Due to circumstances beyond our control, we missed our SETI update yesterday. We’ll do a 2-week update next week. In the meantime, however, the SETI Halo Marines need to realize that they’re falling behind the TidBITS team… after weeks of being 4-500 units behind, the gap has now grown to over 600 units, and continues to widen. How will you find the Covenant at this pace?

Thanks mightily to Mark Levin, who has updated the HBO FAQ to reflect recent information. Tons of good stuff… stop by and take a look! (If you want to nitpick, do so in this thread on our forum.)

Kudos to Harry Al-Shakarchi, who snagged this from ShugaShack (who, in turn, got it from Telefragged)… The latest issue of the British gaming mag Edge has an article on the Xbox, and a sidebar contains comments from developers about the platform. Joseph Staten was quoted as saying the following:

“Throughout Halo’s design process, we’ve had to face tough choices about limiting the game’s scope to accommodate lower-end PC systems. Now that we’re making the game for the X-Box first and foremost, we haven’t thrown away our old performance guidelines, but we certainly feel a lot more comfortable committing to high-poly models, more detailed textures, a litany of shader effects, inane physics – all the really sexy things that X-Box is capable of. Tackling a game as ambitious as Halo, it feels really good to have a clear hardware target. Even better, one that allows the whole team to create stuff that’s a lot more complex than we originally planned.”

Which makes one wonder… will the PC and Mac versions be up to the same level of quality as the Xbox version? And if so, will the system requirements be much higher (relatively speaking) than Bungie’s been known for in the past? Thanks, Harry.

Rockhound sends word of a new Clansite, Germany Clan. This one’s a bit different from other clansites… it seems to be a meta-site, a gathering place for German clans in preparation for clanwars against other nationalities. Divisions are to be 6 to 8 soldiers… if you speak German, feel free to correct any misimpressions I’ve gotten from Babelfish. 🙂

Thanks to Pr@iler, of Halo.ch, who gently reminded us that we’ve mentioned quite a few new Halo pages in our news in the past couple of months, but have been lax about adding them to the Links page. Hopefully, we’re updated now. (The General Sites section has been alphabetized, as well.)

Thanks to fire phoenix, who whipped up a new banner for our Banners page. Nicely done… go check it out!

Thanks to MrEiffel65, who posted on our forum about a new German Halo site, CoD Halo-News. (No relation to the German site HaloNews.) Looks an awful lot like Battleground: Halo to me… Check it out!

Thanks to Brad Custer, of Custer’s Corner, who sent in a new desktop for our Wallpapers page. This one comes in more resolutions than any I’ve seen yet, you should find a version that fits your desktop.

$erial-ki!!A is back in the writing game, and has released chapter 6 of his Halo work-in-progress, this one titled “Mutiny and Dissension.” You’ll find it on our Fan Fiction page. Enjoy!

Last week, we mentioned an upcoming product called 3d studio gMAX, a 3D modelling program that Discreet (makers of 3d studio max) plan to distribute free to modmaking communities. Thanks again to Picky, who noticed that Stomped interviewed a Discreet exec about gMAX at QuakeCon earlier this month, and quite a bit more info about the program and its distribution was made known. It’ll likely be available next spring (which means the Halo team will have plenty of time to create a Game Pack for it, if they so choose), and Discreet hopes it will both invigorate the already thriving mod community and create sales for gMAX’s big brother, 3d studio max. Check out the interview!

People are still whining about Bungie selling out to Microsoft, and for the most part, Bungie is still being good-natured about it. Every once in a while, though, they feel the need to respond to a particularly egregious attack. This attack was made on the Rampancy.net forum a couple of days ago… and after a rather large number of fan responses, Matt weighed in with a very nicely written (but slightly bitter) response, here. Max followed up with another, um… serious post. Or not. The whole thread is worth a read… in between the (NT) posts, there’s some good reasoning.

Thanks to Chris Hanel, who sent in a new desktop for our Wallpaper page. Nice compositing job!

Mhaddy =PN= writes to let us know that he’s put up scans of a Halo article from the September 2000 issue of Computer Gaming World at the Junkyard. (There are also scans of a Tribes 2 article, and a funny column that should be appreciated by gamers who are parents everywhere.) The information isn’t new (in fact, it’s no longer even accurate), but there is some good background on the purchase, and it’s a great example of how far behind the print media really are. THIS is why we’ve suddenly gotten a deluge of forum posters and emailers begging Bungie to reconsider and create a Mac/PC version. Thanks, Mhaddy!

Thanks to TomeOne (via email) and edge (via our forum) for pointing out an interview with Marty O’Donnell at MacCentral. A snippet:

MG: What’s involved in creating the alien language we hear in the trailer? It certainly manages to sound otherworldly, but also feels like there’s dialogue and meaning, as opposed to just cool sounding noise.

MOD: Well, for this trailer we were in kind of a rush so the alien language is not necessarily the final content that you’ll hear in the actual game. I’m not going to give away all my production secrets, but what you hear was based on the English language and I believe that we will actually try and develop a true alien language for the game. One of the cool things that the trailer shows is that not only will the Covenant have their own language, but they can also speak and understand English, if they need to.

Read the whole thing… as usual, Marty’s got a lot to say!

Oops, nearly missed this one. Matt answered a few questions about gameplay on our forum… solid info about the mounted gun on the jeep, on the jeep’s winch, and on the player’s interaction with the dropship. Read it for yourself! Thanks, Matt.

Bad news for ultramarathoners… the old pledge of being able to circumnavigate the entire Halo gets shot down by Matt in our forum. Too good to be true, anyway. Nice to hear that Nathan’s promise of no computer-generated terrain is still good, though…

The Halo SETI Marines continue to dog the heels of the TidBITS team… 500 units still separates them from position 46 in the Club Rankings. Welcome to new team members Marvin, Master X, and MKULTRA… hopefully, with these (and several others that didn’t make the top 400 this time around) we can pass them soon! DarthFlounder takes la Crunch Honneur again, and butch takedown climbs past 46 team members to garner the Frogblast Award. Details can be found on the 7 day stats page.

We’d like to take a moment to wish luxor, of Halo Vault, all the best in whatever he chooses to do… it seems he’s leaving IGN. Good luck, luxor!

Dispatcher has pointed us to another pair of images (that he made, this time) pertaining to the celestial positioning of the Halo. You’ll find them here (a view of the close galaxy, showing the relative positions of Iota Horologii and the Galactic Core) and here (an enhanced terminal pic from Marathon 2, showing (sort of) the relative positioning of Tau Ceti, Earth, the Pfhor homeworld, and Lh’owon. These were snagged off the Rampancy Hotline server, and referenced in this post.

Okay, we haven’t asked permission for this, and you should really read the original post for explanations of all the details… but we’ve received a number of notes that the starmap SiliconDream posted yesterday is unreachable in its original location, so we’ve taken the liberty of mirroring it here. (If this is a problem, Sili, let us know… we’ll take it down.) Read the R.net post, look at the pic… then bother Bungie when the world of Halo doesn’t match Sili’s painstaking research.