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Originally Posted by Bungie.net
Here we are again - it's Friday, which means it's time to uphold the time honored tradition of posting the Weekly Update to Bungie.net. I shall warn you again right now though - the new maps are out the door and we're all either pre-occupied with them or other, top secret stuff, so you won't find much of an actual update here today.
To make matters worse, our regular scribes Luke and Frank are both out of the office. Again. Shishka and I are left to take the helm and take a futile stab at matching the update we cobbled together last week that was full of juicy matchmaking tid bits and hilarious photos of Frank. We used that all up. You will find no such content here today. What we do have is some helpful ProTips from Shishka on how NOT to earn Recon armor and a nice pictorial from Luke from his recent visit to the MLG Meadowlands event.
Map Attack
The team is just as excited as the rest of you that our latest Halo 3 maps are finally out the door. We've been looking forward to this release as much as you and overall it's great to see that our fans enjoy the Legendary maps as much as we do.
On behalf of everyone here at Bungie, I'd like to extend a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has purchased our new maps and continued to support Halo 3!
Avalanche seems to have found itself a home atop the list of best big team battle map in the history of the universe (according to some), while Ghost Town continues to catch people by surprise with its awesomeness since they were initially dazzled by the return of two known classics. And then there's Blackout. The remake that's 99% accurate to the original Lockout but with the 1% delta being just enough to incite flames and outrage from the depths of the community. Of course we expect no less. Without rage and anger, what would our forums have left? (I kid, plenty of you make valuable contributions every day and I thank you for that)
Luckily plenty of people are having a blast on Blackout and (gasp!) even adjusting their play styles to account for the small difference over the original. I've even seen some smart Forging at work to re-create a few of the missing jumps people are clamoring for. All three maps have a lot to offer and we've not even begun to see how people will use Forge to make all new ways to enjoy them. We'll be keeping an eye out for cool stuff to share in upcoming releases of Bungie Favorites. Sadly, there have not been any requests to include "Stoshout" in that mix.
Legendary Hiccups
Tuesday’s release of Halo 3's Legendary Map Pack had some users experiencing hiccups with the maps once they were downloaded. Let's take a quick look at some of the issues and how they can be resolved (or what we're doing to resolve them).
"Help! I downloaded the maps and tried to go into the Legendary-required DLC playlist and I am getting a message that says "'Maps not found.'
A similar issue popped up on certain Xbox 360s with the Heroic Map Pack. Rest assured, assuming you downloaded the maps, they are there on your Hard Drive, their existence just hasn't cached to your Xbox 360 yet. In order to find them, back out of Matchmaking to the Halo 3 main menu and then click "Custom Games" and select Maps. You should find the Legendary Maps in your map list then.
If you don't see the maps, you can try to clear your Xbox 360's cache: From the Xbox 360 Dashboard, navigate to the System blade. Press Y on the HD symbol and then press X,X, Left Bumper, Right Bumper, X, X. If you did it correctly you will see a message saying: "Do you want to perform maintenance on your Xbox 360 storage devices?"
With Halo 3, specifically, clearing your cache will clear your Recent Games, Recent Maps and Recent Films, so make sure you've saved anything you've played from those Recent lists in Halo 3 before clearing your cache.
We've also heard of a few reports of people experiencing map issues related to something else entirely. While we're still investigating, it would appear that people who have the maximum amount of content items for the game along with Heroic and Legendary may end up having issues loading the new maps. The maximum limit is 50 screenshots and 100 total combined content items like films, clips, game variants, maps, etc... If you're at this limit and experiencing map problems, try deleting one of your custom content items. We're digging deeper into the problem but our initial tests show that seems to do the trick.
"We were playing on Avalanche and a Wraith turned invisible and started dominating us in new and profoundly horrifying ways."
We're aware of this unfortunate issue, which is a product of a bug with tag systems on the map. Shishka has whipped up a fix which has already been deployed to matchmaking so you shouldn't encounter this bug there. However, it could still happen to you in custom games. To fix this yourself quick and easily, either save the version of Avalanche that's found in Matchmaking or, using Forge, delete the default Wraith and add a new one back and save it.
"I tried to use your new screenshot filters on Blackout and all I saw was nothingness and sadness."
Nova and Pen & Ink and filters are producing all white screenshots on Blackout because those two filters specifically have conflicts with the lightmaps used in the nighttime lighting model that appears on Blackout. Because it’s only two of the filters, we elected to leave them on the map, rather than removing all of the filters from Blackout altogether.
Inside Bungie
Beyond the DLC maps and some ongoing related work, things are pretty busy here at Bungie. We have quite a few projects underway, all of which are far too secret to spill in this story. I'd love nothing more than to give you the blow by blow run down of our next steps in the World Domination 2008 play book but doing so would unleash the wrath of 777 flaming ninjas and I've got a small child who needs me to care for her. Suffice it to say that we're operating at 110% right now and even expanding some operations into a new building just up the street that's finally coming online for use. Which reminds me, we are still hiring. If you or someone you know has mad skillz, please check out our jobs page!
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04-18-2008
Bungie Weekly Update 4/18
