Twinreaper

I agree Pope, but as myself and Esorath have pointed out, they need to use a balanced choice selection so they dont further push away certain gameing sub cultures. Esorath has it.exactly right with his layout.

Bloom has been in every Halo title. Search the forums, you can find my detailed post about it and I also included the exact tag settings.

Did you know that there were originally 12 Halo Arrays created. I forget where I read it...

Hey Ashlynn, we're gonna be Like-millionares!!!

I can certaintly try to build on this. The blood animation is actually called "AOE Core Radius" and it is a decal not an animation....just to clarify. The host issue is like this. When you connect to the reach server, the server pairs you up on commendation completeness, meaning people with similar skill sets get paired against eachother. The server basically goes thru some maths and pairs team as equally as it can. This is the reaosn why you could be an inheritor and have 3 nobles with you, but get paired up with 4 generals or 3 majors and one forerunner. it all depends on the gametype and what % of completetion your commendations are. It also factors in lightly your K/D and wepaon usage. Remember, some people score farm their way to high ranks. As for the lag issue, it's the host. As I started to say before, the Reach server simply pairs you up and checks for map encryption. Once that is doen, it passes server hosting duties to the person who is closest to the "middle" of all players in terms of distance around the world. Lets say for example you live in the UK, and you are playing with 4 people from the USA and 3 people from Japan. The server at that point would choose you as the host primarily becuase your position between all players represent s the most equal amount of ping that can be expected among all people connecting to you. When ever a shot is fired, the client sends the info to the host. The host then negotiates the timing with the client. If the data doesnt match or sync to a degree of accuracy, the shot is either discarded or registered as a miss. Unfortunatly due to the way games work, the visual end is last to display timing issues. Collision and physics are always at the top of the calculatuion chart when it comes to the processing plane of things. Furthermore, contrary to what people believe, the speed at which your connection can uplaod and download data means nothing. Even if you had the most kickass service like in Belgium or one of those other 1-3 rated EU countires.....it still depends on the client as to how fast data can be interpreted. Hardware and system stability also come into play here as well. Not all 360's are created equal. Sometimes minor things like processor state or memory usage can vary depending on the batch it uses or when it was created. Contrary to popular beliefe...just because the design and materials are the same...it doens tmean that in the end everything comes out euqal or comparable.

You have answered your own question. The Halo community itslef since Halo 2 has been fractured and divided into what i call I complete cluster ****. When you look back on the community 6 to 7 years ago, there was a common ground and common bond we all shared. With every new title that emerged things changed too drastic for some, and not enough for some. Realistically speaking, the whole community has emerged into 3 main catagories, or sub communities... 1. Hardcore/MLG/Competative 2. Fun/casual 3. Semi/competative/campaign Within these communities however, halo 3 and reach has spawned various micro communities...being the TU/vanilla for each one of the main ones. The Halo community is in more pieces than a 1,00 piece jigsaw puzzle at this point. And because the genre of FPS's and competators alike keep evolving it is only hurting the fragile community even more. What even more seperates us is that we have 3 different Halo title servers to game on. Most FPS makers like to retire previous servers once a newer title comes out, or at least stop supporting it, or turn serving over to the community via a PC release. Keep in mind also, that very few gamers contrary to popular beliefe, do not visit, join or participate in online gaming sites. And even if some of them do, many do not take the time to voice or post their feelings about the games they play or issues they have with it. Unfortunatly now, the sites are mostly dominated by hardcore or MLG lovers. The casual or family types have no real voice or presence, making things one sided and very uneven when it comes time for the developer to look into what will please the next generation of gamers, or the veterans. In the end, by my own summary and thesis, the community will begin to even further shift out of alignment and seperate even more as the years and games go on. The only way the community can and ever will get back to it's roots and a singular common foothold, is if 343i or whatever next developer takes over, decides to stick with a solid core fundamental engine mechanic system and does not ever deviate from it. In terms of the above, think about BF and MW. Every game is usually the same exact gameplay feel. No new powerups or jump settings, or even movement speed. It's the same game but with redifined weapons and story. Halo is constantly changing core gameplay mechanics and can never seem to find a cozy medium. All these things have led to Halo's downfall in terms of community one-ness. Of coarse this is just the viewpoint of an older gamer who was well into his 20's when Halo started out. My perspective of it has always been one sided on the basis that my clarity oand experience ids that of an adult. As it is well known, people of younger ages see the world and many things in a simpler different light than adults do. So yeah, I'm a little biased and old, but that makes my position on it no more right or wrong...it siomply just is a viewpoint and should be taken as nothing more or less.

Even if, and this a big flippin IF......say the campaign is completely finished. This also means that all weapons, vehicles and objects are set in stone with no rorom for adjusting outside a scripting system. This also means directly, that all weapon mechanics and operation standards are complete as well, which means weapon use in MM is already defined. Now I cannot speak for everyone, but when a developer puts the polish on things like weapons in the campaign without fully testing them in a MM setting just to make sure things don't need to be changed a bit....I get worried. I'm not worried about the campiagn, but for my MM playing brothers and sisters. While I may not like MM as much as everyone else, I do want people to get the very best experience they can. And rushing things like campaign without testing things in a polished map or MM setting just seems a little nieve.

Halo 2 did NOT have any effective means of taking down a vehicle. To this day, Coagulation shows a great example of this. If the opposing team should happen to gain both banshees or even one tank and all hogs, it is nearly impossible to counter the team. You can't get enough shots off at the vehicles or grenades to counter them. In Halo 3, they downshifted the health of all the vehicle permutations to provide players an easier method of taking them out. Reach simply downplayed them further, but if you take a closer look at the vehicle use on each map and the completely dominant power they possess compared to their H2 and H3 counterpart, it is balanced well. Part of the magic in Reach, is being able to choose and utilize a vehicle knowing that doing so sacrafices armor. It actually takes a bit more skill behind the wheel to stay alive and rack up kills. Last thing I ever want going into MM, is being dominated by a sissy vehicle driver the entire match, or at least lose a slayer or objective match, because every time you respawn, a vehicle user is taking you out. I can count on one hand, how many times I ever needed or used a vehicle in the entire Halo series....and I have been playing since launch of Halo 1. I hate vehicles period. I will say that the range of the DMR is horribly wrong. It is way too overpowered in those terms. IIRC, the world unit max range is something like 575. In Halo terms, Masterchief stands nearly 1 World unit tall. So line up 575 players back to back and that s roughly the distance you can shoot before the projectile de-spawns. For a weapon, thats pretty disproportioned compared to earlier perscision weapons. In fact, here is a fun test that will show you how much range it really has. Play on the level where you get the jumppack and meet the ODST Bullfrog troopers. I think the map is "New Alexandria"?. Anyway, make your way to the end where you encounter a Brute with a Fuelrod gun. Now, get past those brutes and glitch or trick jump out of the map, all the way back to where you get the jumppacks for the first time. You can do this by jetpacking to the building off the right side of the map. Go unitl you reach the spot where the phantom landed or dissapears at. From that spot all the way accross the map, you can still fire accurate shots with the DMR and still hit the brutes.

Regardless of how much you like a game, when successors come out, the old must go. it's time to just man/woman up and accepit. I guarantee that within 6 months of Halo 4's release, Halo 3 will be taken down? bets anyone?

To add to this, yes aimbots can force the projectiles to overpentrate any wall or surface. Most of these aimbots employ a "macro". A series of script commands in console form that run along side the game itself and very hard to detect...even on servers. Macros can do just about anything that is included inside the myriad of scripting options avaialble in the entire game. They do have their limits and usually much be simplistic or have a one sided effect or ability.

By zoom with every weapon, you are referring to the "binocular" HUD display, just to clear that up for people who may misread or misinterpret that. So basically what you are saying is, that like the target locator, when using the basic binocular zoom, it should display the rnage in meters that an enemy is, and you should be able to paint a target....like sort of lock the enemy so you know where a painted one is at all times? While I like the idea of range for eneimes, I don't think it would serve a good purpose in terms of mm. Gameplay for Halo is really never about at what range an enemy is, nor does knowing how far the enemy actually is from you, help in any way with aiming. Grenades are a result of the physics and not much can be done to ensure that the arc and range would be great inside the tag itself. It all comes down to pre-defined engine physics for this kind of stuff. Don't get me wrong, I think these are fabulous ideas actually. I just dont see how they could effect or improve gameplay at a great ability. Perhaps if you could elaborate on the idea to give us a much more vivid idea of how they could please?

Everyone always has a skewed view on how the engines are thought out and made. Redstar has the right idea and was heading in the correct direction. Halo 1: This was the engine that started it all and included the 1.0 version of Havok Physics. This version had cloth, collision, physics collision but no vehicluar physics. This is why the vehicles operate the strange way that they do. the handling for them was custom made to work. Halo 2: This engine was a stripped down halo 1 engine. By stripped down, I mean that the basic kernel of the engine was all that remained. In order to use the updated havok version (5.1 IIRC) which then included vehicle handling, it was needed to be recoded int hat area. Also they recoded from scratch the shader system to employ a wider variety based on the current gen shader model schema. Other changes were also obvious like seperated collision models and tags for various objects etc... Calling Halo 2 a modified Halo 1 engine is not accurate. Fact is, Halo 2's engine was drastically different in every aspect and only kept the single I/O base core metrics, which is why we regard it as a Halo 1 "variant." Halo 3: This engine was a sclose as you could get to the original CE one. For Halo 3 they stripped down the original CE engine and added extensions for it that incoporated the root shader system used in Halo 1 and extended it to use other variant, shader type specific tags. Such tags examples are [silly], [****] and [scsr]. Again, most of the code that ran Halo 1 was simply added onto to create a wider range of available options during development. In fact, during a dev VidOC they talk about how they stripped it down to extend the greatest aspects of Halo 1 and make them work flawlessly with Halo 3. Halo 3 was in no way at all, anything like Halo 2 nor did it use anything previously in Halo 2 at it's core. Simple things such as seperated collision models and things like that were not so much engine changed, but rather development evolution. The most notable change and addition to map structure as dictated by the egnine, was the open ended engine ability to change and alter in memory, a maps scneario file and save it as a standalone loadable file.....yes I am talking about Forge. Halo 3:ODST: This engine was the exact Halo 3 engine, with the exception of it's scripting system. The scripting system was fully utilized and that is how we got Firefight. Halo Reach: The culmination of all things ever created or destroyed. Reach's engine is to date, the most powerful and ahead of it's time engine that Bungie has ever created. Calling it an engine isn't accurate. Calling it a fighter jet on speed and crack would be a more viable choice. Anywho, Reach is a heavily modified Halo 3 engine variant. When I say modified, I mean it was stripped very little, and utilized open ended coding to incorporate a lot of extension use. MegaloScript is the side engine scripting type service that was added most notably. It itself is so powerful, the entire game could likely run just from lines of executing script on Megalo's side. Aside from thesechanges, reach also began using what we call "imitating". This was the process of making items in game, have a much lower poly count and a much less memory cost for rendering them. Such examples of this, is the various scenes maps where in the distance we see battles taking place. When you get up close, you see a blocky turd...but from far away you see epic win! Thats because the post processing of these items kind of distorts and morphs what we usually call :LOD" Line of Draw...to work a bit differently. This alone was a huge leap forward. In all other Halo titles, they had to use waht we call "Cinematic Anchors" in the form of "scenery" items. Basically they had to spawn actual models with animation at full LOD and play looping the entire time. Rendering hundreds of items at full LOD so you could see them anywhere on the map was a huge drain on memory and loading times. Halo CEA: This engine or rather engines, is as close to date, as you can get to the original engine in every aspect. CEA used the Halo 1 engine in it's whole, running along side a modified Reach engine, designed to mimic and run parallel to the original. The tweaks to CEA engine allowed it to communicate and sync with the original flawlessly. The best example of the two running at the same time, is illistarted by the changing of the mode, from classic to new. While you change and the screen goes black, you still hear the current game's ambient sounds or battles playing out. Also you will notice that at no time at all, does your position change unless you switch and your still holding the button forward or whatever way you do. This is because the two engines communicate back and forth and relay everything that is going on in the game. Now, going forward into Halo 4, it would make a lot of sense and great use of the code architecture, to keep the Reach engine and strip it down only to add onto or change certain aspects of it, to allow greater customization of existing features or add new ones. Development wise, it would not make sense time wise or resource wise, to completely strip it down to basics and build everything from the ground up. Now at first thought, I know what you all are thinking. In the TU they couldn't use the reach engine to mimic perfectly the classic feel of the weapons or movemtn. While this is true, it should also be noted that the reason they could not achieve this, is because the physics handling can only be adjusted or tweaked to a small degree, without needing to extend the code to allow changes of the magnitude required to match perfectly the classic feel. Doing so also would have required them to compile a new engine and maps. This of coarse is not 343's fault but Bungies. They did not plan the egnine on being used for CEA, nor did they likely have the time to write in exceptions to allow the handling code to remain open and fully editable by the toolset. Halo 4 using the Reach modified engine makes great sense and if used and extended properly, should provide us a great game that will truly re-invent and reanimate the Halo franchise.

Halo 2 for the pc is far more active them people state. You can always find at least a minimum of 20-30 servers and at most about 5-10 good servers always full at all times.

As I had said he touched based on the ranking system in mm. Im not getting all worked up...though it may seem like it some times. I actually thougjt OP did a fairly decent job as a first post for this sort of.topic. Mg only primary concern is the influx of new members that dont take the proper time to.search for the posts that we already have like this. Members need to start using the search feature a little more.

Although your post was layed out and tbought out fairly well, but you simply cannot post up that you know anything about core mechanics without providing technical data in relation to tag values or physics/collision handling. I do applaud you sense of style though. Dmr is.not.hitscan. Hitscan.weapons do not have a defined projectile speed, as seen in the weap tags on the DMR. The speed of the projectile.is.meerly increased to.simulate hitscan...but it is not. Vehicles were nerfed because they were strong against infantry weapons. Biggest complaint about vehicles in Halo 2 and 3 was how ward it was to take.them.down with standard respawn.equipment. The vehicles in Reach are balancex between sacrificing armor.for power. Yet again simple.minds.dont.grasp the ranking system Reach uses. It isnt about credits or actual.rank. The mm system compares.your commendations to match you up.against players.....if that is you adjust the custom.search setting. Ive heard far more than enough whining about your precious bragging system. Not everyone wants it...deal with it.

No, SI's involvement was strictly related to "graphic layers" and "geometry". Although they did have very little mention when it came to CEA, the project they were involved in. I suspect they are working on something else but I do remain interrsted to see if the things they are working on, are in part, part of a large release other than just the 360.

First off Snipesnide, the port is exactly how it was on Xbox 1. Vibrant, is a good way to describe it, it has seen some pickup in the last few months. The reason it is not the stellar title it could be, is simply because it requires Vista or 7 to run properly and enjoy multiplayer. Forget what people say about it on Xp, it plays much better on Vista on 7....if you have an up to date machine...but thats another whiney ass tale for another day. The game costs you a measly $10 to $15 bucks....we aint exactly breaking the bank or the allowance funds here. It's agreat port with lots of map making potential. trust me, I'm a co-leader for the H2MT on Monstrmoose.

Netcode is no easy task to modify. writing a brand new code structure with latest networking models based on current networking protocols can take alone, upwards of a year to two years. Thats complete integration and fromm scratch though. to modify the reach engine, it would be an equal venture. they would first have to use the basic kernel if you will, and add onto that. Unfortunatly it isnt as easy as changing a flagged value.......unless the server support coding was already in there.....hmmmmmm

These items are not what is crippling halo. Halo redefined the genre and lead the way for console fps'. But also in doing so it built an army of wannabes and competition. Halo has never truely evolved as other titles did. It is still the same core gameplay...same old story that sells short of every title, and still clings to a console only release. MW3 didnt sell a **** ton of games by doing the things that halo did. While you cannot compare the games equally, you can compare.drive, ambition and determination to.be the #1 fps title. Sadly....Halo has fallen short since Halo 2 with this.

Servers are only half the issue. The rest is in Blam! 's netcode. You can have all the servers u want....but unless great support for data handling is incorporated into the engine........then its just useless hardware.

I know this sounds really stupid but I have to ask..... a. Are you starting Reach via the "games" section and launching it from the hdd b. is reach and not cea in the dvd drive c. is your xbox set to launch games as soon as they are inserted or recognized?

My main problem is not the game itself or the mechanics. I can play on either TU settings or classic. I prefer classic but can appriciate TU as well. The playlists are supposed to be maintained and.created with the sole purpose of giving players options to enhance their gaming experience. Forcing people to play playlists that use only TU settings defeats the entire purpose of having them. True that I could simply just make custom games, but friends are not always available or willing to play when I have time. So the only choice I have is to.either not play, or use the playlists. Using the playlists again, offers me no.choice at all since they want to apply the TU settings to everything...assuming that a majority of people agree on having the TU settings. Dog and I had a discussion the other night, bringing to light that a wider majority of players dont join sites or.use any type of.feedback tool given the time it takesbfrom real life.

Yup, just as I was saying the other night. "not complete or polished" is way to vague a term for Frank to use. As I had stated, most things are probably asset placeholders while things like textures, shaders, cinematic finilazation and a myriad of ther things are brought up to polish or completed level. But do not go and assume that yhis means they nearing anything. Properly adjusting or creating shaders takes weeks alone just to polish and produce one or two of good high enough quality to be deemed acceptable for retail use. Also keep in mind, that just because MM was stated as being playable....doesnt mean that map geometry, animations, weapons or even data tracking is complete or polished. Most likely MM is being played on basic textured alpha phase maps with very basic play options. Unless something other than handpicked images or.video is posted up by 343, nothing can really be 100% confirmed or taken with any sense of reality. Hand selected pics will only show what they want you to see, if only it is actually to trick you into believing it looks like those pics in game or all over mm at all. Remember the Halo 2 dibacle? The showcased level and graphic layer used for it ended up not even making it into the actual game. Basically they created it with the intention of.building on it to shape Halo......but it all fell apart and we got what had instead.

Sorry for the late chime on this one...I dont check my threads as often as I should. This sounds like a bug in the checking of maps. Do you have Reach or the Reach map packs installed to the HDD? Did you optionally install the CEA maps to the HDD? Does this only happen on one profile? Just a few things i need to know first.

I ran both for a while AT one point I had 2 Halo PC servers going as well as crysis 2 and one Halo 2 server. ATM they are down since I am in the middle of packing and moving to a new apartment and new ISP service.