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HaloGAF |OT: Anniversary| So fades the great harvest of our betrayal.
- Thread starter User 73706
- Start date
Only way to get hired is to start a Halo related podcast, buy tons of drugs and be high on air on said podcast. Guaranteed employment.
That's just for approximate dynamic bounce lighting, not for shadowing.
edit: IThe simplest would be to add a sunlight that casts real-time shadows.
LPV isn't perfect either; insufficient volume resolution can easily lead to light bleeding through relatively thin structures.
I understand that it is an indirect lighting system and not (technically) for shadowing.
However, I was saying that in reference to the fact that the way they had the baked shadows in Halo 4; they were also using them for baking indirect lighting.
If you looked carefully inside the shadows, you'll notice that they had really blocky and posterized gradations which took on the color of the skybox and surrounding environment from ALL directions. It's like they rendered shadowed, colored lights from every directions at ~15 degree steps and blended them for indirect shadowing -- essentially their attempt at emulating color-bleeding/GI.
It was subtle, and they had the sun shadow pass modulating it into areas without direct sunlight.
I've posted some in-depth posts and observations about this before. Here is a couple animated .GIFs that I made in stop motion by moving forge pieces, rebaking lighting, and taking a screenshot for every frame:
Notice how few samples the indirect shadows have and how posterized they get. Also, because all the indirect lighting is generated from a composite of orthographic shadows projected from infinite, the indirect shadows have no way of reaching around corners and into crevices, the way that indirect shadowing/lighting would from GI/bounced-lighting. They can't reach spots that are fully occluded from directly seeing the skybox or ocean. Notice how flat the lighting looks in the corner where the black arrow is pointing when I moved the building closer to it.
It can looks pretty bad. (but also, it was pretty good/clever when you consider the platform it was made for and the fact that it all gets generated in 1-2 seconds)
On that note, ill point out, if you knew what you we're doing in Halo 4's Forge, you could take advantage of this effect by using indirect light-blocking pieces that you would float high above your level. I tried to explain how this could be done a long time ago in a forging tutorial:
In this remake I made of Halo 2's foundation map, I could add some flavor to the indirect lighting with this technique. By floating a big flat plane above the map at varying distances, I would occlude more or less of the indirect shadows and in turn I would make the blue team's half of the map darker or lighter.
Again, note how this does not affect the sun shadows that you were talking about in your post, but the indirect colored environment shadows:
Also of note, the lighting system In Halo 4’s Forge didn't have any indirect lighting generated/baked for dynamic objects, so characters/vehicles/crates/etc… looked really flat and dull:
I mean, look at this shit.
You get no sense of depth on where the Spartans are in this environment at all since they even took out most of the dynamic object indirect shadows in Halo 4.
(But, as far as I remember, for some reason these were only excluded from casting on forge objects.)
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As for the New/remade Halo games, if they go with Light Propagation Volumes, (or some similar system, doesn't have to be LPVs, could be 'Radiance Hints' for example. We do have far greater capabilities at our disposal with XBONE) you could use them Spherical harmonics to do all kinds of nice indirect dynamic lighting on characters/vehicles/particles/everything.
Also we would no longer have the long delay for baking shadows when you switch from the forge monitor to player mode.
I don't think Halo 4 Anniversary will get anything like this, maybe a resolution/sample/bit-depth increase.
Halo 2 Anniversary forge and especially Halo 5, on the other hand, have some potential....
Nirvana
Member
I think that I speak for most people (maybe not) when I say that this is really the least of my worries when it comes to things they need to add in the MCC. I'm sure some people get hung up on graphical enhancements, but really it's pretty far below gameplay in priority for me.
Gameplay is essentially remaining the same though. This remake is all about graphics.
Also, since the Halo 2 Anniversary multiplayer has forge and is partially based on Halo 4's engine, they will likely do something to make this forge lighting stuff look better.
My point is they got a decent opportunity here, and porting these things exactly as they were in Halo 4 for Parity's sake would be... meh...
just look at those shots, its not exactly pretty at any resolution or framerate.
Either way, I'm probably not going to be playing much of the Halo 4 forge maps in MCC. Let alone its multiplayer in general.
This upcoming school year is the year I pretty much have to find an internship, so I'll be sure to network nice and gently and plant a few jobies.
Would be nice if someone stopped by at PAX Prime to see what I worked on for the last year, and was like, "Get hired kid."
Then I could afford an Xbone and the MC Collection.
Huh. I wonder what Halo 3's water will look like on MCC?
IIRC, X360 had special proprietary hardware for tesselation/displacement, and their shader had some quirky limitations. The water displacement was very unstable when you paused time and moved around it in theater mode. kinda entertaining really...
I wonder how faithfully it will be recreated (or if it will be at all) with DX11 class hardware/shaders?
IIRC, X360 had special proprietary hardware for tesselation/displacement, and their shader had some quirky limitations. The water displacement was very unstable when you paused time and moved around it in theater mode. kinda entertaining really...
I wonder how faithfully it will be recreated (or if it will be at all) with DX11 class hardware/shaders?
Actually, light and shadow generation and baking do play into gameplay - they serve to sort of give your brain a z-buffer of the map's geometry when parsing it with your eyes, and you can also use it for orientation by making one base darker than the other one.
A nice example is a pre-make of Relay I did with a couple of other Forgers. The Reach version is about the same map, but notice how hard it is to see depth or size since all the pieces are lit flatly. If you think about it, it almost looks like pieces are floating above the floor:
Versus with shadows:
Now my brain can understand the spatial relationship between parts of the map instantly and instinctively without having to actually 'think' about it.
Reach actually had some really nice HBAO, but the radius was too tight to really notice it. It could have done more to ground the dynamic objects into their scenery.
Halo 4 had no dynamic AO of any kind IIRC.
Sidenote, a team of coders forked Cube2/Sauerbraten's engine to add some graphical enhancements and a large part of their focus was going fully dynamic/realtime with their lighting so as to make Map-building seamless. No more precomputation and bake times.
Check this map editor out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUYUNgr22m8
You can edit the map while people are playing on it in your server just like in Forge, and all the lighting updates in realtime. Unlike essentially every engine out there, you also get realtime indirect lighting through a system they call Radiance Hints. its all completely automatic too, you just build, and all the sunlight just bounces in off of the walls with proper color bleeding and indirect illumination.
Its the closest thing we got to realtime GI since UE4 dropped Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination and it is so cheap you can run it with almost negligable performance hit. You could probably run this game decently on iGPUs.
It's pretty slick, I would love to have something like this in other engines that I work with.
Though I am not saying that the next Halo should have this in it...
Nirvana
Member
I can understand the theory you're putting forward, but I've never had those problems. Despite the lack of shadows on Reach maps, I never had any issue with understanding the space.
The main issue for me was that it looked ugly, but it wasn't something that I felt the need to request a change for. I guess other people feel more strongly about it, but to me, it's just a small graphical issue and in the grand scheme of things doesn't seem as important as getting the fundamental gameplay mechanics right (when it comes to the MCC).
Having said all that, I can appreciate that some people are going to notice this stuff (especially Forgers) and it is something you guys would want fixed. I just wouldn't want it to take priority over other things that seem more important to me (personally).
I honestly wonder why anyone would want to play halo 4, if H2A is like a revised engine. Those 6 maps, the fact sprint is removed, descoping is back, I'm imagining that a lot of capable forgers will be able to make some great CE/2/3 remakes in it.
If someone forges Haven into H2A, why even play h4 multi-player in a sense. Also, it was nice to hear Bravo say that the Halo 4 medals are most likely placeholder. I hope that white screen text is placeholder too and that they bring back classic H2 or H3 medals.
If someone forges Haven into H2A, why even play h4 multi-player in a sense. Also, it was nice to hear Bravo say that the Halo 4 medals are most likely placeholder. I hope that white screen text is placeholder too and that they bring back classic H2 or H3 medals.
I won't be surprised if a relatively large portion of MCC owners somehow can not live without their Sprint and Perks, as well as looking at teh sik grafix of Halo 4. It might be interesting to play a little Halo 4 in MCC, if only to see what kind of weirdo motherfuckers are responsible for throwing Halo way off track.
Nirvana
Member
I feel like Halo 3 will be the most populated. It will likely be:
Halo 3
Halo 2
Halo 4
Halo: CE
As much as the list pains me, I think it seems right. On launch we might see Halo 2 take the top spot for a while, but I think most people will gravitate towards 3.
Ya, after enough scrubs get shit on by BxR, double-shots and just more talented players, they will skip over to Halo 3.
Halo CE will be played by a small hardcore community of people that take it very seriously. The majority will treat it as more of a novelty MP game that people just kinda do for the nostalgia of it, they don't actually think that Halo CE is an amazing MP Halo game.
I think Halo:CE will be decently populated at the start, and slowly the gulf will grow. A while down the road, you'll have mostly hardcore people who are really, really good, or the BK's who are new and want to try it out. I hope a lot really try to get good at the game though. High skill level, but with solid players, you can have a blast. I think the fact it's all under a unified game, will mean all games have healthy populations, coupled with dedicated servers.
Ah, that's a good way of describing Halo 4's Forge shadows. The "GI" aspect of it looks very odd; terribly hugely-space gradients with loads of dithering. It's also sadly unsuccessful in avoiding Forge maps looking both blown-out and very flatly shadowed much of the time.
Maybe I'm crazy, but Reach's Forge maps tend to look just as readable to me, and perhaps more pleasant on the eyes. Sometimes the AO even kicks in helpfully, and this is coming from someone who usually hates screen-space AO.
I'm not sure whether the instabilities to the displacement had anything to do with the tessellation method itself, or if it's just that dynamic displacements themselves were applied in a somewhat camera-dependent way (sketchy handling of high-frequency displacements on low-frequency geometry mesh? I have no idea.). The core water waves appear stable when moving around during pauses; it's splashes caused by dynamic phenomena that wobble.
On close inspection you might be able to tell if explosions and stuff force the surface to tessellate more (which could cause camera-dependent displacement aliasing effects depending on implementation), though the "angular graphics" of those waves make me suspect otherwise.
Part of why I might lean toward displacement textures being camera-dependent is that in Halo 4, the extra normal mapping applied to water from stuff like warthogs driving through it is clearly dependent on camera position.
I always felt like it was the anchor on the crosshair.
Yeah, you're probably right about the camera mapping. Im curious what will end up happening with some of this stuff, since I imagine some of the specialized shaders aren't a straight forward port and are probably prime material for a graphical tune up.
Damnit, now I wanna hook up my box and load up Halo 3 Valhalla BTB again...
Bullet travel on smaller maps with dedicated servers will mostly be fine. It's still an issue, and they never really needed to add it into the game, but in arena maps it's not as noticeable.
ShadowsFell
Member
I'm most interested in Halo 2 probably, being as I never really played much of it, and only played it years after it had been released. But with the halo 3 br mechanics, and big team battle seeming to be very laggy much of the time, halo 3 on dedicated servers interests me very much.
Deputy Moonman
Member
Halo:CE BTB will be glorious. I'm really excited.
Personally, I think it'll be H2 at first for a fleeting moment, but it'll settle down into
Halo 3
Halo CE
Halo 2
Halo 4
Mostly because Halo 3 is well, Halo 3. It WAS the dominant game on Live so long, and has little competition on the One now, and is essentially an evolved Halo 2. CE has years of a bunch of people not willing to buy it on PC. Halo 2 will eventually have it's great journey weighed down by it's hilarious amounts of glitches. Everyone that wants to play Halo 4 is playing Halo 4 right now, and now you're splitting that playerbase.. and you have to leave your CSR and all your armor behind. I don't see a lot of people that can play a game just fine right now making a jump to play the same game in 1080p.
For Forging though, it's probably going to be Halo 4 at the top, since it'll have the most usable Forge (unless one of the H2A maps is a Forge-centric map). As Nok has said, if Halo 3 comes back 1:1 it'll take him months to remake some of the Grifball maps people will want to be able to play again. You load up Halo 3 these days and wonder how you ever put up with it's Forge.
Well I for one think that the general population is shallow and will gravitate towards the new games because they're actually nice to look at.
Halo 2 Anniversary
Halo 4
Halo 3
I don't see Halo 2 and CE by themselves having anything more than small communities. I guess the cross game playlists will alleviate that a bit but I don't think they will be terribly popular. As much as we'd like to think so, anyway.
Halo 2 Anniversary
Halo 4
Halo 3
I don't see Halo 2 and CE by themselves having anything more than small communities. I guess the cross game playlists will alleviate that a bit but I don't think they will be terribly popular. As much as we'd like to think so, anyway.
ShadowsFell
Member
Nope. I've never played the Combat Evolved campaign, and I never finished the Halo 2 campaign. With the remasters for both, it should be very fun.
The Librarian
Banned
I think it'll be more people realizing, correctly, that those glitches don't belong in a Halo game, so they'll be moving over to the superior Halo 3.
Deputy Moonman
Member
I am looking forward to the CE campaign, and I'll also probably play through Halo 2 with the updated look. I'm not a fan of getting my butt kicked, so I'll stick to Heroic. I love the feeling of being pretty powerful, but without the moronic AI from normal difficulty.
If 3 had the BR from 2 with some ported maps it would be no contest.
Deputy Moonman
Member
I hope people give CE a chance. It's a different feel, obviously, but the simplistic yet deep game play, and more focused sandbox is worth it. I wonder if there will be no radar for the CE hoppers. That's the only way to play CE.
The Librarian
Banned
I'm guessing you'll find the Halo 3 BR much better on dedicated servers.
I wouldn't agree Halo 3 was superior to Halo 2. Yes the glitches were unbearable at times, but I still had more fun with H2 than I did with H3. Though, the fact that Halo 3 is now 1080p/60FPS with dedicated servers is not lost on me.
Can't wait for 4v4 BR's on the Pit or even Construct but without Radar/motion detector. Hell, even playing a match of BTB on Sandtrap or Avalanche with no frame drops, silky smooth game play has me excited.
I actually want to jump right into Halo 3 campaign first, just play the first mission. See what it looks like, how it feels.
Haha no. As soon as I get the game I'm gonna marathon through H2 on heroic. Then I'll start again and go through the entire series on the same difficulty
Legendary play throughs will wait, however. I will do it but only after my initial run. Would probably just get annoyed otherwise. Same mindset for every new Halo release
Same. I feel Halo CE might be a sleeper hit with players that started with Halo 3 or later. It's a different type of game than what they have been used to with this modern shooter craze.
Also, I completely agree there NEEDS to be a no radar playlist.
For some people.
I can say with 100% certainty that I won't be touching CE with no radar. I know you competitive people like it but I've always been against it. It's just not fun in any Halo game for that matter.
The Henery
Member
Did I see it correctly that MCC is releasing on the 14th of Nov in Europe? I want to feast on my day one scrubs on day one.
Also, I want to see the CE vets on here getting a Prisoner killtac with one clip against XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX, XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX (1), XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX(2) and XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX(3).
Also, playlist settings will make or break this game. AR/SMG starts cannot return, there has to be a no radar playlist in CE/2/3 and mainstream objective settings for Halo 3 need to be reworked from their original state.
Also, I want to see the CE vets on here getting a Prisoner killtac with one clip against XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX, XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX (1), XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX(2) and XxBarbieridingRaCeRxX(3).
Also, playlist settings will make or break this game. AR/SMG starts cannot return, there has to be a no radar playlist in CE/2/3 and mainstream objective settings for Halo 3 need to be reworked from their original state.
And somehow, only one of the three remakes ended up being worth a damn despite having some of the greatest maps in the genre as a blueprint.
Truly, one of history's greatest mysteries.
I shook my head so hard in disagreement that I actually broke my neck. Monster.Well, Zanzibar wasn't all that great to begin with, so they couldn't really "mess it up," so to speak.
The Librarian
Banned
Well, Zanzibar wasn't all that great to begin with, so they couldn't really "mess it up," so to speak.
Damn, didn't realize there was a potential to step on a hornet's nest in that DestinyGAF Ps4 group thread.
I just jokingly read the title of the thread, said there is only one DestinyGAF, and that members of HaloGAF probably thought to run it long ago ie. Slightly Live and BlueBlur running the twitter etc. Apparently though there was some drama yesterday, and one guy definitely is upset at PsychoRaven, haha. I mean I always thought HaloGAF members would take the lead for DestinyGAF, Ghaleon made those great Halo threads, Dax too. Duncan runs HaloGAF.com and DBO, BlueBlur and Slightly Live run the twitter. It's natural that Halo and Bungie fans would do it.
I just jokingly read the title of the thread, said there is only one DestinyGAF, and that members of HaloGAF probably thought to run it long ago ie. Slightly Live and BlueBlur running the twitter etc. Apparently though there was some drama yesterday, and one guy definitely is upset at PsychoRaven, haha. I mean I always thought HaloGAF members would take the lead for DestinyGAF, Ghaleon made those great Halo threads, Dax too. Duncan runs HaloGAF.com and DBO, BlueBlur and Slightly Live run the twitter. It's natural that Halo and Bungie fans would do it.
The Librarian
Banned
It is coming out on the 14th I believe.
Keep taking "L's" Euro-HaloGAF. We superior North Americans will have 3 solid days of playing on you guys. By the time you get around to playing, we'll be 3sk headshot masters in CE, have relearned all the glitches and button combos for H2 etc.
This is all in jest. Ideally we'd want everyone to get the game within a day of each. The first few days are always the most fun. Here's hoping launch goes smoothly.
User 73706
Banned
Predictions for MCC multi pop counts:
1. Halo 2 Anniversary (at launch), then has a 50/50 chance of staying up there if it's actually good. Given it's just a better-looking Halo 2 without the glitches and shit, I think it has a pretty good chance of staying alive.
2. Halo 3. Graphical fidelity upgrades in addition to all of the sandbox toys and feature set will probably keep it alive for a long time.
3. Halo CE. Major drop in population compared to Halo 3, but vocal minorities will definitely get their money's worth out of it. Pretty big potential for BTB, too.
4. Halo 2. I don't see Halo 2 doing that well if it's a glitchfest and it has a better-looking, modernized equivalent out.
5. Halo 4. It's Halo 4. On top of the usual stuff, you now have to unlock everything again. We don't even know if pre-order exclusive cosmetics will even be obtainable in this build.
1. Halo 2 Anniversary (at launch), then has a 50/50 chance of staying up there if it's actually good. Given it's just a better-looking Halo 2 without the glitches and shit, I think it has a pretty good chance of staying alive.
2. Halo 3. Graphical fidelity upgrades in addition to all of the sandbox toys and feature set will probably keep it alive for a long time.
3. Halo CE. Major drop in population compared to Halo 3, but vocal minorities will definitely get their money's worth out of it. Pretty big potential for BTB, too.
4. Halo 2. I don't see Halo 2 doing that well if it's a glitchfest and it has a better-looking, modernized equivalent out.
5. Halo 4. It's Halo 4. On top of the usual stuff, you now have to unlock everything again. We don't even know if pre-order exclusive cosmetics will even be obtainable in this build.
Nirvana
Member
I've expressed how I will be beating Halo 2 Legendary into the ground day 1. One of my favourite campaigns of any game, ever. I love it. The story, the gameplay, even the horrible boss fights. Not Regret on Legendary though...jesus christ.
Playing through the other games on Legendary wont be that fun, CE is pretty painful on that difficulty, and the Library is just atrocious. Halo 3 is just not a very good campaign altogether to be honest, and for someone who never touches vehicles the sheer amount of massive vehicle parts in that campaign puts me off. Halo 4 was a joy to play through on Legendary actually, really felt like a well thought out difficulty level - although not particularly hard, it wasn't as irritating as 3's vehicle portions, as painful as the Library, or as punishing as Sniper Alley - it felt much more balanced overall.
Can't wait to slog through them all though really, especially if there are Vidmasters.
Also, this may be a stupid question, but do dedicated servers mean I wont be able to play with American pals (I'm in Australia) outside of customs?
Have they said what kind of graphical improvements, if any, are going into Halo 3? From the sounds of it, all of the "improvements" are more or less incidental, due to the increased resolution and higher fidelity of the X1. Halo 3 will look pretty terrible without AA, and the issues with pop-in will exacerbated with a higher resolution and framerate. An option for a wider FOV would be nice as well.
I want to play all the games in order once I get MCC. Play Reach the week before, marathon 1-4, maaaaaybe play ODST a bit. Legendary, all skulls on. KREYGASM
Frankie said that Halo 3 and 4 won't receive additional graphic packages. He also said that because halo 3 will be at 1080p/60fps, that we will see a lot more detail, immersion, and smoothness to the graphics that we didn't see in the past. This applies to a less extent to halo 4.
Frankie said that Halo 3 and 4 won't receive additional graphic packages. He also said that because halo 3 will be at 1080p/60fps, that we will see a lot more detail, immersion, and smoothness to the graphics that we didn't see in the past. This applies to a less extent to halo 4.