Gamespy has posted an interview with Marc Tardif, Director of Marketing and 3rd Party Relations at Gearbox. There’s some good info on what Halo CE (Custom Edition, not Combat Evolved) really is, and how it will be supported.

GameSpy: What’s the reason behind having a separate .exe for this update?

Marc Tardif: The new software was the method chosen by Bungie / MGS (Microsoft Game Studios) to deploy the things that Gearbox has done to Halo since the game launched. Given the amount of time we’ve been working on this stuff and given the value of the material that’s being released, we are really happy to finally get the software into the hands of Halo PC customers.

This, finally, explains the delay in the release of the HEK; it wasn’t as simple as ‘make sure the HEK works, and put it out there’, it was ‘make sure all the new features being added (fast shaders, better networking, other multiplayer tweaks) will continue to work properly with HEK-created material’. Halo Custom Edition is, in effect, a whole new ballgame. (Halo CE and HaloPC are NOT compatible; you will not see listings for HaloPC games in a Halo CE browser, and vice versa.) It’ll be interesting to watch how this all shakes out!

A couple of fans have compiled all the questions and answers from the Gearbox Q&A thread into a single post, for easier reading. There’s an awful lot of info in there, so read carefully. This covers questions both about Halo Custom Edition and the Halo Editing Kit; they’re separated for ease of understanding.

So says slim.

Take the night off, miss fun stuff at Bungie.net. Frankie put up a great retrospective on the life of Marty O’Donnell, who turns 107 today. It’s an inspiring rags-to-riches tale – well, gassed-canaries-to-loafer-lightener tale, actually – that gives insight into the events that shaped the man who came up with such beautiful music for Halo. Check it out! (Happy Birthday, Marty!)

The Weekly Update this week is at Bungie’s own Underground; it’s relatively light, but still has some tasty morsels. Frankie’s description of ‘skimming close to wall surfaces, trying to beat the optical illusion a bump map creates’ is so close to how I felt about Halo it’s scary. (And this is HALO 2!) Go read. (Thanks, Fuzion.)

In tandem with the HEK announcement, Cysco, over at the Gearbox forums, has changed the HaloPC forums to Halo Custom Edition forums. What is Halo Custom Edition? Glad you asked – Cysco answers some basic questions in this thread. It’s a completely unsupported version of Halo, available free to all HaloPC owners, that introduces lots of new features – including the ability to play user-created (think HEK) content. THIS is what we’ve been waiting for; THIS is why it wasn’t as simple as ‘dump that HEK out there’. There will be lots more info in the next few days about this stuff… but for now, you can discuss on our forum, on Gearbox’s forum, or at Bungie.net – it’s the topic of the moment. (Thanks to Reppyboyo and L337Mondo for the first notices.)

Stephen Cakebread, a programmer on the Project Gotham 2 team at Bizarre Creations, dropped a note in our forum about ‘a mostly complete copy of the silent cartographer exported as a circuit which can be loaded in the gotham 2 engine’… a tribute to the level as a driving challenge! (Before anyone gets their hopes up, it’s unlikely that he meant this construct would ever get released… though I think it would be really, really cool.)

SketchFactor has posted a very cheering (though vague, with respect to dates) note to Bungie.net about the Halo Editing Kit… it’s coming, folks! And it’s coming soon. W00T! (Thanks, KP, you’re not fired… yet.)

WhiteRaBbit pointed out a fun Halo/PGR 2 composite he found. Adam Daniel pointed to a different thread on Bungie.net – started by the image’s creator himself. Nice work! (Special mention goes to blinkmetoys, in the Bungie thread, who noticed it might be photoshopped.)

What’s a birthday without presents? Some HBO regulars put together a small collection of presents for Stuntmutt to celebrate the One Year Anniversary of One One Se7en.

• The Story of an Artist, Fanfic by Jillybean
• Dual Weapons, Wallpaper by BOLL
• Mmmm…, cake by c0ld vengeance

Of course, there are plenty of others that feel like this might be the perfect time to hang up the pencil… but hey, never listen to the naysayers. They’ll just say nay.

One One Se7en turns One Year Old today… and it looks like the cast is making a statement. Happy Birthday, Stuntmutt! (There were wellwishers on the forum, also.)

Halo: Resolution gets… odd.

Red vs Blue Episode 32, ‘me, myself, and you’, was posted a couple of hours ago – pretty early! (It’s currently in the Season 2 Sponsors forum.) Very nice work – and props to Yomary for the funniest bit in the film. Thanks to pilotelite for the heads-up.

Oops – another one.

Caskey discovered a Timberland conversion for Unreal Tournament 2k4 – and rapture points out that it’s being hosted by cooked Gamers (along with other Halo conversions). Nice!

Bungie.net has been updated with a new Top Story – A Covenant Primer: The Best of the Bestiary. There’s some excellent background information about the Covenant itself (and how the Forerunners fit into the equation), along with individual descriptions of each client species. Absolutely worth a read for anyone interested in the backstory of Halo! I heard about this on the #hbo IRC channel this morning, but the earliest note I can find about it is from MC vince on our forum. Update: Gah, is right. Seems mnemesis actually posted this story when it first went live… I never checked the page. 🙁 My bad! (Thanks, Dean.)

Halo Babies has a new strip up today – it takes a shot at Bungie’s scripting. (mrsmiley also points out that today’s the last day to donate to HaloBabies.net and get entered in their Spoiled Sponsor contest – he’s choosing a winner tomorrow.)

Hokey Smokes! Apparently, Frankie has gone insane and is actually providing official story information on the Covenant over on Bungie.Net. Godlike Forerunner! Engineers in trances! Jackal snipers! With needlers! Gah! Thanks to MC Vince, for noticing the story in the first place.

WaLKa came up with some very nice HUDless desktops, and posted ’em to our forum. KP put up a mirror, and so did we – I can’t speak for anyone else, but as long as you can get to HBO, you can get to ours. 🙂 Enjoy ’em!

Deanero asked a reasonable question on our forum, concerning the energy balance of Halo and its denizens. (Personally, I think Speedy’s answer is the most likely, and not just because he took a totally gratuitous shot at KP in formulating it.) BOLL, however, went in a different direction… hrm.