Bungie Sightings

Porting Xbox games to Mac made easier

Products assist developers porting Xbox and Windows games to Mac - Macminute.com.

This is very interesting news. I wonder what companies have plans or are currently working on porting some Xbox games to the Mac. The more the merrier, I always say. :)

Of course, Peter Tamte's company, Destineer Studios, is specifically about porting Microsoft Studio game titles to the Mac. They've done a bang up job so far. His group is handling the port of Halo to the Mac and earlier this year I had a chance to talk to him about landing such an 'important' port. You can read a summary of that interview here. I recently corresponded with him and he's happy to tell me that the port is still on schedule.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bungie history, Peter used to be Bungie's VP of Publishing, back when Bungie was a company unto itself.

Old Bungie.com Gallery is Back!

For the longest time (since the physical move to Redmond, maybe even a little before) the old Bungie.com screenshot gallery perl script has been non-functional. Folks who like to dream up conspiracy theories thought it had to do with some sort of Microsoft draconian measure. "YOU SHOW OLD PRODUCT, YOU DIE!" or some such nonsense. Others, who just got into Bungie via Halo, never got a chance to bask in the coolness of the official Bungie screenshot gallery.

Well looks like the Bungie Online team finally got around to figuring out what the problem was with the script, tweaked a *single* character, and now it's all back. Of course, they announced that they fixed it, but do they give you any direct links to the gallerys? Guess they're busy enough that they couldn't do that. :)

Well, that's where we step in. Below are all 9 screenshot galleries by product. I doubt there are others, but you never know. :)

Minotaur Screenshots (3)

Pathways into Darkness Screenshots (8)

Marathon Screenshots (7)

Marathon 2 Screenshots (7)

Marathon Infinity Screenshots (7)

Abuse Screenshots (7)

Myth: The Fallen Lords Screenshots (11)

Myth 2: Soulblighter Screenshots (13)

Myth: The Total Codex Screenshots (7)

If you're wondering why the Halo screenshots aren't listed, it's because those are running over at Bungie.net, and they've never been down. Halo Screens are here.

Okay, I guess you're wondering about Pimps at Sea. Yes, it's a 'sekrit' page, but what the hell, here's the gallery, but there are only 3 screens. I wonder if we'll ever get to see some new ones?

[b.net] Designing for Carnage

Designing for Carnage
11/22/02

Mac OS X Hell

I'm a computer consultant, specifically for Mac systems, though I'm familiar with PCs as well. I've been really into OSX this past year or so... it's pretty rock solid, and has not given me any real headaches... until just recently :( What follows is a pretty racy message by me, that I posted to a private list so I could vent after spending the better part of the day trying to get my laptop back in order. I cleaned it up some, esp. my mixing of tenses (hope I straightened all that out - how embarrassing), and added some further thoughts on what we thought went wrong.

Backups saved me from completely losing my mind, but some stuff was still permanently lost. Consider it a cautionary tale of hard drive space and OSX...

Sometime this afternoon I noticed that I couldn't save some small text files that I was working on. I had Mozilla, Mail, BBedit, and maybe a few other programs opened. I was trying to save a new document I had open in bbedit, but it said it couldn't because the drive was full. I checked my drive's stats and it plainly showed 80mb free. I had just installed this new copy of BBedit lite 6.1 so I figured maybe something was wrong with permissions or something. Anyway, to test things out (me, being this supposed techie) I tried to duplicate a file. I selected a file on my desktop, some small rinky-dinky little text clipping, and hit command-D for duplicate. Nothing. No file duplication, no warning or error message, nada. I thought maybe the desktop didn't refresh fast enough (has happened before) so I opened my home folder, and then the desktop folder. Still nothing. Now I thought maybe it's the keyboard shortcut I'm using. I mean, come on, I'm asking it to duplicate a 4k file, how hard can that be? Still no go. So now I'm wondering just what the fuck is going on and I option-dragged a document from one folder to another... forcing it to copy not move. This time I got the "can't do it, drive full" error.

!!

80MB free and the system says it's full??? So, I decided to play it safe and dump a few largish files to an external f/w drive. I freed up about 500mb, thinking that should be more than enough, and it is, because now I could duplicate with no problems.

No more than maybe 10 minutes have passed since this whole thing started, and I still had a bunch of programs open, if you recall. I noticed that Mail was acting kind of funny. No new mail was coming in, so I figured I should restart the machine and get it all refreshed. As I hit restart, I should've taken a good look at my desktop, with it's beautiful Halo 2 Desktop pics, the super-tiny icons that are tightly organized on the right hand side, the dock with all my preferred icons and such. I wasn't going to see those again for a few hours. :(

When the machine was done rebooting, my jaw hit the floor as I'm staring at the default OSX setup. My icons on the desktop are now all piled on top of each other, and my dock is generic! I started to get nervous now, so I launched Mail. What's the first thing I see? (I'm paraphrasing) "Welcome to Mail, you have no accounts setup, please create one" FUCK! I start to imagine the worst, all my recent emails are gone, and mayhaps even worse... thankfully I leave emails on the server for a week. Now I launch Mozilla. Cookies... gone, Bookmarks... gone, all prefs in general.... gone.

Now I had backups of most of this, and actually, after a few hours of somersaults and some backflips, the only thing I've permanently lost are my most recent set of bookmarks, which still sucks as I had collected quite a few dozen important (to me) urls over the last few weeks. I got back all my emails, I re-tweaked my finder prefs, and I even had a fairly recent backup of my cookies, but what really kicks my ass is how the damn OS didn't tell me a damn thing about the drive getting dangerously close to full, even at a setting as ridiculously high as 80mb.

With hindsight, it seems apparent to me that any program that was currently open and that had open files off the 'full' hard drive, tried to save the last state of those preferences at some point, couldn't write them back because the drive was on the fritz, and instead of warning me, just saved empty pref files. My Mail prefs, Mozilla prefs, cookies, bookmarks, finder prefs, etc... all got zeroed out. Why it didn't initially warn me when I was trying to duplicate just a simple little text clipping, I have no frikkin' clue.

Let this be a warning for those of you running OSX. Keep an eye on your OS drive's free space, and backup your library/plist folder alot more often than usual.

---

On further reflection, it was noted that 80mb is the size of an OSX swap disk file. It's possible that the VM engine in OSX got mangled somewhat, and did not want to take that last bit of space and leave the drive at 0% full. The strange thing is that I recall with absolute certainty that I've had the laptop as low as 20mb before and with no problems whatsoever.

What's infuriating is that even if the OS thought the drive was full, WHY didn't other programs or the OS itself warn me that I was close to losing data if I kept filling up the drive?

I checked the drive out with my trusty DiskWarrior, and Disk First Aid, etc., and nothing out of the ordinary was found. Whacky!

[b.net] Picking Your Perfect Login

Picking Your Perfect Login
11/15/02

[b.net] Seventh Column Theme Contest

Seventh Column Theme Contest
11/14/02

Marathon Launched

On this day, 207 years in the future, "the grandest technological achievement of all of mankind," the colony ship Marathon will be launched from from the orbit of Mars to begin its historic mission to Tau Ceti. According to the Bungie Future Calendar (BFC) the Marathon will be launched on November 11, 2209.

We implore all interested parties to not wait until the last minute before buying your tickets. During the voyage, Bungie Sightings will maintain a hospitality suite with complementary Mida martinis and Misriah food chits. Patrons will be entertained by the musical stylings of Gheritt White and the Waves. We look forward to seeing you there.

Gathering Experiment

I'm leaving in a few minutes to visit a friend who's turning 50 and is having a big party. He has his own Xbox but has never played Multiplayer, so I told him I'd bring mine along with some extra controllers and see if a bunch of us old male geeks could get into the swing of things.

From my point of view, Halo should absolutely be the surprise hit of the evening. We'll see though. When we were emailng back and forth about the party, I offer to bring my video projector, but he put the kibosh on that, implying it was overboard. OMG! :)

OK, here's a quickie report on what transpired:

First off, it was fun to see my friend who I hadn't seen in a few years, though we had stayed in touch via email and cellphone. He loves Halo, but only had one controller. He didn't even realize you could do coop play. The multiplayer option on the main screen implied to him standard LAN play, not coop play. Well, after playing a few rounds of Coop on T&R, he promised to buy another controller for either of his two boys to play with him next time.

He first showed me a savespot on T&R/Legendary that he himself has been stuck on for the longest time. It's right before you approach the transporter to the covie ship. The thing is, he checkpointed just as he was running between the two areas, as fresh elites and grunts had landed one side, and the battalion of covies were waiting on the other. He was down to 2 bars of health, and was carrying an empty sniper rifle and AR, and he had just picked up invisibility. Before I even saw the situation I told him I was sure that I could finish it for him.

Me and my big mouth...

About an hour later I was nowhere closer to finishing off the level, or even triggering the next checkpoint, which would be right before the 2 hunters come down from the ship! I tried everything, but it was one tough mutha of a situation to be in! The thing is, I knew it could be done, it would just take alot of patience and careful planning. Man, that was fun though... I love trying to beat the unbeatable.

Anyway, multiplayer was fun, although we never bothered to unpack my own Xbox. He has his house wired but there was never more than 4 folks interested in playing MP, and the other TV was upstairs, so it would've been a little frustrating since all these newbies needed tips on what to do. So we all played on a big Sony Wega TV he had.

Simply stated, I owned them over and over again. 2 of the players were my friend's sons. But one player was another adult that was an avid gamer. Had never played Halo but had heard alot about it. He did his best, and was getting into the swing of things. Actually came up with some good counter strats to mine on Blood Gulch CTF. I noticed that he would go straight for the sniper rifle, so I think he was trying to play like CS or Wolf: role-based FPS, but he quickly learned you could adopt any role you wanted. I think he was impressed at the end, though I could not help but school them all.

My friend and I kept playing coops, even after his party guests had left, so he was definitely gun-ho about the whole thing. I think I left around 2AM.

I had a great time, and even if all I contributed was a bunch of extra controllers, it was fun to watch someone else's addiction to Halo take hold again. :)

Halo offers Good Vibrations?

While browsing plastic.com, I noticed a link to a, hmm, interesting review of the game Rez, made for Playstation2.

I've heard alot of good things about the game, a sort of non-violent trance-music game (if memory serves, Marty O, Bungie's Audio/Music man, has mentioned playing it) made by some of the geniuses over at Sega. If I could get my brother, the PS2 owner of the family, to rent/purchase it, I'd love to give it a go.

However, after reading the article, you may find, like I did, new reasons for getting this game. Especially with the special 'trance vibrator' made exclusively for the game. Girl gamers or boy gamers with girls that are a bit into the kink, take note: this is a game made for you.

Quite simply, the 'trance vibrator' is exactly what it says it is. A vibrating pak that buzzes and groans as you play the game. The more you play the game and 'progress' up the levels, the more intense the vibrating. Do I need to paint you a picture? How about photographs then? Well, there here ya go.

NOTE: Link above is not work-safe, nor young-kids safe. No explicit nudity is shown however.

If I may add to this particular topic, it seems the folks involved with creating the game in the first place knew exactly what they were up to, just read what some of the women in their staff have to say about the game on their own website:

Mineko Okamura / senior assistant producer
"I also have a lot of private episodes concerning the production of Rez, and it has become a very special game for me. I hope a lot of people will be able to play Rez, and I really think they should! Please don't judge it singularly by it's appearance. Play it first and you'll see what I mean!"

Yu Omura / assistant director
"It taught me many many many things."

:-)

So what does this have to do with Halo? Jane, the author of the article, a girl-gamer if there ever was one, mentioned that 'feeling good' and rumble-paks are not anything new for the curious girl gamer. To wit:

"I did discover that Halo was a pretty good game for this (although for not much else), because as the gunner in the Warthog, you have unlimited ammo and you can just park yourself somewhere and rat-tat-tat to your heart's content."

So, while I, of course, disagree with her assessment of Halo, I'm happy she was able to get something out of it. The more wicked side of me wonders if there are any girl Halo fans in our community that could spend the time and inspect different aspects of the game (weapons, in-engine cut-scene FX, explosions, etc.) and rate how they rate on the 'pleasure-meter.' It seems obvious that the LAG on the back of the Jeep is a 10, but how does the rest compare? I would imagine The Maw, with all its explosions and laser-fire, would rate quite highly. Especially as a co-op game, since such vibrations travel across both controllers, letting one of you drive and the other sit back and enjoy the show. Ahem.

So the next time you're trying to get your girlfriend or wife to play Halo, let her ride Gunner, remind her that the ammo is 'free' and to just press the trigger to her heart's content. :)

Crocodile Bungie

Some of the more hardcore Bungie fans down under have been putting out some very cool videos lately. Our brother site, HBO, has already highlighted their recent "Speed" video (Halo Done Quick style) but I noticed a few days ago that they had previously put out a Myth video that is equally as stunning. A blast of wight and satchel charges set to the tune of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture!

Their Crocodile Myth movie is listed here and is available in a 20mb and 9mb file size. You'll notice that there are plenty of other fine films available as well. I'm not sure which individuals are responsible for the movie, they did a fantastic job though.

Inky, the guy that runs the Crocodile Bungie website and 7th Column fanclub, has been instrumental in getting alot of Aussie Bungie fans to come together. I've also had the pleasure of meeting him and his family many moons ago when he visited the states here to attend a Macworld Expo. He's a great guy and I hope he and his mates down under continue to hoist the Bungie flag upside-down as it were. :)