[image:4252 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]OK, you've probably already seen this-- but if you haven't, head right on over to HBO and read the interview of Destineer's president, Peter Tamte. Destineer is publishing the port of Halo for the Mac that Westlake Interactive is coding, and Tamte himself is an alumnus of both Bungie and Apple.

[image:4208 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]In an interview with Macteens (a site for teen mac users) the President of Westlake Interactive, Phil Sulak, gave a few details about the upcoming release of Halo for the Mac. Among them:

[image:4108 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]In addition to the new releases and new additions, Project Magma has announced two upcoming projects. Both are still early in production and have no release date as yet.

WWIIi is to be a port of the WWII: Recon plugin by Santa's Head to Myth 3. It should be available "in a few months".

[image:4108 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Three new projects for Myth II: Soulblighter have now been completed by Project Magma.

[image:4043 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Zandervix at MBO has written up a state of the community address for Myth. After, of course, appointing himself President. (Hey, how come we never thought of that?)

For the most part, this seems to have been prompted by Clem's recent statement at the Mill, that those critical of the Mill and the MythDev team should remove their creations from the archive:

Clem, just the other day, posted a rather wordy point about the use of The Mill. I won't re-cap it all here, but I will say that I agree with it for the most part. It basically states that if you want to post to The Mill, you should be free of problems and issues with it's management and members. Also meaning philisophical differences with these same individuals. I won't pretend to know exactly what that means, but I get the point.

I don't know. To me, this sounds as if I dislike President Bush I shouldn't expect my garbage to be collected. On the other hand, you pay taxes to the government, and the Mill is free-- which I think is more or less the point. Somebody gives you something for free, be nice to them.

The administrator of the Myth archive site called The Mill, is calling for users who have been seriously critical of both the Mill's management and the MythDev team, to remove their creations from the Archive. MythDev is the group responsible for the PlayMyth server and the recent patches that temporarily broke compatibility with rival Marius.net's metaserver. Clem says, in part:

If we feel that there are members of this site who have been taking advantage of our free services that obviously have philosophical differences with this site we will take it upon ourselves to remove said person's work from The Mill's archive. We will do this for them to save them from the undue embarrassment that is sure to come from allowing their work to be freely downloadable from a site associated with individuals that they feel so strongly against. We have the full right to do this where this is a private system. We hold the right to remove any and all work from any individual who we feel is not an appreciative member of this archive.

Clem notes that this situation affects those who have contributed to the archive, rather than those who only download from it.

Some Loser has written over at MythWolfAge that after a server crash last week, they are now back up and running, promising to have films from MWC 2003 soon.

Gholsbane at MBO has announced that the results of the 2003 Myth World Cup are now known: BIAUIHYAC defeated Northern Paladins.

A complete writeup of MWC2K3 is available from PlayMyth.

Zandervix at MBO has passed on word from MythDev that they're looking for help with their next phase of Myth development; they're looking for programmers, illustrators, modelers and beta testers. Anyone interested can contact them.

Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, the man who provided most of the information about PC Halo during the recent Fanstock event, has been interviewed by Computer and Video Games. Highlights include the fact that playing as the Covenant-- originally a central idea in Halo's design, pre-buyout-- was discussed and rejected. And while bots will not be in the game as shipped, the possibility exists for something in the future:

One is that the network architecture was re-written, so if we were to do bots, we'd start it now, which means the product would take even longer. This may still happen - I mean BotMan, the guy who created the foundations for all of the Half-Life and Counter-Strike bots, he works at Gearbox! He sits in that office right over there [points]. We'd like to expose this stuff to mod authors to see what they come up with.

Steve of Forerunners.org has supplied some of the bits of information he's been able to glean while down at PC Halo Fanstock at Gearbox Software in Plano, TX.

• PC and Mac versions of Halo will not be released simultaneously. The Macintosh version is not yet as far along as the PC version. (Westlake Interactive still lists the Mac version as "pre-Alpha" as of this writing.)
• Level editors will not ship with the game, but be downloadable from Gearbox, along with (hopefully) some tutorials.
• It is unknown at this time whether there will be a Mac version of the editors.
• The Halo editor is comprised of three programs.
• The Halo level editor is called "Sapien".
• The shapes and physics editor is called "Guerilla".
• PC Halo has six new multiplayer maps. Many draw on the original game's solo maps for inspiration. They are:
  • Death Island
  • Timberland
  • Ice Fields
  • Danger Canyon
  • Gephyrophobia
  • Infinity
• PC Halo is one of the quickest loading PC games ever. It is reported to load in approximately three seconds.
• PC Halo has two weapons not in the original (unhacked) Xbox release: the flamethrower and the fuel rod gun.
• User-created netlevels will be about 18Mb in size.
• User-created solo levels can be up to about 100 Mb.
• System requirements under Windows will be around a 700 Mhz processor (assuming P3 or P4, not sure), a "good" video card, and 128Mb of free RAM.
• There is a new version of the Warthog with three cannons on top.
• After playing a bit of Halo on the PC, the guys got to watch the same realtime demo of Halo 2 given at E3, and got to play a little Halo 2 themselves on Xbox dev kits. Observers report that Halo 2 is graphically much improved over the original.
• PC Halo will ship on 1 CD, not on a DVD as the Xbox original did.

We will update this item throughout the day as more information becomes available.

These items have been discussed at two of the major remaining Myth sites, MythVillage and MBO, but we'll reference it here just for completeness. MythDev, a group of developers continuing to update and extend Bungie's original Myth games, Myth: The Fallen Lords (TFL for short) and Myth 2: Soulblighter, recently released a patch for Myth: TFL called 1.4. Among other things, it allowed users of Mac OS X to play TFL natively.

However, the patch also broke compatibility with one of the two remaining metaservers for Myth online play: MariusNet. Which, in itself, might not be a huge problem... except that MythDev runs the only other remaining metaserver, PlayMyth.

Jon the Baptist at MythVillage has posted that MalektheAncient has put a new version of the "Creep on the Borderlands" map that was ported to Myth 3 up at The Mill. It now features the original unit count as well as three meshes.

Gholsbane posted awhile back at MBO that there's a second beta version of the Myth 1.4 patch available at Project Magma.