Twinreaper

Whether or not the Halo Series is destroyed is all opinion, and not one ounce of fact. The only measurement of how well the series will do is by looking back on the numbers once it has had enough time to be digested by the mass population. Halo is not becoming CoD nor is it mimicking it in any way. Halo is simply using techniques found in other games, and has improved and expanded upon them. This is normal in the game industry. If you wanted to be quite literal, you could so far as to say that every title is trying to be Quake, or Doom, etc... 343 is comprised of all employees whom share a great passion for the Halo Universe. From what I have seen from all the VidOC's and other videos posted, they are coming out of the gate with more passion and love than Bungie ever did. 343 is taking Halo to it's rightful place in terms of evolution and continuing the many untold stories that lie within the Halo Universe. There is more to Halo than just a battle between the Covenant and Humans. If the series were to mimic the books, we would likely have over 50 Halo titles, each telling a new portion of what is found in the Halo Universe. Killerdude and other like minded peeps....I really don't appreciate the "True fan" comments. I was a gamer long before you were all born, and followed the development of Halo long before it became a FPS. In terms of being a fan, I am an old old old school original. I feel as if 343 and Halo is taking the proper steps to become the dominant force in the FPS market. I have played, contributed and still contribute today, to the Halo franchise in terms of community content. So no, YOU DO NOT SPEAK FOR ANY FAN BUT YOURSELF!!!!

Correction, none of the weapons were hitscan. As I had previously stated, all the weapons had a defined speed, friction and gravity scale. True hitscan weapons do not need these as they have infinite velocity and are not effected by secondary constraints. Halo 3 had "bloom" as you call it. every Halo title has had it, only the degree of it at a certain range changes. It is only logical that the closer you are to a target, that the less spread you will see or come into contact with. The true test of how all the newest session of spread will play out, is only by playing it ourselves. Videos can show you many things, but they cannot give you the feeling or actual first person expereince.

Bullet spread always operates the same way regardless of title. The question you are more so asking is how much is there, and on what weapons. To answer that one, I would have to look at the data from the weapon tags to tell you that. Also, the weapons in Halo 2 were not "Hitscan". Hitscan means a weapon shoots a projectile with infinite velocity and range, and simultaniously hits it's target as it leaves the barrel. Halo 2 weapons had projectile speed defined and it varied from weapon to weapon. Recoil on the other hand is going to be an issue. They stated before that the BR in particular would have a "z axis" recoil similar to the SMG, but from the gameplay I have seen, it is either very small recoil, or they decided not to include it. Overall we really have to wait to play the game, and wait till we modders get a hold of the files and try to crack them open before you will know for sure.

47% comes from my personal interactions with playing Halo 1 and Halo CE for PC. At average I game with over 1,000 individual unique players a week. By my estimate, 47% of those I asked about Halo 3 and Reach stated that they didn't play either or don't have an xbox. that comes in at roughly 5k community PC members alone just in my gaming time that have not played. Hypothetically you could calculate that roughly 10k unique people a day play Halo at some point and have never played a title outside Halo 1 or Halo 2. 10k at $49.99 is a net sale of $499,999.00 just on that one interaction base alone. How many people around the world could you then estimate that don't play Halo 1 or 2 for PC, that have yet to play 3 or Reach? You could easily at best say in the millions. The potential target audience is wide enough that if the development cost was split between 2 studios, it would generate into a massive gain. Let's not forget also the countless numbers of Halo 3 and reach players, that would undoubtedly pick it up for PC anyway just because they could. And Kayla, please don't try to pass off a lame excuse like modding and hacking as a reason why it would not work. You need to get your facts straight and eat your Wheaties before you try to take me on in this type of technical / Corporate product aspect.

Cost > Profit is not accurate. The compiled format in which the game is spit out by tool.exe is derived and processed on the PC platform. Therefore making it automatically compatible with the DirectX codebase for whatever target platform they want. The real time and issue comes from making it open ended via a HEK (Halo editing Kit). This is where the time and resources come in mostly. To make it a full HEK every bit of the game has to be decompiled and interchanged to a standard format capable of being reproduced by an installed consumer version of the tool-set. By my estimate it would take no longer than 6.5 months to completely recompile the entire source and have it ready for tool usage. Add maybe an additional 4 months for secondary items like networking, Live etc... The total cost in man hours would roughly come to $1,512,000.00 Now that is assuming they use the max needed team of about 42 employees for a full year at industry standard pay. It could be far less depending on the contract with a secondary studio or less team members. But the cost does not outway the profit on that one. Even though Halo 3 sold a lot of copies in it's time, there is roughly still about 47% of the PC gaming population that has not played anything past Halo 2.

Downloading additional SpartanOps missions as they are released is a fine idea. What IS NOT a fine idea, is Microsoft yet again, forcing anyone who wished to play Halo 4 outside the campaign...to HAVE TO BUY LIVE. I'm not a big fan of companies forcing me to pay for a service that I DON'T need. Spartan Ops can be played standalone or co-op locally on the Xbox, so why should I have to pay for Live, if I DON'T NEED or WANT IT?!?

Agreed. Handsome Jacks dialog alone left me.nearly peeing myself stupid. Awesome well put together game with hours of fun to be hqd during the campaign. Now I just have to wait for Creature Slaughter Dome. And yes, the Mechromancer is seriously freekin sweet! Btw...anyone else think Moxxxie is a stacked hottie?!?

Join in progess should have been implimented as a "benched player" option. I see no reason to force "Ranked Playlist" to have such a silly and detrimental effective approach to balancing teams when players quit or disconnect. I had said it before and I will say it again... Join in Progress should allow up to 8 replacement players to sit on the "bench". When someone quits or disconnects, a random benched player is thrown into the match. Benched players can use a "spectator" camera to call out things to their teammates. Benched players who don't play at all get credits for armor perks, but no EXP for rank.

Speaking of Linda.... I bet she has some badass Spartan armor if she is back on active dutie. I mean she did teat the Chiefs new.armor in Halo.2 so..... and because her last post or active whereabouts were Earth, that would mean she got the nano upgrade achematics well before John for Halo 4.

Let me just go on record as stating, that Halo fans have just about the same amount of lame ass excuses as to why Halo is better than everything else also. Not one day goes by you don't here various large amounts of people spouting off reason like, "It's just better", or "In Halo it takes skill". These 2 examples are perspective and not a factual account of what would typically make one game better than another. That beign said, CoD is a great franchise and was not meant in any way to play or ressemble Halo in any aspect, which is why it is nothing like it, and why Halo fans will always bash it. MW3 was the best MW of the bunch. Granted the campaign of MW2 was my personal fav, but MW3 brought the survival and mission sections that amused me for hours on end. Yes I did get Firefight with Halo, but as far as substance goes in terms of weapons and tactics, Survival has Firefight beat by a mile. Black Ops II looks to change how players see CoD by introducing elements we are not used to. The same type of changed happened when we shifted from the WWII genre of CoD to the more modern MW and Vietnam BO. In short, neither game is truly better than the other. Only through personal choice, perspective and comfort of style can tell ONLY YOU what game is better for YOU. Don't listen to thousands of BS posts that try to tell someone different from you how YOU should feel about a game or which one is better.

Hate to break it to you, but with current engine and hardware it aint gonna happen. People.forget that rendered cinematics are not true in-game running. The animations and level of.detail are always just slightly off scale of the engine, and normally dont evwn try to include a massive spawn fest like the one you are talking about here. I agree it would be really cool to see this, but as I said....atm its pretty much impossible.

It's not the weapon that does less damage to vahicles, it's the vehicle itself that has been modified to cut down on the actual physics response. Weapon have what we call an "Acceleration Scale". This controlls how much force a projectile or object has on an opposing object. Then we have what is called a "Physics Response". A physics response tells the object how it will react. Should it roll like a sphere, or roll like a block, or should it be launched by the acceleration scale factor in relative proportion to the object mass. Yadda yadda. So basically all I am saying is this: They didn't lower the amount of force the Concussion Rifle has, they simply increased the mass of the vehicle and tones down it's wacky and extremely high physics responses, which is what we saw in Reach. Now that's not to say that any other heavy weapon WON'T have such an effect, but at least as far the Concussion Rifle weapon is concerned...they made it react different to it.

AI Pathfinding is a seperate set of tag data that is added to a scenario file thru the sandbox Ui known commonly as Sapien. basically this happens... 1. Scenario file is loaded. 2. Spawns are added to the map. (Crates, scenery, machines, etc) 3. A pathfinding tool is then used to calculate where objects, scenery etc are in location to where bipdes are able to be spawned. 4. The map is compiled into it's .map compressed format, along with every other item that requires compiling and compression. Unfortunatly due to how the engine is layed out, as I had tried to explain, pathfinding data is a compressed set of spacial coordinates that tell the AI where and what is located on a level. Without this data, AI would just run around into walls, into objects etc... Campaign maps have the AI Pathfinding already compiled and included into the map file, and cannot be edited as this would change more than just the scenario file or globals. Most players are not aware of this, but all of the Forge features we use are simply memory edits on sections of the scenario_structure file, globals.globals and globals.multilingual_global map files. While yes there ar eother edits that we do such as physics of an object or it's spawning time, but every other edit we are capable of doing is an edit that does not require a complete re-compiling of a map file.

Yeah I'll just download the HD version when it finally gets ripped. Aint noone got time for waiting each week! I'll watch it all in one sitting. my life is far to hectic to add another series into the mix.

343i has said that there are still many items they have not revieled yet, adn one of those is a countermeasure for Promethian Vision. Also from gameplay I have seen, it does appear that active camo does hide a player from the Promethian Vision. My guess is, there will be some sort of either deployable or armor active effect that jams the Promethian vision, much like the jammer does to radar in Halo 3. It would be wicked if the jammer produced like 4 copies of someone when promethian vision was used. it would be like shooting drunk! lmao

The best use of bots, would be to finally add a style that supports gametypes like CTF, Assault, KOTH, etc... One of the best and only ways to sometimes make a good forge map for a certain gametype is hours of coordination with friends to test thigns out. it would be much simpler to have a range of gametype styles that could easily allow AI to actively search for the oddball, or tactically make a flag grab etc. But due to the way the engine is layed out, AI is easily added. Each map would have to have some sort of either pre-compiled AI pathfinding, or a standalone compiler process inside the forge environment that would allow you to update or creat a pathfinding data block. either one would require a lot of memory (RAM) and a whole lot of time to recompile those data fields into the tagsets. Unfortunatly those particular types of tags are not easily stored or referrenced. At least not in the same sense that the scenario_structure file is edited in memory.

Slippery, mind your language please. no need to curse about a change, just accept it. I think the changes they ahve made better suit the newer generation of gamer that is emurging. Killcams are a welcome addition to the franchise. Far too many times do we get killed and don't see it coming, or lose what happened due to lag or too mucha ction on screen. Seeing what happened up front rather than in theatre, will help players grow and avoid making fatal mistaked over and over again. Promethian vision in particular is a isefull and very balanced item. many games have used an infrared or thermal vision item to allow players to see what lies ahead. Halo has taken this method of pre-battle defense and gave it a nice balanced usage.

And this my point exactly when it comes to LOD. The code base should not determine LOD based on what graphics adapter (TV) is attached to the 360. When we talk about the direct streaming process that DX9 uses from the DX10 and 11 library, the 360 should be direct streaming the max LOD at all times. Not picking and choosing. By the 360 using a makeshift determining factor on how to display LOD for a specific TV, you can effectivley inhibit other players playing against others. What I mean is, it is unfair for the system to decide that it should cut LOD for no good reason for some players, which may in turn allow people playing on bigger TV's to gain the upper hand in controlling territory...since they can see more of the battlefield at any point. I have played Reach on both a 60" LCD and a 32" LCD along with a basic tube style 21". The 21" shows just as much rendered models as the others, just not as detailed. none the less I could still clearly see far enemies with no trouble, and the fact that it clips models slightly farther than the larger Tv's is just BS. A bigger TV does not make for a better player or a better gaming expereince. i actually prefer to play on a tv in which I can look straight at it, and see the entire action...rather than rotating my head around or having to focus on one particular section of the screen.

Congrats Choot'em! Well deserved and like SJ said, to me you were already a member of the "Legendary" group of folks we have were. Keep up the great work, the forums would NOT be the same without you!

Cryengine graphics are still far superior to any game or comparable engine on the market, that is fact. The flexibility and source base give it the edge when programming the myriad of codecs for rending and texture compression and streaming output. Halo 4 is a fantastic looking beast, but like with Reach, I am worried about the LOD of things. In general for Reach, the environments were fantastic and had a nice LOD, while secondary spawned objects like scenery, bipeds, etc... seemed to me to be far to clipped or occluded given the distance at which they did all that. Halo 4 looks to have possibly the same issue. It really isn't that big a deal, but when you look over a battlefield and everything starts to disappear at say like 50 yards....it kinda seems lackluster. The one issue I do take with the new engine and the graphical process is the post processing rendering and shader work. A lot of what we have seen in the past month doesn't really do enough for me. I like to see my environment and structures have more of a reflective or shiny aspect to them. Forerunner structures in particular should be throwing or bouncing ambient light and you should always see some kind of environment mapping on them. Everything I have seen in this aspect is devoid of any real life or wow factor. But to get more on topic and more to the point, in terms of comparable graphics it is closer to the Battlefield series in terms of rendering power. Battlefield may not have looked as polished as we had hoped, but the Frost engine in it's current state has the processing and code base that is closest to Blam! Sabre Interactive in my opinion, is like the lost younger brother to Blam!...a great engine and definitely comparable. Now if I just had a recent title from there to compare to, I could make a more informed comparison...

By multiple map zones I hope you are not implying multiple bsp's. Multiple seperate bsp's all tied into one map will never be a reality for multiplayer or custom Forge work. Now if you mean multiple zones by "Trigger Volumes" (spartan trait zones), then yes you could make some pretty drastic changing sections of a large area.

Ughhhhh..... yeah no likie. The map itself is nothing more than a variety of shader tweaks from the looks of it, extremely dissapointed in that map remake. And the Mantis? What good are the vehicles on the map with that overpowered Macross wannabe mech? Not liking that thing one bit.

Robius next

You have to look past weapons as just mearly tools, and look.at the story and why we have the weapon.set we do. This particular Old Covenant.faction we are facing predates the events of Reach and therefore places the weapon sets slightly askew from what we saw in any Halo title before. Weapons like the Focus rifle and Needle Rifle were likely created or produced somewhere between the events of Of post Harvest and pre Reach. It is unclear how long this faction of Covies has been in.deep space, but it is quite clear that they have no knowledge of the events we have seen in previous games. Going by that alone, it is easy to theorize that this alone is why we have the particular weapons we have. Brutes likely created the maulers and brute shots to rival what the Sanghelli had in terms of firepower. Without their presence in the ancient covie factions and in this newest year of events it only makes sense that their weapons, as well.as certain covie ones make an appearance.

Really? So it wasn't Microsoft that saved Bungie from bankruptcy by buying the early half developed rights to Halo? Wow, someone needs to go thru the Bungie company history. Microsoft is the sole reason WHY you and millions around the world are able to enjoy Halo today. If not for them, Bungie would have went broke, Halo would have never been finished or released, and you would all be playing CoD. Microsoft was not the ones whom decided to remake Halo 1, that was all 343i. It was a project that Frank and a few ex-Bungie employees wanted to do as the studios first title, I don't count Halo Wars as an actual Halo title. Yes, Microsoft gave them the green light because of the $$$ it would make, but it was not Microsoft's idea or forcefull hand that made it happen. Technical mumbo jumbo aside, just because it worked for CEA does not mean it will work for H2. CE did not have the luxury of having Havok at it's physics, animation and collision backbone. The first generation of Blam! was more compatible with the Reach engine than any other version they produced. Halo 3 comes close with it's shadering system, but Reach, was more or less a stripped down and upgraded CEA engine. Very open ended and very highly optimized. Also realize that CEA had no base code for a previous network model such as Live, integrated into the engine. This made CEA a great title to remaster on a separate running engine without gumming up any of the internal works. Again though, they already have Halo 2 for the PC, so there is no good reason why people cannot go back thru enjoy campaign. Campaign even works on XP with the right modifications, and said modifications are very simple to do and understand. Yes the campaign play would be solo and no co-op, but who cares. In an age where 4 player or more co-op is now king, 2 player seems lame. And lets be very brutaly honest, after the mess with Hired Gun and PI studios on the porting of Halo 2, do you really think Microsoft would ever contract it back out to be worked on again by an outside studio? Don't get me wrong, Sabre Interactive is a great Studio with a lot of skill, but Microsoft even today is still feeling the effects of the botched port. Honestly Grumpy, I'm getting a little sick and tired of you trolling everything I say, only to reply with complete BS and posting things that are false. If your gonna troll someone, might I suggest you troll someone slightly below your level of programming and gaming experience? Perhaps try a 5 year old?