wingnut

Originally posted by Mutasem Semakieh: Quote: AND WTF IS A IMO???? In My Opinion Originally posted by Mutasem Semakieh: Quote: AND WHY DO U THINK HALO 2 HAS MORE POP UPS THAN HALO 1?? When you say 'pop ups', are you in reference to the post I submitted about pop-in? I don't think there is more pop-in, I know there is more pop-in. Newer games are doing it a lot more often now. Some games do it better than other games and you don't notice it, but Halo 2 does it pretty badly, especially during cinematics. Star Wars Galaxies and Killzone are pretty bad too. Even my friend who is a Halo fanboy is disgusted by the bad pop-in of Halo 2. In order to save on framerate, programmers have developed a means of detailing ... What happens is, as the camera gets closer to an object, the object will swap with bigger better versions that have higher poly count and higher texture detail. So, when a camera does a cut from across the room to suddenly next to the shoulder of a character, the character's higher detail model swaps and that is where you see the pop-in. There are things you can do to make this better like calculate ahead of time to see if the camera will be there and swap before the camera moves, but Halo 2 doesn't do that and therefore you experience the visually jarring pop-in. It isn't as evident during gameplay because the camera isn't doing cuts from one place to another. Nonetheless, there is jarring pop-in in Halo 2.

This is a post to compare Half Life 2 to Halo 2. If you really want to talk about the story of Half Life I suggest you open up a new thread because there are many questions about that game that could be discussed. Also, sorry I didn't answer your question about the ending of Half Life, but if you read my whole reply, you would have realized you could have e-mailed me about it.

Ok, here we go ... Half Life 2 vs Halo 2. Why did I choose Half Life 2? Half Life 2 does SOOO much to improve on Half Life. The environments are greatly interactive. I can do a LOT more now than flush a toilet. The graphics are top notch. I haven't spotted any pop-in on the level of detail of characters when I get close. The water looks wonderful. The AI reacts smarter and more realistically - of both your teammates and the enemies. The physics of the vehicles are fun. Um ... I think the only vehicles you got to 'drive' in the first Half Life was those stupid trolly things. The physics are fun with everything! Oh yeah, and they did take a way a lot of the stupid jumping games. Halo 2 does not do that much to improve on the first Halo. I feel like I am re-embarking on basically the same adventure. The re-use of textures is amazing (sarcasm). The AI of the enemies and of your teammates is a very canned feeling. The graphics are good and I can understand why they aren't better than HL2, BUT there is one thing that I would detract from the score here on. There is this horrible horrible pop-in - that is especially witnessed in the cutscenes. I would rather have a slightly lower level of detail without pop-in. The pop-in is so jarring! Gameplay is fun - hell I like to shoot stuff. You get to wield two weapons - which is an improvement over the first that is a LOT of fun. The physics on the vehicles and ragdoll are nice - just like the first Halo. Multiplayer is just a bit more exciting than the first Halo. BUT, I would have to give Halo 2 the props for having a built in new multiplayer from the start, rather than HL2 which depends on the mod community and updated version of the old multiplayer. BUT, if we are going to argue about multiplayer I would also have to say UT2004 is the best. But, we aren't arguing about multiplayer, we aren't even arguing, we are just giving our opinions on what we think is better and why. Conclusion. I think Half Life 2 is better because of the fact that it does so much to improve FPS's all together and because it is extremely polished. While, Halo 2 on the other hand does a lot to improve on, but then has some things that detract from my opinion on it - like the pop in and the fact that it seems to re-use some of the first Halo too much. note: This is aside from the kbd/ms vs console controller war. I have played many PC and Console games and like most of them. I'll just list FPS's here PC: Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem, Decent, Sin, Half Life, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, UT 2004, Tribes, Tribes 2, Tribes Vengence, Half Life 2 Console: Goldeneye, Forsaken 64, Duke Nukem 64, Quake II, Medal of Honor, Timesplitters 2, Halo, Halo 2, Riddick If you really want me to explain the ending of Half Life, e-mail me at swingler@gmail.com.