I like that you can go to the bungie webpage and browse custom game types and levels that are ranked and created by other users and cue them to download when you get back to your Xbox and play Halo. I was adding new levels to try out while just sitting at my desk and when I got home just a few quick multiplayer matches later my downloads were complete. It's pretty nice.

Adam In Texas

Let's not forget the EA Sports football (Madden, NCAA08) that came out this past summer. It's obviously easy to do.

Halo 3's MP features, Forge, and all that jazz is all really impressive. Consoles are catching up to what PC's have been doing for many, many years very quickly.

Still got a ways to go.

yonderTheGreat

What i'd like to see is a layer built into Live that enables vidcapping at any point, some sort of 'fraps' that you can enable through the guide, or by holding the guide and pressing start. Would enable you to 'cap' ANYTHING in ANY game without development costs for the game studios - however it'd go into MS's version of youtube.

Would be *wonderful* to add a bebo type gadget to your live page online that you can have a gallery of these things on.

Please MS, make it happen.

edhe (xbl)

bman784

Which will rape my wallet worse than the game ever did.

Witzbold

Darkest Daze

kojirodensetsu

tehFluffz

Truepatriot

If one of my friends does something cool, they can record it and flag it for me instead of saying, "Aw, man you should've seen the other day on Snowbound, I got an Overkill with the Beam Rifle . . ." That I'll watch, I know the person who pulled it off - that's why they call it a 'Friends' list and not 'Random Strangers You Met in Team Slayer'. I'd rather spend my time playing the game than surfing videos of someone else doing the same.

For what it is, it's a pretty cool and fun little bonus feature which, ultimately, is an ongoing cost in terms of bandwidth and storage that someone else is picking up the tab for. You're not paying extra for it, and the vast majority of games don't have anything remotely like it.

Ninja20XX

Tei

No, please don't. If they were to do this in a way like Skate, the videos would be extremely short (much like Skate's system limits them) and would be of very low-quality once they left your box. Not to mention being forced to get the entire thing done in one shot.

If you're making a Machinima, for one, you ought to be dedicated enough to the project to want to own a capture card, from there you'll be able to not only take and edit the videos elsewhere which would also mean you could have more takes and less worry when filming that it had to be perfect every take. Not to mention the benefit of having an HD video to purvey about. I mean, while it'd be convenient to have the "export" button somewhere, I don't really think it would be for the best, pragmatically, in the end anyways. Like someone else said, all this would lead to would be a lot of Teabagging vids, so the difficulty of ease is actually good as a content filtering measure. It keeps stupid things like that off the open-web, I mean, it would essentially be like taking the B.Net forums and putting them in video form.

MIKEAWESOME

However, when you make a video clip, what the viewer initially sees when they replay the video (if they don't touch the controls) is how you controlled the camera; they can then take control of the camera and venture around the map. I would like to be able to take this initial control of the camera and turn it into a video. I don't see (other than perhaps space reasons) why this wouldn't be possible.

karmaghost

Another problem here is that the more they give the more people complain. I can totally understand that people want more now that they have been shown what may be possible with this complex of a game a little further down the road, but that just shows how much Bungie has brought to the table this time around. But where does it end? If Bungie were to make a video converter, for example, then some people would complain because maybe it isn't in an HD resolution.

PolicePeople

Volomon

Err what? Oh, right.. MTV. SpikeTV. Too bad they're over 10 years behind reality. If they actually had some interest in games maybe they'd let their viewers know that although the "saved film" is nice and new to Halo, it's a really old concept. Maybe that would encourage console developers to actually do something new for the genre.

Crecente, "broken" is putting it a little lightly.

internetnerd

In order to make a video of the data, probably you will have to render it first with your xbox from a fixed perspective (because it is a video), do it locally and store it on your system. The size of it will be too big compared to just the data, preventing server storage.

This way can be acomplished, but the videos will not be available for sharing as they are store locally, unless you move them to the internet.

Herodito

SeannyFunco

I do think that I'd get Bungie Pro if they offered some kind of video upload service for members only. That'd make it worth the 800 point subscription fee, if you ask me.

Raydancer

Konrad

I say leave it as it is this time around. Concentrate on adding more maps and content.

Just playback the saved film, record it on your tape/dvd/HDD recorder and upload it to youtube.

joncoffee

LennyShimizu

Sounds kinda far-fetched and unecessary.

SNK-Jorge

@DigitalHero: Last time I checked I never claimed ANYTHING about being able to WRITE any code. Let alone a replay system.

LennyShimizu's comment is on the right track. There should be a way to export the video in some fashion. Wether that's an AVI file dumped to your PC via the X-Box Connection to your PC or to a USB device, we should be able to export it in some fashion. Hell even if its 2 minutes only, like .skate, thats something. What Bungie has done is ground breaking but I think the technology IS there to go the whole rest of the way. If it means I got to wait 6 months to a year after Halo 3's launch to get it, thats fine, I just know we are capable of getting what we want in some form or another.

SeannyFunco

AnEternalEnigma

jimb213

Uploading a 10 second clip means something like 20MB of data...I see the point in allowing the user to freely roam around the clip on their xbox but its just a pain to transfer 50MB here, 35MB there, just for a couple seconds of gameplay that you really didn't care to spend that much time downloading. Screenshots show up online though! I guess that's something, but yeah Skate has the advantage here.

noelix

Jest

creid

The first video tells the tale.

Borman18

Integrating that all with a site like YouTube wouldn't be trivial, but it's not impossible either. The fact that they haven't done it yet implies to me that either 1) they want to force people to buy Halo 3 so they can watch any Halo 3 movies or 2) they just haven't decided if it's worth the effort yet or 3) they'll be adding it soon in some way. I'd bet on 3.

I mean, if I were the sort of casual mainstream gamer who Halo 3 is targeted at, and I'm on the fence about buying a 360 to get the game, I could probably be convinced by wasting an hour at work by watching funny frag clips on YouTube.

Incidentally, as somebody who works in the online video field, I can say that in some ways a 360 is a *better* environment for posting a video to a site like YouTube than your laptop. Uploading big files, for one thing, would be easier to manage in a more locked-down user environment like a game console.

LennyShimizu

People are hoping Bungie creates a tool that lets you take one of your saved films and have it render an actual video you could upload to Youtube or where ever.

Jesus.

Canadian Impostor

I am not saying I do not want a Halo 3 youtube button, I am human. My beef is that Halo 3 is worthy of a technology award for offering what no other console shooter has ever offered before and for adding that on top of the finest matchmaking system ever achieved.

godhandiscen

DrFresh

kiigan

Seems wrong.

Then again, if that's all you got out of a best-of-7 match...

Tenth

The halo 3 recorder is recording the coordinates of every object in the game world every second and feeding them into the game. Instead of recording the images - its as if it was keystroke (or in this case gamepad press) recording every move to be played back later through the game.

Bungie would need to come up with a utility that recorded those actions being played back through and I bet they'd need a beefy server or some sort of complex system and the bandwidth to do it - the same thing that makes the movies so small and sharable makes this next to impossible to easily do.

Rambo731

reprimanded?

locked for 10 days in the kotaku tower?

would like to know.

Dakobah

Dimipapa

Jest

The replay technology is amazing -- saving the last 25 matches you played IN THEIR ENTIRETY for you to watch from any angle or player perspective is an astounding technological feat. Not catering to lazy people who want an easy way to annoy others with their replays hardly means it's "broken".

Z-Word

You can't rewind in a literal sense. It's not a video. You're jumping back to a benchmark. The physics are trying to recreate what occured by telling the engine where things are and what they're doing. It's a simulation, where minute details under the hood more often than not won't be identical. Rewinding frame-by-frame wouldn't be likely to yield the same position x after going to x+1 and back down to x.

Saving data specific enough for that would make the file sizes even larger, so you'd be able to host fewer over your fileshare and hold less on your 360.

Heliophage

Astrofox

G.L.G.

What would need to happen is, like with clips that you take of your saved films, there would have to be a set camera position. In saved films (I don't know if you've toyed around with this or not, Crecente), you can detach the camera from yourself, hover over others' shoulders, or just fly the camera around while the action is occuring.

What the game is doing is simulating everything that's occuring, not just replaying the game from your persepctive.

You can detach the camera in a clip, too, but it's a start for having a fixed view to render from. With the appropriate software, that rendering could then be exported as a video, though the video file would be significantly larger than the raw data (which is why they aren't doing videos in the first place).

@SeannyFunco:

Perhaps you should re-read Bungie's reasoning, because you obviously haven't fully understood any of it yet.

Heliophage

Oh please, the system is more complex than you know. Can you write a replay system that well? Doubt it.

DigitalHero

I agree with what you said. not what you meant.

WhaleMenace

While we're on the subject, Bungie should work on implementing some sort of rewind and super-speed feature for saved films, since that "go back X seconds" button just causes more frustration than it alleviates, and the fast forward only doubles your play speed, so you still have to rip through 15 minutes of nothing to clip an 8-second clip out of a half-hour match.

Archaotic

godhandiscen

fuchikoma

Kobi

Tonx

PGGB

yeah its a nice idea and i am sure something they are looking into but its almost technicaly impossible cause you need the game engine to watch the film.

baby steps lol. having the replay film changes alot of halo 3. and this function adds a whole new angle on mulitplayer and social gaming in general.

MassaLefty

Kamizzle

The fact that you can browse and rate other peoples replays from within the game is amazing. It adds a whole new dimension to the community aspect of the game and expect it to be the basis of replay systems in future games.

I would love to see this feature in GTA4 and Burnout Paradise for example.

Astrofox

Brian Crecente

WhaleMenace

it can be done but with so much going on the engine soul;d have errors. and even freeze up. so they decided to remove that function and possibly add it back after they fix the bugs.

once again its not a VIDEO. WHEN YOU WATCH A VIDEO OF THE GAME YOUR ACTUALLY PLAYING THE GAME AGAIN.

its the game engine rendering what happened based off of simple data. its not a video. its a controlled rendering in the engine.

MassaLefty

ao_hatefulrobot

so right now its really hard to do alot of things with that. now ncaa 08 had a similar function but i think that was an actual flash video file. which is why they were shorter and much bigger to store.

but good idea none the less .

MassaLefty

SeannyFunco