Halo 1 & 2 for PC
This topic has moved here: Subject: Test patch 1.09 for compat fixes
  • Subject: Test patch 1.09 for compat fixes
Subject: Test patch 1.09 for compat fixes

You need to stop posting.
Thank you.

[Edited on 08.21.2009 12:59 PM PDT]

  • 08.21.2009 12:59 PM PDT

Daodan Latency at 65%

I guess you don't play Halo PC. Sorry but respect is going downhill with a statement like this. Way too many false positives to be reliable. Some servers are better than others, but I can guarantee that every single excellent player out there has been banned at one point or another for "aimbottting" when in fact they are just good. Relying on "the community" to deal with cheating is a terrible idea and if you played the game you'd see firsthand the many reasons why after all these years it has never worked. Plus, the "before we shipped" statement I don't believe for one second considering the game did not ship with RCON support. Hmmmm.

I agree with the majority of this post, but I don't think it is the game developer's responsibility to regulate and monitor the online game experience that the game can provide.

  • 08.21.2009 1:36 PM PDT
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Hey, newer patch worked perfectly on my old eMachines T6216 with 1GB DDR Ram, 160 GB HDD, AMD Anthlon 64 3200 2.01 Ghz processor, with a BFG NVIDIA 8600 with 256 MB DDR2 Ram. And I am running XP Home SP3. I haven't had any problems running Halo with 1.08.

  • 08.21.2009 2:10 PM PDT
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Posted by: Frnksnbns

I guess you don't play Halo PC


Honestly, not much for a long time, and mostly LAN at work. I don't claim to know as much about the Halo PC community as you guys, but since I'm the one person involved in the development cycle who is both willing and able to use my personal time to make the security and compat fixes needed to keep the game playable, I'm afraid you're stuck with me. (or, y'know, boycott my personal patches and return to 1.03)

"Before we shipped" we were of course already planning the features that only got delivered in later patches. For reasons I've discussed in the past, I will not be entering the "arms race" of trying to stay ahead of aimbotters, which would involve rewriting large portions of the game and constant updates to keep up with new exploits. (It was considered too complex a problem for the team of ~10 full-time devs to fit into the 1-year dev cycle; I'm 1 person - and not one of the original devs - currently spending 2 evenings a year on the game.)

"Old" games can really benefit from community support. My best advice is to find a preferred moderator who will collate ban logs submitted by individual server operators and master-ban a person who has been banned from enough servers. Then the server ops can pick up the updated banfile at their convenience. Your collective judgment, even if imperfect, will still be more accurate than any anti-aimbot code that isn't constantly updated by a dedicated dev team that doesn't exist. My involvement will continue to be limited to only the tiny spot-fixes that keep the game from instant death at the hands of a new OS or crashing exploit.

[Edited on 08.21.2009 2:51 PM PDT]

  • 08.21.2009 2:44 PM PDT

There's a rumor going around that you will be taking on the dead weight project of Halo 2 Vista?
Is this rumor true or false?

  • 08.21.2009 3:29 PM PDT
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Posted by: AsK Magic
There's a rumor going around that you will be taking on the dead weight project of Halo 2 Vista?
Is this rumor true or false?


False.

  • 08.21.2009 3:44 PM PDT
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~~OpsY
Love you Bungie!
Still playing Halo1 Custom Edition!

Hey Sawnose, I'm a long time Halo PC player, from about the release and I wanted to thank you personally for all this. The CE community is shrinking and shrinking but there's still lots of fun going on there. Keeping those patches alive means alot to me and probably to other users of the community.

If there was one thing I could ask, and I know it has been asked before, it would be to merge PC and CE together so that the players on CE learn about the possibilities of Custom Edition.

Anyway, Thanks again and hopefully we'll see you some day playing some of our custom maps!

  • 08.21.2009 7:11 PM PDT
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One thing I'd like to see improved is Halo PC's netcode, to get the updated netcode that Halo CE got. I rescently played a few games of PC and realized just how much worse off it is than CE. There is constant lag spikes even in a server with a descent ping. There is roughly about x10 more people playing PC than CE and it can be frustrating with all the lag, knowing that the server's ping isn't the problem.

  • 08.21.2009 8:07 PM PDT

Daodan Latency at 65%

One thing I'd like to see improved is Halo PC's netcode, to get the updated netcode that Halo CE got. I rescently played a few games of PC and realized just how much worse off it is than CE. There is constant lag spikes even in a server with a descent ping. There is roughly about x10 more people playing PC than CE and it can be frustrating with all the lag, knowing that the server's ping isn't the problem.

I play almost every night for 2-3 hours and I don't often get these lag spikes you are talking about. The netcode works just fine for right now and Roger has already said that he will not be updating the netcode now.

  • 08.21.2009 8:29 PM PDT
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Posted by: OpsY 31337
Hey Sawnose, I'm a long time Halo PC player, from about the release and I wanted to thank you personally for all this. The CE community is shrinking and shrinking but there's still lots of fun going on there. Keeping those patches alive means alot to me and probably to other users of the community.

If there was one thing I could ask, and I know it has been asked before, it would be to merge PC and CE together so that the players on CE learn about the possibilities of Custom Edition.

Anyway, Thanks again and hopefully we'll see you some day playing some of our custom maps!


You're welcome, and thanks for still playing! Incidentally, there were 76,000 unique players online in July, including 5500 first-timers! (based on cd-key)

Unfortunately, the original reasons for splitting off CE still hold - most importantly, that CE maps are language-neutral, and PC (including Campaign) maps are language-specific. The engine can only deal with one of those at a time, and it would be a huge amount of work to get both running in the same "game". Also various other things, like that the shader tweaks made for CE were never tested against the campaign and would probably have to be revised. Basically, we made the right decision to separate them.

  • 08.21.2009 9:19 PM PDT
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I've always wondered if there only six new maps were shipped with the game because of disc space limitations.

There were eight maps in development, and although Gearbox said they may release the final two at some point, they never did.

Don't suppose you have any info on those two ditched maps just out of sheer curiousity. Names, styles, anything? ;)

Probably not, but hey, worth a shot to try and get an answer to something I've always wondered.

[Edited on 08.21.2009 9:59 PM PDT]

  • 08.21.2009 9:59 PM PDT
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Btcc22 - Honestly don't remember details of any unshipped maps there might have been. I remember we were really squeezed for CD space, but that didn't keep us from shipping any content - we managed to get everything we wanted into the disc budget. That was a happy event.

  • 08.21.2009 10:06 PM PDT
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Don't mean to be a pesky bug sawnose but since we're talking about this and that just out out curiosity how hard would it be to enable actual widescreen for halo? Many people today, way more than when halo was released use widescreen. The problem is when even using the -vidmode in console the weapon will be off screen a little and the HUD stretched.

Thanks, Rook

  • 08.21.2009 10:53 PM PDT
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Surprisingly hard. I actually spent a good deal of time investigating that about 4 years ago for an internal project. And it was quite a headache, because so many systems (hud, shaders, text,...) assume 4x3. it just wasn't meant to do that, sorry.

  • 08.22.2009 12:15 AM PDT
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Ok, one more version of the patch is up, same URL as before. This one adds a fix for a network exploit that can crash a server after enough bad packets. Please re-download the patch and make sure all the old stuff works as expected. Plus if you are aware of this exploit, see if the fix works for you. The version number is still .619.

I hope this is the last fix to go into this patch. If there are no new problems, it will eventually go out for auto-update so we don't fragment the player base by having unpatched users unable to see patched servers.

Thanks to BrandiniMP_ and Omegga for working with me on the network fix.

[Edited on 08.22.2009 12:30 AM PDT]

  • 08.22.2009 12:27 AM PDT

Ah yeah brandini is the one who discovered the new way to crash servers. He has provided a patch for Haloce dedicated servers earlier.

And yes this new patch works like a charm.
And an even better bonus, I tested to see if the aimbot still worked and to all you guys out there against aimbotters the aimbot crashed halo. It was the one released by Sodomist.

So a unexpected plus came out of this as well.

Thanks Roger.

  • 08.22.2009 1:58 AM PDT
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Thanks for the answer and patch then Sawnose. :)

When you release it, could you update the MotD text file so it has the right version number in please? It's been out of date with 1.07 for a couple of years and probably doesn't help the community to be so out of date.

AsK Magic, the bots will be working again within 30 seconds of the patch being released. I suppose I'll have to see how to fix them myself so I can update Halo Anticheat in advance since they all have to use the same method of working pretty much.

  • 08.22.2009 5:31 AM PDT

Daodan Latency at 65%

Another idea could be to plant fake values for what the aimbot goes after into memory. From personal experience with using a program called "The Cheat" which searches the memory a program is using for values you can specify that Halo really only has value for an item in most cases. If how these values are loaded is changed and fake values are placed in as well it would throw off the aimbot as to which is the real set. Ofcourse this would involve a lot of work with the engine, but I think that should work.

[Edited on 08.22.2009 9:19 AM PDT]

  • 08.22.2009 9:18 AM PDT
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It wouldn't do anything.

Plenty games try to prevent cheating by making sure they don't use static addresses for storing important information, but it does nothing since all you need to do is figure out the location that contains the pointer to the real information (in basic terms).

The game always needs to know where the data it needs is, and if the game can find it, so can any other program.

  • 08.22.2009 9:28 AM PDT

Daodan Latency at 65%

Well if you have a user trying to sift through 20 different memory address that change all the time with movement it is going to be very hard for them to get it done well. You have to figure out which of them are fake and which ones are the right ones. It would break the current aimbots and force the people out there to either stop using it or to find a way to write a new one.

  • 08.22.2009 9:47 AM PDT
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There wouldn't need to be any rewrite. It'd do nothing to slow them down I'm afraid.

There are more ways to find the addresses you want than sifting through them.

  • 08.22.2009 10:36 AM PDT
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Unfortunately, the original reasons for splitting off CE still hold - most importantly, that CE maps are language-neutral, and PC (including Campaign) maps are language-specific. The engine can only deal with one of those at a time, and it would be a huge amount of work to get both running in the same "game". Also various other things, like that the shader tweaks made for CE were never tested against the campaign and would probably have to be revised. Basically, we made the right decision to separate them.

Talking about language thing... I don't know if you're already aware of this, but HaloCE's auto-update only work when you're using the english version, others (German, French, Italian... ) do not auto-update. :-)

Would it be hard to add sv_say and the other nice things from HaloCE's to HaloPC ? ( Like players name on screen, F2 board...)

Also, just tested 1.09, works fine. :-D

  • 08.22.2009 11:24 AM PDT
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Brandini put me onto another bug that can take down servers, so there's another new build for you to try. Same link. This one is Build 620. Lemme know how it goes.
(it's the rcon / sv_map bug, if anyone knows it and wants to test it)

  • 08.22.2009 11:40 AM PDT
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Don't suppose you know anything about the bug that stops the rcon console from putting any commands through to the server?

Goodness knows why it happens, but plenty people find that they're unable to send any commands through rcon while Sidewinder is on. Not something that happens 100% of the time.

I know that's out of the remit of what you're doing though.

  • 08.22.2009 11:43 AM PDT

Dear Mr. Sawnose,

While we at OpenCarnage (formerly ModHalo) do appreciate the efforts you are trying to place to help us enjoy a game we have for many years I must say the work that you have passed along to Dirk isn't close to some of the fixes we so desperately need. We need fixes in better net code for online gaming, more insight into the workings behind our game and any questions that may arise during your visit to our forums. Im sure we could set you up your own section here for us serious modders and players of the original HaloPC that would just like to have some questions answered as well as some problems addressed. Alot of us have spent years in this game competing, modding, glitching, pubbing and just enjoying time with friends. The core of the HaloPC modding community have moved to these pages now and feel this would be a excellent place to interject some banter back and forth on possible upgrades and fixes that could keep this game alive proving the Halo franchise does have longevity from the beginning to the current day.

Thanks for your time reading,

Pepsi

P.S. LoL Ur IGN is "sawnose".


http://www.opencarnage.com/index.php?showforum=105
Posted By Pepsi On OpenCarnage.com
Don't be afraid we don't bite

[Edited on 08.22.2009 12:38 PM PDT]

  • 08.22.2009 12:30 PM PDT