The Secret Glyph Project have been hard at work and have figured out what was causing the doors in Sector 8 to disappear (see The ODST glyphs *DO NOT* unlock a door!” and Confirmed: ODST door disappearance is a glitch) and got in working in other sectors!
They’ve wrapped it up nicely in this Youtube video which servers as both a demonstration and tutorial.
For detailed information on how to repeat it and how it works check out their discussion forum and get “bumping”!
I’ve just gone back to the in-game video of me showing a friend the disappearing door in Sector 8 (see my previous post for details) and I checked out Sector 8 before and after the door disappears. This is nothing more than a repeatable glitch.
In comparison to the fully loaded sector when the door is missing the following applies:
3 areas used as the SI supply drops are now open (not just the 1 originally discovered).
The grunts and turrets are not loaded in one of the circular areas.
Adverts for cars are missing from the walls.
Various items are not loaded such as the Opticon health dispensers and stand alone terminals (such as the one near the shotgun).
So it’s a case of good work on finding a glitch, now can we do this on other sectors to access even more areas that should be blocked off?
JSM26 has uploaded an ODST video to his Bungie.net file share showing missing Opticon dispensers and de-loaded doors in the starting sector. Further evidence that the ODST modified Halo 3 engine has glitches, possibly exploitable to access other blocked off areas the designers never wanted us to get to…
There’s been quite a bit of excitement over at Bungie.net recently, someone noticed that if you look at some of the glowing Covenant glyphs in Sector 6 resulted in two doors in Sector 8 disappearing allowing access to a previously blocked off area and an empty supply drop. The Secret Glyph Project got on the wagon and produced a video demonstrating the effect and a whole slew of sub-forums were created to track this phenomenon.
I’m sad to say that the doors disappear from what appears to be a loading glitch, not from looking at any glyphs. Here’s how I determined this, I encourage you to try this to replicate the results:
Having completed the game I loaded up New Mombasa Streets, immediately got myself a mongoose and headed to Sector 8 to check on the door. At this point I should point out that at no time after getting the mongoose did I have the visor on. The door was closed as expected.
I then drove over to Sector 6 and without turning on my visor walked up to the covenant sniper rifle next to the Elites, picked it up and got back on my mongoose (parked near to the Sector exit). I then drove immediately back to the door which was now open with no glyphs sighted.If you look at a map you’ll see that Sector 8 is actually a twisted mirror of Sector 3 and if you look closely you’ll see that Sector 3 also has a room with funny tiles on it matching the location and design of the one in Sector 8. If you go to this area you’ll immediately feel at home and easily spot the Security door as placed in a mirror fashion to the one in Sector 8. This door opens…
So, it’s my belief that this is just fall out to the way the game engine loads the levels and nothing at all to do with the glyphs, it’s just coincidence that they are located in the area you need to go to de-load the doors.
Certain glyphs lead you to keys areas so for me it’s pretty clear that the glyphs are there for player guidance and to add an air of mystery. Give it it a go, try the experiment above and let me know your results.
Sep 17
As expected, the redesign of Bungie.net; has stopped the Halo 3 Asset-O-Matic from working.
I’m not sure if I will be updating the app to support the new layout, I’ll have to see how inspired I am with the release of ODST…;)
Jul 29
So, I booted up my 360 this morning so I could experience the wonders of the new dash…
Avatar props:
They’ve missed the crucial factor here, impulse purchasing. Every thing’s priced too high, prices should range from 20G to 100G, if it were I’d have probably spent 800G this morning alone, but as it is I’ve bought nothing. I’m not spending 320G on a remote control warthog that can only be seen on the dash, that’s almost half the price of a game!
Stan’s Outfit should be 1 purchase, you shouldn’t have to buy the hat separately.
I’ll be sticking to the freebies from games for a while until something that really appeals to my impulsive side turns up.
Dash speed:
Yup, it’s true, the dash feels almost as responsive as the USA one did! I was able to queue up 4 episodes of the guild in the time it would have previously taken to queue up a single episode. I’m hoping that this responsiveness continues into the guide when you’re in game, I’ve nearly thrown my controller around the room before whilst waiting over 2 minutes for the guide to load up at a crucial part of an online game
The other stuff:
It’s all fluff apart from that. I don’t need to tweak my display options, date stamps on saves are very useful but I rarely do anything with my saves as it is. The change to my gamercard is very nice but I can live without it, as can most others I expect. The achievement browser is a useful indication of how few games I have 100% whored, I wish they’d taken this further showing games with easy achievements to reach, links to guides and strategies and the like. Could have been a great cross promotional effort with IGN, as it is it’s just a nice bit of fluff.
It’s good, but it doesn’t have any of the exciting features such as Last.fm, Sky integration and the other cool features we’ve been promised at E3. Still, nice to be on the first wave I guess 😉
Jul 10
I managed to start the UK client a few hours early..
1 vs 100 UK launch
Might try it an hour or so before the live show when they might be accepting connections 🙂
Jun 23
Using the wonderful Render-to-Video feature at Bungie.net take a glimpse into my Halo life where I make a daring raid on an incoming banshee
I’ve noticed that some questions are reoccuring, spefically how people can view their search results. Results are not automatically loaded, searching and viewing and two entirely different actions and can be done at the same time.
To assist users old and new I’ve knocked up a quick Halo 3 Asset-O-Matic FAQ, this will be updated as and when information becomes pertinent. If you’re struggling to figure something out and it’s not on the FAQ feel free to leave a comment so I can answer your question and add it to the FAQ if appropriate 🙂
May 19
Download Halo 3 Asset-O-Matic Beta 4
What happened to Beta 3 you may ask. Well Bungie made a few changes in between me completing Beta 3 and actually finding time to upload it. By that time it no longer worked.
So, what you have in your metaphysical hands is Beta 4, it’s just like Beta 3 but it works!
The changes are:
*You can now search Matchmaking or Custom games
*You can now go directly to the files instead of the match details
*It is significantly faster (think 5 minutes to search over 2500+ matches..)
*Templates are working (sorta, no word wrapping enabled and no way to clear the output box). This allows you to enter some text in the top section, hit a button and have your text repeated with the following tokens replaced by data from the currently loaded database: %SCREENS%, %CLIPS%, %GAMEID% (used for linking directly to the game), %GAMETYPE%, %GAMEDATETIME% and %MAP%
Alas, Campaign searching did not make it in. I wrote half the code and then realised it needs a whole new DB format to support the relevent information found for a Campaign record. I will add support once my busy work life allows.
Databases from previous versions are not compatible with this new release. A fresh search is always preferred in this house 😀
Give it a try yourself, tell your friends! Download the Halo 3 Asset-O-Matic Beta 4 today!
(Feedback is always appreciated folks! 🙂 )
Feb 16
I’ve tweaked a few things here and there, cleaned up some code and should have a release fairly soon. The current status is:
* It’s faster! I’ve updated the number of threads to match Bungie’s website listings and things are coming in faster. But, the speed is still limited by Bungie.net’s responce time and other factors such as your own network settings (during a search the program has 26 threads all pulling in data from Bungie.net)
* Either Matchmaking or Custom games can be searched and you can go directly to the files for any of these results (Thanks Bungie Web Guys!)
* Campaign searching will be enabled in the release, I just need to code the section dealing with the different layout of these pages.
* Campaign results will not have direct links to the related files (nothing I can do at this time, it’s down to the Bungie Web Guys)
* Templates are working (sorta, no word wrapping enabled and no way to clear the output box). This allows you to enter some text in the top section, hit a button and have your text repeated with the following tokens replaced by data from the currently loaded database: %SCREENS%, %CLIPS%, %GAMEID% (used for linking directly to the game), %GAMETYPE%, %GAMEDATETIME% and %MAP%
* Things are slightly more stable (basic error checking put in etc). Turns out I had already coded around network threads failing and give them 3 chances to recover. When one fails I lose resources, I’ve changed the code around this so it should be fixed but further testing is required…
* I know the interface is basic, I’ve seperated a lot of code from the GUI so I can work on something better at a later date. I need to refactor a bit more of the code to do this. If you want to get funky with your results you can always open them up in any SQLite viewer.
* I’m still not sure why sometimes you can start a new search and sometimes you can’t (app hangs after pressing the search button). All the relevent threads are dead and the app is in almost the same state as it started. I’ll keep watch on this (it may be related to the network code I’ve updated), easy fix if this happens to you is to restart the app..
* Databases from previous versions are not compatible with this new release. Here’s where I wish I’d added a version number to the DB itself. I might knock up a quick tool to update old DB’s to the new format but truth be told you’d be better off doing a fresh search anyway as this is when the direct linking to files data is populated.
Release will be shortly after I’ve coded the campaign section which I hope to have done in the next week or two.