Twinreaper

Ok, I will try to make this as painless as possible. NAT and wether you are using a wired or wireless connection are really only half the problem. While enbaling NAT to open does solve some connections issues, there are other factors that do not help. 1. DMZ Server. By default, the router may be blocking certain internet requests over udp/tcp by default, regardless of wether NAT is open. TO solve this, you need to specify the DMZ server passthrough, with the Static or DHCP IP of the xbox console. 2. Ports Ports Ports. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have the XBox LIve ports being opened and forwarded to the xbox console only. SOme other devices or applications in the house or whereever, may be trying to use the same port as the console. Obviously forwarding all traffic for those ports to the console only, solves that issue. 3. Actual IP for Xbox. Most people just simply plug-in, powerup their xbox and go! Not so fast. If you ahve multiple devices in your house, it is best to manually assign an IP to them. Remember how I was saying to specify and port forward blah blah DMZ? Well that only works if the Xbox's IP stays the same. If you dont specify manually an IP for it to use, it will randomly be given one based off the IP Range set in the router. 4. Even if you dont have Wi-Fi connection, the modem itself that you got from the provider had properties that you may want to go into and change. One of the most overlooked things to do is port forwarding. If everyone who runs Live did the steps above I outlined, I gurantee you would see a huge difference in MM gameplay and hosting.

Leave it to me to show up with the pretext of bursting bubbles....kinda comes with the job of being ME! ANyway, I was reading thru some of these ideas, and I must say they are creative if nothing else....but I am going to go on record and say that almost 99% of them are impossible or not feasable. The list if you please.... 1. Changeable backrounds or bitmaps. Yeah ok. Bitmap and shader swapping functions. This would no thappen since 99% of all map bitmaps and shaders are tied into the resource maps. Changing them, would have to change the resources...which means resigning a map. They arent likely to hand out map encryption algorithyms. 2. No Budget. You need a budget. budgets were designed to keep the map from getting overloaded and cause drops in fps, and memory issues from arising. 3. Adjust Lighting/ weather effects. Not gonna happen. When a map is compiled, it was certain "zones" marked with special characters in the modeling program is was made in. The compiling tool then marks certain covered ares with special zones to host said weather. As for lighting, it is not done "per-pixel", so lightmaps are compiled seperatly from the map and cannot be changed on the fly. 4. Moving and changing water. Water is what we call static/instanced geometry. it is simply a plane created in a modeling app that is given a water shader and therefore not movable since it is compiled with bsp, as part of the bsp. 5. Placable AI. Ai is a lot more complicated than just placing a biped down. When incorporating an AI, you need to also have "AI zones", "AI Pathfinding", "Styles", etc... This would become far to complicated for people to do as the average user would get lost. 6. Terraforming. By this I assume that you mean changing the physical mesh of a map. Impossible. PHMO and Coll or for you guys, physical collision and standard collision are compiled along side the final bsp product. You cannot change vertices and faces in real time on an already compiled map, and still retain the collisions. 7. Larger maps with loading zones. Can't happen. Maps are traditionally divided up into loading zones used with what we call "portals". Portals render geometry based on if you ar in a certain zone, or looking towards a certain portal marked area. While this may seem cool, it also prevents players from seeing or interacting with players inside a different portal or zone. Making a map that used that feature would be impossible, since portals are placed in the map model app before compiling. All these zones have to be linked specifically with one another and all recieve from the compiler a portal or zone number. 8. Interactable water. Can't happen. As stated before water is a mesh plane compiled with the bsp. Even if they were to fnd a way to add water, it would require them to incorporate a real time "spline" effect mesh object...which is not gonna happen in this decade. 9. Multiple disc, many say 2 discs. Understand that incoprorating massively huge content libraries like everything you guys have been posting, would require a 4 disc minimum. All firefight maps standalone, are standalone seperate maps, they are not campaign maps with certain areas just blocked off. Also, the expense of a massive librayr is huge size wise. A simple objects like a crate from halo, once extracted into it's tag form, was about 2 to 3 mb's in size. That was just for a simple 6 sided cube. Could you actually imagine the stagering data size of just 20 vehicles by themselves? It would be somewhere around (in Reach terms), like 600 or more mb's. A simple multiplayer map from halo 2 alone decompiled into tag form was about 600mbs! And those maps hardly had anything compared to what we have in reach mp. 10. Someone stated make the Forge editor like Crytek's Sandbox. The Crytek sandbox is a standalone app that functions exactly like Sapien. Sapien was Bungie/343i's app to place objects and ****. Giving us a "sandbox" style interface to work with on a console is never gonna happen. there is too much in terms of harware and software blocking anything like that becoming like Crytek's sandbox. A sandbox would only work on the PC, and I highly doubt that in only 2 years, the company could give us a full HEK, a kick-ass game and the ability to make maps on the PC, and port them to the console version. A task of that magnitude would require likely a team of double 343i's current size, and 2 additional years or planning, execution and content creation. Like I said before, I enjoyed the thread, but someone finally had to come in and put a stop to some of the absolutely ridiculous ideas that are circulating. I could ahve probably stated about 15 more ideas that are impossible to incorporate, but I fugured this 10 alone is gonna be enough to have people ahting me until well into Halo 4 release season...AKA Dec 2012. Sorry and good day folks!

Not me. I prefer a long standoff to the fast, nix that....extremely fast matches of zero bloom gametypes. Now, if they toned down the rate of fire, then I might like it...a little. It took me a while to get used to the firing, last time I played was against Ghetto testing a forge map. I still had the habit of pulling the trigger as if the rate of fire was from standard gameplay. Needless to say I got owned. Then again, maybe it's just a subconscious part of me that cannot change or adapt to the tweaks.

Nice one on that to you Zed. Looks like I was close to a few. I have to ask...is this official from 343i or an inside source?

Thats a really good question. Common to popular belief, the Reach Skill search actually uses a combination of stats to determine who is a good match for you. Now this answer in particular is not based off any serach query data from intercepted network model code, but an observation of profiles based on my last 10 matches in which I selected Skill as the search methosd. From what i can determine, each person that I had been paired with had an overall Skill Rank of varied types. A couple matches had both me, and an eclipse on the same team with a few major's. The opposite team had a highest rank of a General, and the rest lower. One was even a major grade 1. Now on the surface, you can see how poorly this match was setup based on overall rank. Quite obviously me and the eclipse alone out rank the opposite team by a wide margin. In fact at first glance it was down right pathertic how they paired the teams. But that was on the surface. Upon close investigation of the players, it seems that the system actually takes these factors into account.. 1. Overall k/d 2. Overall match specific commendations...not the overall completion, but individual ones. 3. Weapon usage Basically what I have theoretically found is, that all the players I was paired against had a comparable amount of same k/d, same weapon most used for that particular matchmade type and the same amount of completed commendations at a specific level. So basically it is like the old saying goes, "You can't judge a book by it's cover." In fact if memory serves correct, the opposite team completely destroyed us. It was an assault match on a map I cannot remember and had never played on. So even though the skill part was matched evenly, the maps I knew was not. my team was ata disadvantage with me not knowing the layout, the heavy trafficed areas etc.... But remember, this is all based off of observations over more than one match, so I am sure I am extremely close to the actual method, or at least the number of profile characteristic stats the system uses to judge who is a good opponent for you or not. Again, this isn't exact science and becaus ethe population and availability of gamers is in constant flux, it won't be a good exact match all the time. After a certain time has passed, the system has to just fill in the blanks with whoever is available. In the end, I guess you can just call it a 50<>50 crap shoot sometimes.

I'll be the first to take a crak at what they do...why not. Let's see if I can get close to the truth... 1. Black Eye. Obvious.....shields recharge with melee only. 2. Boom. All downed grenades can be shot and exploded. 3. Eye Patch. Like Blind, but only removes half the screen or just removes aiming reticules. 4. Bandana. Increases the physics of your melee. 5. Fog. Renders you invisible via flashlight toggle. Like the cammo in halo 2 skull. 6. Famine. Weapons dropped by enemies have 1/2 ammo as usual 7. Grunt B-day. Obvious..dont need to explain. 8. Malfunction. Distorts player controls in some way. Possible invert? 9. Mythic. Makes every enemy the top class of enemy...example all elites are zealots. 10. Pinata. All enemies explode into candy like with b-day skull. or flood sacks spew candy instead of infections. 11. Recession. All weapons have only one shot loaded in the chamber and no reload. 12. Iron. Again, we all know this one... 13. Foreign. Randomly selects an attribute on enemies and icreases/decrease them. Ex.. speed / class/ shields

From what i have been able to uncover in the tags for Reach, there are only multiplayer slots left over in the mainmenu map file. Adding campaign maps would require adding them to the mainmenu. Although i dare do say that megaloScript is being used to alter data in memory for the zero bloom and AA tweaks, so I will not 100% say that it is impossible for even megalo to add new data fields in memory when mainmenu.map is loaded up. That being said, I am unsure what exact data is loaded up from mainmenu besides the shard resource tags used in campaign levels and multiplayer. It is very likely that the UI level data is not loaded and read directly, which means no editing. I am almost 100% sure this is the case, or else we would have seen DLC for campaign by now on one of the Halo titles. As for gears, yes it was planned ahead of time. Also Gears uses a completely different compression format, engine, etc... But with 343 taking, there is whole world of possibilities on the horizon. It ahs even been theorized that 343i plans at one point to start releasing Halo along side a PC port kinda like how the other franchises do it. From a marketing standpoint, 343i realizes that a majority of success today on new games, lies in multiplatform release, and not locking in people to only playing on a console. Microsoft I think, also realizes that other titles support a OS that the maker doesn't, and it hurts the parent company. but that debate is for another day.

Well said Silverado. I am in no way a hardcore MM player, and as I get a little older I stem away from it altogether. It would be sad for us non-competative types to miss out on anything simply because he do not care to rank up to the highest level. I like Reach because it gives me the chance to just play casual, the way I like, and still Reach Inheritor or my current Field marshal rank, and get all the armor choices.

Hopefully I have some dates correct and nothing in here that will cause a stir to some people. Even if it does, suck it! This is a FFL, not a serious story arc to the Halo universe. Enjoy! First Name: Gregor Middle Name: Waldegund Last Name: Eberhardt Rank: Lieutenant Faction: UNSC Species: Humanoid Hair: Shaved Hair Color: Blonde Eye color: Blue General Look of Facial Structure(Optional): Square jaw line, medium set eyes, slightly pointed nose. Scaring around the optical region. Height: 5’10” Tattoos: Lower Right Leg (Inverted tribal pitchfork), Lower Left Leg (generic symbol w/words in german) Body Build: Medium build, slightly muscular. Appearance(Clothing or Equipment): Special green cammo painted armor and undercloth Armor(Sangheili Combat Harness, Marine BDU, etc.): ODST Recon with Hazop Helmet. Given to him by the UNSC and ONI on behalf of friend Matthew. Personality: Very focused and task oriented. Extrememly patient. Dry humored and serious at times. History: Born in 2514 on the Planet Harvest. Gregor is the only son of the Harvest Botanical Gardens lead scientists, William and Ana Eberhardt. Gregor spent most of his days studying and learning about plant biology along side his parents. Gregor was like most 12 year old boys. He often acted out war games with his friends and was more interested in roughhousing and violence than in girls. Then, on February 3rd, 2525 Gregor’s life took an unforseen turn that would forever change him. The UNSC had decided on using the Harvest Gardens to host negotiations between the Covenant . Gregor was just outside the eastern wing when the negotiations ended and turned into a bloodbath. Gregor helplessly watched as the Covenant quickly and without mercy, slaughtered his parents during the battle. Gregor was one of many taken to the Space Elevator to escape the now battle enraged planet. It was that very day that gregor swore he would avenge his parents, and do whatever he could to kill the Convenant. Flash forward to the year 2537 Gregor enlisted in the UNSC, and used his knowledge of plant and botanical type environments to achieve high success at sniping. He was an expert in concealing himself with the environment, and often liked to set traps using botanical pathogens. On June 28th 2540, Gregor was the top UNSC special forces sniper and scout. His total number of confirmed kills was 319. Also collecting quite a few Elite and Brute confirmed kills under his belt. His peers admired his skill and fortitude. On October 12th 2545, a best friend and college of Gregor’s, Matthew, enters the Spartan III program. Due to the nature of Gregor and Matt’s s friendship , he is selected as a special partner instructed to train with him. During a routine training exercise on December 24th 2541, Gregor lost both eyes from a stray reflected sniper round he fired. The shot had been deflected by shear fate, and grazed both corneas of his eyes. Gregor spent six months in recovery before finally being released from a UNSC hospital. Shortly following the accident, Gregor was honorably discharged from service. This event alone catastrophically wounded Gregor and sent him into a spiral of self destruction. Then in early 2544, Matt hears whispers about his spiral and comes to his aid. He tells Gregor that even though he lost his sight, he can still fight and gives him something to live for. Matt officially requests a special leave of absence to help Gregor. During this time, he helps Gregor to hone the senses he has left. Through many months of hard training, Gregor learns to use his sense of touch, smell and hearing to aim, approximate and shoot at moving and distant targets. To much surprise, his skill and marksmanship go unmatched and almost outweigh the skill he possessed with his sight. Upon becoming active and healthy again with his newfound skill set, the UNSC approaches Gregor and signs him on as a special training advisor to the Sniper troops of the UNSC and Spartan III’s. Although he greatly enjoyed working once again under the UNSC he still longed to avenge his family and fallen comrades. It was then on July 17th 2550 that Gregor was asked to participate in the first ever “Optical Implant Enhancement” procedure that was designed to restore sight to a Spartan class soldier. Gregor accepts and receives the implants. The implants take hold and are deemed a success. The implants he received not only restored his sight, but enhanced his vision along with cerebral interactive other side effects. He could now switch his vision in between different spectrums of light, gauge altitude, longitude and distance to targets. He had become a virtual moving target locator. On March 3rd 2552, Gregor was officially re-enlisted into the UNSC and relocated to Reach. During the Convenant invasion and glassing of Reach, Gregor was responsible for defending and securing one of many evacuation pods of families escaping the inevitable fall of Reach. Gregor then had returned to Earth to assist the UNSC in the impending Convenant raid. The rest as we say, is history. Gregor is still alive and well today.

Are there any limits to what the shot can be. Is there any required submission rule? Like does it have to be a spartan or can it be whatever?

Never done it alone but me and my son have done it countless times.

Agreed. Like I said, I will look into it and try to get you a defintive answer soon.

It all comes down to one thing, and one thing only...he made a personal prfit from it. Under fair use, we are all entitled to a backup copy of any media we legally buy. That is a federal law. the DMCA contradicts this, and eliminates our federal right to fair use. But, as seen many times in MS EULA's, fair use is allowed. This judge has seen thru an obvious plot within the government to further control and regulate things they have no business regulating. Begs the question, if what this guy did wa soooo bad and wrong, wher eis Microsoft in all this? Why aren't they part of the prosecution against this guy. The answer is simple..... A moddable console will always outsell and fully locked down almost impossible console with no game library. The xbox 360 is a great console adn has great games, and as such, people want to tap into that locked potential. Not to mention that also since the Xbox 360 can be labeled as a media device, we are legally allowed to protect that investment by having a spare backup copy of the software on it that we legally purchased. Weither it be Nand or DVD firmware, it doesn't matter. it is all digital content and fair use acceptable. Furthermore, circumventing the security of a console can be labeled fair use when it is for educational purposes and not personal profit or corporate espionage. In this case, the guy made a profit. I doubt he was modding consoles for free. And also keep in mind that the prosecution is using witnessess that broke the law them selves by performing the same unethical things. Obviously you can't call a serial killer to the witness stand to prosecute another serial killer....this whole thing should have been settled months ago out of court in exchange for the guys help in curbing and icreasing security measures.

Hmmmm. I am unsure of how the gametype selects it's next zombie when someone quits. I can look into this, but I need a few more details.... 1. What country you ar ein. 2. What country were the other players from. 3. Alphabetically, what number would you be as aparticipant. My primary guess, is that either the game selects you based on the following values maybe? 1. Closest country or state to the server or host. 2. Picks based on players alphabetical placement. 3. Picks based on who is either closest or furthest from the zombie who quit. I will look more into this for you and report back what I find. As for you Dog, shame on you for stealing internetz! jk But seriously the lag problem is this.... 1. Your xbox has to transmit the Live in/out flow of data to your laptop first. 2. The laptop then transmits the signal to the router. 3. The router sends back info letting the laptop know it received the data packets, which in turn then gets sent to the xbox. In a nutshell, the xbox is having to wait and rely on 2 sources of data transmital plus player hosts and reach servers, just to get online. All that bouncing around increases the chances of data packet loss, which means more time is spent by everything, just to send a good solid data packets, which in turn gives you lag. It is likely also, that the neighbors router is not configured properly for port forwarding of the Live ports, and more than likely has NAT closed.

Great shot, and I appriciate pointing that out. But, I think his main concern was more or less, why they used Reach bipeds instead of just touching up the original ones. Hopefully he undstood the reason why as I explained it, and also understands the point you are making with that helpful screen of the marines from Reach. Kudos!

Well, as of now it looks like the new maps will be included with the CEA disc, and not a seperate disc. The package will include the CEa remastered game, and the new maps for Reach. Beyond that, any extras you get are specific to the store you pre-order from.

For starters, looking at it from a dev point of view, all the tags for the bipeds are labeled as like this... objects/characters/marine/blah.... I have not read books or anything of that nature, so as a gamer, I consider only what is published and released in game form as the story arc itself, not books. All secondary ground and support forces are labeled usually as marines. Secondly, in order for the Reach engine to be switched to in enhanced mode for CE, they had to use resource shaders and bitmaps that are already present in the engine, which means whatever marine armor or resources they used in Reach are in enhanced mode. It wasn't laziness, do not assume that. It was done out of compatability. Anything like new models, bitmaps, shaders and sounds, all have to be present in the resource maps in order for the Reach engine to use them. The reach engine is the primary running engine. The original CE engine is just a simple function call from MegaloScript to execute it. If they were to go ahead and completely re-vamp the CE models, for enhanced mode, they would have had to also go ahead and revamp the primary resource maps for the Reach, which are present in the CE disc, as well as recompile the engine to recognize the new things from the start. Patches for new map geometry levels are a completely different beast. Also remember, that new maps also cannot contain anything that MegaloScript cannot control natively thru the resource maps. That is what makes Reach unique. The MegaloScript can pretty much control any game present item in the resource map, any way that it basically wants. Very powerful and very hard core programming. If you have specific game questions like these in the future and you need a definitive answer, please try out the "Tech help" threads for the Reach forum. Spectral has it pinned and I can help you better from there, rather than write these novel long replies in which everyone just oh so loves...

You need to relax a bit Sterk. It's a game bro. Besides, the Title Update is only in effect for the playlists that support the changes. You will still have your basic Reach experience available to you.

I actually quite enjoyed that read. Very well structured and you provided quite a bit of thought into it. For that you get a cookie......and an actual basic nice reply from me instead of the huge novel involving you being an idiot...enjoy! 1. Those certain features like "bloom" and "AA's" have always been around. Reach is just the first game outside of Halo 3, to give the player a HUD based visualization of the firing radius of a weapon. AA's are similar to equipment. In time you learn to love both. They are neither good or bad, it's all preference. 2. I kinda agree and disagree. I only disagree when it's me getting killed, instead of me taking advantage of said anim lock. lmao 3. I could not agree more. In fact, since Halo 2, there have been no original brand new map layouts at all. Almost every single map ever made for Halo 3 and Reach, are all borrowed from H1 and H2. We need something new and different, not re-imagined stuff. Don't get me wrong, bringing classic maps like that are awesome, but should not be something released and labeled as "New DLC" content we have to pay for. Ship those puppy's with the game! 4. YES YES YES!!!! Credits should never be linked to the rank system.. bad Bungie.......(slaps faces with genitals) 5. Kudos on that. I hate playing the myriad of playlists for team stuff, only to get a forge map. I absolutely hate playing on forge maps. 6. Absolutely! I hate being in a match and seeing someone with a guest. I loved how you couldn't go into certain playlists when you had a guest in Halo 3. 7. Unfortunatly, I don't play enough multiplayer to put in a thought on this one. So I will just pretend it doesn't exist and say YES!!! BRING BACK CLAN MANAGEMENT FEATURES!!!!!!!! See, told you I would go easy..lmao

Seriously need to re-read what you post...I'm not following..jk jk. Anyway, the Halo 3 engine was a great piece of code. Not only is it the first completely scrapped, cut, regurgitated, and then re-written engine since H1...(yes H2 borrowed much of it's code from H1). Now, besides the official statement about how 343i did not want to split the fan base by making the MM run on the CEA, and keep the game completely seperate from Reach, the engine compatibility was the big issue. Halo 3 used a whole new netcode system, and it used a completely different different technique for shaders and bitmaps. In fact, Halo 3 is closer to Halo 1 in all engine and tag layout ways, including the use of the Chicago Scenario Shaders , and such. In the end though, the side scripting engine used in in H3, or as we will call it MegoScript Sr, lacked the necessary tools to allow a classic game engine to run along side a newer one. I'm sure they could have rigged it somehow, but Live would have been the biggest issue. Halo 3 was the first title we had true "anywhere in the world" co-op. Halo 1 didn't even have anything besides LAN multiplayer. The only engine capable of pulling any of this off was the Reach version of Blam! And that is the more than likely the sole reason 343i chose to do what they did. Kinda makes you wonder what they are gonna do for H4?

I can only guess that you are using a wireless connection if your talking about poor signal. In that case Dog, it isn't actually signal quality that is effecting you. More than likely it has to do with packets of data getting lost along the route the connection is taking. In any case, the best way to bridge a connection is and always will be in my opinion, using a LAN cable and default Windows Connection settings. BTW, what tunneling app are you using for the 360? I assume it's either XBC or Xlink Kai?

You guys really need to stop trying to post as a guest. Just come on in and join already.....DON'T BE SHY!!!! We don't bite....unless Twam tells us too.

As with the Reach forum, this is the official Technical Help thread for all things regarding the CEA edition of Halo as well as the original Combat Evolved. Same rules apply as the Reach forum one. Ask your tech questions, and myself or others will do our best to answer them. Ready set go!!!!!

Good day everyone, your friendly resident tech junkie Twin here. Today after talking with Absolute Dog, and hearing all the positive and friendly support from the staff, I have decided to open a "Technical Help" thread for all games in the Halo series. Here's the scoop... Everyone has questions about the game. How stuff works, how they decided what they can fix, the games limits etc... you get the idea. I am here to answer or help answer in some cases, the many questions that revolve around the forums everyday. So don't be shy, stop on by and ask away. Now, because we don't need to keep order in here, there are a few guidelines... 1. All questions must be posed as such. No pointless opinions asking why something doesn't work, when your opinion is simply that it should. We want actual well thought out questions about important things. 2. Do not re-post asked questions. Wait til myself or someone else replies with an answer before bumping your own question. Please. 3. Do not post negative or insulting comments aimed towards another members' question. This will not be tolerated and will result in punishment. 4. No links to material or materials deemed inappropriate. Meaning map files, hacked XEX's etc... And no I won't provide anybody with this stuff either. Ok guys...have at it!!! Ask your questions when ready!!

Sorry I missed you the other day Mystic. I was playing with daughter for a few daily challenges and when I tried to accept your invite after my last match, you were already in-game and it wouldn't let me join. I'll catch you next time I'm on for sure. Should be sometime around monday and tuesday. I'm off both those days. Same goes for you Ghetto. If you got some more maps and stuff look for me at some point.