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Posted by: Zeph
MS's insistence on 56k support was more logistical than anything. Even though broadband was becoming more common, it still hadn't truly entered the average home. Most everyone has broadband now, because ISPs now have a good infrastructure to get high speed access to anyone without incurring a large price. Thus, broadband can be offered for a lower price. That is assuming that your local ISP isn't holding a regional monopoly on the market, like mine. My internet access is rediculously high, and only a fraction of what I can find only a half hour away, but it's the only thing being offered. I'm sure you can imagine how it was about six years ago with a bit of though to more easily understand MS's decision. I think it was a bad decision, but it was correct.
That's actually what I meant by them fearing that broadband wouldn't catch on, cost issues to the consumer, so we agree on that.
I'd like to know how Gearbox messed up. Are you talking about the multipurpose maps? (psst. that's your shiney AR and flagpole stuff). If you think that was them messing up, how else do you propose GBX get the game to run on hardware that simply doesn't have the potential to do what the code is asking it to do? If they included it, you'd suddenly change the minimum gpu requirement from a 32MB T&L card to something around a 64MB DX 9.0 card. At the time, that would be similar to a game comming out tomorrow and only nVidia's 7xxx line and AMD's X1xxx line only being able to run it. Or more realistic, a DX10 game being released next month. Halo being ported to PC was next-gen.
You should know perfectly well that there are a number of games that have been released over the past year, or more, that at the time of release, kicked the arse of even the most uber end card out at that time. Halo's midrange graphics setting looks just fine to me, above that is eye candy for those with better cards, and GBX could have at least added proper shaders etc. to the max range settings if not mid range.
But most of the problems I have seen with the game are less related to graphics and more related to triggers and AI, there has only been one case when these glitches were not evident, and that was on my friends computer, a self build circa 2002, with the GeForce 5700, the one that everyone wanted but virtually no one got because it was discontinued.
When he upgraded his card, the glitches started, and the glitches were on my much older GeForce 4 Ti 4200 as well, perhaps it was driver related, but whatever it was, that was an annoying problem that was never fixed, on my wife's brand new machine I get the exact same glitches. So yea, I blame GBX for that, I know for a fact that trigger debugging is not that big of a problem, somone likely got lazy and didn't clean up a bit in memory before doing an addition, and so the glitches happen randomly.
Also, how are you suggesting that code changes from console to PC? The split-screen code works the same way, it's just not a good and feasible design feature for a personal computer port.
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That is what I said, classic PC co-op is different than consol co-op, and as people don't want to play split screen on their monitors, and working it to hook up two keyboards and mice to your computer would be moronic anyway, the code to make co-op work over networks or the internet would have to be written from scratch, and I think we can agree that Halo's netcode, due to the 56k requirement, was not up to the task of syncing two computers for co-op play, triggers would be lagging all over the place.