Jaime has been working on tuning the vehicles from Halo 2, for their reappearance in Halo 3. The new engine, new graphics and so on require of course that our "old" vehicles be rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of all the extra horsepower we have. New vehicles, were there any in Halo 3, would have been created from scratch and need less re-imagining. Jaime also promises some new gameplay related features for vehicles that you might not expect.
The design, engineering, art, test, tools and audio teams, have all been working hard on a major internal milestone. Nothing you guys would be interested in but still an important and significant step. Thanks to everyone who worked late and hard to reach that goal, and they should all have a beer this afternoon to celebrate.
Multiplayer test sessions are proceeding apace and I already have stumbled into one of the perils of Halo 3 development - playing a two hour multiplayer game of Halo 3 and then playing Halo 2 at night, only to discover I have forgotten the layout of Burial Mounds and the cool new weapon I just got used to, isn't in Halo 2…
We now look forward to MP sessions when Lars instigates 'em about 4pm. He stands behind you like a stern teacher and says things like, "Why would you even play that way? You're like Mr. Magoo trying to find his way around an oil rig."
Lars is looking at how smoothly these new multiplayer maps play, and what tweaks can be applied to make a level more fun. Of course, he also has to note what kind of technical bugs there are. One match had a bunch of glowing, smoky explosions that didn't delete themselves after a blast, and simply hung there, burning in the air. It was surreal and to be honest, very pretty.
Lots of folks have asked about the weird glitch that mysteriously appeared in the HD version of the Halo 3 trailer seen on marketplace. We can assure you this is not some kind of time-released Easter egg, but rather a plain old codec encoding bug that appeared after the recent Xbox 360 dashboard update. Don't worry. Men are on it. TOP men. And in other video news, the HD QuickTime we had of our
Behind the Scenes documentary is also in the land of codec hell. If we get the thing fixed, we'll repost, but in the meantime, we have an excellent WMV HD version available right now, which is actually smaller and more streamlined. So you should just use that.
Marty's visit to the Play! Concert a couple of weeks ago resulted in a couple of interviews,
including this one over at 1Up.com's excellent video site - watch it for a look at what your state of mind will be when you're a nonagenarian.