Bungie day 2010

[jcap]

I'm slightly irritated by the lack of proper lighting that'll come with it being a Forge-based map.The rocks didn't seem to have shadows either, so it seems like a LOT of the map is made of Forge objects.

...Though, shouldn't scenery objects still get some sort of shadow-casting on the terrain? Or have I just not noticed that?

This is bothering me too much. Honestly, if you were to take out the sky and high poly terrain, it looks worse than a Halo CE map with a quick radiosity on it. The lighting is what makes maps shine. They should at least invest some time in real-time shadows for certain objects.

It would actually be cool (and suicide for your console) if they let you run lightmaps (not high quality ones) for forge maps.

Additionally, they could just make it so there's multiple lightmaps - one for the stock map, and one for the empty forge map.

[Kornman00]

Such operations wouldn't jive well with their current resource model without some hefty changes and which quite frankly really should just be in a full toolkit, not a scenario (not map) editor like Forge.

[Rob Oplawar]

Wait a minute. I got the impression from this presentation that Bungie was using entirely dynamic lighting for Reach. What I've seen so far does rather point towards lightmaps, though. That's disappointing.
Well, I guess we'll see it in whatever this super-secret-project is they're working on.

[PlasbianX]

Did nobody else catch the new armor ability? :O

[Kornman00]

Wait a minute. I got the impression from this presentation that Bungie was using entirely dynamic lighting for Reach.

Maybe if the Xbox was running a "modern GPU" and had the memory capacity to support such things. Also, it could very well be that, just like the visor in Halo 3, MP has reduced rendering quality for some things or that RT lighting is only during cinematic quality sequences when things are executed in a specific and deterministic manner.

[Rob Oplawar]

Yeah, that makes sense.
Actually, didn't they say the lighting didn't make it into the Beta? Maybe that video came from an older build without the real time lighting.
/me is still holding onto that hope. I'm a big fan of lighting. :P

[Ifafudafi]

If I remember correctly, there was an old campaign vidoc which showed some dynamic shadows on the first-person gun. Not sure if that means every single light is dynamic, but it's a good sign.

ODST used dynamic lighting in cutscenses but Bungie said that the announcement trailer was rendered entirely in-game, and things can only have gone up from there, so I'm guessing that at least the campaign has it by this point. Bungie did say a lot of new rendereing awesomeness (like SSAO) didn't make it into the beta, so maybe (hopefully) you're right about that Korn.

[Limited]

The new BG looks pants, like Jcap said its the lighting and possible lame textures. Right now we dont know the layout of the map, so we cant really assume that.

I don't like the fact you can use jetpack with the flag.

I dont believe thats a new armor ability, Bungie wouldnt just fade the player at the end of the effect, they'd make it more hologram like, give it those scan lights and it would flicker off. Fading is done becase its easier in video effects, I think RT faked it.

[Kornman00]

I don't like the fact you can use jetpack with the flag.

...I think RT faked it.

There is also strong evidance that says they faked the moon landing jetpack w/ flag combo. Either way, Bungie would make such things customizable via the game variant so it's nothing to get your knickers in a bunch over.

[Arteen]

I don't like the fact you can use jetpack with the flag.

Bungie has said many times, you can't use AAs while carrying the flag in matchmaking, but it's an option in custom games.