- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Heres most of the article.
We’ve made several changes in the game’s control scheme this month in response to player feedback received on the show floor at Leipzig. The 360 controller received tweaks to the deadzone of its two analog sticks, but we overhauled the mouse and keyboard controls. We’d been told by fans that the mouse felt sluggish when compared with the controls of other popular PC games, so we did some side-by-side comparisons and realized we weren’t properly accounting for mouse acceleration. That’s been fixed, and the default sensitivity settings now match the out-of-box settings for Halo 1 PC. Our keyboard layout pre-sets are being evaluated too, although many players will still customize their keys.
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Seems they realized the problem with the mouse slowness, and have corrected that :D
We also introduced an entirely new feature to Halo 2 Vista this month. Players can send text chat to each other from the pre-game lobby or even during the game. H2V supports in-game voice, of course, but we figured text chat is an honored tradition on the PC and belonged in our game. Apart from broadcast chat, you can chat with your party in text or send a private whispers to a specific player. We even auto-complete their names for you in the UI.
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Sweet :D
Halo 2 Vista shows really well now, thanks to some visual enhancements. The game runs at 60fps in most cases, and the world is lit dynamically as you can see for yourself in the screenies. The art for the Master Chief, the Arbiter, and the multiplayer “skybox” scenery have gone through a touch-up to make them shine at our preferred resolution of 1920x1200. Honestly, the game looks so hot these days that I want to call it Halo 2.5.
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Improvement in lighting and graphics :D
Let’s see. Oh yes, we’ve made good progress in our multiplayer mode this month. As you know, the game supports dedicated server play and user-created maps. This month, the devs showed us an end-to-end demo for us of those features, with a custom map running on a dedicated server PC, administered remotely from a laptop. That might not sound like much to you jaded PC gamers, but it was cool to see these features up and running for Halo 2. The dedicated server runs as a Windows service, so basic things like starting and stopping the binary are available through the Windows GUI. Real control of the game environment is exposed through the command line. The server offers a simple interface that pretty much anyone could learn in a few minutes, with support for starting, stopping, and delaying games. Users who want to customize their matches further can specify a Halo 2 playlist file chock full of details like maps, game types, weapons, vehicles, victory conditions, and so on.
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Dedicated servers and other nice things about online :D
Our test lead uses the mouse and keyboard exclusively in our afternoon games. I still use the 360 controller, and I admit there’ve been a couple times when his ability to pivot and precision-target my noggin cost me a match. He’s getting better, too. I feel like a T. Rex who used to laugh at the rodent creatures, but now gets creeped out by their beady little eyes. It’s looking more and more as though those posts in The Maw were right when they said that an experienced mouse-and-keyboard gamer will give a controller gamer a run for his money.
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Finally: They read the forums :P
[Edited on 10/7/2006]