Frankie's Bungie Updates - Search results for lightmap farm
Friday, July 16, 2004
Michael Wu's Meandering Fable
Water and weather - we're messing with Hao's new systems for getting environmental effects in. You'd be surprised how much more complex these systems are compared to Halo 1. Earth City uses 3 types of water so far. Fortunately some of the improvements in our tools makes it easier to propagate our settings from one scenario to another. So generally one of us has to figure out the settings for a given type and then the rest of us can copy it and then tweak it until we're content.
If the lightmap farm ever crashed, we'd be sunk for a day, because that means we wouldn't have an accurate representation of our previous day's work. Unfortunately it happened this week so that set us back a bit. Zach figured out what caused the crash and put it down, so hopefully we won't crash again. At this point every hour counts.
Xbox development and our engine changes so often that if you don't keep up you'll have no choice but to wipe your dev kit and resync - a process that can take almost 2 hours. Yesterday it took 4 people to identify and fix one such dev kit in our art pit.
Somebody documented Paul Russel's Halo 1 "Michael Wu don't like it" Easter egg on the web and now you hear it in the environment art pit whenever somebody doesn't like something.
Friday, February 27, 2004
Working on the lightmap farm.
Zach just told us he's been working on the lightmap farm. Maybe it's because I've had a brutal head-cold, but I suddenly imagined him, sleeves rolled up, ruddy-cheeked and up to his elbows in the dirt, reek, and good honest work of a lightmap farmer. Of course, what Zach actually does is build a utility to make some computers share a tedious workload. It allows numerous machines (mostly Compaq rack servers) working diligently, to do some boring, time-consuming, but ultimately vital lightmap rendering, so that all that geometry is properly lit when it gets spat out at the other end. Some of the better lightmaps are starting to trickle onto current Halo builds and the results are very pleasing. The biggest difference I see, apart from an overall improvement, is really convincing bright sunshine, and therefore better transition into shade. You almost want to cover your eyes when you step into the light.
So I peek into the lightmap farm, just because I'm curious and Harold, who's the cigar-chewing Teamster-type who runs all of test said that I should get the hell out of the lightmap farm; "Toasted buttercake like you wants to be careful around these here computers. Wouldn't want to get your face elctrificuted, wouldja?" He's working on porting over old Marathon web content to the new Bungie.net. We're kind of doing that in reverse order — moving Halo 2 stuff, then Halo, then Halo PC stuff, working our way back through gigabytes of ancient materials. There's some really cool old pre-Xbox Halo stuff hidden in there, that even people here hadn't seen. We'll let you look at it one of these days...
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