Bungie Sightings

Fanfest exclusives start to appear

E3 is just 2 weeks away and as it gets closer so does the Bungie Fanfest. As is the tradition from previous fanfests, there are going to be exclusives that only folks that attend the event will get to experience. Hey, Bungie has to reward those of you that are traveling far (some from Italy!) just to sniff Chucky's sleeve.

SketchFactor has already announced that a surprise mystery guest will attend. Who do you think it is? Speculation is running rampant. heh :)

But on to today's new announcement: It is Bungie's great honor to welcome the guys behind the RedvsBlue videos. Not only will they be around to sign your girlfriend's breasts, but DVD-quality versions of their videos will be playing on the big screen! And here's the kicker: They are working on a special video just for the fanfest. The premise for this "Special E3 Video" is so funny that even the folks at Bungie can't wait to see it!

This is truly shaping up to be the Fanfest to beat all Fanfests. How will Bungie top it next year? One can only wonder, but I'm bringing my secret decoder ring just in case.

Halo: The Flood a Bestseller

According to the Publisher's Weekly, Halo: The Flood makes its debut on the Mass Market Paperback Bestseller's List at position number 11! Note that this isn't just sci-fi and fantasy books, but every paperback book out there. Stay tuned to Bungie Sightings for more news on the sales figures as they come available... and if you haven't bought a copy, what are you waiting for? Do it.

Thanks to Brannon Boren for the tip-off. Brannon is about to leave Microsoft for his 100-day forced 'vacation' and we at BS hope he has a nice time off.

[b.net] Interview with Frank O'Connor

Interview with Frank O'Connor
04/25/03

Sketchfactor talks with OXM's Editor in Chief about shizzle, pizza, and a bunch of other stuff concerning Halo 2. Worth a read to get some idea of what might or might not be on the cards at E3. Maybe.

Matt reclaims his Soul

In a surprise announcement today, Matt Soell gave his last farewells to the Bungie community. For the past eight years, he fulfilled his business card to become the unmistakable voice of Bungie throughout their rocky rise to fame and glory. It's just a shame he won't be around to see them take over. Or will he?

Matt has seen the company rise from humble beginnings and kept the naysayers at bay amid cries of outselling, while throughout, the Bungie Way has been safe in his charge. We wish Matt all the best for the future as he packs away the legions of hippopotami, his change-filled pants and the trusty goatee comb known only as Herbert.

The Plan will live on.

Whazzzup?!

As is no doubt clear, when PD takes a break from the site, this place turns into a ghost town. His energy and enthusiasm for all things Bungie is plain for all to see and I would like to trumpet my appreciation for his presence here to all corners of Bungie fandom.

That said, I'd like to let you all know that I am working on stuff that's soon to pay off. First, there's the Pillar of Art contest. Yesterday we received our first entry, and I'm sure more will be coming over the next few days. The deadline is May 16 and I'm very anxious to see the kind of work Halo fans will produce in natural media. The entry I'm looking at right now from Richard White is quite impressive.

Second there's the upcoming Bungie Fanfest to be held the night of May 15 on the floor of the E3 Expo. Of all the fanfests so far, this is destined to be the biggest and baddest one yet. The seats have been filled, but there is a standby database where you can still sign up and hopefully get a chance to attend. Some surprises are being worked on and there may be an announcement soon to update folks on what to expect.

And there you have it!

Alain Roy Interview

Often times, in my spare moments, say, on a plane to spy on Bungie's secret nudist retreat in New Zealand, I read the Marathon Scrapbook to get a feel for what Bungie was like in the poor ole golden days. This is also where I get my ideas about which ex-Bungie I should next stalk. Unfortunately, ex-Bungie employees are getting harder and harder to come by - probably due to the overwhelming shame of not being associated with them. Frustrated, one day I threw the Scrapbook away from me and tripped, striking my head against the Bungie #1 Fan trophy I had stolen. When I came to, a passage from the Scrapbook came to mind:

Alain Roy wrote Marathon's Byzantine networking code and received a Quadra 660av as compensation.

"What kind of fool would get paid with a Quadra 660av for working on the worlds most influential game?" I wondered aloud. At that precise moment my maid, Miguelita, chose to remind me that the same time Alain got that computer, I was using a Macintosh LC with that weird 65 DPI screen. Point taken.

Still, with the thought of Alain Roy firmly planted in my mind, I resolved to track him down. I pulled out my trusty web browser and prepared to take a great risk. It had been said that some men have died doing this, but I thought it was worth it. With my forehead beading sweat, I typed "Alain Roy" in Google and fatefully hit the enter key. As luck would have it, I didn't die and I breathed a sigh of relief. Also, my hard work had paid off, his homepage was at the top of the results. He shoots! He scores!

A quick plane trip to Wisconsin and I found Alain in the computing room of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was wearing a blue satin wizard's robe, complete with pointy hat. Although he was busy turning graduate students into rabbits, I interrupted him.

Alain, in the Marathon Scapbook it says you got a Quadra 660av...

I received the Quadra 660av as compensation for doing the port of Pathways Into Darkness to the PowerPC. I received small amounts of money for working on Marathon, and at some point after that I received a PowerMac 7200 as a bonus.

Agh! That Hamish! Another error found in his Scrapbook! Excuse me, I heard that Bungie hired you because you fiddled with Pathways.

One of the reasons I was hired to work on Marathon was because I broke the initial copy protection on Pathways Into Darkness. And maybe because I could write "300:A9 41 20 ED FD 60" without looking anything up.

What it was like when Bungie was beginning Marathon development?

I was at Bungie in the summer of 1994. There were just a few people at that time: Jason, Alex, Ryan, Reg, Doug, Greg ( sometimes), and me. Tuncer Deniz used to stop by sometimes, but he was at Inside Mac Games at that time. Bungie was in the middle of Marathon's development. They had just recently moved into their offices in Pilsen, a neighborhood in the near south side of Chicago. Jason and I lived both in Hyde Park, so he would pick me up in the mid-morning and we'd work until midnight or so. I was usually wiped out by 11:00pm. After a couple of weeks, I refused to work on Sundays, like Jason and Ryan, so I could preserve my sanity.

When I first joined, Marathon looked a lot like Pathways Into Darkness. Doom came out (a beta?), and after some discussion Marathon was reworked to be much cooler. For instance, walls didn't have to be at ninety degree angles. It slowed things down, but it was worthwhile.

I was the bottom-rung programmer, so I didn't work on the sexy graphics or sound. I worked on the code that let you do replays and demos, a lot of the user interface, networking, profiling, and more.

I remember one time that Jason told me I should profile the code, so that we could see where we were spending a lot of time. Maybe we could tweak the graphics code and get an extra .5 fps before the next demo. I spent a while profiling the code, and it turned out that we were spending 30% of our time in some little utility function that wasn't drawing graphics, making sound, or doing monster AI - it updated elevators or something like that. Jason didn't believe it, so I double-checked everything. Sure enough, 30% in that little function. We fixed that, and the game got one or two frames per second faster. Lesson: profile your code before you optimize it.

Once the networking code started to work, we had a lot of evening games. The network games were tested a lot. I usually lost. I'm lousy at video games, as much as I like them.

Sometimes, Jason and I would hang out in a park. He had a laptop, and would work on his latest changes to the rendering code while I relaxed in the sun.

I remember Ryan trying to debug some of the rendering code and failing. Jason made a new mode for the code, so that it displayed details of what it was doing on the screen. He debugged it in a day. This was a huge lesson for me: spending time building tools can save you time in the long run, and get you better results.

Was there something in the game that you liked, but didn't make it?

When the engine was improved to be non-orthogonal, like Doom, the doors got a lot less cool. The old doors had cooler lighting and shadows and had more variety of shapes.

Interesting. Besides development, what was Bungie like?

La Cucina's gorditas and burritos with their green sauce were consumed endlessly. I still miss their gorditas. I still remember the awesome food at Nick's Fishmarket and the whole dead cow carcasses at Lawry's. Wow.

People got fired a lot. "You checked in code that doesn't build? You're fired." We gave people a piece of PVC tubing when they got the shaft.

Really?!? I hadn't heard that! About how many people were fired while you were there? So Alex and Jason were vicious taskmasters after all? I knew it!

That was a joke.

Oh.

You know, I would do something slightly stupid, like some stupid bug. Jason would tell me I was fired, and I give him the finger and keep on working. Same with "the shaft" - definitely a joke.

Hmm. So they were sweethearts after all? Damn! I was looking for dirt...

I got along with Alex just fine. I had nothing but good relations with Jason. We were always very friendly and he treated me well. When I wasn't at Bungie, I rarely heard from him, but he also worked insane hours. In my experience, Jason is one of the most brilliant and creative people I have ever met, and I've meet some great people. He wrote brilliant code while developing a great storyline. Not many people can do that. Heck, he did at least half the artwork for Pathways in addition to the story and all of the code.

Back to you. What happened after Marathon?

I did do some consulting work for Marathon 2 and Myth, but I was barely in touch with anyone other than Jason, and didn't hang around much. Other than the Christmas parties, and that doesn't give much insight into things.

When I was at Bungie, the web was only just beginning. I remember telling Alex that Bungie should have a web site. It was only 1994, and he was unconvinced. They had an AOL presence, after all. Not long after I left, he must gave gotten it, and they got a web page.

Rats. I was hoping you had some idea who the Bungie Webmaster was. Oh well. Now that I think of it, there is another Bungie mystery I wonder about; a game called Odyssey. Do you know anything about it?

After making Minotaur, Jason started on another similar game with a top down view. He stopped it and made Pathways instead. Richard Rouse inherited the code and made Odyssey. Odyssey was a pretty cool game, though the graphics weren't fancy. It never sold many copies, I don't think. I wrote about 20 lines of code for Odyssey though. It was an LDEF, to make a list look nicer.

Richard and I eventually were hired to turn the Marathon engine into another game, Damage Inc.

Ah, one of the rare Marathon 2 ports! Yes, Marathon has turned into the Game That Wouldn't Die. Have you seen Aleph One?

I haven't seen it in a couple of years. I was impressed by the amount of time and effort that people put into it.

Are you surprised that there are a fair number of people out there keeping Marathon alive?

Given the wide variety of things that people do, I am completely unsurprised. It's pleasing that people are keeping it alive. We don't always need the latest game to have fun. Heck, I play cribbage, which has been around for 400 years.

Now you have moved to bigger computing issues - from Marathon network code to large scale networks of computers, namely, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Condor Project. On a philosophical level, is writing Marathon network code and architecting a distributed computing methodology related?

I think that we can consistently will both of these activities, so according to Kant's categorical imperative of morality, they are both moral actions. If I understand it correctly, which I probably don't.

Say what?

It's an interesting question. In some ways, they are very similar, in other ways, they are totally different.

One thing that we care about in the Condor project is making reliable programs. Reliable algorithms (two-phase commit, persistent job queues...) and reliable code. When writing the Marathon networking code, we cared a great deal about making it work reliably. In both projects, there was a feeling that we had to do things correctly, and as well as we could. In that way, they are similar.

Marathon was a very tightly constrained environment that didn't rely on a lot of other software. A great deal of the grid computing efforts these days fewer constraints on the environment and have a larger number of dependencies. MOP relies on Condor-G, which relies on Globus, which relies on a batch system, which relies on an operating system... Life is way more complicated in grid computing than it was in the Marathon networking code.

Sony has announced that the PlayStation 3 will use grid computing technology to make online games more responsive. Do you think this is the way to go for multiplayer games?

I've read some of the announcements for that, and I was confused by them. As far as I can tell, they're going to use OGSA (web services on steroids) for communication between some of the components. Is it between individual playstations? Between servers hosting the games? Part of the problem is that there are as many definitions of "grid computing" as there are grid computing researchers. I suspect that Sony is really saying, "we're using an open protocol to communicate between playstations". Maybe I'm just cynical though.

Can you foresee any gaming applications for Condor?

Not directly. Condor is aimed as doing high-throughput computing: there is no focus on high-performance or low latency. That is, if you have a lot of long running jobs to run, we will run them reliably for a long time. We won't get the same peak performance that you can get for short bursts of time on a highly tuned cluster, but we will also get the work done reliably, which matters more in the long run.

Here's my favorite Condor story. Shortly after I was hired in 2001, I heard about some people that had just set up a cluster. They installed Condor on it and submitted hundreds of jobs. But the cluster was still unreliable, so they spent the next several days fixing nodes, fixing networks, etc. One day, they got email from Condor saying, "your jobs have finished", and they were flabbergasted. No, we didn't get high performance, but many systems wouldn't have finished the jobs at all, so we got high-throughput.

Condor is cool, and I love games. But I don't see a direct link between the two, at least at runtime. It can be very useful if you have lots of advance computation to do. For instance, at least one special effects studio uses Condor to control rendering on their cluster. An artist says, "render this", and Condor makes sure it gets done. That sort of usage is probably the way that Condor would be the most useful to a game.

I can't help but wonder what it would have been like if all the non-playing people in, say, the Myth chatrooms gave up a smidgen of computing power for those they were actually playing the game.

That may be, but Condor wouldn't be the right way to do it. Given Myth's dependence on fairly low latency, I have a hard time imagining relying on extra computing power that may come or go at any moment, may provide high latency answers, and adds extra complexity to the code. That said, there may be some cool ideas in there.

Alain, thanks! This has been very interesting. By the way, I hear you are you are also an amateur magician. Seen any good ticks lately?

I recently saw a DVD of Rene Lavand, a magician who does fantastic card sleight of hand with just one hand. If anyone did what he does with two hands, it would be beautiful, poetic, and impressive, but he does it with one hand. Arturo Ascanio said, "The most amazing thing about Rene Lavand is that the most amazing thing about Rene Lavand is NOT that he has only one hand." And he's right.

I would have asked more questions but Alain waved his wand and disappeared with a flash accompanied by the sound of a 1200 baud modem. I presumed the interview was at an end. I wished he would have teleported me back home. When I got back on the plane to go home I began flipping through my dog-eared copy of the Marathon Scrapbook. Perhaps I could find Ryan Martell? Last I heard, he was somewhere in the Caribbean pretending to be a pirate.

Halo Bible Updates

According to his journal, Brannon Boren has been hard at work updating the Halo story bible and, rightfully, celebrating the release of Halo: The Flood.

Read on as we summarize what Brannon's been saying.

Friday, March 28th, 2003

...life for the last couple of days has been consumed by Halo: The Flood. My task is to scrub the novel for facts that need to be added into the Halo Story Bible, and then to create the new material (background for new characters, for example). I spent about an hour yesterday pulling the names, ranks, and positions of all the Marine officers out of the book, and arranging them into the org chart for the marine contingent on the Pillar of Autumn.

There are a lot of great new characters in the book, and also expansion of some facets of the setting, so I have a bunch of territory to develop. It covers lots of stuff that's only hinted at in the game - much like the novelization of a film covers events that happened off screen - and also fills in more of the background for the Halo universe. Many of the things I wondered about when playing through the game get directly addressed. The fanboy in me is really gratified :-)

I wish I'd brought my copy of the actual novel home from the office so I could take a MPG of me dancing gleefully around holding my copy (which won't be in stores till April 1st). Unfortunately, I only have my printout in a black notebook, because it lies flat open on my desk that way, which is a lot easier to work with.

A funny thing: almost everyone I know is in the game industry, or doesn't care about games, so none of the stuff I do is a big deal to the people in my direct circle. I don't have any friends who are really impressed that I have the Halo novel long before release, or that I've already got a good idea what's going to happen in the next one, or that I've had the prototype action figures in my hands. I have to keep reminding myself how special the stuff I do is, and how cool it is that I get to do it.

Thanks to Eric for slapping me on the back of the head and making me think about that.

I'll talk more about the book after it comes out - y'know, when it won't get me fired :-) I suspect the HBO Forum will be very busy April 2nd!...

Sunday, March 30th, 2003

Charged through my summarizing work on Halo: The Flood and got through half of Chapter 8. My goal for yesterday was only to get through Chapter 4, so I'm ahead of the game.

That leaves me more time for the extras I'd like to squeeze in, like doing a lot of history on the new characters, more on the ODST "Helljumper" Marines (which Eric will surely want to work on as well), updates to the current characters to explain what's changed after the latest events, and some revisions to the technology sections based on decisions we've made in the course of development. Some of my initial work on AI, for example, needs to be updated based on the things we've now seen AI systems do.

I suppose I'll need to do an update on my write-up for MJOLNIR too. I'm pretty sure Eric will want to handle the new weapons, since that's more his bag than mine, so I'm off the hook for that. I'm really glad to be able to do this, because I've lately become dissatisfied with some of that material, and I've wanted the chance to have another whack at it...

Keep up the good work Brannon and keep us in the loop.

Master and $ervant?

There are times when this reporter wonders how firmly the Microsoft collar is attached to Bungie's neck. The answer may well be that the slave collar is not that tight at all. Case in point: Halo 2: Broken Covenant won't be released in time for the massive wave of Xbox Live subscribers whose yearly contract expires on November 15th. This issue is worth keeping an eye on, especially as the date of doom comes closer.

This and other issues with Xbox live are rather well explained by Chris Morris of CNN Money in the article Trouble ahead for Xbox Live? Thanks to Noah "migraineboy" Brimhall via HBO for the finger pointing.

[b.net] Calling all Fans!

Calling all Fans!
04/02/03

Check out news of the upcoming Bungie FanFest at E3 and read up on details of the latest Bungie contest for juicy prizes and the title of Ultimate Halo Fan.

Bungie Fanfest Announced!

WOOHOO! It's happening! Keep an eye on bungie.net and you should see the formal announcement of the latest crazy shindig perpetrated by the rocking and rolling fools that we all know and love, BUNGIE!!!

HALO PC! HALO 2 MOVIE! HALO XBOX MATCHUPS! FOOD!!! DRINKS!!! WOOOOT!!!

GURPS Halo Removed

I have been forced to take down all GURPS Halo materials from Bungie Sightings because Microsoft sent me a cease and desist letter.

The letter says, in part:

Dear Sir,

Microsoft has received information that the domain listed below, which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering infringing copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted materials owned by Microsoft.

1. Identification of copyrighted works:
Computer program: GURPS HALO images and image translations
Copyright owner: Microsoft Corporation

2. Infringing material or activity found at the following location:
http://bs.bungie.org/mtarchives/000252.html
http://bs.bungie.org/mtarchives/000250.html
http://bs.bungie.org/mtarchives/000247.html

3. Statement of authority: I hereby certify under penalty of perjury that the information in this notice is accurate and that I am authorized to act on behalf of Microsoft, the owner of the copyright(s) in the work(s) identified above. I have a good faith belief that none of the materials or activities listed above has been authorized by Microsoft, its agents, or the law.

We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the materials described above, and thereby prevent the unauthorized distribution of them via your network.

You can see the letter here.