Contractors Of Gearbox Software Announced
Gearbox Software Announces New COGS Initiative on the Gearbox Software website reveals plans to use students/mod developers to help with projects on a temporary basis. COGS contract openings will be in level design, art and programming areas. Find out more here.
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BaBOon
replyGearbox's staff goes from highly paid professionals to college students - the world is blissfully unaware of a change.
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show facts to back up your trolling? maybe...
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Lots of people complained at the port. Randy Pitchfork addressed the community's problem with their game by saying everyone was just jumping on the bitching bandwaggon compaining the game had poor fps on moderate rigs. This pissed alot of people off who had genuine issues with the game.
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Here is the evidence (now who is a troll, hmm?):
You'd think a high-end PC could handle such a game easily, but this port, which was done by Gearbox Software, is surprisingly taxing even on very fast PCs with tons of RAM and the latest video cards.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/halo/review.html-
It's still trolling, the statement about halo pc had absolutely ZERO to do with the topic. Truth of the matter is that _rage dropped in on a thread that had absolutely nothing to do with Halo, and added his own two cents. That is indeed trolling.
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Internet%20troll
See for yourself.
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On Halo PC performance:
I've always seen the posts on the forums on this and aside from a few other developers out there who know how the difficulty in porting a game. Much to my amusement the vast majority of flames on the subject can only at best guess as to the reasons why things are the way they are.
Today I will lay this issue to rest, (though undoubtedly a large percentage of the people who insist on these threads will not see this post and become enlightened). I cannot really go into the political realm of things, but rest assured there is always plenty of that on any project. Which for me only leaves the technical, and even that is a subset of information as I can only talk about the obvious or harmless information. Luckily the remaining information can be used to blackmail Bungie and hopefully I will get a copy of Halo 2.
Halo as designed was to be capped at 30 fps. A good chunk of code had to be re-worked to allow the game to run higher. This work was done by myself, and as far as I know would not have been completed by anyone else here due to scheduling. As anyone who has ported a game can probably tell you, a change to the game timing or frame rate locks is one of the hardest scariest things possible, because its basically breaks the game everywhere, and you have no obvious way to find out where aside from guessing and having the game play-tested a lot.
But the real question is the overall performance of the game. As publically known the XBOX uses a 733mhz P3 celeron CPU. However compared to a P4, its really fast, like on par with a 1.2ghz P4. The XBOX ram is fast, much faster than a normal P3 would have as well. In addition to these basic differences, any game on the PC has to run through a hardware abstraction known as Direct3D. On the XBOX the app gets to be hardcoded for XBOX, but on the PC D3D generates hardware independent data and it gets sent to D3D, through nasty things such as ring0 context switches to get into the kernel, as well as spending a good deal of time on the CPU due to the driver having to translate the commands from the hardware independent D3D to the video cards native instruction set. Net result: the game is some percentage slower (cant say on exact numbers here) on the PC in addition to the CPU/RAM differences.
Now Halo at best can run (and tries to run) at 30fps on an XBOX running at 640x480. However its quite easy to get into some good sized slowdown during just about any sizeable combat and the game will run at 20, or even 15. [If anyone from Bungie is reading, you know how nice I am being here :) ]
Like almost all games, Halo is very CPU bound. Considering the above processor and D3D abstraction differences, you are looking for at best a 2x-2.5x frame rate improvement from the console version of the game with fastest processors availalbe at the time the game shipped.
We encountered two fixable performance problems in the game: One was that a portion of PC DX9 code used as documented was not ideal for the design that Bungie originally came up with for the XBOX. This was non-obvious that it was even a problem beyond the normal 'D3D is abstracted on PC' performance differences, and eventually required some DX team guys to tell we could do a few pieces of code better to fit their design (and as a result documention was fixed). This is what the patch fixed. The other was a design flaw in the D3DX effect libraries causing some unnecesary inefficiencies. This was eventually improved in the recent release DX9.0c. This second fix would also require a patch to the game iteself, since that library would be compiled directly into the game. Microsoft is responsible for future maintenance on the game, so its up to them now to fix and patch that one.
In the end it boils down to this:
If you have a 1.4ghz machine P4 or equivalent you should expect an XBOX like performance, its not like we can magically make the code faster.
If you crank up the resoloution beyond 800x600 or so, prepare to quickly shift from CPU bound to fill bound. The game draws a lot of lighting passes, especially if they are bumpy like in ship interiors.
The XBOX is quite a bit faster than a comparable PC because it is not a PC. It is a console and benefits from all the things that makes consoles fast. Extremely fast RAM shared directly between CPU & GPU, no OS, no hardware abstraction, the ability to optimize for the hardware (a lost art uttrely unknown to PC games), no need for protected mode context switches, and most of all no other programs running in the background.
Halo 2 is going to rock and make everyone forget all about Halo 1, because this time around they have all the bad ass development tools I can't tell you about which will enable them to significantly improve the performance over the original :) This performance will generally not be passed onto you the customer, but be instead stolen by their art and design teams to make the game look better, run more enemies, etc.
P.S. How would you like it if you had always been 'Waiting for the PC version' fo Halo to play it, then find out you have to help port it yourself? Kind of spoils the fun don't you think? :)
And as for the Nightfire comments:
My above comment about politics applies so strongly to the topic that I will never be able to comment in depth publicly ever, though mostly due to the convulsions and flashbacks and not so much as ability or desire.-
I almost forgot this one since it was out of our hands:
The drivers available at the time the game shipped were relatively slow at handling a game exclusively using hardware shader features. Halo was pretty much the first game that really pushed the new hardware capabilities of vertex and pixel shaders. Some games had come out that used some shader functionality, but Halo renders 100% of everything through a shader.
This comes back to politics a bit but needless to say some people somewhere who have to write drivers were surprised when Halo shipped and they discovered they had some work to do. The work they did benefits everyone in the future, but the fact it was a surprise for them, thats the politics :)
One major 3d chipset manufacturer had a good deal of improvement after the game shipped, while the other had some seriously disturbing bugs in their drivers during the course of the project but overall had good performance. In the interest in keeping conspiracy theories running forever, its an excercise for the reader to figure out which companies I am talking about here :)
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