Halo impressions thread

[Vash]

Originally posted by saturnotaku
People are getting crappy performance even at 1024x768 on 9700 Pro cards. This is on a game that was originally demoed on a Mac with a TNT2-class card. I remember the Penny Arcade cartoon from 2000 that talked about the original Halo demo. I've followed development pretty closely the whole way. For all the time and effort that was suppoesedly put into this, the results are speaking for themselves. [/b]

Yes the game demoed on a TNT2 class card way back in 2000 - but they went through at least one engine re-write before they had to re-write it again to move it to the X-box. Comparing the performance of an ancient build to the current game is just a little unfair, I think. If I remember corretly, that TNT2 demo was back when they were going to use terrain generation to allow you to traverse the entire Halo construct. That and the TNT2 version didn't have bump mapping and other cool graphical goodies that the X-box version does.

In my opinion, Halo is the best console to PC port of a game that I've seen. GTA 3 still makes me turn down the draw distance because my system can't handle it. In Halo, I get very playable framerates (no hard numbers yet; haven't done any testing) at 1024x768 with all the details turned up and Vsync off.

That's not enough in and of itself to make me ignore the game's flaws, however: Gearbox is under contract with Microsoft to continue producing content and working on the game (patches, bonus content, editing tools, etc) for the next year. No other console port, ever, has released editing tools (or at least I can't think of one). Certainly not one that's this high profile. So we can look foward to increased performance (stability doesn't seem to be an issue), bugfixes, more MP levels, editing tools, and hopefully, addressing some of the game's other weaknesses: a high-res texture pack, higher poly count models, better animations, this sort of thing.

It's not perfect, but then the game's a console port. That's what Microsoft wanted Gearbox to do, and that's what they did. They weren't hired to build a PC game from the ground up. While I don't have any experience porting code from the X-box to PC, I can imagine that doing that produces some pretty strange coding challenges (and legal situations, too. Changing the code too much to adapt it for the PC may be restricted by the contract), and will undoubtedly affect how the game is built compared to other engine'd games. The Halo engine definitely has its eccentricities (the command-line refresh rate thing for one), and I think these are attributable to the nature of the port.


That said, there are issues that I have with the game. First and foremost is the need for a higher sensitivity for the mouse. It shouldn't be too difficult to do. Whether this can be taken care of in an .ini file, or if Gearbox handles this in an upcoming patch, or if someone decides to write a mod for Halo that allows higher mouse speeds, it'll get done somehow.

Second issue: performance. While I'm happy with where my system is running the game (specs: 1.4Ghz Thunderbird, SBLive! value, Abit NF7-S 2.0, 1Gig Corsair TwinX, GF4 Ti4600, no overclocking on anything), I can see room for improvement. There are definitely issues that need to be resolved that will allow the code to run faster. From what they've posted in their forums, Gearbox will definitely be addressing this.

Third: appearance. I can see Gearbox releasing a high definition pack for Halo sometime down the road with higher res textures and higher polycount models. Also a possibility for this would be better animation files.

Fourth (not least): timing. While it's an interesting feature, I'd like to see the frame limiter go. Whether or not this will happen, I don't know. We'll have to see. I'd love to see the frame limiter go and the animations improved.

Bottom line for me is that I'm having a ton of fun playing single player and I'm really looking forward to getting broadband this month and going out on the Internet. The game's great and very fun to play, and while it is an eccentric piece of software, the rougher edges are gonna get smoothed out.

[Vash]

Just found a short tweak guide (primarily for MP, but you can use this in SP to improve your experience, too). Check it out.


Woohoo! More tweaking: This one's to help with the mouse lag.

Yes, it's a pain to have to type in a command every time you start the game. I haven't tried this yet, but I'd guess that there's some way to add the command to shut off acceleration to the config.txt, we just haven't found it yet.

Is it worth $50.

I'm headed to Best Buy over the weekend, and man, I loved the hour I played of it on the Xbox.

[Vash]

In my opinion, it is. It's the funnest FPS I've played since Half-Life. There are technical issues, but those'll get worked out. The Halo community is a pretty cool one to boot, and they're gonna be all over those editing tools like mud on a pig. I'm expecting some very cool MP maps for this game, as well as some sweet mods.

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by The Baron
Is it worth $50.

I'm headed to Best Buy over the weekend, and man, I loved the hour I played of it on the Xbox.

If you've never played it before, and you plan to do some MP action then this game is absolutely worth the money. You will enjoy it even more with "proper" controls.

It may sound like I'm really knocking the game, but this is a good game overall. But having played it on Xbox, I'm left wanting more.

By the way, Midnight Club II and GTA: Vice City were very good console ports. Halo is definitely far better than GTA3 in this category, but I'm going to mess around with the former some more before I make a judgement if it's up there with the other two.

Originally posted by Vash
In my opinion, it is. It's the funnest FPS I've played since Half-Life. There are technical issues, but those'll get worked out. The Halo community is a pretty cool one to boot, and they're gonna be all over those editing tools like mud on a pig. I'm expecting some very cool MP maps for this game, as well as some sweet mods.

Oi.

The simple possibility for a Marathon mod makes my decision for me.

[Vash]

Sat: yes, GTA:VC is a good console port. Sorry to have jumped all over ya, buddy; there are a lot of idiots running around the Gearbox boards throwing insults and poorly thought out accusations and I'm still a little jumpy. Over there, at least, I feel as if I'm the only one who can see 1) the work that was put into Halo: PC and 2) how difficult it might have been.

So, to summarize: I likes it much, the tech issues will get worked out, and I am "teh suck" for having blown a fuse.

[randsom]

well, i have had nothin but problems with game,

hard locks, eax is broken,performance issues, mouse and movement issues.I have a pretty nice gaming rig.p4c@3500 ic7-g,9800pro,audigy 2, 1 gig of ram, and it runs like crap, uttter crap. I have zero isssues with any other game out there so its not my box.i have gone as for as going to back tostock speeds on everything and still the same issues. theres supposedly a patch on the way next week, thats supposed to solve some of these issues, but right now, i feel ripped off.

Microsoft and bungie reportledly put the collective squeeze on gearbox to get this game out the door yesterday.The games is absolutly fun to play, has a great story line, and mp is a blast, when i can get it to run.Theres absolutly no excuse for this.


the wierd thing is the beta 1.5 was supposed to run much better than this.what happened.

[RoachMojo]

It's worth it, Baron. Way fun!

Performance issues aside, I also have experienced the EAX bug where character voices cut out, but disabling EAX only partially fixed the problem.

I had one other weird bug at the part where I get woken up from cryosleep and have to look around. I could only look left and right, but not up and down. I then had to remap movement to the arrow keys and it worked (mouse movement, that is).

Also, the game would crash on load if my pop-up stopper was running.

I would like to know if others are getting the 6-9 fps drops when on the Covenent cruiser. Even disabling all effects had very little impact on framerate at that point.

[Vash]

Someone claims over on the Gearbox forums that running an Anti-virus software package also kills performance.

If true, that definitely needs to be resolved.

[RoachMojo]

Originally posted by Vash
Someone claims over on the Gearbox forums that running an Anti-virus software package also kills performance.

If true, that definitely needs to be resolved.

I'm running the free version of AVG vscan, and tested that as well. I didn't see any differences in performance with or without it running, but maybe other vscanners cause problems?

I was pissed after installing Halo and getting an exception error on first load. The first game ever that had a problem with Meaya ad filter...

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by Vash
Sat: yes, GTA:VC is a good console port. Sorry to have jumped all over ya, buddy; there are a lot of idiots running around the Gearbox boards throwing insults and poorly thought out accusations and I'm still a little jumpy. Over there, at least, I feel as if I'm the only one who can see 1) the work that was put into Halo: PC and 2) how difficult it might have been.

So, to summarize: I likes it much, the tech issues will get worked out, and I am "teh suck" for having blown a fuse.

I'm not mad at you, and I certainly didn't take your post as "jumping all over me," no need to apologize at all. And as I said, I don't dislike the game the game at all. I'm most mad at the fact that we are well over a year (more like 18 months) from the launch of Halo wih the Xbox, the team was supposedly going to work on the PC port a few weeks after that and this is what they released. GTA: Vice City came out within 6 months from the PS2 launch and it's much more polished than Halo. I have to believe that porting from PS2 to PC is more difficult than Xbox to PC. Compounding the problem is that I know Bungie and Gearbox are better than this. Oni was a great game from a development standpoint. It ran well on almost all harware and is one of a handful of PC games I've ever played that didn't display major, showstopping bugs that required patching. And Gearbox: look at Opposing Force, Blue Shift and the Half-Life High Definition pack. Yes, I know it's a weak comparison because they weren't working on a completely original project, but both those games were exceptionally well done.

I don't expect perfection, but some of these issues are inexcusable considering how much time they had to work with this.

I did some playing this morning and I did find that 1024x768, 2xAA and 8x performance AF does give a good combination of performance and quality. But with no AA, 1280x1024 runs like garbage, which bugs me to no end. I've found the high degree of AF is necessary because you can blatantly see the mipmap boundaries on anything less. I'm not too mad about this because performance is still somewhat good, but in UT2003 I can barely see the mipmap boundaries with AF off. Also, I disabled the specular setting. I think it makes objects look more realistic, and I gained probably about 2-3 fps in the process. I will definitely try the mouse lag thing posted above. I'll do it every time I launch the game if necessary, but I hope this is something that can be resolved in a patch.