Halo 4 engine has ‘vast improvements’ over Halo: Reach

Halo 4’s engine will have “vast improvements” over the one used in Halo: Reach, 343 Industries has said.

Speaking in a presentation to journalists at Microsoft’s Spring Showcase, 343 Industries creative director Josh Holmes stated that the team has made considerable attempts to improve on Bungie’s former work with the mighty Halo: Reach engine.

“Moving things forward, we’ve made vast improvements across the board with this engine, rewrote massive components of the technology which powers this game” said Holmes.

While the studio was unprepared to go into specifics about the upgrades to their new engine, we can look back before we look forwards. Halo: Reach runs at an ever-so-slightly sub-720p native resolution 1152×720, and features one of the Xbox 360’s most impressive motion blur effects to ensure the 30fps limit is as smooth as possible. The Reach engine is a massive improvement over Halo 3’s, which ran at a further sub-HD native resolution of 1152×640.

Bungie explained Halo 3’s cut in a resolution (which the team later refined into the spectacular Halo: Reach engine) as necessary to facilitate its then-excellent lighting system. “The reason we chose this slightly unorthodox resolution and this very complex use of two buffers is simple enough to see – lighting. We wanted to preserve as much dynamic range as possible – so we use one for the high dynamic range and one for the low dynamic range values. Both are combined to create the finished on screen image.”

Could Halo 4 be the first Halo game to run natively in 1280×720?

For more on the game, head over to our first-look at Halo 4.