Halo 2 for Windows Vista! | The Coffeehouse

ricodued

http://bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=halo2vistaannounce&p=6136047

Amazed I didn't see a thread on this earlier.

Bungie has announced they're (well, not they, but another studio at Microsoft Games) writing a version of Halo 2 for Windows Vista. Exclusively for Windows Vista.

They're writing it exclusively for Windows Vista, so you can't run it on Windows XP. They say this is because they want to take advantage of blah blah blah. What advantages will Vista have over XP in terms of gaming? DX10? If it's just DirectX 10, why won't that be available to XP?

What an excellent way to push Vista onto millions of desktops right out the gate... Wink

All conspiracy theories aside, I'm super excited for this. If any of you were hardcore Halo Xbox fans, and then played Halo PC with its numerous and endlessly entertaining mods, you'll know how exciting Halo 2 on the PC will be.

Besides, it helps to bridge the gap between the Halo movie and Halo 3, presumably Bungie's next project they've been working on. I say Halo 3 just because it makes a lot of sense to release Halo 3 around the movie and now PC game. Why would you release a completely different game while a movie and PC port are going on?

/ends random thought stream
//jumps up and down

-Eric

Cairo
I want my waffle sundae, give me my carbs!

XBox Vista™

Tom Servo
W-hat?

What does Vista give them that a current computer, which is lengths better than their damn XBox anyway, running XP with more a performant version of DirectX than the XBox?

Marketing retards.

ricodued

Tom Servo wrote:
What does Vista give them that a current computer, which is lengths better than their damn XBox anyway, running XP with more a performant version of DirectX than the XBox?

Marketing retards.

I thought about this too. My guess is that XP was not designed exclusively for games as the Xbox was, thats why games like Doom 3 run worse on a computer that maybe leagues better than the original Xbox. Developing Halo 2 now for PC gives some exclusive advantages not present when writing Halo: Combat Evolved for PC: The Microsoft Games team can easily talk with the Vista and DirectX 10 development teams. Gearbox didn't exactly have the ability to talk to the Vista team and tell them, Hey, you know, the way you're doing this sucks, could you tweak it a bit? They also didn't have the convienence of being in the same area as the Vista/DX/Bungie teams; Gearbox was way out in Palo Alto, Texas.

That's the one explanation I can think of, at any rate.

Cairo
I want my waffle sundae, give me my carbs!

Tom Servo wrote:

Marketing retards.

Ding. Halo doesn't require anything Vista-only, and Vista doesn't provide anything a game can't either do itself or get on other platforms, including XP. Heck, Halo was ported from the Mac to Windows to begin with. I imagine there's already a certain level of abstraction and services built into the Halo runtime already.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

ricodued wrote:
I thought about this too. My guess is that XP was not designed exclusively for games as the Xbox was, thats why games like Doom 3 run worse on a computer that maybe leagues better than the original Xbox.

That's not it. Part of the reason may be that a PC is more likely to be running background processes that can disturb a game's performance, but the real big one that will nearly always tip the performance scale in favour of a console is homogeneity. With a console, you know exactly what hardware each and every one of your buyers will be running, so optimizing your game is far, far easier.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Halo 2 is the Pinball of Vista?

TimP

I heard there was significant work done on Doom 3 for Xbox to get it to run acceptably.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

TimP wrote:
I heard there was significant work done on Doom 3 for Xbox to get it to run acceptably.

It's because the Xbox sports a Pentium 3 700 MHz.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Sven Groot wrote:
ricodued wrote:I thought about this too. My guess is that XP was not designed exclusively for games as the Xbox was, thats why games like Doom 3 run worse on a computer that maybe leagues better than the original Xbox.

That's not it. Part of the reason may be that a PC is more likely to be running background processes that can disturb a game's performance, but the real big one that will nearly always tip the performance scale in favour of a console is homogeneity. With a console, you know exactly what hardware each and every one of your buyers will be running, so optimizing your game is far, far easier.

Well yeah, but won't Vista be running even more background processes that affect performance?

Such as, but not limited to:

That 3D windowing system texture-generator process you talked to me about
the new indexing service
Sidebar widgets

Hmmm?

I'll bet there's a way to run Halo 2 on NT5.x, it would be rather silly of the developers not to test/develop the game on XP (not to mention Vista'a current pre-Beta status too). So let's wait and see for Megagames to release a patch.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Minh wrote:
TimP wrote:I heard there was significant work done on Doom 3 for Xbox to get it to run acceptably.
It's because the Xbox sports a Pentium 3 700 MHz.

And a GeForce 3 Ti and 64MB RAM

DoomBringer
Doom!

Sweet, now my friends will stop bugging me about when/if it will come out. They've been begging and cajoling for like how long now...

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

Funny, this is getting crazy support on Slashdot, I guess Window Gamers are happier than Linux Retards that this is happening.

rjdohnert
You will never know success until you know failure

Im pleased about it. I cant wait for Halo 2

pepsi224

Tom Servo wrote:
What does Vista give them that a current computer, which is lengths better than their damn XBox anyway, running XP with more a performant version of DirectX than the XBox?

Marketing retards.

Actually Vista will offer quite a bit. Word of the day: Microsoft GDI. Read about it here.

yman

W3bbo wrote:
Sven Groot wrote: ricodued wrote:I thought about this too. My guess is that XP was not designed exclusively for games as the Xbox was, thats why games like Doom 3 run worse on a computer that maybe leagues better than the original Xbox.

That's not it. Part of the reason may be that a PC is more likely to be running background processes that can disturb a game's performance, but the real big one that will nearly always tip the performance scale in favour of a console is homogeneity. With a console, you know exactly what hardware each and every one of your buyers will be running, so optimizing your game is far, far easier.

Well yeah, but won't Vista be running even more background processes that affect performance?

Such as, but not limited to:

That 3D windowing system texture-generator process you talked to me about
the new indexing service
Sidebar widgets
Hmmm?

I'll bet there's a way to run Halo 2 on NT5.x, it would be rather silly of the developers not to test/develop the game on XP (not to mention Vista'a current pre-Beta status too). So let's wait and see for Megagames to release a patch.

Apparently, Vista can shutdown down the majority of background apps and services while playing a game. Dont know if this is valid though.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

At the very least the DWM will shutdown if you use an exclusive mode DirectX application. Not for a windowed one though, although you can always shut it down manually.

EDIT: The indexing service will also only run when the current load isn't too high, and even when it's running it has priority "Low", so the impact shouldn't be too bad.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

Sven Groot wrote:
EDIT: The indexing service will also only run when the current load isn't too high, and even when it's running it has priority "Low", so the impact shouldn't be too bad.

Stay away from *my* indexing service Smiley