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.

For awhile now, registered users of Rampancy could enter in their XBL GamerTags in their profiles, by clicking the my account link under the lefthand menu for their username, and editing their personal information. Now, we have a way to actually use that information. First, you can see a list of our registered users, and if you like, you can see only those who have entered GamerTags.

The list will also display users' city and country, if they have entered it, so you can find GamerTags of Rampancy.net users nearby you if you like. Personal information like your email address is not displayed on this page, or anywhere else. We are also planning to allow users to share information like GamerTags and stats feeds between various Halo fansites.

There is also now a field to enter your Bungie.net stats RSS feed; so if you have XBL and haven't entered this information, go ahead!

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.

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.

[image:8488 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]The Halo 2 Illustrated Guide that Rampancy began compiling last week, using images extracted from Halo2.com by akba and dogchow, has now been greatly expanded with the assistance of BOLL who provided even more images.

New sections have been opened:

• Covenant Units
• Human Units
• Multiplayer Maps
• Multiplayer Gametypes

These sections are still not yet complete, of course, and will continue to expand in the near future. Each section features an illustration and text describing an aspect of Halo 2. Images can be viewed in several sizes, and users can attach comments to any item in the Guide.

[image:8374 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Two Halo 2-related additions to the site today. The first is the Halo2.com Decoded gallery; akba and dogchow produced translated texts for each of the images on the Halo2.com flash site, and superimposed the English text on the images to make it readable by all. Our gallery is arranged in a hierarchy similar to that used on the site, so viewers can get an idea of the information contained therein without having to load the Flash file or use one of the many translation programs.

The second addition is related; again, with thanks to akba and dogchow, images of the various units, weapons and vehicles that were featured on Halo2.com were made into cutouts and combined with explanatory texts to form the beginnings of our Halo 2 Guide, which will later be expanded to cover maps, tactics, and other pieces of information as they become available post-release.

Free t-shirts not being enough to motivate Bungie.net's volunteer moderators to put in the long hours necessary to remove all the spoiler content from their forums, Bungie is now being forced to consdier closing their forums. Let Bungie know what you think by voting on this page. Thanks Louis Wu.

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.

Xbox in the repair shop? Can't wait for Halo 2? Upset that BOLL hasn't produced a new Flash game lately?

If you've got a fair bit of time to spend while you wait, check out the Grunt Zone Flash game by Coke.

The viewers have voted, and Louis Wu at HBO has posted the verdict, that HBO's forums will remained closed until November 11, with 77.7% of voters supporting the closure. A moderated forum idea was discussed, but abandoned.

Louis Wu has put up a poll at HBO, asking whether the forum should stay closed until November 9, to avoid risking exposing users to spoilers from the pirated copies of Halo 2. Right now, the poll is running at a bout a 3.6:1 ratio for closed:open, so if you want the HBO forum to stay open, go vote.

Congratulations to icecoldman23 who became Rampancy's 3000th registered user!

Looks like the new Rooster Teeth Productions website has gone up, with neat new features, a slick new design, and information on Red vs Blue as well as new productions like The Strangerhood (machinima using the Sims engine). Thanks Rams at Halo Planet.