Chronique:BWU 25/06/2004

Lorraine's Sordid Shower Scene...

This week was full of back-to-back deadlines and "Your Attention Is Required Right Bloody Now" matters.† The two big things were the POP (point of purchase) art for big stores like Toys R Us and box art. Needless to say there is never enough time.† The YAIRRBN matters beyond those big pieces of art were more art or things regarding the game manual, Halo and Halo 2 action figures, the Making of Halo DVD, the art book, and some, uh... sensitive matter with Marketing and the advertising team.† I didn't get to go home last night — hey, lookit that, the file is now actually writing to my hard drive — but that meant I get to eat a hearty breakfast from the cafeteria.† Now if my hubby can get over here soon, I'll get to eat it too.† The buttermilk pancakes smell awesome and the scrambled eggs are quite good (I had to give a taste!).†† Oh, and last night I discovered that the towel service in the shower room is being discontinued next month.† Bummer. †And the other thing th — oops.† The file is saved and the screen has redrawn the image.† Gotta go.

- L

Michael Wu's Long Panoramic Shot

In general the enviro pod has been hammering away from late morning (recovering from night before) till late night (when the security guards come over and play Street Fighter) on texturing and lighting their levels.† I'm working on New Mombasa (with short forays into Old Mombasa to help on the single-player milestone).† I'm actually working on a lot of geometry finessing before I get to texture and light the city.† In general we feel like we have just enough time to finish, but I mean barely!

John Butkus' Tight Close-Up

Well, I figure I might be the only animator chiming in today so I'll throw you a bone and let you in on what we've been doing.† For the past couple of weeks I've been working on the CENSORED cinematic.† I think it's the second longest one in the game at somewhere around CENSORED minutes or so... it has CENSORED different characters in it so I'm basically animating my ass off every day.† It has two CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED the CENSORED into the CENSORED chamber to face CENSORED and CENSORED.† It's coming along pretty nicely and I should have CENSORED's part mostly finished by the end of the weekend.† It's nice to have the final dialogue in the game, but when you're animating it you have to listen to it frame by frame or scrub through it quickly both forwards and backwards so after a while you go a little nutty.† In fact, I've lost it.† I'm gone.† No I'm not — yes I am! ††Stacey has been working on a cinematic with the chief jumping across these huge beams as nasty shit is going down behind him and then there's this sick-ass explosion and CENSORED.† Mike and Bill have been troopers and are putting the finishing touches on a lot of vehicle and character animations, and Jeremy has been a massive help with finishing off a lot of stuff for the Chief.

In other news, it's Friday and that is so sweet.† I've also discovered that 2 out of 3 Americans do not appreciate the taste of ketchup flavored potato chips, which I find odd since they are so damn tasty.

Ryan's Artsy Short

"Bunch of testing for the internal-only beta."

Brian's Gotham Flick

This week I was recruited for a top secret mission to escort Halo 2 Zanzibar discs to a special event taking place in the Big Apple. As you've read in other updates, Bungie is uber focused on security our builds are never made available to anyone or any group outside of our Studio.† So, when the marketing folks stumble across an opportunity to promote Halo 2 and a build is needed, we're called on to deliver the goods and make sure not a single trace is left behind.††Duty called and I endured 11 hours of cross country air travel for what amounted to†about 1 hour of actual Halo 2 involvement.† I can't reveal the specifics of this mission but if it works out, the fruits of our efforts will be revealed sometime in CENSORED.† Ask me about it then and I can share some stories!† Equally exciting was just strolling through Times Square and getting stopped by dozens of people who noticed my Halo 2 t-shirt.† "Halo 2 is going to rock!!" "When is Halo 2 coming out!?" "Can I have a free shirt!?"†"Sweet soul patch dude!" It's cool to see so many random people familiar with and fired up about Halo 2. And no, you can't have my shirt.

Marty's Stirring Score

I still remember the first Halo Weekly Update. I was just a wee lad of 64; none of the others who are here now are old enough to have been around back then. That is the advantage of being "The Elder". In those early days I was making music for Halo on a ukulele. Now for Halo 2 I have the power of a Mac SE and an Electronic Casio Keyboard. Progress is a wonderful thing. The dialog files for Halo were around 27 unique vocalizations, all by just one actor (Joe's father) and now we've recorded over 112 different sayings by up to 4 different actors (including Joe's father's son Joe)! All the weapon sounds for Halo were made by pitch shifting one mouth noise I had recorded by accident in the bathroom (...don't ask). Now for Halo2, we've been able to recorded, pitch shift AND filter mouth noises made by not only me, but Jay and C Paul! Who knows where we'll be by the time we celebrate Halo2's 200th Weekly Update?

Marty The Elder
(I'm not losing it,,,)

Butcher's Auteurism

I've mostly been working on weird boundary cases and stabilizing for the beta. Our matchmaking system is coming up and it's almost playable which is the suckiest period, because you are really excited when it works and very sad most of the rest of the time. In other news, I was excited to see that the first ever New Zealand game developers conference kicks off this week! http://www.nzgdc.org.nz/

My favorite bug this week: One that allowed a player who was booted from a CTF game, but was able to rejoin with his old score intact, and the mysterious and useful ability to see any player, friend or foe, from clean across the map — through objects, buildings, whatever. And as a bonus, he could see both flags, no matter where they were.

Only 24 hours remain for us to fix bugs in the beta.

-- Frankie's Autobiographical Epic

What have I been doing? Well, apart from neglecting the site content, I've been crunching with the UX guys on the manual, which is half-joy, half-horror as we struggle with how to describe dual-wielding in a way that a mom can understand, or explain the difference between a game-type and a game rule and then just when we think we have something finalized, the team points out that they added an entire game feature that you didn't know about.

Describing the new weapons is fun too, since it means I know pretty much every weapon, vehicle and device that's going to be in the game, how they work, which ones boost, which have secondary fire, what the zoom levels are and what it is exactly that shoots out of them. This doesn't necessarily mean I know how to use them...

We also went and did a Zanzibar demo at a Microsoft job fair thing. J Allard was trying to hire the cream of the crop from all over Microsoft plenty of them whooped and cheered when the Halo 2 demo started.

Anyway, that's it for this week, more next and until then, enjoy the awesome poster for the Mister Chief movie, When TriSquids Came to Eat Earth Because it Smelled of Prawn Cocktail