Well on Gamespot they have a release saying Gearbox is doing the PC port of Halo. Its release is scheduled for summer 2003.
I thought Halo was a cool game but with the crowded market in the PC scene, and whats coming up I see this being recieved with a collective shrug by the PC crowd.
How the hell can it take a year to make a Windows version of a game that runs on Windows hardware?
“already runs on Windows hardware” is what I meant to say. thanks.
Cause the game will RoOcKerz!!!
:shock:
It’s not how, it’s why would they take a year.
Answer: To give them time to release Halo2 on the Xbox
Yeah, whatever. I’m not so concerned that HALO make it to PC. I’m more concerned that HALO’s gameplay characteristics carry over to other shooters. Heck, I wonder if so-called ‘game designers’ even think about his stuff. ;)
First things first… why is it taking so long? Oh, I’ve got no doubt that 90-percent of the Xbox code could be ported immediately, and the remaining 10-percent would be graphical enhancements (higher resolutions, higher color art, scalable graphical settings for slower systems) and multiplayer optimized for the PC. But of course, Halo is a killer app for the Xbox, and MS isn’t in a big hurry to dilute that fact. And Gearbox, no doubt, will throw in some new features and surprises for us PC folks.
Frankly, I’m not too worried about Halo for the PC. Everyone talks about how Doom3 and Unreal2 will already be on the scene, but honestly folks, has there been anything that you’ve seen of those two games that indicate that they will be nothing more than a fancier-looking Quake III and a fancier-looking Unreal2?
For me, gameplay rules supreme, and I’ve yet to see any PC FPS even come close to doing what Halo does so amazingly well on so many different levels. Perfect single-player… Insanely perfect co-op multiplayer… Brilliant (and hilarious) AI… Top-Notch Weapons, Physics, Vehicles, Seamless Indoor/Outdoor environements… Perfect Atmsophere… Best Music and Sound… No Bosses… and The Best Fucking End Sequence That Screams “Why The Hell Didn’t Anyone Think Of That Before?”
So yeah, I’m gonna buy Xbox for the PC.
Ooops, I meant a fancier looking Unreal, not a fancier looking Unreal2.
Oh yeah, and Halo looks awesome too. It’s graphical art style works perfectly for that game.
Ugh, and gotta learn to type slower, or to slow down the thoughts in my head…
I meant, yeah, I’m going to buy Halo for the PC.
I bet “XBox for the PC” will only run on Windows XP.
Ok, but when you say Doom3 might just be a fancier looking shooter, give it its dues. Doom3 will be an INCREDIBLE looking shooter. The realtime gameplay looks like FMV. It’s hard to think of any shooters that aren’t just better looking versions of Quake anymore. Half-Life had lots of character, but some people still argued it was just Quake tweaked a bit (I disagree, but that’s another story). What did Halo add that you think makes it unique in this regard?
I’m not saying that Halo added anything per se.
What I’m saying is that Halo is the very rarest of games… one that does everything spectacularly well. It’s a convergence of excellence, from the single player, multiplayer, graphics, AI, physics, design, pacing, sound, music, engine, etc, etc, etc.
Yes, Doom3 will look spectacular, but will the actual gameplay itself exhibit any kind of similar leap?
Guys, if a game is programmed specifically for Xbox, it’s going to be coded a whole lot differently than it would be for the PC. Particularly with regards to memory management and file access.
DirectX is just an API, and it’s even customized a bit for the Xbox. It’s not like it’s HTML or something. It’s like saying that a PC-only game that uses OpenGL would be trivial to port to the Mac. After all, they have OpenGL on the Mac, and the game was programmed in C++, right?
They never should have told the public that the Xbox uses a kernal based on Windows 2000, or a version of DirectX. It has just totally confused the public about how similar/different the architectures are.
You can make a game engine that is easily portable between the two, sure. And going from PC to Xbox isn’t that big a leap. But going from a Xbox-specific engine to PC takes a lot more work than you guys realize.
Oh, and before you say “but Halo was a PC/Mac game first!”:
Bungie completely scrapped the engine and overall game design when they switched to Xbox. They wrote the engine over basically from scratch just for Xbox, and changed it from a large-scale multiplayer-plus-AI “one seamless world” thing to a level-based single-player story driven game. It’s like they started over with the same concept art.
I’m not saying that’s why it should take so long to port. They could have had it done in a year if they really wanted to and if they jumped on it immediately (and if Bungie did the port). Part of it is marketing, naturally.
I really hope they do more than just add internet multiplayer and some more multiplayer maps. I’d love to see them spruce up the artwork a bit, and liven up the three very repetitive locations later in the game as well.
Part of the reason it is taking so long is that Bungie wanted some time off after rushing to get the original ready for the XBox launch. They said they would wait a while before even starting work on the PC version. That Gearbox is doing it (who are they again?) causes more problems because they didn’t do the original game (or did they in some way? if so, pretend I didn’t say that!). I don’t really care. Since I haven’t played Halo it doesn’t bother me to wait, even though I am looking forward to it. The vehicle combat in particular looks fun, though I think I will get a similar experience (maybe better) from Battlefield 1942.
Gearbox did the Half-Life: Opposing Force expansion pack (among other things).
Ports can be a bit tricky, except that I suspect most of the assets (artwork, sound, level design, scripting, game logic, etc.) will transfer over fairly easily. The only tricky part is the hardware specific stuff, which for a PC versino of the game would probably mean reworking the handful of Xbox-specific DirectX calls.
The reason the PC and Mac ports got contracted out is because MS has got Bungie working like mad on the Halo2 project, which from what I understand is both a sequel and designed to support Xbox Live.
Gearbox does some good work, and I’m sure they’re gonna do a fine job. Hell, I’m assuming they’ve already got the code, so that means they’ve got a full year to do the port, which should be plenty of time. They won’t have to rush it out.
Gearbox did Tony Hawk 3 for PC…
Which is TERRIBLE on the net.[/b]
We’re looking at a lot more than a few Xbox-specific function calls.
Did Bungie use a scripting language for their AI, in-level scripting events, etc? If so, they only need to port over the main engine. If they were explicitly coded, that’s more of an issue. Especially if their timing relies on the speed of the processor (not a nutty thing to do in the console world).
It’s not the DX calls that are troublesome. It’s the whole memory management and file system thing. Making good use of UMA makes things VERY different than a PC/Mac. When both your grahics chip and CPU can alter the exact same data sitting in the same RAM locations, you can do some very nifty things, but it’s also totally unlike the PC/Mac’s “send it to the video card and never get it back” method.
Then they have to make the main engine render to multiple resolutions, build in options menus for graphics/sound/key bindings/network settings, change the control for the keybaord/mouse, build an in-game server browser (hopefully!), change all the AI behaviors (movement rates and such) to make it harder since everyone will have a keyboard/mouse…
And then there’s compatibility with all the various PC and Mac hardware. And the sound system, which instead of coding directly to the MCPX will have to be generalized for the extremely broad capabilities of modern PCs. Oh, and they gotta add in the ability to load lower-res mip maps instead of the big textures so it scales to low-end or low-memory machines. Same with the audio samples.
Oh, and file/resource loading off a PC’s hard drive is going to be very different form the Xbox, where it was caching a big hunk of the DVD to the hard drive for each “chapter.”
And so on and so forth. It’s a lot of work to go from a very Xbox-centric game with a “for Xbox only” engine to the PC. Not 18 months of work, but a lot nonetheless. Had Bungie developed the Xbox game with a more generalized engine in mind, it would go much faster. Unreal Championship could be ported to the PC in like three months.
Then there’s potential enhancements. Are they going to make it mod-able? (PLEASE!) That requires some engine changes. Release the tools/game code? Change level design? Add new multiplayer maps?
For the curious, Gearbox:
and of course Halo PC.
They also did the Half-Life port to Dreamcast which never saw the light of day but was apparently all but on store shelves.
–Dave
Captivation was doing that Half-Life port for Gearbox…it was about 97% done, but since the DC was pretty much dead, the publisher (Sierra) didn’t want to bother with production.