I’ve noticed that the lighting in halo 3 is a lot better than in reach. Anyone else notice this? I do hope halo 4 is on par or better than halo 3’s lighting.
In Halo Reach they tried to make things a little more dark or gloomy
all shooters are dark and gloomy, so it’s a good idea for them to maintain Halo’s beautiful settings.
> all shooters are dark and gloomy, so it’s a good idea for them to maintain Halo’s beautiful settings.
You messed up at the all part…
I too, vvant to see the H3 lightning back into H4.
Can you point to any specific examples? Are you really only thinking of the Seirra 117 forest?
Technically, the lighting engine in reach is far more advanced.
Indeed Halo 3 used superb lighting for it’s time. Can’t really go down on all the technical aspects of the lighting system but Halo 3 renders the scenes twice. One with HDR and another with LDR. For this full range of HDR, it took up a lot of eDRAM which in turn gave Halo 3 the resolution of 1152x640. This got a lot of flak back in 07 when so many people would argue and fight about if Halo 3 rendered at full 720p. Bungie said nothing until those “pixel-counters” officially confirmed Halo 3’s resolution. Which in turn made Bungie write a Weekly Update on it.
Bungie decided to change the HDR format for Reach so they could save a bit of eDRAM and in turn gave us a higher resolution (1152x720 as opposed to the 1152x640 in Halo 3) and MUCH more dynamic lights and a better particle system. Bungie also changed the HDR format so they could save memory for dynamic shadows.
So all in all: Halo 3 lighting - lower resolution, no available memory for Anti-aliasing, greater/realistic lighting in different types of environments.
Halo: Reach lighting - higher resolution, more memory for Anti-Aliasing, more memory for dynamic shadows, higher amounts of dynamic lights, greater use of deferred rendering.
Who knows what route 343 will take for Halo 4’s lighting system. I mean, advances in global illumination techniques are still an option. What I liked about Gears of War 3 and Uncharted 3’s lighting is it’s excellent transitions between light and shadow. The God-ray effect in Gears 3 was also quite nice.
I just hope with people like Corrinne Yu on the team, we will see Halo 4 push the boundaries on 6 year old hardware.
I look at maps like narrows and then the metallic boring forerunner structures in reach. I also look at stand off and how insanely great the sun feels, then i look at “hemorage” on reach. I look at orbital, then anchor 9. I can’t help but think that the lighting is far better in halo 3. Everything in reach feels like it’s just draped in the same light source. No sunset light, no real shadows, no nothing. I hope halo 4 brings the thunder on this.
It’s different, but it’s not worse. It’s actually a lot harder to light night-based levels and areas, although it obviously won’t look “as well lit.” That doesn’t mean the lighting is worse though, most of Halo 3 takes place during the day.
i thought the title of this thread was “lightning”
lolz
> i thought the title of this thread was “lightning”
> lolz
LOL Good, I wasn’t the only one!