Halo 03 |News & General| OFFICIAL


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@ Alpha:

Thats what I thought when I first noticed all the jaggies and really low textures for a AAA title. Where did the free AA support go? The game wasn't rushed by any means so I would have figured that all these "polishes" would have been applied.

Not berating the game or the console for not delivering, its all still great, just... odd? Not even annoying.

I've never been a huge fan of HDR, personally. Sometimes it looks nice, but most of the time it looks fake to me... as in the lighting doesn't look realistic at all. The whites glow far too much, and characters glow in cut scenes in most games with HDR.

I would've preferred better texture work and AA, myself.

I've never been a huge fan of HDR, personally. Sometimes it looks nice, but most of the time it looks fake to me... as in the lighting doesn't look realistic at all.

Same for bloom effects. I think a good example was the Assassins Creed pics posted a week or so ago where the candles looked like they were burning the viewers eyes out, basically glowing pure white.

Also, why have HDR? Doesn't Master Chief have a visor, shouldn't that block out the sun glare?
You'd also think that after gunning on a warthog going around in a arid landscape that the visor would be covered in dirt and dead bugs.

Microsoft?s Xbox 360 has been on the market for two full years now and has created the a gaming experience for millions that has been memorable, unique, and damn fun. There is no question that the 360 is a powerful machine and can create some terrific games. However, with the launch of Halo 3, Microsoft?s own brainchild from Bungie, and the last of a great series, comes a time of sorrow. Although most gamers won?t notice this effect for about another year, it is happening. Let me explain.

The shear fact that Halo 3 was arguably the most anticipated sequel of all time, including all gaming platforms gives Microsoft a very high standard to live up to. Now that it has been released, a new question has been raised. Is the 360 past its prime and now working on the back nine?

Halo 3 has suffered some serious ridicule from a short campaign mode, to the disk actually corrupting the hard drive. Now, I?m not saying that the game is killing consoles, as this topic comes up with every major release and the forums tend to pack with ?_____ bricked my 360?, but I am saying this, Halo 3?s graphics were not up to par for what they should have been, the games packaging showed signs of being rushed as thousands of gamers reported scratched disks right out of the box, and the fact that hundreds of reports keep flying in that the game locks up. So, with these things in mind, let?s focus on one, graphics. If Microsoft themselves can not surpass the technology of games like Bioshock or Heavenly Sword on their own console, with a completely in house development, that has been in the works for well over 3 years, how can one expect to see an increase in quality in games to come? The theory here, is that the Xbox has prematurely reached its potential. Instead of continuing to improve on games graphics and play over the course of the consoles life, they have hit a barrier on the limitations of the system. Graphically, Bioshock is as good as it gets at this point and the truth is, there are a lot of games that look very similar to it, graphically speaking, and they have been releasing them avidly over the last 6 months as the console war amplifies between the 360 and the Playstation 3

http://www.gamerevolver.com/articlenav-52-page-1.html

Talk about a stupid biased article *sighs*

Is Halo 3's save system broken ?

I finished with the 4th mission, then the cut scene happened then i got my achievement unlocked. I started playing the 5th mission but had to leave it since i was out of time. Now when i resume my solo game, it starts me from the starting of the fourth mission. This totally sucks :/

Is Halo 3's save system broken ?

I finished with the 4th mission, then the cut scene happened then i got my achievement unlocked. I started playing the 5th mission but had to leave it since i was out of time. Now when i resume my solo game, it starts me from the starting of the fourth mission. This totally sucks :/

I had the same complaint. It's not that it's broken, it's that you need to manually save your progress when you stop playing.

As for HDR, I think it looks very realistic when you go from a dark area to a light area. That's the point of it being too bright. I guess you don't experience that much from your parent's basement, though... ;) j/k Ayepecks :p

Is Halo 3's save system broken ?

I finished with the 4th mission, then the cut scene happened then i got my achievement unlocked. I started playing the 5th mission but had to leave it since i was out of time. Now when i resume my solo game, it starts me from the starting of the fourth mission. This totally sucks :/

It should work fine, when you quit make sure you pause the game and go down too "Save and Quit" :)

It should work fine, when you quit make sure you pause the game and go down too "Save and Quit" :)

The only "problem" with that is that virtually every other game that goes through levels like Halo 3 does saves as you go. You may not appear in the latest checkpoint but you'd at least be at the last level you loaded up. So it's not an issue if it actually working, it's just the expectations that have been set up from games before it on how it normally works.

Bungie Addresses "640p" Whiners

Over the past few days, we received a ton of emails about Halo 3's "resolution". Seems people had somehow deduced that, for whatever reason, Halo wasn't actually running at 720p, it was running at "640p". Sounded pretty...well, pathetic. Bungie agree. They've thus issued a statement as part of their weekly update, addressed to any and all "interweb detectives" indignant at their short-changed 80p.

One item making the interwebs rounds this week was the scandalous revelation that Halo 3 runs at "640p" which isn't even technically a resolution. However, the interweb detectives did notice that Halo 3's vertical resolution, when captured from a frame buffer, is indeed 640 pixels. So what gives? Did we short change you 80 pixels? Naturally it's more complicated than that. In fact, you could argue we gave you 1280 pixels of vertical resolution, since Halo 3 uses not one, but two frame buffers - both of which render at 1152x640 pixels.

The reason we chose this slightly unorthodox resolution and this very complex use of two buffers is simple enough to see - lighting. We wanted to preserve as much dynamic range as possible - so we use one for the high dynamic range and one for the low dynamic range values. Both are combined to create the finished on screen image. This ability to display a full range of HDR, combined with our advanced lighting, material and postprocessing engine, gives our scenes, large and small, a compelling, convincing and ultimately "real" feeling, and at a steady and smooth frame rate, which in the end was far more important to us than the ability to display a few extra pixels.

Making this decision simpler still is the fact that the 360 scales the "almost-720p" image effortlessly all the way up to 1080p if you so desire. In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152x640 image and the scaled 1280x720, it's practically impossible to discern the difference. We would ignore it entirely were it not for the internet's propensity for drama where none exists.

In fact the reason we haven't mentioned this before in weekly updates, is the simple fact that it would have distracted conversation away from more important aspects of the game, and given tinfoil hats some new gristle to chew on as they catalogued their toenail clippings.

I'm glad they took this tone. Like they say, internet cry-babies can really poop the party sometimes!

Source: Kotaku

I had the same complaint. It's not that it's broken, it's that you need to manually save your progress when you stop playing.

As for HDR, I think it looks very realistic when you go from a dark area to a light area. That's the point of it being too bright. I guess you don't experience that much from your parent's basement, though... ;) j/k Ayepecks :p

The only complaint I have of the HDR was when using the flame thrower. It's way too much on the eyes imo

Thanks for the heads up. I will be sure to go through 70+ pages next time. :)

Good boy :)

The whole point of the Halo 3 News & General thread, is to keep everything together. Not only are you posting news twice, you aren't doing what DirtyLarry set the thread up for either (N)

I didn't really understand what all the crying was about. But Bungie once again came out and set things straight. They always seem to handle those things well. :)

Anyways, I couldn't really give a crap eitherways, Halo 3 looks great as it is imo. It could run on 640*480 for all I care. XD

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