Category: Rampancy

Brannon Boren made good on his promise over the weekend, putting together a nice little retrospective on the thinking process that went into creating the parts of the Halo Bible that deal with artificial intelligences like Cortana. Just about everything that he mentions is revealed, in one way or another, either through the games or…

Brannon Boren says today he’s playing on doing some more shop talk about writing on his blog, possibly on a weekly basis. The first installment, due this Sunday, he says will be called “Creating A.I. for Halo”. Can’t wait!

There’s a lot of goodies in this week’s Bungie Update. Not a whole lot of it pertains to Halo 3, except possibly the logo, but that at least is something. What is special is the first-ever Bungie podcast. Go check out the update to download it if you haven’t yet. I don’t see it in…

Parallel to the changes that we made in how the Bungie Timeline works, letting you search, filter and sort entries according to different criteria, we’ve now revamped the entire user profile system. Among other things, this allows us to bring back the Gamertag Database with much better features than before. The new Gamertag Database allows…

As part of the most recent technical upgrade, we’ve revamped the appearance and functionality of the Bungie Timeline. Now, all entries are presented in an easier-to-read table format, and users can change the sort order from earliest to most recent. The table also displays which game the event is associated with and which platforms each…

If Halo 3 were going to have boss battles, who would your opponents be? That’s an idea that occurred to me after participating in an HBO forum thread that started out talking about a rather idiotic article wondering if Halo 3 would suck, and ended up morphing into a discussion of boss battles. I’m not…

Russian news site Novosti says that the Russian government is planning on launching an unmanned mission to the Mars moon of Phobos in 2009. The vehicle is expected to arrive on the moon in 2010, and depart for Earth in 2011 carrying soil samples. The story doesn’t say whether or not the Russians expect to…

Dean Takahashi caught up with Hamilton Chu of Giant Bite to talk about life after Halo. Chu spent three and a half years working on Halo; before that, he was part of the Oni team. Now, he and Bungie alum Michael Evans are cofounders of Giant Bite, which is working on a project but is…

Game-Spectrum, purporting to cover the entire spectrum of gaming, gets a nice interview, along with threats of physical violence, with its interview of Bungie’s own Kevin “KP” Paul, covering his turn-ons, turn-offs, and how he sleeps at night knowing all that stuff about Halo that we’ll never even know we don’t know.

This is a test Halo 3 spoiler. You should not be able to see it.

With Halo 3 not only stealing the thunder from every other game on the Xbox or Xbox 360, but personally tasked by Bill Gates with submarining the PlayStation 3 launch (guess he didn’t know about the proposed $600 price tag, or else he wouldn’t have bothered) it’s not surprising that a little studio called Wideload…

According to Frankie in Bungie’s latest Weekly Update, the artificial intelligence in current builds of Halo 3 seems to be quite a step up from the previous games. The progression of talent in Bungie’s AI drivers is well-documented; marines, for instance, could only handle Ghosts in Halo 1, often with disastrous results. Vehicles were thrown…

The previously Halo-themed mod for Command & Conquer Generals might not have a Bungie flavor anymore, but the request to cease development using Halo intellectual property does not mean the project is dead. Halogen lead Dispraiser said in an interview with GameSetWatch: Luckily, though, everyone on our team is devoted. When I posted in the…

Version 0.5 of PhysicsEditorOne for Windows by HogePiyo is out, in English and Japanese. The program edits Marathon physics models, allowing mapmakers to change player physics, monster sequences, sounds and weapons. Thanks for the heads-up to Marathon Open Source.

Jordan117 has put up a nice bit of analysis in the HBO forum alleging that various artistic and design choices in Halo 2, specifically those made in the Outskirts and Metropolis levels, indicate that Bungie is postulating increasing global warming in Earth’s future. While probably not essential to the plot, if it’s true it does…

Quint at Ain’t It Cool News has put up part three of five in his interview with Halo movie producer Peter “Freakin” Jackson. Unlike just about everybody at Bungie, Jackson actually likes to talk and talk about Halo, so there’s loads of content in here. It is probably too far out from the film’s expected…

KP’s latest piece at Bungie.net is for all the fans who wish they could work at Bungie like he does. It’s probably fair to say that Bungie has hired more than its share of its own fans over the years, so while it’s certainly a long shot, it isn’t impossible, if you’ve got education, determination,…

Eastbeast314 posted up links from Let’s Kill Dave to the PPT presentations at this year’s GDC, as offered by Microsoft. The Graphics Track (caution, direct link to large file!) includes a portion called “HDR The Bungie Way” about HDR lighting. The files are huge– about 500Mb, though, so be careful.

The latest Community Spotlight at Bungie.net by KP is on Recon54, who is currently on an extended mission ordered by th’ greybeards o’ auld school Bungie fandom t’ observe noobs in their natural habitat, interactin’ with Microsoft’s “magical hummin’ box”. In addition, he drives th’ Spambulance and has a healthy fear o’ Shishka, which certainly…

Gravemind wrote up an extensively compendious piece on the Halo franchise, posted it on GeoCities, then linked it in the HBO Forum, with predictable results. When HBO front-paged it the next day, the site quickly exceeded its bandwidth quota. HBO had a mirror up by that time, with simplified HTML for quicker loading. I decided…