- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Well, I was just catching up on some Halo 1 SP, and I engaged in one of my favourite pastimes: Grunt-Bashing.
Now, grunt-bashing is fun, because they shoot blood with each hit, so you go up to a corpse, pull out a fast-melee weapon, and then start smacking. The results will be a blue ground in the local area. Very fun. :P
A problem with this, though, is that it slows the game down MASSIVELY. By MASSIVELY, I mean the game lags enough that 10 seconds can pass between action on the controller and reaction in-game can complete. I think the reason this happens is because they loaded a sprite that modifies the colour of a random blotch of texture, this actually sits on top of the grass texture, and tells the texture's colour to run through a filter wherever the two are in contact, or something along those lines. It could also just be a loaded texture that sits ontop of the base texture.
The thing with that, is that the XBox doesn't like having 25 sprites or 'upper textures' to load with every cycle, so it slows down. I don't know whether Bungie has anticipated and compensated for this in H2, but I hope they have. I have a few ideas (ie. just make a series of textures appear, progressively larger/bloody, and the stage of texture is dependant upon a variable of how many times the chief has bashed the little covie.) It wouldn't (shouldn't?) be that hard to implement a fix to this problem - and I think they likely have. But now, in the bug-fixes, they might be ready to look at something small like that. Just wondering.
Anyone have any suggestions on who I should mail about something along these lines?