- Frnksnbns
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- Elder Mythic Member
Posted by: Nessy
The bungie.net community is the halo PC community that is renowned for being unbelieveably sucky.
Posted by: Havoc 101
I think it's mainly Gearbox that supports the Halo PC servers, but yeah it's great that they're still updating it after all these years.
It's Microsoft doing it now, and has been for years. The last meaningful update from Gearbox was probably 1.03, which I believe was released only months after the launch date:
Halo PC 1.03
Halo PC 1.03 is our first update to address some of the most important issues that have arisen since the game was released. Our goal with this patch was to 1) improve the quality of the online experience for gamers and 2) address the most frequent issues gamers run into. This update is also our first opportunity to improve our networking architecture with some of our learnings from our hours of online play. Here is a summary of what's new in Halo PC 1.03.
Note:All updates to the Halo Dedicated Server are documented in the Halo
Dedicated Server Readme file, which is available here: Halo Dedicated Server 1.03 Readme
Improving the Quality of the Online Experience for Gamers
Addressing Team Killing
Servers now have a complete team killing / banning system that should
significantly reduce team killing online. The concept is simple: team-kill a
number of time and you will automatically be banned from the server for a
period of time set by the server administrator. Because team kills can be
accidental, the concept of grief also exists: following a team-kill, if you
don't team-kill again for a period of time, you are forgiven for your
team-kill. These settings are customizable by the server administrator(s) using
server console commands.
In addition to the system above, players are no longer penalized for being
killed by someone on their team and respawn time penalty for a team-killer is
multiplied by the number of teammates he killed, rapidly leading to very long
respawn times for team killers.
Improving the Quality of the Online Experience
We've made a number of updates and bug fixes to our networking architecture,
the most important one being specifically in how we transfer / predict player's
movement / position as well as the action of reloading your weapon. While going
into the details of these changes is beyond the scope of this document, the
result should be a smoother online game experience across the variety of
connections to
the Internet.
We made the following changes to our user interface:
* Servers name now supports 65 characters for dedicated servers and 32
characters for client-hosted servers and now accepts an extended character set.
* Chat text length has been extended to 64 characters
* In-game scoreboard now displays every client's ping
* In-game scoreboard now displays your # of assists
* Server port numbers are displayed accurately throughout their range
Additional Online Multiplayer New Features:
* Teams are now persisted for the next game when map cycling occurs
* Map Reset: It's now possible to restart the current game without requiring
the server to map cycle.
* Assault: We now have a timer to keep track of how much time is left to your
offense / defense round
* Assault: Alongside this timer, we also have an "Offense" and "Deffense"
indicator to quickly inform you of your role
Addressing the Most Frequent Issues Experienced by Gamers
Many users have reported problems with Halo PC when using 3rd party software to
force the refresh rate of their monitor. We have changed how we handle this
situation in our code to seamlessly fall back to the forced refresh rate.
A significant number of reported game crashes are related to an external
library called keystone.dll. We have updated this library to address the most
common failures. These crashes would usually occur when changing screen
resolution, when starting or quitting Halo PC, when chatting in a multiplayer
game or when using ALT-TAB to minimize Halo PC and return to Windows.
Additional Bug Fixes
* Halo can now be bound to a specific IP address using the -ip command line
agrument. (facilitating multiple NIC support for Halo Dedicated Servers)
* Halo can now read/write data files to a user specified folder using the
-path command line argument. This is particularly useful for Halo Dedicated
Servers but also be be used for users whose "My Documents" folder is remapped
to a UNC path. It is an advanced option and using it will force you to manually
move saved games and multiplayer gametypes.
* Online Multiplayer: Telefrag message is now appropriately replicated.
* Online Multiplayer: Minor fixes to switching teams in kill-in-order games
(scorew will now remain accurate)
* Online Multiplayer: Minor fixes to the end of the game state (new players
now have to wait for the game to be restarted before being admitted to the
server)
* Online Multiplayer: Fix for clients flashlight states when joining games
* Online Multiplayer: Vechicles won't respawn if they have a projectile (such
as a plasma grenade) attached to them. They will wait for the projectile to be
removed.
* Online Multiplayer: Minor fixes to using teleports for high-latency
connections
* Sound: Fix for cinematic dialog being cut out on certain cards when
enabling Audio Hardware Acceleration in the Audio Settings.
Patch 1.02 was pretty important too, it allowed RCON support and multiple server instances.
Most of the stuff in the later patches were security fixes and bug fixes, or fluff like playability without the disc.