NiTrOuSoXiDe has released a no-leading patch for Halo CE; it’s currently in beta-testing. To be used, both the server and the client need to have this installed for it to work (a download link is in that thread). If you’re finding that the changes in client-side prediction made in Halo CE made playing more difficult compared to HaloPC… give this a try! Thanks to MasterGrief for pointing out the thread.

In classic Stuntmutt fashion, today’s One One Se7en looks at an unintended consequence of a new Halo 2 feature. (No, it’s not bee-related.) If it makes no sense to you… use that mouse button.

The latest version of the Mac Halo Timer, now up to 1.5, has been announced. Lots of new features – if you’re running MacOSX 10.3 or higher, and you want to keep track of spawn times for various items, this puppy’s for you!

The final winning run for our Going Nowhere Fast contest, Trevor Fitch’s Maw run, is now available for download via BitTorrent. Once again – it hasn’t been mentioned for a bit, so here is a BitTorrent client download link. This run is really efficient – no deaths at all, and some really classy moments. 82 mb, QuickTime format. Go grab it! Now that all 10 winning runs have been released, we’re ready to begin consideration of the Grand Prize winner – these 10 runs, plus 20 more, will be analyzed for style and speed, and the run that comes out on top of the heap will garner for its owner a brand-new Limited-Edition Halo Xbox. Expect an announcement sometime next week.

While I was out last night, a huge thread erupted on our forum, arguing about my choice yesterday to ban the use of the word ‘bee’ from forum posts. I’ve been accused of stifling speculation, of favoritism, and of limiting new fans from entering the Halo community (among other sins). In my defense, I’d like to say that I really do believe the ilovebees campaign is Halo 2-related, and that it comes from official sources… but I DON’T believe those sources are inside Bungie. And my biggest problem with the entire phenomenon (at least here at HBO) is that there is ZERO ORGANIZATION. The day this story broke, there were over 800 forum posts on the subject. If someone had filtered them for new and unique information, however, I bet there were fewer than 25… all the rest were simply restating finds that had already been found. (On Bungie.net, the signal-to-noise ratio was even worse; there were 5000 posts that first day or so, and only a tiny fraction contained new information.) Without organization, this puzzle is nothing more than an annoyance. There is some wonderful organization out there – at the NetninjaBeeWiki site, at the unfiction forums, and elsewhere – but NOT HERE. And THAT’S why I asked that discussion be taken elsewhere. It’s likely that this puzzle will provide a ton of fodder for the Halo Story page, and that an after-the-fact analysis will show that it was hugely productive in building hype for Halo 2 – but for now, other, non-bee-related material is becoming harder and harder to process because of the roar, and I’m simply not capable of doing it all. (There’s a great article on the subject, summing up my personal views pretty well, up over at Gamespot right now. Worth a read.)

Update on this morning’s outage at Subnova; looks like a storm took out power for a good chunk of the evening. Things are getting back to normal, so everything that used to be running on halosn (including Fan Fiction) is back up again.

Dang it – I just found the beginning of this news post; I started writing it yesterday morning, but must have gotten distracted. Stupid bees… Captain Spark continues his cel-shading-like manipulation of Halo screenshots; he posted a pair that are actually the same shot, with different coloring. Very cool, if you ask me.

Last Friday’s Weekly Bungie Update has been added to our Archive – the collection (29 in total) is getting hefty, weighing in at 220kb worth of text. That Frankie writes a lot sometimes…

HaloSverige.nu (a Swedish Halo site) is gearing up for full coverage of next weekend’s $50,000 CPL event (in English). Currently, the section holds basic CPL info (maplist, participants, rules, and so on). Check it out!

Nice catch by Ross Mills – a few weeks after we posted a note about Eric Trautmann’s leaving behind his involvement in the Halo world, Eric posted ANOTHER note on his blog stating that he might, in fact, remain on in his old capacity.

My job transition may or may not happen, I may or may not stay in this group. Or I may leave. Or I may not. I exist upon a bedrock of stability and security. 😛

That was posted 2 weeks ago… Eric’s a bit busy with wedding plans at the moment (good luck, Eric!), but it’ll be interesting to see if he sticks around; he’s been a major player in shaping the public aspects of the Halo universe from the beginning.

We’ve moved our forum to a faster machine, which should solve the viewing problems some people have been having since the ilovebees invasion last Friday. The downside: it might take a little while for the DNS change to propagate. Please be patient!

Red vs Blue Season 2 DVDs are now on sale; they’re not shipping until August 2, but you can plunk down your cash now. You get the full collection of episodes, plus directors commentary, outtakes, deleted scenes, line readings, easter eggs, and ‘Never Before Seen Videos’, all for $20. Sounds like a deal! First heads-up came from Gentry Geissler.

Figures.com has put up a gallery of pics of the newest batch of Halo 2 prototypes from Joyride, taken during last weekend’s San Diego Comic Con. Some are quite washed out, but you can get a decent sense for what they look like in any case. Thanks to gd for pointing them out (in a totally random post, I might add).

We’ve known for a while that halosn.bungie.org, one of the mirror sites for our material and the sole server for our Fan Fiction section, was moving – what we didn’t count on was losing touch with Deimos Fawkes, its proprietor, in the days leading up to the move. At this point, the machine has stopped serving Halo content, but I have no way of reaching Deimos to find out where to point things… so we’ve redirected the sections it was serving to other machines, and turned off the Fan Fiction section altogether. Hopefully, we can rectify this problem in the not-too-distant future. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks to clarksbrother, for going above and beyond to help provide to Mac users what Windows users got last week. (Thanks, also, to Rufo Sanchez, who tried to do the same, just a little later.) You can now download a 1920×1080 version of the Halo 2 Ad released recently; it’s 43 mb, and it plays BEAUTIFULLY on my G5, though I get less than a frame per second off the G3 laptop. Update: SanchezTheLlama has put up a mirror of this file. Grab it from him – he’s got a lot of gigs to burn in the next 4 days!

Kikizo.com has put up a bunch of very nice screengrabs from the Ad trailer – they’re listed as 800×600, but most of them are 1280×720, with a few that are 800×450. Very nice quality.

We’ve put up direct-download links for Taylor Jones’ Two Betrayals run, released last Friday in the continuing Going Nowhere Fast series. You can find the links (and direct download and BitTorrent links for all OTHER runs except the last couple) on the GNF Status Page.

Today’s One One Se7en looks at the gap between bling… and bling.

Later than usual, but the ninth segment of the Going Nowhere Fast contest winners is now available via BitTorrent. goatrope’s Keyes run isn’t always pretty, but it’s the fastest we received (and several people tried). Give it a look; at just under 100 mb, you should be able to give the BitTorrent network a run!

][-][awaiian pig is back with a new batch of Red vs Blue ‘set pieces’ – this time, with the white ‘Director’ character on-set. Pretty nice work!