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User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/9.0.2509
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 18:41:31 -0800
Subject: Halo Report 11/10/00
From: Matt Soell <matt@bungie.com>
Mime-version: 1.0

Matt's Halo Report - November 10, 2000

- Four programmers continue to churn out code.  Lightmaps are on the verge
of working better than ever.  Chucky is very excited about revisiting the
vehicular physics.  Impressive progress has been made in the realm of AI but
I've been asked to keep mum about this particular subject for now.

- I took another look at the structure Marcus showed me last week and its
complexity seems to have increased by an order of magnitude - which is
saying something considering the sheer size of the place in question.
Marcus says he'll be working on this one building for the next few weeks.

- Also got a look at some of Eddie's slick concept art for a new Covenant
vehicle.  Interesting to hear the artists explain how the Covenant use (and
misuse) technology they - heh - acquire from others, and how the Covenant
hardware in the game is all created to reflect this subtle-but-definite
design aesthetic.

- Speaking of reflection, there's a lot of interesting reflection technology
in this game, including cubic reflection and specular BRDF, which allows
curved objects to reflect differently depending on the angle from which they
are viewed.

- One of the weapon ideas currently being discussed is suspiciously similar
to a suggestion made on this very forum in days past. :-)

- Stephen has been working on animations for certain secret beasties,
including limb-specific impact animations.

- Two of the Halo artists expounded at length about how the rewritten engine
allows them to do just about any cool thing they can imagine. Overhangs,
caves, and waves smashing against the shoreline were all mentioned.  As
always, I don't want to promise these will all be in the final version of
Halo...but we can put them there if we want to. :-)



Matthew Soell
Community Guy / Keeper of the Bungie Way
Bungie Studios
matt@bungie.com
bungie.org