Frankie's Bungie Updates - Search results for Greg
Friday, August 06, 2004
Greg Snook's Plea
DEAR GOD HELP US (and send Pocky!)
Send all Pocky (including unusual Pocky variants to: Greg Snook, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052
Friday, July 09, 2004
Greg Snook
I'm going to go out on a limb and say we have too many animations in this game. Most people would consider that a good thing, but when your job is to make sure all those animations fit in memory and play back silky-smooth; having this many animations just sucks. Perhaps it's a problem with Canadian math skills, but Butkus has authored some 881 animations for the Elite alone. We have more characters than the original Halo, and each one performs far more actions than the previous game. The end result is a fine looking game which requires the memory of three additional Xboxes :) So, this week was spent looking into new animation compression schemes and devising a system to cache animations off disk while the game is in progress. Luckily, much of this work was already in place to handle the metric ton of geometry and textures we have, so caching animations slipped right in. The end result is that the levels now fit in memory and look fantastic. W00t!
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Butcher Bray
Butcher has been making sure we can do all the stuff we're committed to doing! One problem he pointed out with Halo One is that when you're the Master Chief, you face your head, point your weapon and turn your feet in the same direction when you run. The end result is that from a distance, a sidestepping player appears to "slide." This is especially noticeable after a player death, when you view the action from the brief "afterlife" cam.
So Butcher has connected Greg's cool animation system to the player control system, and now that little animation problem is all but eliminated. It seems like a small thing but it makes a heck of a difference when you're watching a lot of characters on screen at once, and it works brilliantly when Chief transitions from walk to run.
And for this E3, Butcher's looking forward to Full Spectrum Warrior and Riddick.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Down in the Engine Room...
A letter from Chucky in the boiler rooms.
Hmm...
We've been making new multiplayer maps and game-types work and polishing everything to a nice golden shine. Cuban's new HUD system is in place (but what it looks like is a secret!) - it uses all our graphics goodness now instead of being a hard coded custom rendering path.
Michael's working on something that will help build the kind of community for which we're known. Eamon's been working with Carney and Steve to get a bunch of sweet physics stuff. Butchy did a bunch of profiling and performance work so that we're way closer to where we need to be. Bart is testing and tweaking all kinds of MP code he wrote and he did some performance work as well. Ben and Hao are pounding away on under-the-hood rendering infrastructure that'll allow us to cash the crazy checks the designers are writing.
Luke's been making a bunch of features like breakable glass work over the network. Greg's closing out animation and boarding bugs. Bernie's fixed some old bugs with the first person model rendering. Stefan's slaving away on Max's mad UI plan. Mat's closing out sound features and fighting fires. Damian's off in the corner talking with his AI. And of course I'm management overhead, and doing a #%#&* fine job of it. :P
Love, Chucky
Friday, February 20, 2004
Greg and the animators have been working hard to get Dual Weapons properly implemented in Multiplayer ó the problem of course isn't putting them in, it's making them balanced. Early implementations basically turn Master Chief into an unstoppable force of evil and matches can end far too quickly ó as if everyone suddenly had rocket launchers. The fine tuning and balancing required to make dual weapons an advantage, but not a ridiculous advantage, is a tightrope the designers will be walking for months.
For me the coolest part is seeing how the two weapons interact ó control schemes are being fiddled with there's a whole bunch of stuff I would love to tell you here, but can't. I can tell you that Master Chief right now holds each type of gun in a totally convincing way. The other animations ó for reloading, crouching with two weapons and switching them, look buttery smooth. I want to PLAY this.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with suddenly becoming a horrifyingly powerful superplayer...
Friday, January 23, 2004
Greg Snook and the animators are doing some really cool stuff with the Chief's walking and running animation. Right now he sidesteps convincingly, has a real walk animation (instead of just a slow version of the default run set) and even cooler, he crouches and crouch-walks much more convincingly. It sounds like a small thing, but if you go back and look at Halo compared to this new stuff, the difference is astonishing.
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