- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: MoneyMan
Bungie isn't going to take the time to completely revamp the engine and make it completely cutting-edge. By PC standards when it was released it wasn't all that cutting-edge.
How do you know this? That's just your assumption. If you have a PC that can run FEAR and HL2 on decent resolutions then you may not have to upgrade. My guess is that a lot of people complaining here don't have PCs that could run those games on anything but the lowest settings.
Merely because I'm making assumptions doesn't mean I'm not using logic to come to my conclusion. I will admit to start, however, that you're right that not much info is released about the game, but I think people are expecting far too much from a port.
Considering that Halo PC was released, and that Bungie should have expected the outcry for Halo 2 to be ported as well, they should have at least started the port to coincide with the Xbox release. As it is, it's about 2 years late, and probably going to be another year before Vista is released - Bungie was behind on the port before it started. If Bungie decided to completely revamp the Halo 2 engine for PC to take advantage of many of the new technologies today (parallelix mapping, HDR, things such as that) how much longer would the port take?
It seems that they only started working on it recently, it took Gearbox an extra year past their original release date to fix the engine problems they encountered when making it (they had to essentially start from scratch) - and even then what we ended up with was an exact port with somewhat sharper textures and higher resolutions that ran poorly, even on systems well over the minimum specs.
As it is, it doesn't seem as if Bungie has alloted itself enough time to fully optimize the Halo 2 engine with all the graphical features that can be achieved on the PC platform. They are working with a deadline with Vista, and I'm sure Microsoft is pushing them to release at a similar time to maximize profit - just like they were rushed with Halo 2 for Xbox. As it is, at the most it looks like we'll have a port of Halo 2 with higher resolutions, and some DX10 features.
I didn't have to be in a secrete developer's meeting to come up with this idea. It's all pretty much right there in front of you.
Though, if Bungie does manage to pull some awesome new graphic features on Halo 2 PC, I'll be thoroughly impressed, and probably owe you a coke.
This really isn't relevant to this topic, but since you went there.....the problems with the online play of Halo PC was the physics engine. This was a propietary engine written by Bungie and was not written to be played over anything but LAN (which it was fantastic at). You could retool the engine all you want, but it still would not have worked right over the internet. Why do you think they switched to a commercially available physics engine (Havok) for H2? The only solution would have been to completely strip the engine out and replace it with something like Havok, which just wasn't feasible, given the time constraints.
Speaking of not being relevant, I don't think I mentioned online play at all in what I said. Perhaps you misread. The Halo PC online play is clunky, laggy and inaccurate, but I didn't go there. I was talking in reference to the overall framerate issues.
It stemmed from release, every review I read about the game had the same issue - even on their higher end testing systems, they encountered poor framerates at many points, obviously when there was action on screen or a lot of times even when there was nothing occuring on screen. It was poor engine and framerate optimization on Gearbox's part. The game is hard to run, but not because of it's graphical features (which really weren't all that impressive, it was nice to play the game with some clarity though), but because it was probably rushed (only took 4 years..?) and Gearbox didn't get to do what they needed to.