IMG Magazine has posted an interview with Bungie's co-founder, and code jockey behind Halo's impressive engine, Jason Jones. The interview's a good one, as Jason answers several good questions, including ones about the engine's origin (it was supposed to be the next-generation Myth terrain system), as well as this one that helps explain why it looks so damn good:

One of the reasons it looks so good is multipass texturing. Every major object in the Halo world has at least two texture maps, and many have several more. For example, the alien hover vehicle seen in the keynote trailer has four maps, a base color map, specular map for lighting effects, a "dirt" map for the scuffs, burns and pitting that objects in a real battlefield might have, and a per-pixel reflection map for varying levels of reflectivity from shiny objects.