“There’s no way that we can co-exist… We can’t afford to have our business confused with games for kids. Either we find a business solution or we get into a legal battle.”

The full Financial Times article can be found here. Thanks to MSXBox for the heads up.

First, it’s taking out it’s checkbook. Since march 2000, when it announced plans to enter the multibillion-dollar video-game industry, Microsoft has bought two small game developers, Bungie Software Products Corp. and Digital Anvil Inc., for what some analysts estimate is more than $20 million.

Well, that’s a bit less than we thought the sum would have been… but it’s interesting to see this hit the mainstream press. We’d have thought the spin would have been the half-billion they’re spending on advertising…

we’re in the process of getting the site backup as i speak, but as we dont have 100% control over the new machine its taking time. once we find the root mysql pass for the machine we should be up within a matter of minutes,should be tonight if we can beat it out of the tech admin (who was the guywho forwarded haloplayers.com to that site, not the forum as we’d asked)

Gotta love those tech admins… Good luck, guys, getting back up and running!

Q: Which game does Halo most represent when it comes to modifications (ease of use, how much they change the game etc.)?

A: Well, since the tag system is similar, Myth II, with some restrictions since we don’t create environments in the editor like we did in Myth II.

So… Halo editing will be tag-based… but not the environments? Something like that. Thanks, Jaime!

“The fun part in terms of the music playback in the game is that it won’t play the same way twice.”

With this, Marty O’Donnell had me hooked. He’s a sucker for a free beer, though, so I eventually got more of the story from him:

So it’s a little something I’ve been working on for years now. Just some simple ways to keep music looping in a non-repetitive way. The start and stop are caused by the player’s actions, and the middle looping areas will play random sections that go together in musically acceptable ways. So each time you hear music play, if you pay close attention, it will be a variation of the last time you heard it. I even did it to all the techno tracks, as repetitive as they are, they aren’t predictable.

He’s been using this technique for a while now – the win screen music and loss screen music in the Myth series were the first experiments with it, and it’s used extensively in Oni.

Almost all of Oni’s in-game music uses this technique, even during the scripted cut-scenes.

I think it’ll been even better in Halo, but it works pretty well in Oni.

Pretty slick – the same old, same old, without being the same old at all! Thanks, Marty.