For those interested, several folks from 343 plan to speak about various aspects of Halo Infinite at the GDC 2022 conference in March. Some of the topics look interesting:
Deconstructing the Combat Dance: Designing Multiplayer Bots for ‘Halo Infinite’
Sara Stern (Senior Multiplayer Designer, 343 Industries)
Halo Infinite is the first Halo game to feature bots in multiplayer, and the team started with a clear design goal: create AI that helped players learn how to play and enjoy a multiplayer experience with a twenty-year history. This will be an in-depth look at how the team broke down the Halo “combat dance” and developed bots that could strafe, bounce grenades, and use equipment the way that players do. By modeling human behaviors, bots provide an effective learning tool for both new and returning players to improve their skill in multiplayer.
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/deconstructing-the-combat-dance-designing-multiplayer-bots-for-halo-infinite/882306
Thinking Like Players: How ‘Halo Infinite’s’ Multiplayer Bots Make Decisions
Brie Chin-Deyerle (Senior Lead Gameplay Engineer, 343 Industries)
Halo Infinite is the first Halo game to feature bots in multiplayer, and while Halo has a legacy of compelling AI characters in its campaign, the team had to rethink how to model player-like behaviors and thought processes for the competitive multiplayer aspect of Halo. This will be a deep dive into the decision-making process Halo Infinite’s bots use to decide what they should be doing at any point in time, whether that’s engaging in combat, finding new weapons on the battlefield, or trying to capture an enemy flag. The talk will cover how bots understand the game state and what actions are valid, the process for weighing different actions against each other, and how the team evaluated their work to bring their critically acclaimed bots to life.
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/thinking-like-players-how-halo-infinites-multiplayer-bots-make-decisions/884294
One Frame in ‘Halo Infinite’
Daniele Giannetti (Principal Architect, 343 Industries - Microsoft)
This session explores solutions 343 Industries built for efficient cross-platform execution in ‘Halo Infinite’ and beyond, detailing the high level structure of a frame in the game and the execution model differences across consoles, PCs and dedicated server virtual machines. Topics covered include: how 343 Industries transitioned from a fixed 60 fps execution model to a variable framerate solution, how the team moved away from hand-crafted explicit scheduling and towards a dependency-based implicit scheduling approach, and what additional modifications to the engine execution model were necessary to achieve high execution efficiency across diverse target hardware.
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/one-frame-in-halo-infinite/881669
Technical Artist Summit: Building ‘Zeta Halo’: Scaling Content Creation for the Largest ‘Halo’ Ever
Kurt Diegert (Lead Environment Technical Artist, 343 Industries). Mikael Nellfors (Senior Environment Artist, 343 Industries)
Building the first cross-platform and largest ever Halo game presented many new challenges and opportunities. We needed to build more content than ever before and make that content scale across platforms. We developed new processes, pipelines, and tools to meet this new challenge while nailing our new art style and preserving that Halo special sauce. We’ll cover the mask painter, the terrain system, the hex system, designing a spec control system, and an assortment of tech art concerns.
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/technical-artist-summit-building-zeta-halo-scaling-content-creation-for-the-largest-halo-ever/884168