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http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/news/0,10870,2907480,00.html
Quote:
The PC game isn't intended to change the single-player campaign in the slightest, so the challenges aren't creative, but technical. The first major hurdle has been to port the game engine to run on a PC. Although many think of the Xbox as a modified PC, Pitchford notes that the Nvidia graphics chip in the console is highly specialized, and since Halo was a first generation Xbox game, it doesn't deal with the hardware as elegantly as it could have.
Pitchford said that the project is about 40 percent done, much of which includes a successful port of the graphics engine. The port required Gearbox to move to supporting DirectX 9 and completely rewrite all the pixel shader effects. Part of what that rewrite means is that the PC game will have some enhanced effects for PCs with the latest graphics cards--Pitchford mentioned that Nvidia was helping with optimizations for the GeForce FX--that are more capable than the Xbox hardware. The game will also support cards down to the GeForce2 MX, and that has required designing some alternate effects. In particular, the flashlight effect had to be redone for low-end cards in order to keep the gameplay intact.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but.. wasn't the game supposed to be out on PC in the first place? What happened with all that data? And why is this port taking such a rediculously long amount of time?
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