation demo. Probably more, but again, it's been a while since then.

 

Don't you understand?!? Batman showed that we need the true power of PhysX!!!

 

Btw, I am not saying it is a bad effect -- a game in dark environments should have bouncy sparks that are independent lights. A lot of games lack this sort of detail. But this isn't some extreme feature where we need to question, "The 360 doesn't have the SPEs, how could it do this!?!!"

If this is a quasi Crysis armor system (change armor "state" on the fly) count me all in! I thought the only thing Crysis lacked was some Bungie polish

 

No, it seems to be more like Red Faction: Guerilla, where you have to switch out the backpack at a location.

 

Correct. The ultimate graphic whoring stage.

 

It could be done with just collision detection + bounce/friction values. Collision detection ranging from just terrain to terrain + statics or that + dynamic objects. Or simple physics or rigid body physics. lots of games do this with different settings (the first). Nothing out of the world and just take a look at GTAIV that has sparks with full world collision detection (terrain, static, dynamic objects).

Though bouncing sparks with glow effect is quite nice. IIRC multiplatform game FEAR had this, no?

 

hmmmm, character customizations in reach?

at the top of page 55 of the game informer magazine it shows Noble 6 (aka lone wolf) wearing a different helmet than in the trailer recently shown.

it also says on that pic (top right)

very interesting, sounds cool.

 

Well Guerilla used a SPU for it in KZ2, obviously it was a much more advanced implementation that the PS2 demos (which were probably closer to what AlStrong said Halo 1 was doing).

It seems Bungie's implementation will match or outdo KZ2's, and I just thought that Bungie might be better off using the 360's CPU cycles elsewhere (especially when 360 games are usually CPU bound and you don't have SPU's sitting idle like the PS3)

 

Perhaps making an engine that is meant only to run on X360 with no considerations for cross platform (Even Gears is based on a cross platform engine), no intention of being able to run on PC, and most likely a larger budget than any other exclusive on the system has allowed them to finally leverage X360 resources.

X360's version of a UC2/KZ2, for instance. An engine coded entirely with one platform and only one platform in mind and a budget to match.

Regards,
SB

 

Only if Bungie have decided to stay Xbox 360-exclusive for the rest of the generation. (Which would make sense IMHO, but is still not a given.)

 

So I been wondering about the HDR lighting this time around, how likely do you think they have maintained the same quality while doing a 720p buffer? Do you think it's possible to get around the EDRAM limitation? I can give Bungie the benefit of doubt for making a new engine but it just seems a little too much with everything else taking into account.

 

They could be using tiling, which should allow them to get around the EDRAM problem, and maybe even add 2x AA as well if they keep it just a bit under 720p. All it really needs is some careful fine tuning as far as I can tell.

Or they could use a completely different HDR method; the Gameinformer article indicates they're doing a deferred lighting pre-pass and I'm not sure how that'd work with Halo3's method - if it can work at all. Maybe assen or joker can shed some lite on this issue.

 

Well, one thing I'd wonder is if they would just use an FP16 target. (Do all the MRTs have to be FP16 then ) The deferred approach already means they would have to do a separate pass for alpha blending anyway. Of course, there is the cheaper approach that Mintmaster & Fran were advocating awhile back with the scene graph analysis.

 

They should just use the FP16 target as the quality is already good enough for the mass and then with more rooms for other effects no? But if they can crank up everything by fine tuning it then by all mean, it'd be beautiful.

 

"New" pics: http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=27160904&page=0