Super Facinating! (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, January 05, 2017, 13:34 (2878 days ago) @ Ragashingo

It started with what ended up being a faulty assumption though.

At the time Halo was created, the consoles were very different than PCs, and so to see how your game 'really' looked you had to look at it on a console. The original Xbox had a custom GPU that wasn't available on PCs, and had some differences with file management and IO etc.

So with Halo, you had two engines: one for the game, and the other for development. The development engine would just load up all the TAGs and let you edit them, but this process was too slow at run time for the actual game since there were tens of thousands of them, but fine in a dev environment on a PC. For the game engine, instead of looking for and loading tens of thousands of TAGs, a kind of monolithic file was created which could be sequentially read.

This worked fine, but you needed to save everything down to this format, transfer over to the XBOX, then run the game. However, it made small update patches hard to create.

For Destiny, they thought it would be nice to not have to do this. It turns out, that doesn't really matter anymore though, since the current consoles are so close to PCs, you can essentially see what your game looks like on your PC development environment. It turned out to be kind of a non problem.