Wow, I'm shocked /s.

Looks like I was right, the rumour was bogus, both ACG and Sean W are not reliable sources, Jez originally called Sean W's rumour as something looking like it's from 4Chan until he knew it was a Youtuber who leaked it, Lol. Then he thought it made sense based on very weak speculation, one reason being that the Slipspace Lead had left the company, then he made an article saying he has sources that say it might be true but no hard evidence so take it with a grain of salt, now he's saying he used conflicting sources and is 50/50.

Weak stuff from Jez, he's usually more careful than this, Lol.

Unreal doesn't use Lua. Slipspace does.

Developer commented on Halo switching to Unreal Engine.

Since I'm a developer in the industry, actively working with UE, and decently far up the ladder (looking at senior soon), I'm going to give my thoughts on this.

The demands of Halo's sandbox and gameplay are fundamentally unachievable with the out-of-box features of UE4/5. Unfortunately, it's far too easy for those outside of the industry to see all the fancy marketing and demos and thing the engine is some gift from the gods. It really isn't. The architecture is full of technical debt, lack of care, and ineptitude.

Unreal makes very poor use of hardware resources. Your poor CPU is sitting there waiting constantly for fetches to main memory because the spaghettified object-oriented architecture is blowing your cache lines on every function call. Imagine if you were trying to work at your desk and had to walk a block down the street every time you needed to perform an action.

The renderer might have added support for DX12/Vulkan but the actual implementation is a joke. It's painfully obvious that the developers working on it have no understanding of these new APIs. In fact, the engine violates the specifications of both quite often.

The networking of UE is straight up not equipped to handle the physics-heavy sandbox of Halo. It would be a mess worse than Slipspace if you could even get it functioning at all. Forge is fundamentally impossible as those sorts of object counts require state-of-the-art rendering and modern data-oriented programming techniques. Unreal lacks both of these entirely and trying to modify the engine to add them would be a massive undertaking.

Slipspace also doesn't appear to be the pile of garbage that the community likes to compare it to. The GDC talk alone demonstrates that 343's developers have a lot of skill and experience. Parts of the engine are very modern and would scale well into the future. It's just unfortunate that they dropped the ball on some systems that have a large impact on the experience.

I'm not saying it's impossible to make Halo in UE and I'm not trying to argue for the sunken costs of Slipspace. This sort of swap just doesn't make sense to me. The timelines also don't add up. Unless the next mainline title and the battle royale are targeting extremely cut-down features sets, there's no way we'd see anything after a major engine swap till 2026 at best.

I'd be very cautious about these rumors and even if they are true, keep your hopes low for a Halo title made in Unreal. The Unreal titles that do perform well are often built on heavily modified versions of the engine.

Not that Sean W was a reliable source to begin with, but with how much talk and digging that came out his “reporting,” he just about permanently tarnished his reputation.

Reading that UE dev’s comments cements about theories and brings a huge sigh of relief

Bathrobe Spartan who has leaked stuff previously and seems to be considered as reliable by ResetEra, I've seen them speak positively about him and he's a member on the forums, plus he has leaked stuff before but usually stuff through datamining so I would take this with a grain of salt too, anyway he has posted his leak on Slipspace and the issues at 343i.

----

Here's the result of our investigation into Slipspace, the reality of the tool and its impact on #Halo, in Thread form. Are Faber & Slipspace bad tools as you've often heard? That's not exactly the sound bite we got. Next.

Before we continue, a transparency point and a message. First of all, our sources. We have several, which we have classified into 2 categories, detailed below: external sources, and internal sources. That is, you ask?

Our outside sources wish to remain anonymous, and given their responsibilities, we understand. We have verified their identities. The deal is simple: we do our research, and they agree to confirm, correct or deny our findings. Absolute trust.

Internal sources? Well, that's us! Through research, data mining and luck too, we find many elements that allow us to establish cause and effect links. We are rarely wrong because we don't share anything if we are not 99% sure.

Finally, a message to the #Halo Youtubers: You have the trust of the community, and therefore, a great responsibility. If there is nothing to say about the game, that's sad, but it's better to say nothing than to damage the morale of the community with inventions.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get started! You may have seen on Twitter that we were doing some research regarding Slipspace and Faber, 343 Industries' tool for Halo Infinite. We wanted to know if the rumour that the tool was difficult was true.

Answer: No, not quite. According to our sources, Slipspace & Faber would even be excellent, currently qualified as sometimes much better than other engines and tools publicly available, like Unity or Unreal Engine. We summarize it for you

As an example, Faber offers an incredible experience, if not better, in the following areas:
- Automatic organization of projects
- Optimized level and 3D asset clipping to support different platforms
- Excellent procedural generation tools
- A terrain editor described as "incredible".
- Very good world building and experience tools, to manage the placement of elements, AIs or even pre-defined actions by the Designers responsible for missions and sections in campaign.

That said, Faber seems to have his share of problems, for example:
- Crashing several times a day
- Very powerful for elaborate uses but can require workarounds for simple things
- Cancelling an action had a 75% chance of crashing the project
- In case of a crash, loading assets could take hours
- Some people at 343 would take their lunch break while everything loaded
- Artists could sometimes lose hours of work if they weren't careful about cancelling actions (real life experience)

That said, these problems were true during the development of Halo Infinite only. Since then, 343 Industries has done a lot of work on it. While some of these issues remain, our sources describe Faber as now "much more stable and faster."

This means that there are far fewer crashes in the production of assets, maps, or new experiences today, allowing artists to work more efficiently. It's not the tools that are currently holding 343 Industries back from moving fast.

The problem is actually the manpower still available to create content for Halo Infinite. Between departures and a Microsoft-wide hiring freeze, 343 is having trouble keeping up with the demands and needs that a Game as a Service game requires.

It is not only the production of 3D elements, but also the programming required for them, storing the data, tracking the actions and statistics of the players, requiring engineers in addition to the available artists.

Basically, understand that just because you see a working "DMR" in a leak doesn't mean it would work properly online. Eliminations made with the weapon must be tracked, recorded, etc... And that requires missing manpower.

The team was supposed to get help from studios to produce elements, unfortunately, external events prevented this. 343 Industries is trying to optimize their resources as much as possible to get on the right track, but we'll come back to that later.

So... Are Slipspace and Faber the hell that the rumors have recently sold you? According to our sources, absolutely not, quite the opposite. Like any tool, there are still problems of course. But the worries about 343 Industries' pace are elsewhere.

This concludes our Thread about Slipspace and Faber, 343 Industries' tool for creating content for Halo Infinite. Our next Thread will focus on the relationship between Slipspace and #Halo, and whether or not the engine is suitable for the license. See you soon.

-----

Again. Grain of salt.

Always said that staff is likely an issue for 343i though and the hiring freeze won't help, neither does them losing support from one of their main partners (Sperasoft) due to the Russia/Ukraine war, 343 was contracting their Russian branch for assistance (obvious by how many Russians are in the credits for Halo Infinite) and they primarily assisted on Multiplayer maps.

Meanwhile Skybox is busy with Forge and Certain Affinity is busy with Battle Royale. I'm assuming Bathrobe's comment about "343 was supposed to get help from studios to produce elements, unfortunately, external events prevented this" is in reference to losing Sperasoft due to the Russia/Ukraine war and they can't just swap to a different Sperasoft branch because they have their own partners.

The issues with the tools crashing a lot and setting them back hours a day likely contributed to them having a small amount of content on launch, they had to rush to get stuff in, then after launch they're basically playing catchup even if the tools have improved a lot, catchup whilst losing an entire support studio and being understaffed for a project like this.

But again, a grain of salt, I would be curious what an updated Jason investigation would say.

Maybe they are using UE for the battle royale mode. It wouldn't be the first time this happens; back in 2010 Medal of Honor was developed using UE3 for the campaign and Frostbite for the multiplayer.

The Certain Affinity job listing is only 3 weeks old and mentions proprietary engine and Lua, Unreal Engine doesn't use Lua, but Slipspace uses it quite a bit.

All of Certain Affinity's other projects are Unreal Engine to my knowledge so this job posting is either a new engine built by Certain Affinity for a separate FPS Multiplayer project or Slipspace.

Missed this but Skybox is expanding.

They're also hiring for Halo Infinite's "Campaign Experience"

They've also joined F76 development team.

Certain Affinity Post-Activision Acquisition.

Skybox Labs

+ Fallout 76.

If there was ever a time Microsoft needs to put a ring on Certain Affinity and SkyBox Labs asap!

I figured they would've done it sooner, but I'm still holding onto my old prediction of SkyBox being acquired.  

Sadly, said old prediction is currently deleted/hidden thanks to that site-hacking jagoff.