Twinreaper

Science - The Birthday Massacre

While these things seem real nice upfront, I am just concerned about the HDD space we are gonna have to sacrafice for it. Adding new components like weapons to the game is gonna be a hefty size alone. Can we get a confirm on size for this update? cause if I estimate based on what I know of the file structure and the size these assets even in a compressed form are.... the TU could be 1gig or more.

Exactly. having the skull helps in no big way. It is the same skull they had in halo 2 on the alphagasgiant level. Once you had it, it worked on the levels after that. The final 2 levels don't have any grunts that would help you in any way shape or form. Even if a grunt gets sploded, the amount of spalooooosh damage it would deal to an elite or hunter isn't even enough to make them twitch. And no, I did not double post earlier to increase my count. On a mobile device such as Droid, you don't an option to edit your post. I tried. I hate double posting.

I'm curious though. Is there anyone else besides me that finds it hard to swallow that a company created in 07, has nothing big to show us after 4 years besides a preview of Halo 4, Halo Waypoint and a CE remake. To be honest I tend to believe that by the end of PAX we might see a few surprises from 343 regarding other title developments. Going by previous developer time lines on games and trailers, there is a good solid year and half gap that the team had nothing reported going on. Couple that with stiff lip rumor squashing about partnering with other studios on ports and the whole team's history and development time just doesn't hold water. For one, I will be patiently awaiting some news for us avid PC gamers. It's about time we got another round of Halo goodness! For those that need a review of 343 projects here it is... 2007 - 343 Industries is officially launched. Obviously prior to this the studio had employees, just not enough to announce an official studio. because said studio is an extension of MSG, the 2 work closely together although it is never directly said or confirmed. 2009 - 343 Launches Halo Waypoint. A general Halo Hub. This is nothing more than a beefed up ASPI.net website that uses Bungie developed Halo API's to regulate and collect game data. No major development in such a project is needed. 2011 - 343 launches 2 map packs for Halo Reach. Most of these maps were already in development before the official announcement by Bungie, that 343 would be taking over Halo duties. 2011 - Halo Combat Evolved AE is released. This type of title should not take more than 1.5 years of the teams time. 1.5 is plenty of time to work on it. 2012 - Halo 4. Yet to be confirmed for a solid 2012 release. Until I see a developer diary saying otherwise..... we will see. Now as you can see, from 2007 to 2009 and from 2009 to 2010, there seemed to be nothing going on. 343 is not a small studio either. In addition to the 2008 year reported 34+ members, they are constantly posting and accepting jobs to fill even today. If growth of the studio could be measured, I would guess that the official team roster is probably somewhere near 100+ now, that plus resources and personnel from MSG would greatly increase this. Now looking again at the time line of project releases, it is safe to assume that between 2007 and 2009 the team may have been working on new content for Halo,(it doesn't take 2 years to make a few maps and 2 more years to release them) It is also a safe assumption that said content was probably in preparation for the teams development of something Halo during 2009 to 2010. It isn't like Microsoft to just all of the sudden decide to launch a new Halo anything. A safe better would assume that Microsoft had planned for a couple years now to do something big for it's 10 year anniversary besides a CE remake. Thoughts anyone?

Hey Nezquick or however you spell out that retarded name. Look pal, I know a lot more about Halo, the Megalo engine and the game mechanics than you will ever be smart enough to understand. All that knowledge come from my 33+ years of being alive. I'll bet my son could reverse engineer and write a small VS app to load the Reach maps files quicker than you could jerk yourself off with that smart ass attitude of yours. You called out simple game mechanics with your little rant and I responded. The UI is a singular file? OMG you retard! You have no idea how the tag structure for a Halo game works at all do you? yeah it's obvious....lmao! The Halo series never had noticable bloom? So your one of those guys that needs a HUD based guide to show bullet spread to notice it? Like I said before, did you even play Halo 1? Go ahead and play it now then. Fire away with the pistol and tell me the projectile radius is not noticable. Secondly, where the hell do you get off judging people based on their responses? Did you even notice the little red warning below most of your posts that is now displayed? People dont just get them for cursing or whatnot. You have to be a real all around ass to urk the mods the wrong way and get that. Maybe you should spend a little less time worrying about gaming, and re-analyze some of your quite obvious poor life choices and start to watch how you talk to people. I am a very easy going guy until you call out gaming items that are clearly out of your range of understanding. But let's have some fun anyway, since you seem to know oh so much about tags in a Halo game, explain to me how they get neat little contrails to display on projectiles? What are the names of the Struct Name and Bitmask8 lines that are involved? It's ok, take your time and ask around before posting back so you don't look like a complete a tool. It's ok, I'll wait. Anyways, getting way off track here. This is turning into a big flame war. I blame my lack of sleep personally. The point in all this is simple. Bloom is a feature that is loved or hated. It is all up to personal taste, and everyones own personal taste does not dictate what should be done in a game, or be done to fix anything. If it isn't a widely accepted view it won't happen. As for people who want to constantly come in here and say dumb things like I know lots of people, or hey lots of people have said this here........ I have a suggestion for you. Quit raging and lets see some names of these mythical people. I can count on one hand the amount of members here who actually hate the blooming reticule feature. That's not a whole compared to how many of us are on here. So lets review shall we? Nez is a tool, bloom is no big deal, and 819 has some love to spare on his end. LMAO...sorry man, I had too!

Constant weapon spammers are always given a bad rap. Just because someone can guess where their shots are going to go better than you, does not mean they deserve to be called a spammer. Halo is about skill, and it takes quite an amount of skill to blindly fire shots and have them hit dead on, where you want them. Reading a players movements is always a good tactic as well. Most people, I find that complain about spamming usually are the ones that run head on into a dmr firing, or the ones that only strafe back and fourth a little, instead of moving forward and backward along with strafing. Twins multiplayer tip #1. When engaging enemies in dmr battles at mid to long range, it helps to give your sideways strafing a few forward and backward movements as well. This technique mostly confuses the opponent into over thinking the amount of distance you are moving left to right, which effects his or hers ability to land a shot accurately. Jumping or quick crouching a few times while moving is also a good option for dodging shots. Take it from me, I was a sniper pro back in the day. Without these techniques, I would have been full of holes and no wins.

Neither one of you have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Every single Halo game has a bloom effect. Said bloom effect has only once been seen on the HUD, with certain Halo 3 weapons. Reach is the first title for Halo that has bloom displayed on the HUD reticules. This feature is only a visual, and is not related to the actual mechanics of the weapons firing accuracy. For example, if you were to go into the following directory of the game tags.... UI\HUD\NewHUD\DMR\ and took out any referrence to the bloom bitmaps and shaders, the weapon would still function the exact same way it does with the bloom visuals. For the last ******* time... YOU CAN ONLY CHANGE THE AMOUNT OF FIRING SPREAD ON A WEAPON THROUGH THE WEAPON TAGS!!!! And how the hell do you recon they did a horrible job? Oh I'm sorry you don't like the amount of randomness and area your shots are confined too..cry about it some more. Or how about better yet! Since everyone here always seems to think they know best about what particular game mechanic or feature should be improved, how about this then kids. STOP CRYING AND POST SOME COMPONENT BASED VALUES AND ASSETS TO PROVE YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO OPEN YOUR MOUTHS IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!! I swear to god if I see one more thread about how something is bad, and something like, just fix it as a response to why it's bad..... For once, someone go into great detail and explain how you would adjust the parameters and what fields you would adjust or switch string referrences to to achieve said correction. Oh wait, thats right. Everyone here doesn't know how to load a map file into a readable table of tags and have a window form display a meta data table of those tags values. My future advise to you guys about this kind of stuff. STAY OUT OF MY SIGHT! I WILL RIP YOU ALL TO SHREADS ON BEHALF OF BUNGIE AND 343 WITH MY OBVIOUS SUPERIOR KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR GAME AND ENGINE. Bungie and 343 are great companies and have to date, the most skilled division of game designers and producers on the planet. They will do what they can to correct things that may or may not be broken when they can. Spamming and calling out the same stupid crap over and over again is really getting out of hand. Good thing I am not a moderator, or else over half these threads would have been deleted or merged into 1 due to so many of them always being about the same thing. You can lock this now Spectral, I'm done.

Anyone who reads what Bungie put up in the past about gameplay and glitching etc.... would know full well what he/she did to deserve a credit ban. What? Really? All you knuckleheads thought that just because Bungie no longer handles the servers, that the banhammer took a vacation?

Crap. just realized what i wrote in that first sentence. i meant to say CE not reach...lmao. Post Fail!

If the damage multipliers for the legendary Reach campaign carry over to Halo 4, then it will require you to lower the grunts health before your headshot will actually become the last deathblow and set off the skull's effect. As with any legendary campaign, there is always more of a spec ops and leader grade presence than basic infantry. This also provides more elites etc... than grunts. Also keep in mind that we dont know how this bonus skull will actually work. Will it be enbaled from the menu, or will the code simply allow the new skull to.spawn somewhere and have us actually have to.grab it?

I see someoje else here understands game mechanics as well as I do. Nice job explaning this Serene, I couldnt have worded it better myself.

With all the maps they have for reach including the Forged ones, I am very dissapointed they never did or noone else ver did Chrilon 13 or Ratrace. Those are great shotty maps and fun with oddball as well. Perhaps we will see a forge map pack with some classics as well as some completely overhauled ones?

Nice find there 819, I never played Halo Wars. It's the only Halo themed game I have to actually buy or download via the marketplace. I just really hate RTS'.

Judging from what we already know about the flood and their behavior it is safe to assume the following in terms of infection. Grunts: They provide little in terms of physical combat, but due to their staunchy size and gurth, they would provide excellent choices to become a flood sack. The mobile sack that collapses and releases flood infections. Now, we don't see many of these so it also viable that they are used to construct flood enviroments. Drones. Because these creatures are naturally flight enabled, they of coarse provide the most resistance to the flood. They would be the hardest of the species to infect because of said flight capabilities. Now even if a drone were to be taken host by a flood infection, the drones body are much to frail and small to provide any usuable combat skill. More than likely this species as well as the jackals and a few unknown others are used as sack nurturing fluids or construction material in flood surroundings. Lekgolos or combined....Hunters: Now the hunters are not technically a species of its own, rather a collection of the lekgolo worms simply working together as one inside an armor suit. Now because these individual worms are intelligent enough to combine and work.together cognitavly, they make an excellent choice to become flood infections. Their size would allow them to easily approach its victim quickly and silently. Also, they provide little resistance to the flood in individuals. Even in combined form, without the assistance of an exterior armor or other type of suit, it is likely they would be just as helpless. The main choice for flood hosts of coarse is what we already see. Brutes, Humans and Elites obviously make a first priority choice because of the inherant intelligence and mobility they possess. The floods first action from what we see is almost always creating a good mobile defensive end of combat ready troops. Also keep in mind that the latter of species enable the new hosts of flood to weild weapons. Something the flood during the "Forerunner / San Shyuum- Human war".

I tried to post a reply here, but my phone sucks for writing, so I edited this post just to let you know why there is a double post from me. Sorry in advance.

Here is a great way to break that boredom. Play thru campaign a few times on legendary or Heroic. And just for kicks, jump down on enemies like elites or grunts, and watch what happens after your standing on their heads. It's priceless sometimes. It's stuff that like, with the varied AI responses to any type of situation that make the replay value really great. There are tons a wacky crap you can do in campaign to amuse yourself for the next year until h4 comes out. You just gotta think outside the box a little. For instance, on Sword base. usually when playing thru on Heroic or harder, the elites will use the warthog turret at the entrance to Sword Base after you activate all the AA guns. When they use the turret, they tend not to get out of it even if you go right up to them. Try driving the hog around the map with the elite in the turret. It's funny as hell! Or for more crazy fun, down a ghost with a PP, then carefully wedge yourself between the seat and the beginning of the ghost. When he takes off, if you place yourself correctly, it will boost around doing crazy driving trying to get you off. In the middle of a battle it can be quite insane fun!

The Shoulder Armor Permutations: My god almighty! The shoulder attachments are just exactly what you pointed out...ATACHMENTS!! They are meant to be an add-on extension to the default armor in place, not an entirely new shoulder model section. As far as frames per second....you quite obviously have a little understanding about how the human eye captures light and processes it. A game running at 30 fps is an average zone for any game to run. They base this as the average because everyone in existence has his/her own set of tolerances as to how fast the eye can capture and interpret movement between frames. Sometimes people see blurry movement when fps is increased above 30. Some see rough edges around objects, it all varies. Just because your whoopity doo great eye sight may allow you to see above 30 crystal clear, does not mean everyone else can. Engineering has nothing to do with speeding up the frame rate of the game. Some games look dreadful when running at high fps. In order for lots of detail to be easily noticed, it is important to keep fps's low to mid range. Kat was killed?!? About that little nonsense filled bit. Wow really, you mean the phantom was that close. NO ****! I have eyes and I can see that. For that matter, if what you say is true about that incident, then why didn't the Covie just have a Capital Ship glass it? Hmmmm? It's because the whole thing was a tactical OP to take out the teams most valuable asset. Why do you think they dispatched that special group of Elites down to the surface for? To take out the Spartans. They were sent to personally ensure their demise. In numbers, they would of easily fought off the Elites as they did when they first encountered them at Sword Base. You do remember that part right? You weren't too drunk after that all night Frat bash? Anywho, also keep in mind that the Covenant also needed the Spartans to be on the defensive and on the run. Without the remaining Spartans alive, they never would have been able to discover the exact location of the buried Forerunner installation. Credit System. Ok here is where I call complete and total bull**** on you and your friends. The cap on credits is perfect. If anyone out there, in one day and sitting actually reaches 180,000 earned credits...YOU NEED A ******* HOBBY!!!! There is no way in hell you and your little gal pals are earning 6,000 per match. The only way to do that would be to hit a credit jackpot every match, and complete a challenge or commendation on every match. The only time I have ever hit 6,000 for one match, was when I completed 3 challenges in a single match. Other than that, the basic average anyone can expect to earn is between 3,000 and 4,000. So lets do a little math here cupcake. 180,000 cr / 4,000 cr = 45 matches. Each match lasts an average of 6 to 7 minutes, most going above that to 10. But for easy pickings, lets just average each match at 6. So now still with me? 6 minutes x 45 matches = 270 minutes or in-game play. Now this is not including the time it takes to load the map, end the match, and connect or have to wait for players. That time added into the equation will boost each match to an average of 7 to 8 minutes when all said and done. So lets re-calculate sunshine. 8 minutes x 45 matches = 360 minutes. Now 360 minutes / 60 minutes = 6 hours. Also keep in mind it could take longer based on what game types. Something like firefight would obviously take 3 times as long. Holy ****en Hell!!!! Your really gonna sit there and tell me that for a whole 6 hours out of those 3 to 4 days, you and your loser buddies have 6 hours to just sit there and game? Yet you say you all attend school and work? What do you work....2 hours a day at 3 days a week? Do you even study at all? Guess not. Must be easy taking mommy and daddy's money and waste it playing Halo. My point is this, unless you can provide a video or videos of you and your buddies legit making 6,000 or more per match without glitching the daily achievs or your commendations....YOU ARE FULL OF ****!!!!! Grenades Grenades Grenades: Wow oh wow son. You have not played any Halo game at all before Reach. If you were a gamer of Halo, as you or whoever that was from is....said person would know very well that each Halo title had a different velocity and bounce for the grenades. Throwing nades always takes a slight learning curve when jumping to another title. All this time you played Reach, and you still can't master something stupid like throwing a grenade? Winning Bonus. All I said was the credits you earn for being the winning team is greater...I never said it was a huge amount. Just stating facts about it. The Great Player Filter. You are really annoying at this point. The filter system works perfectly. Keep in mind, that like most filters, it will only work as well as the selection of the gaming populations. For example... say you go to play some slayer. Ughhhh paired with 2 recruits, 1 inheritor, 3 General grade 2's and what ever else. Bummer! The reason why this happened is simple. It is not because the filter didn't work. It is because the ranks of the population the match had to choose from, contained no active game waiting participants. Chances are, everyone else was in another match. The filter or the game itself is not going to just stand there and put everyone on standby for like 15 minutes just to get a match of all selected ranks from your filter. It happens broskie. It happens to the best of us. And besides, wasn't it you that said rank doesn't determine skill? And last but not least...SPAWNING. You really need to get a ******* clue home slice. You and everyone else in the world ******* about the spawning. First off, it's called RE-SPAWNING!!! Second, do you have any clue as to how involved the inital and re-spawning function of the game is? have you ever created, adjusted and tweaked a spawn placement or zone. No I didn't think so. That's because your some dickless fanboy who has no knowledge of any kind about !Blam or the individual components that link tags to function calls, or the value settings. ***** please! I work on mapping for Halo, Halo CE, Halo 2 Xbox and Halo 2 PC. I have been there, done that and then some. I have ripped through tag structures of every Halo game, except for Halo Wars. I understand perfectly well all the relevant data that goes into deciding when and where I will re-spawn during any match. For example. A basic small mpa like Corvette contains 42 to 56 intial spawn points, and that's just for a basic 2 team match. The map itself contains over 84 initial spawns points. Any one of those points can be used for initial spawn respawning, dynamic or overspawns. Basically in a nutshell, what you can play with and do in Forge is just the tip of the iceburg in what is really involved. Trust a pro on this one. To summerise, I have no personal beef with you. You are probably a really cool guy, just like me. I get very worked up about game specific details when it comes to game components, the story etc.... Nothing was meant personal by it.

Don't worry everyone, I will be posting a nice lengthy reply to update this thread and the reasons why it is so flawed, from a decompiled tag, and game mechanic perspective. Stay tuned for some hilarious reading!!!

Infinity is the mystery map that everyone is speculating about. They gave us a hint a while back in saying that the map is famous for it's amount of deaths by falling. Last time I checked, Infinity had almost 100x more fall deaths than Danger Canyon ever had. Then again, if it's a firefight map they made it into, Infinity would just simply be way to large of a map for 4 players to do it on. If I had to guess on the firefight part of it, I would say the map is Danger Canyon. It is a great mid-large map with plenty of spaces, and roughly the overall size of Unearthed. But then again, they said this firefight map was going to be doing things not ever seen or thought possible before?!? Damn 343 you scary!!!!

Wheaties, do you know how the service functions at all? Yes, during gameplay the match is carried by what we call a "host". The Halo 3 server itself is tasked with verifying content of all players connecting to it. It then provides the gametype or whatever, then passes the hosting of the match off to a players with the best connection at that time. The server at that point goes into a data collection mode, and processes the kills, medals etc. all the while still monitoring each players connection (ping) so that in case of bad connection it can re-route hosting duties to another player. Handling the actual game connection between all the players, would not only be a waste of server resources, but it also is very minuscule compared to the various API's it has to rely and process player data for. Now granted internet bandwidth has not seen that much of an improvement or breakthrough, but the server equipment they deploy still needs to be maintained and cared for. Who do you think really wants to keep on servicing and updating hardware for a game they no longer make any money with? You really think that $19.99 worth of MS points for the download, or physical copy is gonna keep those servers running? Hardly. Is it really that hard to come to terms with, that eventually one day halo 3 will no longer be supported by Live? Oh no!!!! Burn everything!!!!!! It's a god damn game....relax already. We all know damn well when the H3 servers go bye-bye, you will already be invested in some other game anyway. Move on!

Halo 3 servers more than likely will go the way of the H2 ones. Financially, what company would re-invest on dedicated servers to host millions of connections for Live? Halo 2 was not shut down due to the discontinuation of Xbox 1 titles. halo 2 was shut down because Halo 2 had made it's way to PC, and gave the gaming community more control over it's playfield. Not to mention the vast gap in community players with ODST and Halo 3 being played. Dean PHP is correct in his view of the servers. Wright8509, you have no idea what kind of server setup or equipment 343 has in their server line. Even if you did, how idiotic of a network manager do you think they have, that they would have instances of Halo 3 running on the same server or servers as the reach ones? That kind of thing might be ok for your home hosted 16 max players...but we are talking hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players. We all have to face facts sometime. Halo 3 is almost five years old now (wow only a week or so!), and as such it has no longer benefited from any kind of product support in the form of DLC or matchmaking fixes, etc. Microsoft will not want 4 different Halo titles being simultaneously supported on Live. It will divide the player base beyond any fruitful means, and it would give the PC community a chance to enjoy Halo 3 on the PC and host their own servers.

The firing spread will still be the same no matter how the DMR is used. Bloom was only a visual so you could judge the radius in which to guess your shots might land. It will and has no effect on teh firing spread calculations that go into the weapon projectile. As for Armor Lock, quit whining and find a solution to your annoying problem. Just because 25% of the whining fanboy community can't compete properly against it, doesn't mean the rest of the gaming community should suffer for your l337 fails in-game. You either like the game or don't. Stop complaining and keep these damn things to yourself!

You quite obviously have no idea what you are talking about. There is no such feature as "pre-timed" shots. The Battle Rifle is a weapon with 3 projectiles that release upon firing. It is a common tag block in the [weap] for number of projectiles. Also last time I checked, the starting and ending velocity for the BR projectile is 1200. Keep in mind that all three released projectiles must hit the target to achieve the maximum damage per round (yes all 3 bullets count as a round) it releases. The bloom effect is a just a visual addition to the hud. With or without bloom, each weapon still suffers from a good accurate firing rate when spamming. The reason you see no bloom on some Covie weapons, is because by default the weapon tag is set to fire accross multiple markers to achieve a random discharge effect. In which case makes the bloom HUD add-on effect useless. The only weapon in Halo history that never gave it's user a clear radius of the firing pattern via the "bloom" or reticule radius.... was the Pistol from halo 1. When spamming it, the shots tend to land outside the radius of the reticule.

1. There is what you call "bloom" in every Halo title. Not just visibly in all. 2. When I played Halo 1 most of you were all "kids". It didnt suck because you played it more than my other adult friends. I find your intolerance disturbing. 3. Theatre was reduced to 1 person because of the extreme amount of geometry data the party leader would be responsable for dishing out over Live. Hosting a custom game is no where near the bandwidth or amount of memory used in the process of theatre. Pretty much evwrything else posted above is spot on.

So because my opinion differs from someone elses( I am an idiot? Hate to break it to you Mr. Ego but it's just a game. And as such everyones opinion or view will differ. The only relavant content you can argue on a right or wrong basis is how the game mechanics work. In which case my knowledge is far more superior than yours will ever be.