Happy Birthday, Halo 2: Live 360 in 720p!

by Dan Choi { Nov 9th 2005 at 7:45PM }

Bungie has released new screenshots of Halo and Halo 2 looking a lot nicer (especially on HDTVs) thanks to the magic of ~~emulation, er~~ the Xbox 360.

Now that Halo 2's reached its 1st birthday (er, 1st anniversary of its launch date), Bungie's posted a retrospective not only on the sequel to its original Xbox shooter, but also on MS's first console killer app (and Bungie's first game as a wholly-owned studio for Microsoft). The biggest news, of course, concerns the improved emulation of system sellers Halo 1 and 2 on the 360, which will be displayed "in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing," without looking "kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player." As they say, "both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions." No software update required (at least at first).

That's some big FPS FSAA news. More information on these resolutions will be given on Friday the 11th.

[Via Hushed Casket]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Bloo @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

awesome

Navstar @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Did I miss it or did Microsoft issue that long-promised list of what Xbox 1 games will be playable on the 360?

FalseProphecy @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Well, they said the best sellers. I'm guessing Ninja Gaiden + Black, Halo 1 and 2, the Burnout series, Fable, etc.

ChicagoONE @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

they still didn't fix the stretched HUD...grrrrrrr. (look at the motion sensor; it is an elipse, not a circle)

Scott @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Shame that they can't get Halo 1 working on Live.

Navstar, they still haven't announced the list of backwards compatible games yet. Though they promised it two weeks ago.

jason w @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Damn let the fanboys come in and talk about something other than how the pictures look. They look alot nicer witht he emulation. I hope alot of the games do this( Dout it.

cyberfelon @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

The 360 plays Xbox games through emulation, so shouldn't this happen with ALL Xbox games? It's not hard for an emulator to bump up the resolution and add anti-aliasing, it should just be standard.

Hitman @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Halo and Halo 2 in widescreen 720p native, that is great news! and happy birthday for Halo 2, bungie's 2nd Halo baby. Still waiting for news on the third Halo baby!

O RLY @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

I was wondering how long it'd take for the whiners to start griping.

Anyhow, awesome news. Kudos to the ladies and gents that put their hard work into this.

MthdDirector @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Can't wait to play it on the 360.

Dan Choi @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

I imagine that the differing levels of zoom would have to do with the different resolutions inherent in 480p and 720p. Since 720p packs in more lines than 480p, you get more dots per inch (or lines per inch) in the former than the latter. Thus, you don't have to zoom in quite as much to get an equally-sized picture on identically-sized displays (or equal proportions on differently-sized ones). Of course, widescreen messes with the calculations quite a bit, but I imagine that after "three hours, 400 lines of DOS prompts and a thousand phone calls," Bungie would get the calculations right. =) Anyone wanna show work?

ZildjianKX @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

clickclickPOP!, the answer is because 720p has three times the pixel count as 480p, and by zooming in on 720p by 3X and 480p by 6X gives you the solider they cropped at about the same size. You can zoom in on the solider in 6X for 720p, but he would just be twice the size.

Clu @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

If you have to zoom in to see the difference who really cares? I doubt you will even notice while the picture is moving.

ZildjianKX @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Dan Choi, damn, you made me whip out a pencil and paper.

480p is 640 x 480, in 16:9 mode it is 640x360
720p is 1280 x 720

There are 921600 pixels in a 720p image, 230400 pixels in a 16:9 480p image... which gives them a 4:1 ratio of pixels.

Since a cropped area on a 720p screen is 4 times the amount of pixels than the same cropped area on a 16:9 480p screen, you have to double the width and length of the 480p cropped area to get the same number of pixels, which is equivalent to zooming in by a factor of 2X... hence a 3X zoom in 720p is the same amount of pixels as a 6X zoom in 480p.

Got to put my engineering degree to use :-p

Ryan @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

ITS My BIRTHDAY TOOOO!!!! 11/09/1989

Brendan @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

me too 11/09/1984 21 years old finally

Dan Choi @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Whoa, happy birthday, guys. There's certainly lots to celebrate. =)

As for your hands-on work, ZildjianKX, I feel obliged to give ya some props. Now that I look back on my original message, I should've done the same thing, as it probably would've taken me less time than writing out what I did. I applaud your use of math in the real world!

Phillip @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

What ever happened to the whole Feb. 9th thing? Did nothing happen on this date? It's like, I heard about it ...and then I didn't hear about it anymore.

ill trooper @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Cool. I wonder if other devs will be able to pull similiar tricks to give the emulated games more life. It would be nice to have some of the games I really like on the Xbox up-rezzed.

jc @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

The pics on the site really show how much difference there is.

Off topic, anyone know the people playing on the X360 will be playing against Xbox players, or will there be seperate maps for both systems? If they are in the same games at the same time, will the people playing on the X360 have a slight advantage with faster processors?

Luke @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

People playing 360 can play Xbox games with people on the Xbox. The 360 people will have no advantage when it comes to that, other than they might look better.

skrati @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

jc:

fyi, players on the 360 can play with/vs. players on Xbox...

Paul Atreides @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

The reasoning for 3X vs. 6X is flawed.

True, it's the only way to get a picture frame of the same size, yet, who said that is what matters?

What matters is the jaggies: Are they gone when you compare 6X vs. 6X?

They won't show you that.
The difference would be minimal.

Glenn @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Paul Atreides - No, your reasoning is flawed.. the soldier takes up the same amount of physical space on the display, so you are seeing exactly what you would see in an A/B comparison. If you compared them both a 6x, well you would see two different imagas that aren't comperable.

yen lai @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

ZildjianKX,

actually, 480i/p in 4x3 mode is 720x480, 16x9 is 960x480. The vertical height doesn't change, just the horizontal. Televisions also use rectangular pixels as opposed to your computer monitor which uses square pixels, so if the aspect ratio doesn't work out completely, it's due to this.

Senor @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

More people remembered today was Halo 2's birthday and not mine.

I dont even have an Xbox...

$ammy @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

I could be wrong, but I think the HD and thus widescreen HALO update would work the samee way as when you have a widescreen computer monitor. The game does't stretch, you just see more of the environments. Modern vg systems are just computers, so I don't see why this wouldn't be true. And, even if it somehow works differently, I would be child's play for M$ to change the formating in the port. Also, if xbox 1 and 1.5 players can play in the same games, I do think that 360 players would have a slight advantage framerate-wise.

Stakker @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

But those are clearly NOT real high-resolution shots.

They look exactly like they took shots from the original version and increased the resolution with bilinear filtering to hide the pixels.

Check it out, you can still see the original large pixels, they're just more blurry. The whole image is blurry, there are no sharp edges at all.

I'm too lazy to actually read the text, so I'm hoping these are just "conceptual" shots and not the real thing... :-)

Darren Tilley @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Stakker,

I read through all these comments hoping someone else would notice that. None of those shots are in High Def. Sure the actual resolution of the images is 720p, but you can make out the filtered jaggies. It just looks like a standard def shot anti-aliasing. They are clearly not native 720p. Everything would be much sharper.

Art Guy @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Darren Tilley and Stakker -

You'd hate to come to conclusions without reading the article now wouldn't you? Reading is a wonderful thing, you can learn a lot, and it will open up a world of opportunities that making crap up just doesn't offer.

From the Bungie website, with full rez pictures and comparisons:

"In the end, we took video at 720p and captured stills from that. So it's far from perfect � Final Cut Pro was the software we used, and while it's very good, these shots are not identical to their on-screen counterparts. In fact, they look significantly better on an HD set (or a VGA monitor with the appropriate cable). But we thought you'd still like to see �em anyway."

Stakker @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Art Guy:

Yeah I know, but sometimes one is too busy at work. I should've waited until I get home, but then it's too late to comment :-P

But anyway, I decided to do a little test with Photoshop. It seems that it actually does have better resolution. Here's my test image, which I "high-deffed" from the lores version with added gaussian blur & sharpen:

http://kohina.com/temp/halotest.jpg

And here's the hi-def:

http://www.bungie.net/images/news/inlineimages/halo2cine2.jpg

So, looking side by side, it's obvious that I was wrong. My apologies to everybody. I'm glad I was wrong, though :-)

But what's REALLY interesting is that utility belt that magically appears on that guy's waist :-)

PCB @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Dan Choi and ZildjianKX. Pardon my ignorance, but I
don't get it. Dan, you said; "Thus, you don't have to zoom in quite as
much to get an equally-sized picture on identically-sized displays (or
equal proportions on differently-sized ones)." If you have two equally
sized displays, but one is running 480p and one is at 720p, the Halo
game picture size would be the same, right? If you have an equal size
display you should have to zoom in at equal levels to get the same size
image. Why do we care about the umber of pixels in that area? I guess
I see it that it is not comparing what our eyes would see were we
watching the same size display.

Dan Choi @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Stakker, that magical utility belt IS really interesting. =) Thanks for pointing that out!

"If you have two equally sized displays, but one is running 480p and one is at 720p, the Halo game picture size would be the same, right? If you have an equal size display you should have to zoom in at equal levels to get the same size image. Why do we care about the umber of pixels in that area? I guess I see it that it is not comparing what our eyes would see were we watching the same size display."

PCB, the images will be the same physical size on-screen for equally sized displays, but they're still made up of different numbers of scanlines or pixels. Thus, if such images are represented on a computer monitor, their sizes will vary depending on the number of pixels in their height, width, and so forth (which is why DPI matters a lot in desktop publishing and photo editing/image manipulation). Without the different levels of magnification, the images would have scaled to different sizes on Bungie's site (if they represented them properly, of course).

We care about the number of pixels because games can look better and more clearly when the same-size graphics are allowed greater definition through higher resolution -- hence, the appeal of HDTVs and better-than-composite AV cables. In fact, greater resolution can aid to some extent in games where accuracy matters, such as first-person shooters and the like (at varying zoom or sniping levels). Wide-screen resolutions can help in games like Madden because the field of vision is increased, and the same advantage can be bestowed on FPSes like Halo.

Art Guy @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

PCB - Here is a laymans example that I think might be clearer for you. Assuming you have an HDTV, the screen size obviously will not change, but there will be more visual information because of the increase of resolution. Take a look at the example below.

http://www.bungie.net/images/news/inlineimages/comparison2.jpg

Increasing the resolution creates an overall sharper, more detailed picture. Now the crazy thing is that the HD shot on the right wasn't even taken directly from the dev kit, it had to be captured from video, so the image quality will be even better than that. It's kinda like a copy of a copy, so artifacts enter the equation.

Below are the screen grabs from the same scene, the bottom one is from the 360 running in HD, so the image is larger. On your tv both images will be the exact same size but there is a information due to the increased resolution (just like changing computer monitor resolutions).

http://www.bungie.net/images/news/inlineimages/halo2_480i.jpg

http://www.bungie.net/images/news/inlineimages/halo2cine2.jpg

badbob @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

For a fair comparison, on the same TV, bungie should run the game on a xbox at 480p and then on a xbox360 at 720p. For each, take a photo snapshot so the resulting two pictures are at the same optical resolution. Then compare the details side by side. Since both snapshots are at the same resolution, any zoom used should have the same magnification for both shots.

Art Guy @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

badbob - For the love of...... Read the article. Read the article. Read the article. Look at the first link in the post right above yours. Just ignore the whole magnification part as it seems to confuse 80% of the populace.

No wonder there are so many arguments here, people don't even bother READING THE ARTICLE THAT HAS COMPARISON SCREENSHOTS.

PCB @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Dan Choi - ah, I get it, it is due to the imaging on the computer monitors to get the same number of pixels that would be seen on the different HD setups; 480p versus 720p. Okay, makes sense to me now.

Dan Choi & Art Guy - thanks, I appreciate you taking the time out. And yes, I do understand the diffence os HD settings, and, of course, how more pixels allows for sharper images. I had just missed the whole point that these were done with computer monitors and whatnot.

badbob @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

The confusion is that the article doesn't mention if they used the same setup to capture both the xbox and xbox360 shots. It says, "In the end, we took video at 720p and captured stills from that." So if that statement also covers the xbox stills, then they ran the xbox at 480p, as the screenshot says, and had the video capture device scale the video to 720p. If they did this, they would have no reason to have different magnifications for both shots since they would both be at 720p. Since they did include the magnification in the shots, that leads me to believe that they used a different method to capture the xbox shots.

Glenn @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

badbob - The screenshots are on the sight... the Xbox ones were capured at 480P and 4:3(probably captured directly using development boxes), the 360 was captured at 720P and 16x9 using video capture software.

The ZeroCorpse @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Note: Your mileage may vary if you're using the Xbox 360 VGA HD adapter on a 4:3 monitor.

In my case, the Xbox games in backwards compatibility on the 360 have a problem with aspect ratio. I can set the 360 to 1280x1024 on my Samsung 930B, but when the actual game starts (Halo 2 in this case) the image is "squished" as if it's a widescreen image on a 4:3 display without being letterboxed. It's not displaying 4:3 at all in the higher resolutions with Halo 2. The only way I can get a proper 4:3 non-squished display is if I run Halo 2 in 640x480 mode, and then it looks the same as always (or worse).

This does not apply to native 360 games. Those display in the proper screen format at high resolutions.

On HDTV Halo 2 looks awesome, and is formatted properly. It's just when I use the VGA cables, and I suspect it has something to do with the way the Samsung 930B processes that information.

So basically, if you're using the VGA cable on a PC monitor, be aware that- depending on your monitor- you may not be able to play at high resolution for older games.