Talk:Blam engine

I think the Reach engine description could use a small clarification. Reach was still fundamentally Bungie’s Blam! engine, but it also shipped with early Tiger technology integrated into it.

Chris Butcher explained at GDC that Bungie replaced Reach’s underlying Foundation layer with the in-development Tiger Foundation and used its task-based job system for Halo animation and part of object physics. Reverse engineering of the Reach binaries backs this up. The Foundation/Omaha job manager, worker threads, dependency system, and portions of the job graph are still present in the shipped engine and can be directly inspected.

Reach sits in an interesting transitional spot. It is still a late Blam! engine, but also one already carrying major pieces of what would become Tiger, particularly in the foundation and multithreading architecture. Treating it as simply another updated continuation of Halo 3’s Blam architecture, as ODST largely was, does it no justice and would lose important historical context.

It is almost fitting that Reach ended up being a testing ground for technology Bungie would carry forward into Destiny.

Source: Chris Butcher, Learning from the Core Engine Architecture of Destiny, GDC.