Bungie Weekly Update/06-29-01

This the Bungie Weekly Update of June 29, 2001, written by Matt Soell.

Bungie Update

• We've got the first in-engine cutscene up and running, which showcases our facial emotion system quite nicely. Faces in Halo look and move much better than they ever did before.
• Marty has recorded and mixed some new music, and his trip to Chicago yielded about 3500 new lines of combat dialog.
• Chucky now wishes to be known as The Bear. Asking why would only waste valuable coding time, so I'll just run with it for now. The Bear did some extensive reworking of the aim-assist code so that it works much better when your weapon is zoomed in. He's also working with Paul Bertone on a level I'm not allowed to discuss. In fact there are a slew of cool things the programmers have done in the last week, but almost all of them are still secret.
• Hardy is working on a large outdoor multiplayer map currently called Sidewinder. It's a snow level. Snowy patches will affect vehicle physics in Halo, and I suspect Hardy will use that to especially devious effect.
• Chris Hughes did some nice modifications to Cortana, as well as a bunch of other stuff I can't tell you about. Let's just say it involves two of the major characters in Halo's story. He showed me a sheet of paper covered with the equations that explain how Bernie's shaders work. The scary thing, he said, is that I almost understand it.
• The skull is now beautifully textured and looks about as good as a mistreated skull possibly can.
• Much work has been done on things that, as Rob put it, you shouldn't notice at all: LODs for hand grenades, the needler, a collision volume for the shotgun. That sort of thing.
• If you've seen Saving Private Ryan and remember the way exploding shells would blast huge clouds of sand into the sky, Shiek has ensured you'll experience a pleasant sense of d*jˆ vu when playing Halo.
• The Shadow is back in the game.