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July 30, 2001 Link to this post
Halo Developer Diary, Part Three
PlanetXbox has put up part three of its Halo Developer Diary series (part one and part two were mentioned earlier), an interview series with Jaime Griesemer about the process Halo is going through on its way to release. This installment is a fascinating look at interactive scripting, and shows how Bungie's working on getting you to forget you're playing a game:
The communication system constantly monitors the game, looking for any of the dozens of hooks it can use to call combat dialog. Just to give you an idea of the complexity of the system, it knows who damaged who, what their respective races were, what weapon was used, how bad the damage was, and what the other characters in the encounter were doing when the damage was dealt, and it can call different lines of combat dialog based on all of these parameters. This means we can have someone say "Eat lead" and be sure he's not firing a flame-thrower. Sometimes they even laugh at each other's jokes or comment on something somebody else said in the heat of battle. This gives our characters real personality and believability.
There's also a little snippet that answers a longstanding question:
The entire first level revolves around the defense and eventual abandonment of the Pillar of Autumn...
It's been speculated that we'd see the PoA only in a cutscene at the start of the game; when the Halo Updates started mentioning some modeling of the ship itself, folks wondered if that meant it would be a battleground instead of a movie - this seems to confirm that it will be. Go read the whole thing - it made me tingle. (Louis Wu 12:27:57 UTC)
