Content tagged with [halo] on DuncanMackenzie.net

Custom Armor Configurations in Halo 3

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:39:00 GMT

In Halo 3 multi-player you can customize your SPARTAN or Elite's armor, with different variations unlocked by various achievements/activities in game (including one that can only be unlocked by being a Bungie employee). You can find out more about the different variations here, but it turns out that your profile on Bungie.net knows what choices you've made and displays your current armor configuration on the web site.

If you go to the Halo 3 Model Generator though, created by a community member, you can find the picture of any particular gamer you'd like (including yourself, which is how I found my picture, below) or create a custom image to plan out your own armor customizations.

What I'd really like to create is a live URL, one like /getpicture.ashx?GamerTag=Festive+Turkey, so that I could put my picture on my site and have it automatically update as I change my armor configuration in the game... hopefully ending up like this

Bungie.net showing Halo 3 stats along with Halo 2

Fri, 11 May 2007 21:16:00 GMT

My profile page... not sure if you can find out, but I've lost the last 3 games of Halo 3...

Halo 2 on Vista interview up on 10

Wed, 09 May 2007 19:48:00 GMT

Halo 2 on Vista: We've got the new maps, features and achievements
Posted by Tina Wood today at 8:40 AM

Halo 2 is officially coming to Vista. It is shipping to retailers on May 22nd. I sit down with Jo Clowes from Hired Gun to talk about new features, new maps and what we can expect from Halo 2 on Vista. We bring you all the cool visuals. Jo talks to us about some of the achievements you can earn for both single player and multi-player. There's a flaming Ninja achievement you earn through multi-player where you kill three....oh, well you'll just have to watch the video to find out about that one.

Including footage of me playing through a few moments of the first level... and even a shot of my gamercard :)

Two new wallpapers up on 360Style.net

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:18:00 GMT

Both are my style... but I had to go with the Star Trek Legacy one for now...

Halo 3 & Star Trek Legacy Wallpapers Added !
Time to switch up your wallpaper, choose your sci-fi poison.
Halo 3 vs Star Trek Legacy !!
(Both available in resolutions up to 1600x1200)

Halo 3

Star Trek: Legacy

Creating backgrounds for your Zune

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:36:00 GMT

On the Zune, any picture on the device can be set as the background for all of the menus, providing a great way to customize the look of your Zune. The screen on your Zune is 240 pixels wide and 320 pixels high (holding it in 'portrait mode', with the navigation pad at the bottom), so that is the proportions you want to shoot for as a background, but if you are making your own background images, then there are few things you should be aware of.

First, the image you choose will be cropped and displayed differently when your Zune is hooked up to output to a TV than it does when you are using the Zune normally.
Second, whenever you leave the main page the image is zoomed in a bit on all four sides.

Given a 320 x 320 square photo, here is what happens when it is displayed in the four different ways (device screen home page, device screen zoomed in, TV home page and TV zoomed in). The outermost red rectangle is what you end up seeing on the Zune's screen when you are on the home page. This is the standard 240x320 image you'd expect, taken from the middle of the picture. The next smaller red rectangle is the slightly zoomed in image you'll see when you navigate to any page other than the home menu page.

When you hook up to a TV though, you may be surprised by the result. We expected the image, (given that it is 320x320 originally) to be zoomed into an area that is 320 wide by 240 high... but instead, the home page screen displayed only the outer blue rectangle's worth of the image. This is an area of approximately 225px x 170px and even less (see the inner blue rectangle) when you navigate to another page while hooked up to the TV.

If you decide that the first issue matters to you (and it might not, TV output is not the main usage scenario for a Zune), then you need to make sure that a centered horizontal slice approximately two thirds the size of the image will still make a good background. If you don't care about TV out, then you can focus only on how the image looks at 240x320, which is what we did when making the Halo image shown below, but you still run into issues when the Zune zooms into your image on secondary menu pages.

With only a 240x320 image, you may see distortion when zoomed in; you can avoid this affect by creating your images at a slightly higher resolution while still maintaining a perfect ratio of 3:4 for the width and height. Following this plan, we created another copy of that same Halo image that works zoomed out as a background, looks good zoomed in, but doesn't look good at all when hooked up to a TV. This second background is 400px by 533px, but you could experiment with various resolutions to see which ones scale down the best on your Zune.

(both Halo images are cropped versions of a wallpaper from 360Style.net)

Once you have a picture (or pictures) created that you'd like to use as a background, put those pictures into one of the folders that your Zune software is monitoring (such as your My Pictures folder) then, when they appear in the library you can drag them onto the synclist and click "Start Sync" to get them onto your Zune. Disconnect your Zune after you've sync'd and browse to the picture and select it so that you are viewing it on your Zune. Click the center navigation button to bring up a menu listing what you can do with this image and pick the "apply as background" option. Hold down the back button to jump back to the home page and check out your creation!

Zune Crazy on 10

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:52:00 GMT

So you may have already seen the videos, but now we've been going a bit crazy and you find an on10.net background for your Zune along with a link to 12 great 360-themed backgrounds... and I went and made my own which you can grab from here

More on Halo Wars

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 07:15:00 GMT

Since my initial post on this upcoming game, I found the site www.halowars.com, which has (among other things) some great desktop wallpaper :)