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.
Environment Design in HALO 3
Author: Mike Zak (Lead Environmental Artist, Bungie Studios)
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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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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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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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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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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Lighting and Material of HALO 3
Author: Hao Chen (Engineering Lead, Bungie Studios)
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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E Pluribus Unum: Matchmaking in HALO 3
Author: Chris Butcher (Engineering Lead, Bungie Studios)
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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The HALO 3 Cinematic Process
Author: CJ Cowan (Bungie)
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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