Bungie Publications is a broad examination of topics ranging from networking techniques in our online games to the behavior of enemy and friendly AI in our game worlds. This section contains transcripts, papers and presentations on matters artistic and technical in Bungie games.
Composed by members of Bungie, these papers are solely the work of Bungie and its employees and may not be distributed, repurposed or presented without the express written consent of Bungie, LLC. The views and opinions expressed by the authors of Bungie Publications are solely the views of the author and not representative of Bungie.
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Modular Procedural Rigging
Author: David Hunt (Character Rigger)
This session focuses on strategies for character rigging in a large production setting. It offers an in-depth look at the architecture of the Modular Procedural Rigging system developed at Bungie. These techniques allow riggers to quickly iterate on character development while neighboring departments continue to work at full speed.
Posted: 03.31.2009
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Blowing S#!t Up the Bungie Way
Author: Steve Scott (Effects Lead)
Bungie's Effects Art Lead Steve Scott shows and tells about the role effects played in Halo 3's development.
Posted: 10.23.2008
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Halo 3 Flood Alien Level Autopsy
Author: Vic DeLeon (Environment Artist)
This session examines Flood biology, the creation of Flood environments and discusses the artistic iteration on Flood-infected visuals which were prototyped during Halo 2's development and realized during Halo 3.
Posted: 05.28.2008
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Environment Design in HALO 3
Author: Mike Zak (Lead Environmental Artist)
This session will describe the mission development pipeline and process for HALO 3. It will show how roles and responsibilities were delineated, give an overview of some of Bungie's thinking about space design as it relates to gameplay, and demonstrate the iterative process for making a game environment beautiful.
Posted: 02.25.2008
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Audio Post-Mortem: HALO 3
Author: C. Paul Johnson, Marty O'Donnell, Jay Weinland
Marty O’Donnell, C. Paul Johnson and Jay Weinland discuss HALO 3 audio.
Posted: 02.26.2008
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Design In Detail
Author: Jaime Griesemer (Gameplay Design Lead)
Bungie's resident Gameplay Guru, Jaime Griesemer, analyzes a seemingly insignificant data point, explores it in exhaustive detail, and explains precisely how and why you should follow in his contrails if you're willing to make the hard choices and want to develop your own supernatural sense of balance.
Posted: 03.26.2010
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The Illusion of Intelligence: The Integration of AI and Level Design in Hal
Author: Jaime Griesemer (Design Lead) and Chris Butcher (Engineering Lead)
An investigation of the intersection between design and code as it relates to combat behavior in Halo: Combat Evolved.
Posted: 08.08.2008
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E Pluribus Unum: Matchmaking in HALO 3
Author: Chris Butcher (Engineering Lead)
The algorithms behind the peer-to-peer matchmaking model of HALO 3, and its implementation over Xbox Live. The impact of matchmaking on the HALO online community, and techniques for shaping the player experience and discouraging cheaters. The tradeoffs of an automatic matchmaking system compared to traditional multiplayer game browsers, and some results from the first months of HALO 3's operation.
Posted: 02.25.2008
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Lighting and Material of HALO 3
Author: Hao Chen (Engineering Lead)
An overview of HALO 3's unique lighting and material system and its main components. Key innovations in the following areas: spherical harmonics lightmap generation, compression and rendering; rendering complex materials under area light sources; HDR rendering and postprocessing. Lastly, the implementation details, practical problems and solutions, and key lessons learned in the process.
Posted: 02.26.2008
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The Technology of Halo 2
Author: Chris Butcher (Engineering Lead)
At its heart, the Halo engine is a world simulation engine. Engineering Lead Chris Butcher describes the evolution of the “Halo” engine from its traceable origins in Pathways into Darkness and to its present state in Halo 2.
Posted: 08.08.2008
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Lightmap Compression in HALO 3
Author: Yaohua Hu (Engineer, Bungie Studios)
The lecture first gives an overview of HALO 3's irradiance lightmaps concept and its challenges. Then, the philosophy of its compression scheme is proposed. It is separated into signal based compression and data based compression.
Posted: 02.25.2008
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New Dog, Old Tricks: Running Halo 3 Without a Hard Drive
Author: Mat Noguchi (Engineer, Bungie Studios)
With multiple Xbox 360 SKUs without hard-drives, Halo 3, a game optimized for a hard drive, has to run off a DVD. Fortunately, it does. This session will cover the design and implementation of that work, from a high level approach to understanding content usage to how designers can create levels that run off a DVD effectively to the low level details of a high performance I/O engine.
Posted: 02.25.2008
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Life on the Bungie Farm: Fun Things to Do with 180 Servers
Author: Luis Villegas (Engineer), Sean Shypula (Engineer)
Bungie presents the tools that were developed to address its increasingly complex content creation pipeline. In particular the talk will discuss Bungie's in-house distributed system which is used for binary, shader, and content builds, as well as for lightmap rendering and other more generic workflows. This system has evolved over several years and Bungie will discuss each iteration.
Posted: 02.25.2008
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Decision Making and Knowledge Representation in Halo 3
Author: Max Dyckhoff (AI Engineer)
Dyckhoff exposes the major representations used in Halo 3’s AI systems, and the algorithms behind the complex decision making which drives the industry leading AI.
Posted: 08.08.2008
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Evolving Halo 3's Behavior Tree AI
Author: Max Dyckhoff (AI Engineer)
An analysis of the improvements to the behavior tree AI system from Halo 2 to Halo 3. Presented as part of a three-part session at GDC ’07 in collaboration with developers on EA’s Spore.
Posted: 08.08.2008
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Halo AI Retrospective: 8 Years of Work on 30 Seconds of Fun
Author: Damian Isla (AI Engineering Lead)
Isla examines the iterative changes made in the Halo trilogy’s AI. From Halo: Combat Evolved’s Elites, to the ferocious Brutes of Halo 3’s and a look what must improve in our AI looking forward.
Posted: 08.08.2008
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Building a Better Battle: HALO 3 AI Objectives
Author: Damian Isla (AI Lead, Bungie Studios)
The HALO 3 AI Objectives System turns the techniques used in previous HALO games on their head: rather than a designer ordering groups of NPCs to certain physical areas and then transitioning them to other areas as the battle progresses, H3O allows the designer to specify a set of tasks in the environment and then comes up with an optimal distribution of squads across those tasks.
Posted: 03.03.2008
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Lighting Research at Bungie
Author: Hao Chen, Natalya Tatarchuk
Straight out of Siggraph '09, Hao Chen and Natalya Tatarchuk talk shop on lighting research at Bungie. Their presentation focuses on high-quality real time lighting with advanced atmospheric rendering and continuous time of day, as well as efficient prefilterable soft shadows. It also takes a look at fast methods for generation of pre-computed global illumination using modern GPUs.
Posted: 10.02.2009
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Wrangling Engineers the Bungie Way
Author: Matt Priestley
Code, script, and server tech are the bones and blood of AAA titles, yet engineers work quite differently from the artists and designers who make a game worth playing. How can we bridge this gap so architectural work arrives on predictable dates even while prototyping swirls around us? This talk reviews helpful tactics for negotiating, budgeting time, and forging trust with an engineering staff.
Posted: 03.15.2010
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The HALO 3 Cinematic Process
Author: CJ Cowan (Cinematic Lead)
Bungie’s cinematics creation process was re-worked for HALO 3 to reduce iteration time. Improvements to Maya allow us to layout and iterate on our cinematics with ease. A demonstration of our new in-house cinematic tag system that auto-generates our cinematic scripts on the fly, and allows us to make changes via a custom GUI. New in-engine tools to examine our work as we make changes in real-time.
Posted: 02.25.2008
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Building Your Airplane While Flying: Production at Bungie
Author: Allen Murray (Producer)
This session takes a brutally honest look at the evolution of production at Bungie from HALO 1 to HALO 3 and shares the failures and successes of the production staff.
Posted: 03.31.2009
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