Bungie’s Luke Smith took the reigns of this week’s “Weekly update” and had some interesting things to say.
Luke spoke about the achievements.
Bunch of folks are concerned about their Achievements and Halo 3. It certainly seems that some are tougher to unlock than others — Overkill in Lone Wolves is the bane of my petty existence – but others, like Headshot Honcho and Marathon Man seem to require a bit of prodding in order to make that “Achievement Unlocked” toast pop up on your display.Headshot Honcho’s achievement text is misleading, because last weekend, I too, was wondering what I needed to do to unlock the Achievement, I was getting my usual 95% headshots in Campaign and unlocking precisely zero Achievements. I poked around with testers here and they confirmed that you could get the achievement in Campaign, you just have to get 10 headshots with the Long Rifle.
Luke then spoke about people asking for “Skull’ location help.
Sketch, Frank and I’s gamertags are all pretty well-known and we all get a lot of Friend Requests and messages as is, but the influx of “can you help me find <insert any skull here>?” is incredible. We’re thrilled you guys are hunting for Skulls and hopefully using them to replay Campaign with scoring on, but part of the fun is finding them and part of the fun here at Bungie is watching you try and find them.
So no, we appreciate the inquiry but we’re not going to help you find them.
Just a reminder, too. Our Friend’s lists are full of folks that we’re, for the most part, friends with in Real Life, so we don’t have any room
And Luke addressed the report by “Interweb Detectives” who said Halo 3 does not run in High Definition.
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 1152×640 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 1152×640 image and the scaled 1280×720, 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.
Bungie Weekly Update 9/28/07 [Bungie]
-Michael “Thrills Killa” Pacheco-
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