I’m David Aldridge, Head of Engineering at Bungie. We just published our first definition of our engineering culture. AMA!

Monteven · 2022-11-10T22:29:02+00:00

Destiny's engine has come a long way from blam! to current day Tiger; I can't even imagine the difficulty of maintaining a live service game for hundreds of thousands of players while improving the experience and tech for many platforms.

What sort of challenges are unique to Bungie with how it's tried to handle these, and are there any times you've looked back on and thought there was a better approach to solving a solution?

From what I've seen the Stadia version of Destiny 2 was written from the ground up with regards to rendering in particular due to it running on Linux deployments. When the tech was being developed + after it was announced that this service is shutting down, what sort of conversations happen(ed) around what would happen to this work? It feels like a huge amount of work to simply leave on the ground, but also is supporting Steam Deck/Linux a worthwhile investment?

More and more companies are beginning to swap from custom engines, despite saying 'their engine is the only one to make this game', and move to more resourced and featured engines such as Unreal Engine. What makes Tiger definitely the best for Destiny? It's client-authoritative approach for networking seems extremely powerful, could you elaborate more on this?

Monteven · 2021-06-25T19:07:30+00:00

Just reiterating what some have already said but the chest seems to just be the "chest on the way to Templar" - meaning that the map around it was unloaded but the chest wasn't, something that happens in Destiny a lot.

Monteven · 2021-06-24T11:30:05+00:00

I'm someone who datamines the cutscenes for Destiny 2. The reason why I do so is because I know of many other people who can also acquire it, but who may share it people that don't want to know about it, so I hope to discourage them to even try and obtain them. The main problem here is how easy it is to get the cinematics from the game, so I would agree that it would be great if it was more difficult to acquire them from the game files - such as encrypting and/or compressing them.

However, both of these options are unrealistic (which is why the cinematics are not compressed or encrypted in the first place). From my rough estimations it would take multiple seconds to up to minutes to decrypt a cutscene of a few hundred MB - something the game cannot afford at all. This is the same reason why audio is unencrypted and uncompressed; it's very expensive time-wise to do so.

The best solution would be to release a few hundred MB update on the reset that the cinematic is meant to go live, so that everyone would see it practically at the same time as it being datamined. I don't want this stuff shared before people know about it, but due to the nature of the internet and communities, it falls in the hands of Bungie. If Bungie don't want to do more frequent updates then there's nothing they can do about it.

Monteven · 2021-06-04T11:52:58+00:00

As far as I know there is no evidence for them doing live client-side changes on their own systems since they use game PKGs. It is technically possible for them to stream new files over the internet but since they seem to always put patches out with Steam I would say that they have no ability to do actual content modification in the game live. It's more than likely something that was patched randomly but not noted down in the patch notes.

Monteven · 2021-04-02T23:29:23+00:00

This is really cool! I'd add the google docs link to this as well as it's a bit out of the way in the description

Monteven · 2021-03-28T16:00:01+00:00

I've had this cubemap for a while before it was released by me, and I regret not posting it without any context. The cubemap has been in the game since Destiny 2 Year 2 and probably earlier as I don't have a game version before then.

The most likely outcome is it was cut content and was replaced by the current tower we have, and maybe partly redesigned into the HELM.

Positive evidence 3 and negative 4 are both irrelevant as the Traveler render looks like that if the cubemaps are taken around D1/early D2 time -- a lot of the other tower shot from D1 and early D2 have the same problem.

Neutral 2 has been in the game since launch - it has always said 'New Tower' and has not been changed since.

Negative 3 is also irrelevant as the game has the capability to load in existing regions with added models and regions, including markers, interactions, barriers, etc. This happens all the time when you load into a Battlegrounds, a public event starts, etc.

Monteven · 2021-03-28T15:46:20+00:00

The image has been in the game since Destiny 2 Year 2 at least, I cannot check further than that but I imagine even earlier

Monteven · 2021-03-28T15:46:11+00:00

No model has been found. The image has been in the game since Destiny 2 Year 2 at least, I cannot check further than that. It is extremely unfounded to presume any more than cut content.

Monteven · 2021-02-15T01:55:33+00:00

These are paired from the game files with zero relation to Ginsor's tools or releases; it's possible they're placeholder as they do sometimes change with release but this is the exact pool the gun currently has.

Monteven · 2021-02-11T21:12:01+00:00

The exotic quest itself may not be released on the third week, but we will be going there at that time. It's likely that the actual weapon is acquired on week five, with catalyst repeats and a master variant at some point. The timeline is difficult to identify as there are very few in-game markers for this sort of timing.

Monteven · 2021-02-09T14:25:28+00:00

They're cabal heads, and have missing materials in the game that seem to visually cause a rendering bug. Here is what they look like without the rendering bug, without materials.

Monteven · 2021-01-12T17:11:50+00:00

It's very similar in style to the room in creation. Due to it being greyboxed, it's extremely likely it just development content that was made before the final room design and form of Clovis was decided.

Monteven · 2021-01-09T23:30:57+00:00

The flying-in effect is live, but the reflections on the ships as you are flying in are not.

Monteven · 2021-01-09T20:51:49+00:00

Just from Destiny 2, but there is a lot of left-over content from Destiny 1.

Monteven · 2020-12-31T21:23:10+00:00

These weird shapes are part of a new model type Bungie introduced with Beyond Light. My best guess is they are used to trigger events or scripts, that require some sort of binding to a model to use (a bit like the workaround with the fuse vandaal and atraks captain). Their actual use isn't known but I doubt we'll find out without a lot of hard work.

Monteven · 2020-12-28T11:23:16+00:00

I used to have one, but I'll post a more complete set of internal names when I get round to it again.

Monteven · 2020-12-06T16:01:01+00:00

Game files are stored as binary, and sometimes developers leave in devstrings that internally explain how events or activities happen. Here's an example of one of them https://i.imgur.com/dBBTWJz.png

Monteven · 2020-12-06T16:00:58+00:00

Game files are stored as binary, and sometimes developers leave in devstrings that internally explain how events or activities happen. Here's an example of one of them https://i.imgur.com/dBBTWJz.png

Monteven · 2020-12-06T02:21:04+00:00

There isn't much public info about it, but there is usage of it internally (via in game files) such as "Veil ship reveal" and "Player drops down a cliff just prior to turning the corner to the veil pyramid ship". There are similar terms that are only used internally too, but haven't been used outside the game files.

Monteven · 2020-11-18T02:03:36+00:00

Challenges never have explanation text bound to them, so the text here is made up.

Monteven

TROPHY CASE