Shattered makes my point perfectly. It has real frame rate issues even on a single screen. I thought vortex was bad but when I first played shattered I facepalmed really hard.
No, I don't expect everyone to buy a second copy of a game, a second console, and second TV. However I do not believe in sacrificing texture detail and draw distance to increase framerate for splitscreen folks. Of course anyone who plays split screen will disagree and I'm not trying to say I don't care about you having the ability to play with friends on one tv. But the fact of the matter is, that is not an ideal way to play a first-person shooter and nothing should be sacrificed for that to hurt the look of the game for single screen players. Splitscreen was never that good on any console. To even get it to run good you have to sacrifice graphics...sacrificing even more would suck for Halo. The Xbox is extremely outdated technologically. You just can't expect these new games to be perfect because they are going to increase graphics to keep up with modern games. If they waited for Halo 4 to be on the Xbox 720 you wouldn't have any framerate or splitscreen issues. But they wanted to milk this xbox as much as they can and this is what we get.
Considering disabling sprint and disabling instant respawn are VERY simple hex edits (modding), its definitely possible for them to implement those as additional options in the gametype settings. In fact, if they don't put those in it just hurts the community. The people that prefer a more classic feel to the game. In saying that its a very easy mod to get these features out of the gametype, its just a matter of time before 343i delete those modded gametypes of people's fileshares.
Microsoft (who controls 343) only cares about money and sales...not making people happy by adding features into a game. They see this as losing money and time. The most important thing to these corporations is advertising, hype, and sales. All of us wanting Flood to have weapon options, Forge to have precision editing, non-forced lime green human colors in flood, sprint disable toggle, etc. are all irrelevant to Microsoft. They are happy with all the money they made selling the game already. Now they are working on making sales for Halo 5.
This is really quite simple as far as I'm concerned. If they have a supported game mode built into the game, it should perform well, and whatever compromises are necessary to make that happen should be made. If they let you play 4-way split, then there shouldn't be major frame drops on any maps in 4-way split. If there are going to be major frame drops on multiple maps, they need to remove the splitscreen feature. And there should definitely never be significant frame drops in fullscreen on any map. If the endless pursuit of better graphics on outdated hardware leads to games that perform so badly that it interferes with your enjoyment and your ability to even perform the game's primary function (shooting the enemy players), then the wrong decisions have been made somewhere along the line in the development process. Hopefully next gen hardware will bail them out of the situation they're in now, and we won't have to have this debate any more. But suffice to say, I think Reach and Halo 4 have made a hash of things on the framerate front. They basically should have removed splitscreen starting with Reach, based on how poorly it performs on many default maps, let alone all but the most efficient 5% of forged maps. But since they've insisted on keeping it in, more attention should have been paid to optimizing the rendering, reducing textures and polygons in splitscreen, and whatever else would have made those games something better than a stuttery mess. I don't even forge maps for splitscreen play any more, by the way. I just assume people will play them fullscreen. It's gotten too hard to support split unless your maps are the size of a postage stamp. So basically, that's me making the decision that Bungie and 343 refused to make - to stop supporting a feature that has become little-used, and basically just a ball-and-chain around the game's ankle.
Hey that's actually not a bad idea. When you play splitscreen either player gets half of the resolution anyway. So in theory toning down the graphics in splitscreen should help resolve the framerate lag, with a marginal appearance change. It actually makes a lot of sense, because believe it or not it won't actually appear all that different for one of the people in splitscreen as opposed to one player not in splitscreen. The best way I can describe this concept is say you have a very high resolution image, first you would apply a filter to make it look a bit fuzzy/blurry. This action acts as the "sacrifice" of graphical quality to make it perform better. Then if you shrink it down to the max resolution of your screen, the result would look marginally different in terms of appearance to the original. It is very much possible for them to make the game do this ONLY when you activate splitscreen, considering the way programming works, ESPECIALLY for the Xbox 360. The other thing I will say is give the option to disable dynamic lighting. For some maps it isn't necessary, and its responsible for most of the framerate lag. The way I think of it is its like your trying to play two or more HD videos simultaneously. The system that your playing on has to be powerful enough to play both videos smoothly this way. However its no where near as taxing to play two or more SD videos simultaneously. However your not playing videos simultaneously, its rendering two or more players view in the same game. Regardless, the concept is the same. Only it takes more power to render than playback video, nevertheless the ratios would be more or less the same. With a lot of testing, I'm sure 343i could implement this and it is a feasible and practical solution to the problem for the time being. At least until we get some more capable hardware, i.e, the new Xbox.
yeah I agree....splitscreen should have been removed since Reach. It's bad enough we have to build forge maps to keep dynamic lighting working and framerate stable, but to also build to support splitscreen you wont be able to make anything in Forge. Now I think in Halo 4 the kill-cam should be removed too as I have seen it's horrendous framerate on maps like Gorroto (or whatever it is on forge test playlist). I can't even stand seeing it. The problem is...they already do this to splitscreen and it isn't enough with the current outdated hardware. They would really have to make the game look horrendous to have perfect framerate with splitscreen. They even lowered texture detail, particle effects (explosions) and draw distance from halo reach to Halo 4 for single screen to compensate for the old hardware and updated Halo game... so imagine if they were to do it even more.
I like to think that none of that is true. Considering how much the previous Halo games were patched / fixed. Also lets not forget that they also make quite a lot of money with DLC sales also, and if they want people to buy the DLC they have to fix issues / add things into the game to make people more inclined to play the game and buy the DLC. Also Frank O'Connor has already made a statement, about the vast amount of stuff that they didn't implement prior to release that they regret. Then he made a special note on glitches. On account of this I think we will see a lot fixed / added with the TU. I personally still remain hopeful. Also, while it is true that Microsoft is greedy, they are still doing very well financially. I will also note that the Xbox division doesn't make them anywhere near as much as their other divisions within the company. Though that isn't to say that it doesn't make them a substantial amount. Its just nothing compared to Windows and Office.
Well I think previous Halo games and Halo 4 is a totally different story. Bungie was Bungie (with Microsoft as publisher)... 343 is a Microsoft created company specifically created just to make new Halo games. 343 doesn't have as much freedom to do what they want as Bungie did. At least this is what my honest opinion is, I could be wrong but it makes sense to me. Halo 4 seems more cheezy or gimmicky than previous Halos...not as deep... has a more corporate feel to it. This has to do with Microsoft I would think. I'm not saying Halo 4 is a cheezy game that I don't like. I just think it is more cheezy than previous Halos with the decisions they made to strip the game down into a more basic form.
What if I were to tell you that Halo 3 used to do exactly what I'm talking about in split-screen? Does it look any different to playing by yourself as it does to splitscreen? Personally I can't. In Halo 4 they make the game render the whole map rather than just a specific section. However its unecessary to render what isn't visible to the player because its been blocked by a wall. This is the main reason why a Forge World in Halo 4 wouldn't work. The impostering system in Reach worked very well. Its the system where it lazily renders the environment that is far away or not visible by the player. If they had instead improved on this system instead of making their own. They could have make it not bother rendering sections of the map that aren't visible to the player at all until they look at it. For example, why is it necessary to render the rocky terrain / base environment in Impact if you were to build a map far away from it in the sky? It is not. Yes, still render the backdrop of the map. It would make your forge map more immersive because the only thing that exists in the map is your structure in a space like scene.
They already do this in certain respects. The most obvious example is with forge objects. If you play a lot on forged maps you probably have noticed the texture-switch that occurs at a fixed distance when staring at certain objects and moving forward or backward. I think that most or all of them do this, but on some it's a lot more apparent than others; for example the containers that have a lighter-colored X on the side, if you look at that and back up slowly, at a certain point there is a very noticeable switch from high-res, detailed texture to a low-res, blurrier look. The transition point is not smooth or faded in any way, it happens immediately, so you can move back and forth and make it switch between low- and high-res. In Reach, this was most noticeable on railings, which had a really crappy-looking version in the low-res render. Also, there are certain distances beyond which some non-structural objects (weapons and vehicles) don't render at all; they "pop in" as you approach them. In splitscreen, these effects are often exaggerated to help performance. The low-res textures are used at nearer distances than in fullscreen, and weapons may not render until you are closer to them. One of the most distinctive examples of this I can recall: I made a map in Reach that was a minigame where you drive mongooses around a big bowl-shaped arena, made of mostly 5x5 flats. We played it one day at my house in 4-player split, and it made the game really bizarre looking and almost unplayable because of the switches in rendering. Mongooses on the opposite end of the arena were invisible (unrendered) except for their headlights, and they would pop in surprisingly once you got closer. Also, the 5x5s used their low-res texture a lot more often, which was darker than the detailed texture; so as you drove around it looked like the entire arena was rippling like waves made of huge pixels. It was highly distracting, and made quite clear how the game self-optimizes for performance. I've done no testing in Halo 4, but I imagine a lot of these same rules still apply.
Yeah they do apply in Halo 4 and I am pretty sure it is worse than Reach to compensate for the updated game's graphics and action. The worst forge object I have noticed so far was the Decorative Columns. I placed on on impact and if you just step 10 feet back it is just a flat grey block that is missing the texture entirely. Not to mention the pixel dots that objects turn into from draw distance. Pretty sure they had to lower everything from Reach when making Halo 4. Another reason why the debris from vehicles after exploding immediately disappears for a Banshee and the Warthogs and stuff disappear after a second or two. They probably made weapons disappear on the ground from dead enemies much much faster than Reach because of this also. [br][/br]Edited by merge: Well, I notice a HUGE difference in graphics when playing any game in splitscreen. I do have a nice 47 inch sony Monitor though. If you are using some cheap 27 inch RCA TV I imagine it all looks similar either way. Left 4 Dead 2 looks like total **** in splitscreen. I recall in Halo: Reach... Lights didn't even work in split screen, you see them but there is no glow or lighting effect.