If you havent heard of Halo. go to halo.bungie.org now and admire this incredible game. But I have one question. How does Bungie (the company that makes Halo) do 5-pass multitexturing at 26 FPS on a PIII 450 with a TNT2? Can it be done? Can Code be optimized enough to do this incredible feat? If you can get 26 fps, wouldn''t it need to be on a PIII 900+ with a GeForce DDR? Also, according to Bungie, the game also has a special physics engine along with an Inverse-Kinematics (IK) engine. Every time you need to move an avatar, for instance when jumping out of a jeep, wouldn''t you need to do thousands more calculations per frame? As you can tell, I''m just beginning tutorial 6 of NeHe, so I''m very new -SkyFire360 There is no random, everything is a paramater of everything else, and all else is nothing...

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Also, according to Bungie, the game also has a special physics engine along with an Inverse-Kinematics (IK) engine. Every time you need to move an avatar, for instance when jumping out of a jeep, wouldn''t you need to do thousands more calculations per frame?

As far as I''ve heard, there''s a montreal based company( not sure it''s montreal but I think it is ) that''s actually got a 3D physics engine that actually charges itself of doing all the physics stuff for you. Not sure how much the licences are but I know it''s probably verry expensive. If they found a way to do stuff like that engine is capable of, they may be able to get the 26 FPS with a TNT2 card. That was the one used in the demo of the engine I''m talking about. I would''ve liked to remember the name but all I can tell you is that the company name is Treneon...



Cyberdrek
Headhunter Soft
DLC Multimedia

Isn't it nice to know that M$ hasn't completely corrupted Bungie already! Halo will still come to Macs and PCs! Anyway, I'm assuming that Halo uses something like the ROAM algorithm/method/whatever which can do continuous level of detal terrain based on height maps (It does it very fast, this is the method used by Tread Marks), www.gamasutra.com has a doc called SimpleROAM (w/source) which gives a demo of this. So you take only the triangles that are in your view frustrum, after they've been calculated for ROAM rendering, then you can do physics and collision detection, which then affects the IK. That's my guess. It's not that hard to do all that stuff. Oni has HUGE levels (using Oct Trees to do hidden surface removal and collision detection), inverse kinematics, motion blur, and, best of all, motion interpolation (so the computer calculates steps between animation sequences, giving you extremely smooth animations and the ability to do switch between tons of really cool moves realistically... i.e. not like TombRaider or games like that, but with smoother and more accurate and realistic animation than Q3 or UT).

Morgan

Anyway, the point I was trying to get accross is that once you get all your polygons sorted, clipped, and culled, quickly enough, you have time to put in pretty much whater you want (if you can make is relatively fast).

Edited by - Morgan on July 22, 2000 11:01:03 PM

Just a quick note, everyone wants to go psychotic and believe that Microsoft had something to do with Bungiee''s "oh, we might port it, we might not" stance. If you had read THEIR FAQ from Bungiee themselves you would have known that it was *BUNGIEE* who was wobbling on the ports, Microsoft had less than nothing to do with it.



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Go for it.
OtakuCODE

That''s the way I''ve been looking at it, but it was due to the fact that they were going to be one of the primary developers for the X-box that made them waiver. But, we''re all going to get it now, so every body should calm down.

Morgan