Bungie Weekly Update/08-11-01

This is the Bungie Weekly Update for August 11, 2001, originally posted at Haloplayers, and written by Matt Soell.

Bungie Update

Must...send...update.....Staff at Haloplayers...falling asleep......no time for...wit.

• Covenant grenades have this nasty characteristic: they stick to you. The AI knows this now, so when a grenade latches on to them they'll spend their last few moments running around in absolute panic. Heart-rending. On a happier note, the AI is also better at jumping back into a Warthog after you flip the sucker and fling them out.
• The Covenant dropship has a gun now, so you can't just camp in its presence. Unless you have a death wish.
• Marines with sniper rifles are in.
• Mat is working to minimize the apparent load times in multiplayer maps, so you'll be able to start a game with maybe a second of delay, tops. Once he finishes making this work in Multiplayer, he'll apply it to the solo campaign.
• Shiek added some progressive damage effects so you'll be able to tell when your vehicle is on its last legs.
• You can say a lot of things about the Sniper Rifle, but you'd better be quite a ways off when you say them. Rob smoked a guy who was 853.053 meters away. We know this because the zoom UI on the sniper rifle now displays target distance and elevation. There's also a very nice blurring effect on the zoom, thanks to the graphics chipset inside the Xbox.
• We have a 3D map running behind the UI now, which allows us to show a background of Halo spinning in deep space. Not especially useful - just cool.
• Marty finished the last major dialog recording session this week. There will be one more small session to pick up a few missing lines, but almost all the dialog is recorded and ready for insertion.
• We finally have surround sound working, and Marty and Jay are well pleased.
• A new multiplayer map titled Damnation was thrown into the mix this week.
• The flagpole now has a skull at the top. Hmmm.