So long Halo 3 Players…
Due to a general lack of interest (I’m assuming most players of Halo 3 have moved on to Halo: Reach by now) and a lack of resources, time and money, I’ve decided to discontinue Halo 3 Players in it’s present form. I would really love to rewrite the whole thing for Halo: Reach at some point in the future but I am not sure when I will be able to get this done so I’m not going to tease anyone by saying “soon”. I appreciate all the support from Halo 3 Players. We started out as the underdog and slowly but surely ended up being the most used Halo 3 stats app on Facebook. Halo 3 Players was my first “large” project and I had a lot of fun writing it. I hope to have just as much fun writing every else in my near and far future. I apologize for the lack of notice to the few active users Halo 3 Players still has.
Stay tuned here for more info on what I’m working on and if Halo: Reach Players ever does materialize, I’ll post about it here first.
It’s been a fun ride!
Xbox 360 Wireless Headset Problem
I’ve been having a strange problem with my wireless Xbox 360 headset that would not let it sync to player 1. It kept going straight to player’s 2-4 (even though there was no controller connected for those players). It turns out, after using a wired headset for so long, some sort of buildup inside the connector tricks the controller into thinking it still has a headset connected. I blew out the connector at the bottom of the controller and wiggled a toothpick around in all 3 of the holes and low and behold, it worked! I can’t be certain this isn’t going to crap out on me or anything, but I saw a lack of support for this issue on google so I thought I’d throw it out there and hope it helps someone.
Halo 3 Players now watches you in the shower..
Halo 3 Players is now watching you! I’ve added a History tab to Halo 3 Players on Facebook now! I’ll be saving an archive of all your old stats once a day (after you update your stats, of course) and you will be able to look at the progress you’ve been making over a variable number of days in several different stat types. You can see how your Kill-to-Death ratio has been improving (or not) or how many Killing Sprees per Game you we’re averaging 2 weeks ago compared to today! All the good stats are there, as well as my own true score (or best score, which ever you know it as) that combines your social and ranked stats (giving more weight and points to your ranked games, of course) and spits out a fancy overall score that you can compare against your friends to see who really is the best.
If you’ve been a fan of Halo 3 Players, this update should work great for you because I have been keeping track of gamertags for almost 2 months now (which means, if you’ve been using Halo 3 Players, you should have some information ready to graph on the History tab!). If you haven’t heard of Halo 3 Players or aren’t a member yet, what are you waiting for?! Show off your stats to all your friends! Scream from the roof tops how much you love Halo 3 by putting a profile tab on your Facebook page! Slap a box on your main profile for some more Halo 3 love! Compare your own stats against all your friends who are also using Halo 3 Players! There’s lots to go, so go do it! Why are you still reading this?
Halo 3 Players 2.x
Halo 3 Players was updated a few weeks ago. Most of the initial bugs have been squashed with only 1 main feature still left to be finished. I’m working on Challenges now and they should be back very shortly. The new 2.x version is a complete rewrite of the old Halo 3 Players. Since Halo 3 Players has been my first ‘real’ project, I did learn quite a bit from it and was able to improve a lot of things in the new version. So besides the nicer look and extra features, it also works better behind the scenes (and is even a little more modular so I can improve stuff even more without breaking other things). If your a Halo 3 Player and have a Facebook account, you should definitely check it out! It blows the other 2 or 3 Halo 3 applications out of the water and I’m not just saying it because I wrote this one. I promise you if you try out Halo 3 Service Record and Halo 3 Gamer Card and think they’re better than Halo 3 Players.. I don’t know. I’m confident enough that Halo 3 Players kicks them to the curb that I include links straight to their app right here..
Halo 3: AutoUpdate Released. What still needs fixing?
The first AutoUpdate for Halo 3 was just released last night (or morning, depending on where you are and what you consider ‘night’) and addressed a few issues people were having with Halo 3. The largest and most noticeable change has to do with the melee system. The short answer says that, in Halo 3 v1.0, if 2 people both tried to melee within 100ms of each other, whoever had the most health would survive and the other person would die. Some cases would seem partially random because if one player took even 1 extra bullet, he would lose the melee contest and the other would walk away. In v1.1, there’s some lea-way that says if you have considerably more health than your opponent, you survive and they die. If the health is too close to call, you both die. I was able to notice this in the first couple of games I played but it really didn’t change much as far as how I play or anything. It’s a good fix. Other than that, not much will be noticed.
Since this update is out of the way, all we can do now is look forward. What still needs to be fixed for the next update? I’ll start my saying that some of these things I was hoping would be resolved in this first update, but I won’t be too picky about that. Bungie does good work and I’ll patiently await v1.2. Please note, these probabilities are just my own little estimates and really have no weight to them at all.
Almost there!
It’s amazing what a whole day of work (with the occasional Halo 3 break) will do for you. Last night when I updated, I felt like I had so much to do to get my application cleaned up and ready for prime time again. Since I’ve been planning on this 1.5 release to be a larger release, I haven’t been very careful about breaking stuff. I’m pretty OK with that though. I broke things on purpose because I knew I could implement them better. The only problem with it, was that my brain KNEW a lot of things were out of order but didn’t know exactly what. So after a day of fixing everything up, I’m back on track. The challenges backend is pretty solid. A few tweaks here and there are going to be needed, but it definitely works. I still need to pretty it up a bit too. The biggest accomplishment of the day, though, was reworking the flash system. Since I drop things like updating gamertags to the background, the user doesn’t get to see what’s happening. I have to use memcached, and check to see if the process is done. I kind of wrote myself into a corner with the old code because it was pretty much ONLY used for updating the gamertag. Now that I have some extra methods (like creating and finishing challenges) that need to be done in the background too, I had to make the system more flexible. I feel like I did this really well and it should work for me in the future if I have to add some more functionality to it.
On today’s agenda, I’m hoping to finish up the loose ends of the Challenge backend and get the views to a nearly complete state. I’ll probably continue to test out everything as I go along to make sure I didn’t overlook anything that I thought I fixed up. Some of the things I changed for this release sounded like a huge task in my head, but ended up only taking me about 10-15 minutes to do. One thing I changed that I thought would take me a while was switching from @user.id to @user.facebook_uid for all my user stuff. I thought it looked kind of silly to have haloplayers/user/123 which would like to the facebook id or 137412794. Using the facebook id for EVERYTHING (except database associations because I couldn’t really figure out how to get away from the primary id on that) took away a lot of confusion. Lessons learned.
Anyways. That’s about all I got. I don’t know why I’ve gotten into the rambling mood the last couple of days. I think I’m going to try and get a couple hours of sleep before I wake up and start working some more. Good night, folks!
Road to One Point Five
Halo 3 Players hasn’t been out for a month yet. I believe the first day it went live was November 20th. That doesn’t mean I’ve just been sitting back and watching the user count slowly grow for a few weeks now. Since it’s initial release, I don’t even recognize parts of the application any more, let alone the code! Anyways.. Since I don’t update here as often as I’d like, I’d like to ramble about my first large update to Halo 3 Players since it was released.. I don’t expect to make a whole lot of sense, but I just want to collect some of my thoughts here to better make sense out of them and if anyone happens to actually READ this, maybe they can offer some input.
The largest thing that users of Halo 3 Players will notice is the addition of Challenges. I have bigger ideas for challenges, but for the initial 1.5 release, the user will be able to challenge themselves in a speed game. You set the number of something you want to increase and see how fast you do it. If you want to see how quickly you gain 5 EXP points, set up the challenge and play. When your done, we’ll record your time and show your friends so they can take a stab at trying to beat your time. The concept is simple and I think it will add a lot more of a social aspect, not to mention, competition. I’ve got most of the back end roughly finished. It definitely needs a lot of polish, but it works. I intend on going through most of my code and refactoring some things to work a little better before this release and that should help me clean up the new challenges code too. One of the larger problems I’m running in to is that some of the tasks that require me to fetch information from bungie.net take a few seconds to complete if bungie.net is going slow. I implemented a system that spawns these update processes to the background and I use memcached to store information about what’s happening. This worked OK for updating the gamertags, but when since I’m moving it over to more aspects of the application, I’m definitely going to need to rewrite some of that code to be more flexible. I’d also LIKE to figure out some way to use AJAX to constantly check the status of the background updates and refresh some things automagically when it’s done. We’ll see if that makes the 1.5 release or I wait until 1.6 for that one. I hope I can get 1.5 out by the middle of the week. That would be great.
On a side note, I’m really enjoying working with the Facebook Platform. It didn’t take a whole lot of work to learn how things worked and my obsessive-compulsive nature really loves how clean things look when your application blends in with facebook so well..
I think I’m done rambling about this stuff. It’s 5am. Time for a little bit of sleep before I get back to work..
Halo 3 Players on Facebook
I’ve released my very first Facebook application! A few days ago, Halo 3 Players went live on Facebook! I learned me how to do a few things on a Solaris system (I’m using that free for a year joyent facebook accelerator), and finally learned how to use Capistrano. After you understand what Capistrano does, it’s amazing how awesome it is! I’ve thrown a few code updates out already since it’s as easy as ‘cap deploy’. I can’t believe I never learned it earlier. Anywho’s, just thought I’d throw a post up here and tell anyone who plays Halo 3 and has a facebook, head on over to Halo 3 Players and let me know what you think.
Update: Haha.. I wrote this about 2 weeks ago but I guess I accidentally checked the ‘draft’ button so it never published…
Halo 3: The Forge
This review is going to be a little shorter than the previous reviews about Halo 3. I’m going to talk a little bit about The Forge in Halo 3. In the simplest term, The Forge is just a stripped down level editor. Instead of changing the geometry of the levels, you change positions of things or add new objects. It’s nothing jaw dropping, but it works well.
The Forge isn’t a full featured level editor by any means. It’s more of a level TWEAKER than anything. The only thing The Forge lets you do is add, move or delete items (weapons, vehicles, crates, etc) on any multiplayer map. The dynamic of a map can change so greatly by just moving a few things around. Put the rocket launcher in a new spot. Add a tank. Move the flag to the other side of the map. All these things completely change a map without changing the look of it. This is what The Forge does best. When your done creating your masterpiece, you can save it and share it with your friends.
The cool things you can do with The Forge that extend further than just editing a level is that The Forge is another game mode. You can play with your friends. You can design a new map with them, or you can just use the forge as a new way to kill them. On the fly, you can press UP on the D-Pad at any time and enter or exit Forge Mode. If you need a new weapon, create it and go back to hunting your friend. This is made even more fun by making a team game out of it where one player plays as The Forge while the rest of your team tries to kill. Just the fact that you can swing in and out of Forge Mode in the middle of a match makes the possibilities nearly endless.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t played all THAT much with The Forge, but the little bits I have played with were really fun and although I don’t think this mode is the reason people are going to buy Halo 3, it’s definitely a nice little addition when you need a break from matchmaking and the theatre.
Halo 3: Campaign
I’ve decided to make a sort of ‘series’ of Halo 3 reviews. This time around, we have the campaign. I beat the campaign late last night. Wasn’t really trying to beat the game in 1 day or anything, I just did. I’m rounding my play time (by adding up all the film lengths) to about 8 and a half hours. Not too bad. I wasn’t rushing or anything. It’s a short campagn. I’m not going to lie about it. I also think that’s a good thing for a couple of reasons. Halo (for me) has never been ALL about the campaign. It’s a great multiplayer game. The campaign is almost just a bonus for me.
The main reason I’ll be playing the campaign a few more times is that there are a lot of reasons to play the campaign more than a couple of times, so keeping it short doesn’t overwhelm you when you think about how much work you have to do to beat it again. If you want all the achievements, your going to have to play the game at least 3 times all the way through. You get 125GP for beating it on normal, heroic and legendary. I beat it on normal in 8 and a half hours and just started it again on heroic. Heroic doesn’t fuck around. It’s tough. Much tougher than normal. So I can imagine each level increase as adding a couple extra hours of play.
On top of that, there are a few other bonus things if you want to get all the achievements and unlock everything in the game. Skulls (and I think terminals) are hidden throughout each level. If you want to actually spend the time searching each and ever nook and cranny of every level to find the skulls, have fun. They’re hidden pretty good. There are also plenty of guides out there already that tell you where abouts the skulls are. Each skull has a special ‘power’ that you can enable when playing the campaign to change it up. Things like disabling your radar, turning off auto-recharge on your shields, dropping less ammo, or having confetti pop out of brutes when you head-shot them. Most of the skulls increase the difficulty of the campaign in some way. One skull in each level is gold and also has an achievement attached to it.
I’m not going to talk about the story too much because I don’t want to spoil anything. Let’s just say that I felt like I was watching an incredibly long movie when playing. And on top of that, the campaign felt even shorter than it actually was. The battles are epic and large and the cut scenes are very well scripted. I heard some people weren’t happy with the ending but I thought it ended just fine and again reiterate that I play Halo for it’s multiplayer games, and not to be wowed by the plot twists or ending of the story. It was good.
The last, and best, part of the new campaign is the addition of co-op play mixed with their new point system. It’s recommended that you leave points off for the first time through the game so you get the story the way it was meant to be told the first time through. But after that, turn on points and see how you do. You get a certain amount of points for killing certain things depending on your difficulty level and what you killed. There are achievements attached to getting a certain score on certain levels. On top of that, you can play the campaign with a couple of friends and see who gets the best score on that level. This addition is what I think is going to take the campaign of Halo from just a ‘finish it once’ kind of game to a game that you play over and over again with your friends.
That’s about all for the campaign part of this review. Check back later for a new section when I play around with something else for a while. Not sure what my next review is going to be about just yet but I’ll start writing as soon as I figure it out.
Halo 3: Initial Review, Saved Films
it’s September the 25th and that means that last night I picked up Halo 3 at midnight! I played a few multiplayer matches and a couple of missions of the campaign and felt like sharing some of my thoughts about my first moments with the game.
For starters, I’ve been extremely excited about this game and so far it hasn’t disappointed me too much at all. The multiplayer games are still some of the most fun you can have playing strange 14 year olds over the internet and the campaign is also as fun (if not more so) than the first 2 were. The mechanics to the game are very similar to Halo and Halo 2 with a couple of exceptions. A couple of the buttons have been moved to places where they make more sense so if you played Halo 2 24/7 for the last couple of years, your muscle memory might take a few sessions to get used to the new placement. It didn’t take me too long to get used to though.
There are a couple of new features that sounded very promising before the game released, too. There’s the Forge and Saved Films. The Forge is a level editor of sorts. Instead of working with the geometry of the level, though, you work with the entities in the level. You can change the placement of most things or add new things to the level which could completely change how the level is played. I haven’t tested this out yet so I can’t really tell you how it is but I’ll post about it later when I get a chance to use it. The Saved Films is great for the photographer and cinematographer in all of us. Because Halo 3 is such a gorgeous game, it’s extremely fun to fly around the replay of your last game and find that perfect head shot or just a cool picture. I’ve played around with this and for the most part it works really great. There are a couple of quirks that I would love to see fixed up with a patch in the near future, though.
One of the most annoying parts of the saved films is the rewind. Or lack there of in some instances. For whatever reason, any campaign saved film you are watching can not be rewound. I don’t understand why this limitation exists but it makes finding that perfect frame to capture a lot more difficult because your pretty much screwed when you pass it up and are already 30 minutes into the film. In multiplayer saved films, you can rewind though (which is why I think it’s really weird that you can’t in campaign) but the rewind just jumps back a few seconds. Currently, if you press A, the film will just play. If you press the Right Trigger, the film will play at a variable speed depending on how hard you press the Right Trigger. This makes you naturally feel like pressing the Left Trigger will rewind at a variable speed. Not the case. Instead, the left trigger is for moving your camera faster than normal. I would really like to see this fixed up in a patch or at least an explanation as to why rewinding can’t happen in a natural, fluid way like going forward. At the VERY least, I would love to be able to rewind in campaign films.
A couple other things I would love to see fixed soon with saved films are saving clips in campaign films and the quality of the screenshots. Again, I’m not sure why this is, but you can not save clips of your campaign. Just seems weird that there’s that much of a difference between multiplayer and campaign films that these limitations are in place. Also, I’ve noticed that the so-called “Hi-Res” screenshots appear to look worse than in the game. Kind of blurry almost. Like some post processing tries to make the image look more cinematic or something, but, to me, it just decreases the detail and quality of the image I’m trying to capture..
For the most part though, Saved Films work great. I love them and I can see myself spending countless hours searching through games I play to find those great shots I made, or to learn from my mistakes and see how I died, or to learn by watching the group of people who just kicked my ass 25-1. The greatness of this new feature, by far, outweighs it’s short comings. It’s still early and I’m sure they’re still working on things. I just really hope they release a patch in the future that cleans it up a little more so that it’s perfect.
