: The original Prey did something interesting things to this manner. Go back
: and play some of their multiplayer maps for a real head trip, but as you
: said, it would be pretty cool to see 343 attempt some of that feel for
: campaign and multiplayer levels.

: - MacGyver10

I've played the single player and enjoyed it.

I wasn't specifically thinking of having "sticky" walls. I mean they are cool and all but I'm more thinking along the lines of curved worlds, non-euclidean geometries: spheres cylinders, rings. Have the entire engine able to represent non-planar gravity.

I think that it would help make even planet surfaces more realistic. There would be a proper horizon, things would reveal themselves as you get closer to them. You could do long flyovers across real, curved surface terrain to land at your LZ.

The previous Halo games have faked large terrains but the perspective never looked quite right. They were good but they would be better using actual curved landscapes.

A spherical(ish) world or moon or asteroid has down as a vector for each physics object pointing towards the world's center of mass.

For rotating cylinders or rings then every physics object's down is a vector away from the axis of rotation.

You can see that the engine would have to calculate the direction of gravity for every object that has physics enabled. This is more work that just hard coding -Z. But I think it would be worth it for the amazing world and gameplay experiences. If 343 are writing a new engine then they have a chance to bake it into the engine. They need to try it and build experimental levels to see what it would be like. I imagine an SC (B30) style level set on a UNSC habitat in orbit around a Halo ring or other major forerunner installation. Or maybe an insurrectionist habitat or in the Rubble or around a Covenant home world.

Imagine having to escape from a rotating habitat across the outer surface. You have to reach a ship before the habitat explodes, there may or may not be Flood chasing you ;-)

Down is away from the habitat, the bulk of the habitat is above you. But there are still surfaces that you could drive on, kind of the undersides of things and there would still be jumps to make. You would have the kind of crazy ride that only the Chief would think of doing or would be able to pull off.

-PS

Hollow spheres are weird. There would be no gravity inside no matter how massive the walls were. Artificial gravity would have to fall off at greater than the square of the distance or, again, there would be no apparent effect. This is down to geometry, gravity reduces as the square of the distance but the geometry is such that when you are near the wall, facing it... the amount of sphere behind you is the amount of sphere in front of you squared so the two attractions exactly cancel each other out.