Hey FyreWulf, would this work for your LAN problem? Get all the xboxes to be used in the LAN, and find an Internet connection. Have someone with a gold account recover it on each Xbox. Boot up reach, download the TU and any gametypes/map variants needed to hard drive. After that, they all should be good to be used offline in the LAN, right?
We're not allowed to bring our own networked devices and attach 360s to them at PAX. One of the things we floated was actually having the Halo Freeplay room all go into BTB and play matchmaking against randoms, but we weren't allowed to connect them online.
This is an (rendered) actual game film from PAX Halo Freeplay 2008, Unfortunately it was the only film that survived
Once I land in Canada, my next test will be to see if I can buy a bunch of flash drives, and start up Reach on each one, get the TU, and then have it work over LAN with each other with the flash drives not being on the box that downloaded the TU. If that works then Halo Freeplay will be 1.1 with Reach disc maps and whatever community 4-split maps I can locate.
So what exactly happened and why didnt you deposit the resulting GAFbux in exchang for a .maps GAF username subtitle or GAF-Gold?
I made a prediction on what could be changed in the Reach title update based on what was known of the Halo engine at the time. Since I incorrectly assumed 343 had any similarities to Bungie, I knew at the time that there was no way to change bloom without breaking compatibility. I assumed at the time that they'd treat LAN the same way Bungie did, which was with inter-version compatibility.
So the two situations I had in my mind:
1) They'd only patch stuff that the host could change. Bloom would not be one of them.
2) They'd change bloom, but to keep compatibility they'd issue a download. the "6GB file" was actually a quote from a Bungie employee that I repeated. Either way, if you were to do Reach's TU AND maintain compatibility, you'd need to ship a copy of the new .maps to sit alongside the old one. Then when you'd selected a new version, it'd load that, but if the host was on an old version, it'd load the old .map. In a way this would have been the Halo 4 situation, where Reach would have required ~8GB of HDD space. The reason the number was so quoted at the time was the new armor that was shown, which would absolutely require every single map in Reach (Campaign, Firefight, Multiplayer) to be updated so that it could actually load the new armor.
In fact, to change bloom and add new armor, option 2 was the ONLY way to maintain compatibility.
343 took wildcard option 3) Do something that 1.0 clients wouldn't be able to understand and provide no compatibility path for 1.0 <-> 1.1 interplay that existed in Halo 2 and Halo 3. And this definitely was a surprise for more than just me. Other people around here that screw around with the engine thought it'd be option 2.
Cue a year of shitty .map jokes and the fact that Halo 4 will now actually have you install 8GB of .maps to play. Oh how the fates change.
We never saw a statically noticeable increase in the number of needle rifle kills in TU gametypes. So rather than stifle the sandbox, the Nerfle was left on maps.
tl;dr
The Needle Rifle post-TU was not necessarily the destroyer of worlds some feared.
Was this the same telemetry that told 343 it was a good idea to include a Banshee on new DLC maps after people had repeatedly proven the Banshee was hilariously broken?
Does anyone actually use the Banshee's normal guns for kills in matchmaking?
