343 Explain The Challenges of Halo’s PC Release

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

edition released on PC via Steam recently, by it wasn’t such an easy task for developers at 343 Industries, the gamehas been optimized PC and looking better than ever at up to 4k UHD and at 60+ FPS. PC Gamer reached the developer to get more information about the games’ port to PC and engineer Andrew Schnickel told the outlet that why is that an old game like Halo running at FPS higher than 60 is such a big deal.

“When some code said ‘I want this thing to happen over 1/30th of a second’ and somebody else said ‘I want this to happen over one game tick,’ they were equivalent,” explained Schnickel. “Now we go up to 60 frames per second, and 1/30th of a second and one game tick, are not the same thing anymore. That broke a number of things: Weapon fire was one area that we found a number of issues; you could see that effects would play too quickly; the mission scripting actually through the campaign, we had a lot of problems with that, a lot of that was tick based rather than time based.”

That’s the main problem, something that older players can recognize, old DOS games might be programmed to work with just one processor in mind, by running the game on a processor slightly faster thus breaking the game. Schnickel explains that the main problem is interpolation. The animations are a challenge as they where designed for slower framerates, basically adding a large number of interpolated images might not actually work as intended.

“If you’re familiar with how animation tends to work, you put in key frames, and then you interpolate between those key frames, and the interpolation doesn’t always do what you expect it to do.”

Halo might be the first demonstration of the hard work that is being done at Xbox, programmers are doing an incredible task for the Xbox Series X, delivering a console capable of running all generation of Xbox Games. A big selling point for the new console.

Stay tuned at Gaming Instincts via Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for the latest gaming news.