Halo 2's Graphics - Article


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This Article has good information on the graphics behind halo 2, and other aspects.

Key points:

[*]The development libraries used in Halo 1 weren't even strong enough to take full use of the Nvidia GPU

[*]All surfaces are going to have accurate lighting and shadowing

[*]Bungie doesn't want to use Splinter Cell's "shadow buffering" but instead a technique called "stencil shadowing."

[*]Halo 2 will use "photon mapping", an advanced form of ray tracing for its lighting.

An example movie of photon mapping - 7.46MB

Edit: this is a month or so old, but it hadn't been posted. Anyone else that frequents teamxbox should have seen it.

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[*]Halo 2 will use "photon mapping", an advanced form of ray tracing for its lighting.

set phasers to stun :rolleyes:

if that's not hype i don't know what is.

just like sony's "emotion" engine or whatever they called ps2 or ati's "tru-form".

they just give fancy names to stuff that everybody else uses

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set phasers to stun :rolleyes:

if that's not hype i don't know what is.

just like sony's "emotion" engine or whatever they called ps2 or ati's "tru-form".

they just give fancy names to stuff that everybody else uses

Watch the video, last time I checked doom 3 didn't even have that (although I'm sure carmack will have added it for this year's e3)

And TruForm actually was quite good in games that had models designed to use it (serious sam: se for one), its just not really used because, for some bizarre reason, its not supported in hardware on the R300.

Sony's "emotion engine" is just the name for the processor.

Oh, and photon mapping isn't a "catchy name" bungie gave it, that's just what that extension to raytracing is called.

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hmmm... just as a though, and while on the topic of halo, does anyone know still if halo is going to be released for the PC... and can now realize that there is no hope for halo 2 for pc.. sigh..

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hmmm... just as a though, and while on the topic of halo, does anyone know still if halo is going to be released for the PC... and can now realize that there is no hope for halo 2 for pc.. sigh..

Yes, Halo is still coming to the pc (should be here sometime in the summer holidays) but only to entice PC users to buy an xbox for Halo 2, which will not be coming to the pc.

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[*]Halo 2 will use "photon mapping", an advanced form of ray tracing for its lighting.

Is this going to end up being like Eternal Darkness' raytraced lighting? :rolleyes:

What Silicon Knights did is tell everyone they were using raytracing, what they didn't say is it was pre-rendered and then painted into the textures. The actual realtime lighting was no more advanced then some of the later N64 games.

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Is this going to end up being like Eternal Darkness' raytraced lighting? :rolleyes:

What Silicon Knights did is tell everyone they were using raytracing, what they didn't say is it was pre-rendered and then painted into the textures. The actual realtime lighting was no more advanced then some of the later N64 games.

I had no Ideas Silicon Knights said that... but bungie will be doing it in realtime (I'm pretty much certain they are anyway)

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i'm not questioning weather each of those things work, i'm saying they give 'em fancyass names just for hype.

can you image the presision quality to actually MAP THE LOCOTION OF PHOTONS!

and doom3 does use similar tech for lighting, except ID Soft doesn't call it fancy name, but rather something like ARB_vertex_light_place_map :D true name of that dx shader

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i'm not questioning weather each of those things work, i'm saying they give 'em fancyass names just for hype.

can you image the presision quality to actually MAP THE LOCOTION OF PHOTONS!

and doom3 does use similar tech for lighting, except ID Soft doesn't call it fancy name, but rather something like ARB_vertex_light_place_map :D true name of that dx shader

I'm not certain, but I think iD's lighting is only Raytracing (its not like its going to be bright anyway - its a horror game) Unless they've added it in recent months I'm fairly sure its just raytracing, it was in the alpha anyway.

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Damn that was fast, what I meant is that I think they're using "Ray Tracing with direct Illumination", whereas bungie are using the "global illumination with photon mapping" technique

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in that example movie, 1st part, there is absolutly no ambient light. there is a single omnidirectional light with no lightmaps.

doom3 will defenatly not be like that. i don't think any game out there is like that.

as far i know doom3 will calculate illumination of surfaces from reflected light. i doubt it'll be to the extend and quality of that prerendered movie, but same can be said about halo2.

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in that example movie, 1st part, there is absolutly no ambient light. there is a single omnidirectional light with no lightmaps.

doom3 will defenatly not be like that. i don't think any game out there is like that.

as far i know doom3 will calculate illumination of surfaces from reflected light. i doubt it'll be to the extend and quality of that prerendered movie, but same can be said about halo2.

I thought that doom 3 was just doing it from multiple sources, and not illumination from reflected light (photon mapping) It is certainly not apparent from any screenshots, or the alpha.

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