So chances are we're getting more concept art and maybe some more info on the story? Hoping for a campaign trailer.

What would I do with a code sample anyway? A new desktop pic or two? Yes please. :)

Everything looks soooo good!

I'm only 20 minutes in but the amount of quality concept art they must have gone through at this point is incredible. Hundreds of designs alone for that last-city-in-space that they ended up abandoning, and each one of the samples they showed was fucking jaw-droppingly beautiful. Unbelievable. The concept art for this is so good.

- No text -

- No text -

- No text -

- No text -

Yeah even Joe and Chris said it's their favorite.

Heh, I've got a buddy who has been going on and on about wanting to play a Robot in Destiny. He's gonna be stoked now.

Me, I like the Awoken. They're dreamy!

- No text -

I'm really curious about the Awoken. I have a feeling there's going to be some really juicy fiction backing that particular race.

Glad you enjoyed! It's the byproduct of a lot of work from a lot of very hard working people.

That was one of the highlights of the presentation. I want to see how the samller parts of the world are fitted together. And more terrain painting, that was beautiful! Do you think the detail brush actually tesselates the ground to make all the wrinkles or if it's just a normal map?

Would be hilarious if Destiny is full of Halo 4 Impact levels of geometry bullshlapskying.

It would be even funnier if, at the same time, the water was going Halo 3 in full force.

Babe. Magnet. You can be..their knight in shining armor.

- No text -

They had me when they went over their inspirations for the idealistic art. John Harris, Terry Gilliam, etc. Awesome.

I have a feeling I'm going to be a Titan (if I can).

They had me at Tarkovsky.

Leaning toward the warlock. Been bound in armor too long. I want to feel the air.

- No text -

- No text -

- No text -

- No text -

- No text -

I also have ALWAYS loved that original concept art, so it immediately rang that bell, lol.

CAN'T WAIT.

Grim

- No text -

- No text -

This one kind of felt familiar as well, but it's really stretching it.

Red swirling cloaks in sci-fi are forever S'pht, to me.

Hello Mr. Errera! Glad to see you noticed that as well, I was just waiting for such a post. In my case, I noticed This Pose and recognized it quickly. I bet you'll understand when you see it. I've been doing my best to find things like there. I already contacted Hamish Sinclair about a certain Description from Halo: Primordium's Precursor and an "Aristocrat" Character from a prologue of the unfinished Duality game by Double Aught. It's the one in the "Hats off to 819" Secret Net Level for Marathon: Infinity. Recently I also found that for some reason, the Original and Unmodified Marathon symbol appeared in a certain Halo 4: Spartan Ops mission. If you're interested, Here it is.

I'm really looking forward to find more things like these and make up for all the years I've been away. Cheers!

Am I the only one around here wondering why, with all the other engines that were shown that completely outclass what we've seen of destiny so far, Bungie still insists on going with their own engine and not licensing? Say what you will about Bungie but their engine tech has always been middle of the road compared to other contemporary games.

And I should care why when it looks that good, and functions that well?

Am I the only one around here wondering why, with all the other engines that were shown that completely outclass what we've seen of destiny so far, Bungie still insists on going with their own engine and not licensing? Say what you will about Bungie but their engine tech has always been middle of the road compared to other contemporary games.

Meh, why you got to stir up trouble?

Anyway, Bungie's engines have generally held their own graphically while sporting features, like theater mode, or vehicles that didn't suck, that contemporary engines lacked. Have they been the most graphically advanced? Generally not. But there's more to games than graphics. You know, like fun! ;)

Am I the only one around here wondering why, with all the other engines that were shown that completely outclass what we've seen of destiny so far, Bungie still insists on going with their own engine and not licensing? Say what you will about Bungie but their engine tech has always been middle of the road compared to other contemporary games.

Because as much as people insist otherwise, Bungie is not technologically clueless.

First off, a lot of the stuff being shown right now is for the next-gen consoles. Bungie can't take full advantage of those resources at the moment because Destiny is a cross-gen game and has to be able to run on eight-year-old hardware. It's also technically quite ambitious in gameplay, which is going to limit the polish of its visuals.

The more important thing, though, is that Bungie can always tune their engines for the look and feel they're going for.
Halo 3 is a great example of this. There's a ton of design choices, like how the water works and the way some foliage reacts to things, that are costly and subtle but contribute to the game's feel. But on a core engine level, nothing stands about the lighting model. It's unique, and it's fantastic, and it's absurdly expensive and would never have happened if Bungie has gone with a cheap middleware solution.

Bungie's games haven't usually competed at the bleeding edge of battles over the amount of detail in the foreground, and they don't always tick off all the standard graphical checkboxes that every middleware engine ever does... but they generally manage to hold their own well enough, while doing awesome experimental stuff that sets them apart, while nailing their aesthetic vision, while also being very full-featured. If having fewer polygons is what it takes for spartans to go splashy splashy float float down a river, I'm down with it.

Am I the only one around here wondering why, with all the other engines that were shown that completely outclass what we've seen of destiny so far, Bungie still insists on going with their own engine and not licensing? Say what you will about Bungie but their engine tech has always been middle of the road compared to other contemporary games.

Maybe because licensing a third-party engine isn't always such a great idea when you're building a multiplayer game. Personally I've never considered Bungie's game engines 'middle of the road'; games like the Call of Duty series have managed a smoother frame rate but usually that comes with a sacrifice to the scope of the environments you're fighting in. But since we're talking about aesthetics here maybe it'd be a good time to remind everyone that this stuff is highly subjective...?

No, you are not the only person who has made a comment similar to this on this forum. You may be the only one who is still making comments like this but, I imagine that someone else will make that comment at some time in the future. There are X billion people alive on the planet, it's inevitable that some of them haven't already raised this issue before and will be along at some time in the future to make it again.

So you have company! :-)

You will need to come up with something far less obvious if you want to be the only one.

-PS It's not such a bad point, it's just old and answered before.

My take on it is that the guys at Bungie are adults and can make their own decisions. Most decisions in programming can be both wrong and right, it's generally not cut and dried. Bungie has weighed up the pros and cons and have decided that they want to maintain their own engine.

343 is an extra datum point. If they continue using it then we know that there are two companies that think that using this engine has merit.

343 has many experienced devs who are used to 3rd party engines, they could switch if they felt that maintaining a proprietary engine wasn't worth the effort and I suppose that they would have less emotional investment in the, formerly, Bungie engine.

Am I the only one around here wondering why, with all the other engines that were shown that completely outclass what we've seen of destiny so far, Bungie still insists on going with their own engine and not licensing? Say what you will about Bungie but their engine tech has always been middle of the road compared to other contemporary games.

I doubt that a licensed engine would suit Destiny's intention of an open, shared, and persistant world. Unreal Engine, for instance, gets a lot more detail but does so by sacrificing scope; maps in Gears of War were more detailed but immensely smaller than their equivalents in Halo. Gamebryo could handle the scale (if you don't mind details fading in from time to time) but I'm not impressed with how it handles character animation myself. I haven't seen much in Frostbite and so will reserve comment.

Also, there are certain business advantages to building your own engine... the pathelogical case being that Silicon Knights vs. Epic brouhaha a few years ago.

-- Steve's fairly confident in the abilities of Bungie's software engineers; they've been walking this tightrope for a couple decades now.

Am I the only one around here wondering why, with all the other engines that were shown that completely outclass what we've seen of destiny so far, Bungie still insists on going with their own engine and not licensing? Say what you will about Bungie but their engine tech has always been middle of the road compared to other contemporary games.

Engine licences can run hundreds of thousands if not millions of $ and sometimes a percentage of revenue too. So there is certainly a cost implication.

You also have to learn someone else's content creation pipeline that is built to either be generic or for a type of game that yours is not. So there is a re-training implication.

Having an engine already up and running from previous projects, that evolves over the course of the development, gives them a space to prototype in rapidly: something that would be set back by having to learn the ins and outs of a new engine and port over all the content.

In-house engine and tools developers at Bungie can create bespoke solutions based upon existing working practices, culture and demands. They can respond quickly, be there in-person to discuss issues, features, work through problems and help the teams.

Maybe their graphics have never been uber-top-of-the-line, they've always looked great, supported the game's mechanics and feel (rather than being 'another-unreal-engine-game') and most importantly (to me) they've packed them with features that many other games simply don't care about. Re: gametype customisation, replays et al.

Destiny may share a lot of things with other games, but at the same time it's mix of things is a bit different from everything else. Even if they did licence an engine, they'd still have to hammer it into the shape they wanted - which would still involve a lot of work.

I dunno, I'd put Reach in the top 10% of games visually from the previous Generation. It had a couple of issues, but I was pretty consistently wowed by it.

All that being said, Bungie gets a ton of flexibility out of using their own engine. They aren't tied to a single tool set. I mean, check out that Grognok video from the show last night. That's not something that you can just buy unreal and plop into your game.

- No text -

2. Concept Art = Concept Reality.

One of the most impressive things I saw during the talk was Grognok. I'm no game developer. Maybe all games are developed like this. But by the way it was talked about, I don't think so. What impressed the most though, apart from fiddling with the time of day slider, was the apparent ease of going from the concept art to the working, lit, almost playable looking, finished product. Maybe the moon base was nothing to write home about (I think it was pretty cool, but whatevers) but now take a step back and look at all the concept art we've seen so far. If all of that can be turned into gameplay quality environments as easily as the moon base was… then WOW!! We're going to have something awesome on our hands!

I don't want to rain on the parade, because the Grognok demo is extremely cool, but it bears mentioning that one of the reasons it was constructed so fast is that Grognok focuses on enabling fast construction and iteration with very modular designs.

The base was able to be made quickly because it was made from a surprisingly small number of pieces that already existed. They were painstakingly constructed prior to the base's assembly in Grognok. If something totally unique needs to be placed somewhere, and artist is going to have to go make it in a modeling tool.
Basically, you can't just present arbitrary art and have it turned into high-quality environment in half an hour. Someone is still going to have to build any new assets.

Not that I think this is a terrible thing. I love Halo 1's environments, and they use tons and tons of modularity as well.

3. Mythic Scifi.

The concept, as shown so far, looks amazing. I always though of fantasy as science fiction with magic replacing the technology, or scifi as fantasy with technology in place of magic.

Nah. Two are at completely opposite ends of the spectrum, or so I like to think.
Science fiction is the extrapolation of what's possible into the realm of probable. It is a mirror to study ourselves, our relationship with technology and the universe.

Fantasy has orcs.

More seriously, I think that the two genres share some fundamental differences (though, there's some blurring and no hard boundaries between the two, as fiction is wont to do) and the biggest line is: Does magic exist in the story?
If yes, then it's fantasy. If no, then it's science fiction (or other). A lot of fantasy has adopted elements of steampunk with steam-powered or magic-powered technology. Science fiction, on the other hand... well, telepathy and Sufficiently Advanced Technology aside, magic doesn't exist or doesn't drive the plot.

Don't bring up Star Wars. That's just fantasy set in space.

Now answer me this: Does fantasy have an equivalent to 'hard science fiction'?

Why not have both?

That's called Fantasy.

Yeah

I think that was my favorite line of any panel I have ever seen.

Possibly.

# 3 reminds me of the large grey rectangular buildings of Vogsphere. The Cabal warrior with his helmet off even looked a good bit like a Vogon!

Go back and look at the faction shirts. Eye of Horus for the yellow, methinks. I want to say green is the Hive. Black triangles in the sky speak to me of floating obsidian pyramids, ya dig?

~M