Chris Butcher talks about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous network schemes with regards to Marathon, Halo 1 and Halo 2 at How Stuff Works. Thanks HBO.

Slashdot has a story on getting Windows clone ReactOS to run on the Xbox.

SPOnG today reports that updated Xbox 2 developer kits are shipping to developers. Like the old kits, the new ones are based on Macintosh G5 computer. The new kits feature R500 graphics cards and are planned to replace the older kits over a span of two months.

Industry rag sheet GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Electronic Arts' CFO is saying that next-generation consoles are going to feature wireless hubs right out of the box. However, when listening to financial muckety-mucks talk tech, be sure to take it with a few tablespoons of salt; he also mentions the phrase "microtransaction environment" which should cast a bit of doubt on anything coming out of the man's mouth.

Slashdot linked to a story at The Wire about Holo-Dek Gaming Inc., a company opening up networked gaming centers featuring PC and Xboxes connected to large projection screens in Hampton, New Hampshire.

Greetings from rainy Langley outside of London, where I'm in town for a few days doing something almost, but not entirely, unrelated to Halo 2; something I hope to rectify in approximately 12 hours or so. In the meantime, of course, I returned to notice that the server logs had filled up the server's disk space, effectively closing the site; hopefully that won't happen again for... oh... at least another 24 hours or so. Rampancy is truly grateful for the upswing in interest since the release of Halo 2, and we are working diligently to make sure that the site can keep up with the increased traffic.

So, without much further ado about not much at all:

• Bungie has announced an XBL autoupdate for Halo 2 that will fix some HUD issues, some matchmaking delays, and unlock the Foundation multiplayer map for everybody. The update is only available through Live; if you don't have it, find a friend that does and take your Xbox to his or her house. If you don't have a friend who has Live... get one.
• Captain Luthan covers The Maw in the last part of the Junkyard's series on realism in Halo. Thanks Ryan "Mhaddy" Matthews.
• MLG readers have written in with what they love or hate (or, in some cases, love and hate) about Halo 2. Thanks dolbex.
• VerdaFolio has posted a spoiler-ridden list of hidden skulls in Halo 2. You've been warned...
• More updates from around the 'net collated at HBO by none other than Santa Cl... I mean, Louis Wu.
• Since I'm in the London area at the moment, it's only appropriate to mention that Stuntmutt, author of Halo comic One One Se7en, has put up a note about an inclusion of a version of the comic, drawn by BOLL, that appears on the Halo 2 Limited Edition DVD, with a link to instructions on how to find it. He's also done a writeup of his UK Halo 2 Launch day experience with c0ld vengeance.
• How Stuff Works has interviewed development lead Chris Butcher about Halo 2's AI; a very readable and worthwhile article without a lot of jargon.
• Penny Arcade turned six years old this week. Too bad they celebrated it with a comic about that other game.

I'm going to try and make it to the Apple Store opening in London tomorrow morning; if they have wireless access perhaps I'll be able to update from there.

UPDATE: A few more items before I go to breakfast:

• Sketch writes that your clan is not deleted. Whew!
• MereCatfish posts his UK Launch Day writeup.
• Forbes asks: GTA:SA or Halo 2?
• Halo 2 won the GameSpy Grudge against Half-Life 2.
• Bungie rolled over Clan HBO in the latest Humpday Challenge.

Evil Avatar points out an alternative to class action lawsuits for getting satisfaction from Microsoft over out-of-warranty Xbox repairs.

Gaming rumor sheet SPoNG has another of its items about infighting between nVidia, ATI and Microsoft over the possibility of making the Xbox 2 backwards compatible with the first iteration. Please pass the salt.

Just a note: Rampancy.net has a feature called throttle that gradually disables site functions as traffic goes up, in order to prevent the entire thing from catching fire, falling over, and sinking into a swamp.

We tested it with the last Bungie Weekly Update we hosted, and while the site was unavailable for part of the night, generally we were pleased, and had less downtime while also being able to serve more users.

However, with the Halo 2 launch craze, we're getting higher than usual levels of sustained traffic, and so the site may disable some of these functions in order to cope. Think of it like Cortana disabling some of her functions while trying to keep all that Halo data intact.

So if you're trying to make a comment, or view newsfeeds, or use some of the other of the site's advanced functions, and all you get is a blank page or a MySQL error-- just wait awhile and try later. It doesn't mean the site is broken or crashed, it just means it is trying to cope with the increased load.

A site called Joystiq is reporting a rumor that both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 2 may both be using IBM-made PPC chips. Thanks cooked gamers.

We missed it, but awhile back Bungie.net had an article on the new Theme Builder for the recently-revised 7th Column community site. The theme builder had been absent from the newly-launched site, but now it's back. Now, Rip-Saw has produced a multilayered Photoshop document to help people work on the visual design of their site before using the Theme Builder. Thanks HBO for the news item and hosting Rip-Saw's file.

A very long thread in the Gearbox forums has some of the usual complaints about Halo CE in it, mostly about lag and "warping", and a response from Randy "DuvalMagic" Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, providing some of the background on the project to port Halo to the PC and how it affected the game's eventual network performance:

Halo's networking system was from scratch, first generation, developed in six months by three engineers and launched into a very competitive world of PC on-line gaming with a game design that is not condusive to the inherent problems of the internet. This networking system had to be meshed into an existing C code-base that had been evolved over 10 years of Bungie games until, in it's last usage, was completely overhauled, retuned and refitted with bubblegum, duct-tape and infinite sleepless work nights specifically for the Xbox platform (which was being invented while all of this refitting was going on).

This does confirm some suspicions held by longtime Bungiefen that Xbox Halo's netcode owed quite a bit to Marathon's deterministic, synchronous netplay, that also worked well only on LANs prior to the addition of native TCP/IP play in Aleph One. Pitchford also cites several requirements, including support for 56k players and fitting the game on a single CD, that he says Bungie and Microsoft slipped into the requirements after the deal was signed. All in all, however, Pitchford says that Gearbox and Bungie both worked hard to make Halo PC and Halo CE the best they could possibly be, but that practicalities and system requirements meant that less was delivered than expected, and there was little or nothing that could be done about it, given the game's design specifications.

Slashdot recently interviewed author Neal Stephenson, and his response to a question about the merging of novels with games turned up information on ILB:

It has already happened in the form of the I Love Bees alternate reality game, which, as many of you must know, is a promotional campaign for Halo 2. I know the people who did it, but I have lost track of what I promised not to reveal publicly, and so will shut up for now.

Also, for those old school Bungie fans who have been around since they were a Mac developer and publisher, it seems that while Bungie has been moving away from Apple, Stephenson has been moving towards OS X:

You guessed right: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of "In the beginning was the command line" is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.

Lots more worth reading in there, so check out the full article. Thanks to Louis Wu for the heads-up.

Today Rampancy.net was upgraded to version 4.5 of the Drupal Content Management System. Other than a few minor cosmetic changes, most users should not notice too much that is different. Here are some known changes and issues. Some we may be able to work on and fix, some we definitely will, and some we might not.

• Anonymous users cannot change comment view mode. The default is Threaded-Collapsed. This one is puzzling us, as it only affects this site, as upgraded, and not the old site or brand new sites in Drupal 4.5. We hope to resolve it. Until then... if you don't like the default view, register. It's free and we don't harass you.
• Files are offline. Files like the sheet music that were stored in the database are temporarily offline while we switch that to a new module. This will be addressed shortly. Large files like Movies are currently unaffected, but will be moved into that new system as well; eventually all file downloads will be restricted to registered users.
• The calendars for the Event module and for the archive of old content seem to be missing. We'll be looking for them.
• The Buddylist feature is generating errors for some users. We are disabling them until we can find the source of the problem.

That's all for now. If you notice anything else wrong, please email me at narcogen@rampancy.net.