Matt's Halo Updates - Search results for Chucky
Friday, October 05, 2001
Chucky added an easter egg and got his toenails painted.
Friday, October 05, 2001
It's Halo Update Birthday Party time here at Bungie HQ. Bungie-blue balloons stamped with Halo logos carpet the ceiling. Strategically-placed strobes and disco balls spackle the room with light. In the portion of the office formerly known as "the Oni room," a band is playing. Liquor and laughter flow in equal measure. And here I sit at my desk, trying to think up what may very well be the last Halo Update.
Suddenly the music stops, as though someone has pulled the plug on the band - and indeed, someone has. A chillingly familiar voice, hoarse from years of whiskey, shouts "Play it, damn you! PLAY IT" Someone says, "Okay, okay, we'll play it." Power is restored, the band begins to play, and the gravelly voice begins to sing:
"Roll out the barrel...We'll have a barrel of fun..."
Marty walks briskly into the room shared by the Sin-O-MatiXXX and Online Teams, heading straight for the soundproof safety of his studio. "You might want to write that from home," he shouts to me. "The Webmaster's back." The studio door closes. Three deadbolts slam home.
I ponder this new development. We had often joked that the Webmaster could smell an open bottle or spiked punch bowl anywhere in whichever hemisphere he happened to occupy at the time, but this is one of those jokes that is only funny because it's true. Whenever the Bungie Webmaster departs on one of his extended "HTML research missions," inevitably stories and lawsuits make their way back to us through third parties. Last thing we heard, the Webmaster was trekking across Nepal, trying to track down the Abominable Snowman and strongarm him into signing the rights to the name "Yeti" to Bungie in perpetuity. There was also a rumor that he was locked up in Kansas, where a group of scientists thought he might fill a few gaps in the fossil record and get evolution back in the textbooks. There are a million Webmaster stories and it's always tough to know which ones actually happened. In any case, he has somehow learned of the enormous volume of free booze in the office and has returned in rare form.
Amidst the din, I think back to this time last year. I started writing weekly Halo Updates because everyone wanted to know what was happening with the game and nothing had been said in a long while. Cynical folks were inventing and dispensing rumors: Halo was done but Bill Gates was making us sit on it, Halo was cancelled, Halo was just nothing but pre-rendered CGI Bungie made to yank people's chains and attract well-heeled buyers. It struck me that I could say "That's all bogus" but I say that all the time and nobody believes me. The only chance I had to prevent the cynics and bullies from poisoning the minds of Bungie Fans was to strike back with as much factual data as I could. Tell people what we were doing; not just that we were working but what we were working on and why it was cool. Of course 99% of it was stuff that was too secret to talk about, but in the worst case I could at least allude to it. I became a Master of Allusion.
A thundering sound and a black-and-brown blur to my left. The Webmaster has discovered the pony ride in the parking lot and gotten the pony inside the building. Up to the second floor, no less. I didn't think the elevators here could handle that sort of weight. The Webmaster gallops down the hall, his giant yellow foam hat flapping in the breeze. The staccato clop of galloping hooves. Breaking glass. Terrified Microsoft employees running for their lives. "GIDDYUP LIL DOGGIES!" the Webmaster screams. The band keeps playing "Beer Barrel Polka," perhaps fearing what will happen if the Webmaster returns and doesn't hear it. The party rages on as if nothing unusual is happening. I think at this point everyone is too drunk to fear the Webmaster, or perhaps too drunk to even realize he's here.
Like many experiments, the Halo Update didn't always have positive or intended results. Certain magazines and websites complained that lowly fansites were getting more new Halo info than they were. Marketing thought Halo Updates gave away too much about the game (something I never could understand, especially in the early days when I couldn't say ANYTHING). There were days when few of the guys on the team were happy to see my smiling face or tell me what they'd been up to that week. And occasionally someone on a website or forum somewhere would take the "Halo Developer Diary" to task for not being more explicit. Those guys had it all wrong; it was never supposed to be a developer diary, just a weekly outburst from a guy who was lucky enough to see Halo every day and wanted to tell others how cool it was without breaking his NDA or spoiling any cool surprises. It wasn't a PR move to suck up to the media; it was a tiny porthole through which our fans could catch a glimpse of what we were up to and know that it was good.
I sip my drink and take a quick walk around the office. Out in the hall, the owner of the pony is trying to argue with The Man, who confounds him at every turn by laughing continuously. The Webmaster is at the other end of the hall, whispering sweet nothings into the pony's ear as they walk towards the men's room. The pony is wearing the Webmaster's hat. Tom stalks from room to room with a broken rum bottle, threatening to "cut" anyone who calls him Tommy Two-Gs. Obviously he's been playing too much of the new Pimps at Sea alpha. Paul Bertone stops pantsing the members of the band long enough to shout, "Hey Matt, when are you going to tell people I farted in the Halo Update?"
"This week, Paul."
"WHOOO!" he shouts, and tackles the bass player.
Diamond Dave Candland comes up the stairs with a piñata shaped like a dog's head. "What's in the dog's head?" someone asks. "Dog brains," replies Dave. The Man stops laughing long enough to say "Hey, if that's true, take it over by Chucky's desk."
In the hall I hear Peter say, "Hey, Tommy Two-Gs!" and then yelp. I head into the Halo room and ask Hambone to call another ambulance. Everyone sits quietly at their desks, playing Halo in twos and fours. They take their work too seriously to join in the party now; they'll wait until the game is done, at which point the rest of the world can sit enraptured in front of their TVs, and Bungie HQ will get REALLY crazy.
I head back to my desk and stare at the empty email message in front of me. What can I possibly write about this week?
Friday, June 29, 2001
Chucky now wishes to be known as "The Bear." Asking why would only waste valuable coding time, so I'll just run with it for now. The Bear did some extensive reworking of the aim-assist code so that it works much better when your weapon is zoomed in. He's also working with Paul Bertone on a level I'm not allowed to discuss. In fact there are a slew of cool things the programmers have done in the last week, but almost all of them are still secret.
Friday, June 22, 2001
The Swarthy Chucky got hovering vehicles back in the game after a protracted absence. AIs can drive them now as well. Chucky also fixed some broken math functions and wrote a bunch of new ones.
Friday, June 22, 2001
The Artist Formerly Known As The Mighty Chris Butcher And Now Known Simply As Chris Butcher delegated his title to Chucky. He also did a bunch of stuff for the Sin-O-MatiXXX team, making sure the communication system for AIs is in proper working order and working on the scripting tools.
Friday, June 01, 2001
Chucky has beaten the pathfinding code into a nearly-final state.
Friday, May 04, 2001
We now have multiple-colored cyborgs for net games, making it much easier to figure out who's who. The hot pink cyborg is called "Chucky" by some.
Friday, May 04, 2001
Chucky made some major improvements in the auto-aiming.
Friday, April 20, 2001
Chucky has figured out three entirely new shapes that he can make with the Rubik's Snake. Unfortunately they all look like straight lines.
Friday, April 13, 2001
Chucky continues pounding away at the pathfinding code.
Friday, March 23, 2001
Chucky took on a horde of grunts with a pistol and tried to get rid of them all with headshots. He lost.
Friday, March 23, 2001
Chucky has made great strides toward getting breakable surfaces in the game.
Friday, March 09, 2001
Chucky did some tweaking to the Jeep physics. In addition to the generally improved control, you can see the suspension working again. And if there's an AI manning the chain gun when you catch air in the jeep, he'll respond appropriately.
Friday, February 16, 2001
Chucky got the super-hi-res screenshot code working. I can't imagine what we'll use it for. ;-)
Friday, February 02, 2001
Chucky has been working on controller issues, and as John said "All of the hidden little things we're doing to make sure you can play Halo with a console controller in such a way that the experience doesn't suck are already working."
Saturday, January 20, 2001
Chucky performed some sort of bizarre coding miracle that allowed vehicles to navigate indoors, which they were not able to do previously. He demonstrated this to me by driving the jeep into a building, down several flights of stairs, and ultimately into a portion of the level known as The Shaft. Watching the sucker flip and spin as it plummeted to the bottom made my day.
Friday, December 15, 2000
Bernie has been furiously adding graphical sexiness. There's so much great stuff in Halo now that it was hard for him to remember all of it and impossible for me to scribble it all down while he rattled off graphical effect after graphical effect. Remember when Chucky said "per-pixel everything"? He meant EVERYTHING. And Bernie can list everything. Some of the effects he mentioned had names you would not recognize because they have not appeared in any other game, ever. We invented them. He also mentioned that the performance of our unoptimized code is greatly exceeding the programmers' expectations.
Friday, December 15, 2000
Chucky rewrote our structure importer so it's faster.
Friday, December 08, 2000
Most of this week's programming involved fixes and improvements to the stuff I mentioned in the last update. Jason's still working on the AI. Chucky promises me more exciting programming news soon.
Friday, December 01, 2000
Chucky was rather busy when I tried to plumb his brain for news tidbits this week, but he gave me a quick-n-dirty State Of Halo Rendering Address: In the last two weeks, the rewritten Halo engine finally caught up to the old version in terms of rendering ability. Then we surpassed it. Work in the coming weeks will explore just how far we can push the graphical envelope.
Friday, December 01, 2000
Jason, Chucky, Bernie and The Other Matt kept themselves busy over the holidays. Point lights. Transparent model shaders. New input code. A revised tag editor. More AI work. A new, "more intelligent" data structure for the models. Lightmaps work on curved surfaces.
Saturday, November 18, 2000
The AI is already good enough to kill Jason and Chucky, no easy task. Lots of work still to go, but I saw a brief demonstration and was greatly impressed. One interesting tidbit: the AI has a fear factor - its willingness to pop out from behind cover and chase or fire at you is directly related to how dangerous the AI thinks you are at that moment. I hope to be able to tell you all a little more soon.
Friday, 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.
Friday, October 27, 2000
I'm not one for telling tales out of school but Chucky and Jason were spotted poring over the new D&D manuals in the cafeteria. How this will affect Halo is difficult to gauge. Perhaps Jason is trying to improve his saving roll against marinara stains.
Friday, October 27, 2000
In the midst of the month-long bacchanalian orgy that accompanied Chucky's birthday, and the spontaneous eruption of love for Stefan that occurred last week when he aged another year, it somehow slipped past us all that The Man Himself has lasted another 365 days. Happy belated birthday, Alex.
Friday, October 20, 2000
You'll all be happy to know that Chucky's spirits have lifted immensely since your collective outpouring of love last week.
Friday, October 20, 2000
The new visualization code is up and running. Much work remains but a big hurdle is behind us. Chucky and Matt Segur gave me a quick demo, running a camera across a test landscape and then up over it to give some sense of scale. Yum.
Friday, October 13, 2000
By the way, we're all very disappointed that none of you took the time to post a "Happy Birthday Chucky" message even though we made it a news item on www.bungie.net. Chucky's doing well, considering - right now we're much more concerned about Jason's habit of dumping his lunch on himself - but we were hoping for a little support from you guys.
Friday, October 13, 2000
There's also a new rasterizer in the works so we can take advantage of all the cool Xbox features. "Per-pixel everything," said Chucky, with a characteristically depraved grin.
Back to main page
|
