Bungie Weekly Update/12-15-00

This is the Bungie Weekly Update for December 15, 2000, written by Matt Soell.

Bungie Update

Another week, another update. How do we do it? Volume, volume, volume!

• Pathfinding on double-sided surfaces works now. What sort of double-sided surface? Think transparent.
• Chucky rewrote our structure importer so it's faster.
• Mat is getting his hands nice and dirty with the tools.
• David Dunn, formerly of the Oni team, has joined the Halo folks and is working on environments. He's currently doing some interior stuff for us. I can't tell you specifically what he's working on because saying who built the structure and what it's used for is just a wee bit too revealing at this point.
• 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.
• Bungie Cinematronics (AKA Joe and Marty) are spending lots and lots and lots of money to equip their new studios just the way they like them. The Oni guys have already moved into our new space, and the rest of us will make the trip later this month. Joe and Marty will have lots more cool techno toys to play with, but they're also assuming a punishing workload and thus require the latest/greatest/fastest/best of everything. Your Halo experience will be suffused with a huge amount of Cinematronic goodness.