Bungie Weekly Update/08-24-01

This is the Bungie Weekly Update for August 24, 2001, written by Matt Soell.

Bungie Update

I'd always thought that things would be clearer towards the end of Halo's development cycle, but these days I struggle with a number of disturbing questions. What's the real reason Joseph keeps a fish named Admiral Tirpitz at his desk? Why do those voices at the beginning of the first mission in Halo sound so eerily familiar? Why is Doug Zartman obsessively reading the Marathon's Story page and looking for a copy of Musashi's Book of Five Rings? Will Marty ever stop screaming?

Here are the few things I know to be true this week:

• We're doing a second and in some cases third pass on multiplayer levels and textures, trying to make things look and play better. Multiplayer-specific sounds (Red Team has your flag and so forth) are now hooked up.
• This update was delayed for the better part of an hour while Chris Carney and Mat Noguchi handed my blam to me over and over again on the Boarding Action map. Deep space, two huge ships floating beside each other, teleporters and sniper rifles. The map should really come into its own once the rocket launchers are enabled.
• Tons of little graphical fixes...explosions look better, the pistol zoom now has the same nifty blurring effect as the sniper zoom, skies on many missions were improved and there's a slew of geometry fixes just about everywhere you look. Other artists are adding detail to the levels with decals and objects...look for the bulletin board.
• Chris Butcher continued to solidify the framerate and also taught the Jackals to use the overcharger on their plasma pistols. The Bear made vehicle-on-vehicle collisions work nicely. Jason insisted that I refrain from naming the CD he was listening to.
• We're testing and tweaking the tank's behavior in multiplayer. And there's at least one mission in the single-player campaign where several of your Marine cohorts will hop a ride on the tank when you climb in to drive.
• Tyson claims to have subjected a voice actor to a horrible fiery death. Unfortunately I can't talk about the details until the statute of limitations runs out.