Bungie Weekly Update/11-10-00

This is the Bungie Weekly Update of November 10, 2000, written by Matt Soell.

Bungie Update

• 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. :)