Stupid Halo TricksWhile posting Episode 73, I mentioned a breakthrough I had during the production of the video. In any game engine, you're going to run into things that are great for gameplay, but not so great for machinima. In the specific case of Red vs Blue, we ran into a particular problem when the game moved from Halo 1 to Halo 2. With the increase in the graphics of the game came changes in atmosphere, particularly in the area of lighting. On some levels, there was dynamic lighting, like the overhead lamps in Zanzibar's hallways. However, there was a major change on Blood Gulch (now Coagulation) that siginificantly impacted our goofy little cartoon. Take a look at shots of red base from the two games:  Halo 2 looks awesome, right? Much greater detail, no creepy-looking stick trees. A dramatic improvement for both gameplayers and machinimators, right? Not so fast my friend. Notice that Red Base is completely in the shade of the mountainside. It's totally in shadow. While moody lighting is awesome for gameplay, it was really hurting our ability to write scenes for the Reds this season. Why? Take a look at this:  This is a scene from Episode 73 featuring Grif and Donut standing on Red Base. While the shadows are awesome when playing, they really affect the color of the charatcers (as shadows should). In this case, Donut's "Light Red" looks remarkably purple. When all your characters look the same (as they do in RvB), color becomes pretty important. And since the sun in the Halo engine is static, we didn't have any options for changing this and had to either put up with darkened Red Base scenes or shoot outside the base where the sun was shining. On top of that, the interior of both bases were utterly devoid of natural light. Our only illumination came from the hole in the roof or from the cool blue glow of the grav lift. This small change was really starting to affect our writing. So, what to do? A lot of my downtime is spent trying to "break" the Halo engine. I know that it's working with the finite resources of the Xbox hardware and the guys at Bungie are better than anyone at squeezing every last drop out of the processors, but finite resources are finite resources. That means you can bend the edges sometimes. For example, in Halo we discovered that if you had more than four characters in a game you couldn't use headlamps or have infinite grenades. Why? I figure because explosions and dynamic lighting are harder on the graphics hardware. So instead of droppping frame rates, those things are not options in higher population games. In Halo 2, we began to notice the same types of things. For instance, if you have five characters visible on screen at time, the game starts to turn off the player (and vehicle) shadows. These are typically the things that drive us nuts while shooting. In the case of the lighting problem, they ultimately led to this, a cool trick to modify the lighting of Halo 2, anytime, anywhere:  Let there be light. As you can see, Donut and Grif are now the brighter, more saturated colors we love. This little trick pretty much saved Red Base, much the same way that the "no look bug" in Halo made the entire series possible. In further testing of the trick, we tried different characters and models with great success, such as the Elite on Midship:   It even works on vehicles:   And on objects, like the flag (the bomb is it's own light source).   This lighting trick even allows you to have the atmospheric dynamic lighting effects applied on top of it. Take a look at this short clip from the lower hallway on Lockout. The stuttering lights are added to the brightened character lighting. Lockout Dynamic Lighting Test (WMV 2.4 MB) The technique even has variability, which allows us to dim the lighting to varying degrees. This gives us a lot more flexibility when deciding what "sets" to write scenes for and opens up locations that would have been startlingly different when cut together with other locations. So, what's this technique? Well this wouldn't be Red vs Blue without a cliffhanger ending. Part of the fun of all this is to try and figure this stuff out. So bust out your Xbox or 360 and see if you can figure out how we did it. First one to post in my comments a full explanation of how to replicate this effect will win some kind of prize. As always, this was done with a retail version of Halo 2, using a standard Xbox/Xbox 360 system. No modding or hacking was done to achieve this. Also, I would never intentionally share any information that could compromise Xbox Live matches. I know of absolutley no way that this trick could be used to boost the lighting of enemies in an online game. While it can be done over Xbox Live, the target has to help. |
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