Kudos to Appleicious (heh – he said ‘kudos’), who points out (on the R.net forum) that NewTek lists Halo among game titles that use their Lightwave product. The press release that contains this information was put out on November 28… we’re a little slow sometimes.

As noted on the bungie.org news page, the Trivia Contest that was held at the Fanfest last week has been converted to a web-friendly format, so you all can go test your knowledge of Bungie lore. Go take the test, and see how much you really know about the team behind Halo!

An apocalyptic conclusion to the Firestarter Squad series was submitted by Iden to our Fan Fiction section. Hit the “more by this author” link to read all three installments in order.

Matt Soell raises his head from a San Francisco gutter (wow, those fanfests can be corrupting) long enough to squash a “Halo Demo coming soon” rumor that’s been floating around since last Friday night. And to clarify what “three weapons finished” means. Thanks, Matt. You can pass out again now.

Dink!… The Halo SETI Marines fall another notch in the Battle of the Teams, as Overclockers UK pushes them down to 49th. The mandatory switch to the 3.0.3 client has hit totals hard – in fact, if not for the addition of twostar, and the influx of those 621 units, the team’s weekly unit increase would have fallen off by over 30%. You can see all the gory details on the 7 day stats page. (Sorry for the delay in processing – blame Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Freedom writes to let us know that Halo Marine has put up a Halo screensaver. It’s PC-based, a bit under 7 megs, and contains screenshots theme music. You can find it here.

Thanks to Noctavis, who mentioned another cache of fanfest pics on the R.net forum – this time from Tobin. (Who’s Tobin?) Go check ’em out!

Damn, that man’s good. First, Jay Faircloth showed up on the scene over at the Marathon’s Story page, with a stunning piece of Marathon artwork. Then, he entered the Gathering of Developers’ Oni Art Contest, and placed second, with this image. Now he’s turned his sights on Halo… and though the final product isn’t available yet, he’s released a teaser for a larger piece for our Miscellaneous Art section. Jay says that this is

a “sneak preview” of a Halo piece I’ve been working on. It’s a wallpaper-sized (1152*870) jpeg snippet of a larger piece I hope to finish by the end of Monday, which shows the full Marine, a couple of “regular” troopers, and an actual background. I still have some cleanup of the image to do…

‘Cleanup’… hmm. Looks pretty spiffy from here. Thanks, Jay!

Pheonixmiser writes to say that the Halo Stronghold has come online. Go check it out!

And more – SiliconDream weighs in with a pretty nice roundup, posted to the R.net forum here. (Where are all the b.org reports, that’s what I wanna know?) Separate pistols for the player and the standard Marine, visual character variations between unit classes, evasive dives and rolls as part of the engine AI… and a playable build the next time we see it (maybe at E3). Wow.

Woohoo! Cunbelin has sent R.net a whole passel of images from the fest… including 5 of those “exclusive” Halo shots! (Yeah, they’re the old engine… but hey, it’s the only engine we know!) Plus a tidbit of artwork that um… is PROBABLY Halo-related… Uh, oh, I’m drooling again.

Update:Harry Al-Shakarchi clarifies that that image was Bungie’s Halo Christmas card, drawn by Shikai Wang. Thanks, Harry!

Thanks to Appleicious, who posted a Fanfest report to our forum. Halo details included:

• In [the] keynote, we got to see about ten exclusivescreenshots from the “old” Halo engine (exclusive = never before seen).
• the Halo multiplayer design doc is almost finished and work on the network code will begin in February.

There’s lots more, so read the whole thing for yourselves! Also, codetoad posted another report over at R.net, with these tantalizing tidbits:

• there’s 3 weapons finalized in halo
• there will be a “halo invasion of the media” (due to MS money) very soon, and we won’t have to worry about getting info on halo, because it will be ALL AROUND us. (Could this mean perhaps there is truth to the superbowl wild rumor? :-P)

Again, there is much more to that report, as well. As mentioned in both, Phoenix was officially announced… though there isn’t much info about it yet, and won’t be for a while. Ack. Why are you reading this? Go read those reports!

… And the fanfest is under way. No, we don’t have any information about it right now… I just thought I’d wish all the lucky festers the best, and remind anyone who HAPPENS to be in San Francisco this evening but DIDN’T know about the Fanfest to stop by the West Bay Conference Center between now and 9 pm PST! Have a blast, folks.

Ack. No sooner posted than refuted. Matt dropped another note to our forum a couple of minutes ago, shooting down the possibility of a live broadcast from the Fanfest.

That was the initial plan but it fell through for a variety of reasons.

All hope is not lost, though… check the rest of his post for a teaser!

Woohoo – nudie pics from Macworld! Well, okay, not really… but it looks like we might get live pics from the Bungie Fanfest tomorrow night. When asked how difficult it would be to bring a camcorder to work, he replied

We are SO far ahead of you on this one. 🙂

Of course, this could be post-fanfest info… but our money is on SF, in less than 24 hours.

Thanks to Tantalum-=SUN=-, who passed along notice of this Telepolis article (in German) discussing the Xbox, and Microsoft’s attempt to use it to change its image. “Crossing a Steam Locomotive with MTV – the Xbox and the Microsft image”… seems about right to us. 🙂 Nice take on the whole spin thing… and anyone who calls Bungie “Game Gods” gets two thumbs up in our book.

Before we forget – there’s a new German Halo site on the scene – Halo Information Network. I thought i was visiting a german version of Battleground: Halo when I first hit the link, but things got clearer after the splash page. Check ’em out!

More clarification from Timothy Wilson about some of the technical aspects of graphics rendering:

Pixel Shaders are a little bit of code that runs per-pixel. They combine textures and may compute lighting. Vertex Shaders are a larger bit of code that runs per-vertex. A vertex shader can move vertices, in addition it may ‘shade’ them. This is not a requirement, as I have written vertex shaders that do no shading at all, but instead let the pixel shaders do the lighting calculation.

Vertex shading is primarily what we have now in current hardware, each vertex is “shaded”, and the values are interpolated across the polygon. Also known as Gouraud shading.

Per-Pixel shading just means each pixel is ‘shaded’ separately, ie the light calculation is computed in one-way-or-another for every pixel.

Just a lot of confusion as to whats-what. Many of the names are similar, and somewhat misnamed even.

In addition, he sent along an example of per-pixel shading, so you can see what he’s talking about. Hope you all read this carefully… there’ll be a test on Wednesday.

Matt Soell popped into our forum yesterday to clear up questions like “who is behind cortana.org?” and “when will www.bungie.com be updated?” (Read the whole thread for more nuggets – it starts here.) Where’s my Big Mac?

Okay, we’re seriously confused. We misinterpreted John Carswell’s comments a little bit, it seems… he wrote to point out the nVidia PR Director interview that MSXbox held this week. There were two quotes that stood out for me:

MSXbox: What is the difference between these 2; Per-Pixel Shading and Bump-mapping?

Derek: Bump-mapping is kind of a hack, for lack of a better term. Per-pixel shading and Vertex shading are more accurate ways of doing texture and coloring. No more helmet head, like in sports games, you always look in the back of the head and [the hair] stands still, but in real life hair bounces. It’ll give images personality, and it’ll give scenes more personality. It’ll make scenes more organic and give it more ambiance.

And then later on:

MSXbox: When are the developers going to get final Xbox development kits- we’ve heard around March?

Derek: That sounds about right.

(That second one was exciting because it means that the final card will probably be in the playable Xbox folks will get their hands on at E3.) Okay, I thought I had a handle on this per-pixel shading/bump-mapping thing, until we got a note from Timothy Wilson (warning – heavy on the geek-speak), which suggested that John was wrong when he said there was no bump-mapping in the Malice shots. NOW who do we believe?