- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
04.23.04
I've only been here a few months, but I can honestly say this is the busiest, most spastic week since I arrived. Everyone is grinding ? programmers, artists, designers, marketing, everyone. Going bananas. There's lots of activity everywhere you look and best of all, every screen you look at has something cool on it that you never saw before. Might just be a pretty tree, could be some spectacular bloom lighting, and might even be some in-game object that moves around in a fun way. But the level of graphic polish seems to be "sudden."
Things that had previously been flat untextured objects, or textured, but unlit, are now springing gloriously to life, with multiple effects being applied. Those range from bump maps to reflections, to simple lightmapped lighting or the occasionally startling dynamic lights. Actually, you probably saw some of this in the E3 demo last year, but our dynamic lighting isn't necessarily static?
Animation Alley
Nathan has been crunching on tons of multiplayer "triage" which is basically the prioritization of bug fixing, and this week that includes first person weapons (we thought you might want these back) as well as a new melee animation system "that is gonna rock the cheese off a 20? submarine sandwich?" Nathan's dietary habits aside, it's a jammed week in animation.
He's also been tightening the vehicle boarding animations, and I can tell you, they look very cool. And the control system for that is pretty nifty too.
As for characters, according to Nathan the Grunts look way better, courtesy of "Billmation" (Bill's animation).
"Billmation is the process where bill takes 100% sass and curdles it with dynamic motion to create lickable content...better than 80?s scratch n' sniff stickers I say..." says, Nathan.
John Butkus, also animating like crazy, is fixing bugs and polishing existing animations for an upcoming milestone. He's been tweaking and tuning Elite animation, and you're going to see a far more articulated, convincing Elite this time around. They look much more distinct and animalistic this time around and his melee attacks (duck!) look terrifying, and the way the Elites reload now is almost too much detail.
John claims it wasn't anything too earth-shatteringly exciting this week, just a matter of making sure that everything is working right, while?Mike has been working on the animations for an updated Elite model, and created a totally sick rocket launcher melee attack for the Chief.?And as Nathan pointed out, Bill has been hard at work on the Grunt, and it definitely shows...the Grunt is looking awesome. Did we say how awesome the Grunt was?