When the Halo 5 Multiplayer Beta released back in late December the majority of the game’s fans were simply ecstatic at the simple chance to play the upcoming Halo game, but for 343 Industries and Microsoft the significance of the beta was much greater than just giving fans a chance to test the game for them. Partnering with Microsoft’s Research division, 343 Industries took a new approach to prediciting, analyzing, and understanding the results that came pouring throughout the beta’s open access.
This approach, called “Trill” is used to quickly debug and continuing to improve the overall Halo 5 experience. Based on a temporal data and query processing system model, Trill helps Microsoft manage the player’s game information in a database. The power of this system is superior to all others at “2 to 4 order magnitudes faster than the competition” according to Rob DeLine, Senior Resercher for Microsoft.
“the Halo team uses Trill, a high-performance in-memory incremental analytics engine, and Tempe, a web service for exploratory data analysis, to monitor and quickly improve the Xbox gaming experience.” — Microsoft Research team
While Halo is the biggest name game to take advantage of Trill they are not the only ones. While nothing is certain, the fact that there is this much more effort going into ensuring the quality of the game remains high should be promising for Halo fans disappointed in the overwhelming number of problems with the Halo: Master Chief Collection release in November 2014.
Check the video below for an example of how the Trill helps the team recognize an in-game medals glitch quicker than normal.