What would Halo look like in the sky?

[009 SPA]

It seems Bungie would have us believe that, standing on Halo, the inside of the ring looks like this:



My question is simple. How did they work out the shape? It's been bothering me for a while, but in the end I sat down and combined a distance/size formula with some trig to produce a formula that maps the apparent width of the ring at any point to the linear distance to that point. In other words, a graph that represents what Halo would look like in the sky:

I've rotated and reflected the result for clarity. I have had to guess a lot of the constants, and I'm still not sure I've completely got it right yet, but I thought I'd share my stuff for anybody else who is as inquisitive as me.

 

[Varsity]

um.. this hurts my brain...

 

[hedtrip]

u have to much free time.

 

[Zat German]

Halo is a perfect ring so your picture is incorrect. It is only distorted like that because of the perspective view and that is just a skybox that is faked to show what a person would see from the ground, which you seem to have forgotten is part of Halo and creates the horizon.

Accounting for perspective distortion, you should have gotten the very simple answer of the equation of a circle with a radius of 5000 km(give or take 50 km or so ).

 

[SquishyShoes]

It seems Bungie would have us believe that, standing on Halo, the inside of the ring looks like this:

That's out of custom edition. Haha, interesting formulas. I'll check it out later. For now, I have maths revision.

 

[SchizophrenicMC]

I get the feeling Bungie didn't use a lick of trigonometry designing the skybox for Halo. Just knowing the sheer size and its shape, I would assume they plotted out the way it would look from the center line of the ring, on its ground level, tapering it in by eye.

For a real treat in the skybox, check out Forge World, which seems to be set further to the edge of a ring, as the ring tilts far off to one side.

German, I fail to see how his graph is incorrect. It correctly maps the distance between any two points in a straight line along a 10000-km-diameter ring, and further, matches the skybox in the Halo games very closely.

 

[Destination HALO]

Nice Going..... You went and Broke the HALO. LOL

Hey you should do this analyzation on the HALO ring in HALO REACH (Forge World):cool

 

[Zat German]

German, I fail to see how his graph is incorrect. It correctly maps the distance between any two points in a straight line along a 10000-km-diameter ring, and further, matches the skybox in the Halo games very closely.

Regarding the first picture in his post: Just because you take the ground away and see the ring does not mean that the now visible portion of the ring is accurate. I am assuming from the clouds that he went so high up that the camera's far clip plane cut out the ground geometry. So you just see the Halo skybox. Except that if he started moving back toward the ground, it would appear much sooner and much larger than that image of Halo would imply.

Simply put: Bungie did not design that portion of the skybox to be accurate and it should not be assumed so. The skybox is only accurate when the ground geometry is actually visible and cuts off a lot of it. The portion he is exposing and now trying to calculate for is never visible in actual, designed gameplay.

 

[Sgt Whoopass]

No no no no no no no math needs to stay far away from halo!!! Its the only safe place for me!!!!!!!!11one!!!!!!!

 

[ventrue]

Just thinking... have you guys tried using a recursive harmonic algorithm, or are you sticking with the usual set of complex functions?

 

[alix965]

um.. this hurts my brain...

I second that.
I wish I weren't so stupid so I could comment on this excellent question without sounding like an ass.

 

[009 SPA]

Update: I've just realised that this formula plots total width, making the 2 in front of arctan unnecessary.

 

[alix965]

Update: I've just realised that this formula plots total width, making the 2 in front of arctan unnecessary.

Update: WAHT??? lolz

 

[sik1276]

owwww my head, in the words of Joel Heyman, "Math makes my thinker box hurt."

 

[tsau mia]

I do have to day, that sounds pretty accurate to me.

Then again, I'm an art major. Anything beyond algebra isn't my strong point, and is highly difficult for me. Hence, i do graphic design instead of computer programming or complex algorithms.

 

[adam4472]

if i was designing a game i dont think i would have the time for being accurate like this.

 

[project003]

I get the feeling Bungie didn't use a lick of trigonometry designing the skybox for Halo. Just knowing the sheer size and its shape, I would assume they plotted out the way it would look from the center line of the ring, on its ground level, tapering it in by eye.

For a real treat in the skybox, check out Forge World, which seems to be set further to the edge of a ring, as the ring tilts far off to one side.

German, I fail to see how his graph is incorrect. It correctly maps the distance between any two points in a straight line along a 10000-km-diameter ring, and further, matches the skybox in the Halo games very closely.

for once, I actually agree with this man here ^^^

 

[Sangheili811]

I'm a Mechanical Engineering major, and I have no clue what you just did....

 

[setabkcin]

if i was designing a game i dont think i would have the time for being accurate like this.

I was thinking the same thing. This is an interesting concept, though.

 

[FrostyTheSnowMan]

I'm a Mechanical Engineering major, and I have no clue what you just did....

hahahahaha, thats hilarious