For the world lightmap, I don't see why Bungie should be using real time lighting - the campaign spaces are tuned to the time setting, and so are the multiplayer maps. They do use real time lighting on players and other objects up close, but I think for Halo whole-world RTL would have been overkill. In fact, they tried it for Halo 2 already and dumped it because it never worked out.
You're confusing things slightly. They experimented with stencil shadows (at the time there was the whole Doom 3 hype with unified lighting and shadow casting but I digress). They even mention in the blog post that they were trying to combine ambient lightmaps with stencil. The reason stencil was ditched was performance issues since stencil shadows require a shit ton of fillrate and polygon performance (essentially 1:1 pixel resolution and hard edges). With shadow buffers/shadowmaps, they have better control over performance although there is a higher memory cost, but they can always tweak the shadowmap size (and of course introduce all sorts of low res artefacts, but that's the whole trade-off).
Both solutions (stencil and shadow buffers) can be cast in realtime, you just flag the light source for casting shadows (or objects for receiving).
Anyways, yes, a fully dynamic global illumination system (environment) doesn't really make sense if they don't intend on doing time of day shifting. The environment is also mostly static (aside from characters and vehicles), so the baked global illumination makes the most sense (you'll still get the baked lighting changes on character objects moving around the environment since the static environment lights are baked), plus it'd be a higher quality than the SSGI techniques by default since it's much cheaper than the latter (CryEngine 3 for example, which will calculate a couple light bounces for dynamic light sources).
Halo 3+ are using a deferred lighting solution so you'll still get some dynamic lighting from dynamic light sources (weapons), but it just won't be as accurate as there are no bounced lighting calcs ("global illumination"). They're just directional light sources, but again, it's kind of a moot point if the dynamic lights are on-screen briefly (weapon's fire). Eventually, an SSGI technique could be used once the performance is there, but I think you're headed into a region of diminishing returns, and on console, it's going to be about the biggest bang for buck.
Hell, Crytek even disabled SSGI for the current gen consoles for Crysis 2 so...
Why would I need to know about creating levels/games? I'm not a game developer, not even some sort of developer-wannabe, I'm simply stating features I would like to see in a game.
If you did, you'd understand why and how developers have to make certain decisions with a limited time frame for development.
I thought that I saw Al at B3D confirmed the Halo 3 res some time ago for Anniversary.
Thanks for clarifying.
I need to do another check on that sometime... the pre-release footage was 640. I may have accidentally told kage it was 720.
I'm no expert, but I think their games would be less aliased if they weren't sub-HD.
Yes and no... Obviously, a very low resolution results in gigantic jagged step sizes, but it can depend a lot on the lighting model too and the chosen art direction. I'd say Halo 3 was very jaggy in appearance from the high contrast lighting. Compare this to Mirror's Edge sans AA, and you'll find that 720p doesn't really help. Contrast (herp derp) this to a game with more subdued lighting, like Gears 3 or Fear 2 or any other darker game, and at least to my eyes, the lack of AA can be less of an issue. Gears 2 may also have been kinda dark a lot, but the directional lighting and super contrasty specular made some environments appear a lot more jagged than others.
Honestly, the difference between 640 and 720 is so slight that the size of an edge step is likewise pretty similar. The slight upscale would normally have blurred the edges to some extent although they do a custom fast scaling IIRC - they don't use the automatic scaler, which can do bicubic or bilinear - so as to overlay a full-res HUD.
