Bungie Weekly Update/06-15-01

This is the Bungie Weekly Update of June 15, 2001, written by Matt Soell.

Bungie Update

• The turret is in the game now and works extremely well, unless you make the mistake of aiming it at the ground - at which point the turret becomes more of a vehicle than a weapon.
• Marty saw, and more importantly heard, a demo of the real-time Dolby Digital 5.1 sound capabilities in the Xbox, and was very impressed and eager to get it working in Halo. He and Jay are busy recording alien speech this week. According to Joe, the finished game will have seven or eight thousand distinct lines of combat dialog (that doesn't include speech outside of combat, such as the dialog in cutscenes), which works out to roughly 160 phrases per AI unit.
• On the programming side, we've made obstacle-avoidance and time-scale fixes (I'll leave it to you to guess why time might speed up or slow down during gameplay), fixed a long-standing importer bug that was mangling our collision models, and fixed the collision functions that caused items like grenades to disappear or fall through two-sided surfaces.
• The Mighty Chris Butcher convinced AI characters to give you a yelled warning when they toss grenades, and gave them the brains to dive out of the way when a vehicle tries to run them down.
• Mat added starting profiles, so you can start an individual mission with different stuff (new weapons, almost no health, that sort of thing). Soon he'll be adding all the cool sniper-rifle HUD stuff that Diamond Dave Candland has designed.
• Mat's also doing some more work on detail objects, the woefully vague phrase we apply to rocks, blades of grass, and other things that add visual detail to the landscape.
• Michael's fixed some multiplayer bugs - the active camouflage effect no longer works when you're carrying the flag, for example, and the flag can no longer be blown off the map. Michael also mentioned that he has a lot of time left to pack features and options into the multiplayer mode. He seems to be enjoying his job.
• The flamethrower is working in the game and looks good when it's spewing flaming death, though Marcus promises it will look even better when he's done with it.
• Likewise, the rocket launcher looks a little more detailed than it did last week. I was particularly touched by the SPNKr logo stenciled on the rocket tube.