Halo Patch

Years in the future, the human race is besieged by a group of aliens, known as the Covenant. Greatly outnumbered, humanity makes its last stand on an aritificially created planet-like ring or "halo".

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.

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.