Shishka has taken his excellent HaloPC Pre-Release FAQ 1.0 and upgraded it to 2.0, adding information collected at the Fanstock event at Gearbox's headquarters this past weekend. The new or updated items are marked in red.

A lot of sites have now been updated with words and images from Fanstock at Gearbox's headquarters in Texas.

Subnova features pictures and text from Shishka, and Steve from Forerunners.org has posted an update at the PC Halo Map Database site, Cortana.org.

Cortana.org, incidentally, has now launched-- instead of just a logo, they've got their site design in place, and there's a special page for Fanstock coverage.

Dark Helmet from Battleground: Halo has also put up a writeup for the event, and then added some images as well.

Several years ago, we heard on the Rampancy Hotline server that Halo was going to be "the most customizable Bungie game ever."

[image:3805,left] That was, of course, before Microsoft purchased Bungie and Halo was changed into an Xbox game. Now it looks as if that prediction is finally coming true.

Along with the news that Gearbox intends to make Halo's editing tools available for download on their site after the release of Halo for the PC, we also received some screenshots of those very same tools, including the Halo level editor, Sapien. However, we aren't allowed to release those screenshots until... sometime later.

What we can do, however, is to share with you some photos taken and provided graciously by Steve of Forerunners.org, who attended the event and brought a digital camera with him. We've put those in a special Gearbox Fanstock gallery created just for this event. When the screenshot embargo ends, that's where they'll be.

Steve of Forerunners.org has supplied some of the bits of information he's been able to glean while down at PC Halo Fanstock at Gearbox Software in Plano, TX.

• PC and Mac versions of Halo will not be released simultaneously. The Macintosh version is not yet as far along as the PC version. (Westlake Interactive still lists the Mac version as "pre-Alpha" as of this writing.)
• Level editors will not ship with the game, but be downloadable from Gearbox, along with (hopefully) some tutorials.
• It is unknown at this time whether there will be a Mac version of the editors.
• The Halo editor is comprised of three programs.
• The Halo level editor is called "Sapien".
• The shapes and physics editor is called "Guerilla".
• PC Halo has six new multiplayer maps. Many draw on the original game's solo maps for inspiration. They are:
  • Death Island
  • Timberland
  • Ice Fields
  • Danger Canyon
  • Gephyrophobia
  • Infinity
• PC Halo is one of the quickest loading PC games ever. It is reported to load in approximately three seconds.
• PC Halo has two weapons not in the original (unhacked) Xbox release: the flamethrower and the fuel rod gun.
• User-created netlevels will be about 18Mb in size.
• User-created solo levels can be up to about 100 Mb.
• System requirements under Windows will be around a 700 Mhz processor (assuming P3 or P4, not sure), a "good" video card, and 128Mb of free RAM.
• There is a new version of the Warthog with three cannons on top.
• After playing a bit of Halo on the PC, the guys got to watch the same realtime demo of Halo 2 given at E3, and got to play a little Halo 2 themselves on Xbox dev kits. Observers report that Halo 2 is graphically much improved over the original.
• PC Halo will ship on 1 CD, not on a DVD as the Xbox original did.

We will update this item throughout the day as more information becomes available.

Another short note at Forerunners.org promises that Cortana.org, which has been largely dormant for awhile, will update. At the moment there's naught but a logo there, but it does say "The Halo PC Map Database" which seems to imply what the site's eventual intent is. Not sure how long that logo has been there, so apologies if this is old news.

Steve's posted a short note from Gearbox today, where he is attending the PC Halo Fanstock event:

Met some really great people at Fanstock this weekend. I have the privilege of sitting in Gearbox right now. There seems to be an abundance of Half Life games everywhere. Halo PC is of course why we are all here.

F.org, as well as other sites attending the event, should have more updates throughout the coming hours and days.

In addition to having arrived safe and sound in Dallas-- with time to spare to sample the local wine selection-- Louis Wu at HBO passed on word about five screenshots of Death Island over at Microsoft.com. We've put them in the PC Halo Gallery.

We've added Gearbox's latest screenshot of PC Halo, this time of the MC with a sniper rifle, to our PC Halo Gallery. Looks like it's from the new multiplayer level that was inspired by Silent Cartographer.

SketchFactor at Bungie.net has passed along an update from Gearbox Software's Michael Bastien, the producer of PC Halo.

Bastien reports that:

We are definitely on the final stretch to deliver the PC version of Halo to you guys. Mehve was pulled in last week to create art for our setup program and it’s very sweet. So the coolness will start as soon as you insert the disc in your computer. Marty was also involved... but that was, how can I say, more "challenging." Indeed, the setup application is somewhat limited in terms of what it can do with sounds and music. Marty, on the other hand, is not limited in terms of what he can do with sounds and music... I’m sure you guys see the challenge right there! In the end, there will be some audio coolness in the setup as well. Not nearly enough to satisfy Marty but enough to complement the beautiful images.

DarkHelmet from BattleGround: Halo has been invited to a Halo: PC Fanstock event at the Gearbox headquarters. They promise a big article on it afterwards, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: According to the latest news post at Forerunners.org, Steve is also headed to this event, and no doubt they'll have updates after that as well.

These items have been discussed at two of the major remaining Myth sites, MythVillage and MBO, but we'll reference it here just for completeness. MythDev, a group of developers continuing to update and extend Bungie's original Myth games, Myth: The Fallen Lords (TFL for short) and Myth 2: Soulblighter, recently released a patch for Myth: TFL called 1.4. Among other things, it allowed users of Mac OS X to play TFL natively.

However, the patch also broke compatibility with one of the two remaining metaservers for Myth online play: MariusNet. Which, in itself, might not be a huge problem... except that MythDev runs the only other remaining metaserver, PlayMyth.

Jon the Baptist at MythVillage has posted that MalektheAncient has put a new version of the "Creep on the Borderlands" map that was ported to Myth 3 up at The Mill. It now features the original unit count as well as three meshes.

Gholsbane posted awhile back at MBO that there's a second beta version of the Myth 1.4 patch available at Project Magma.

Jake 'Evergreen98' Billo has posted a three part article at The Junkyard, comparing elements of the forthcoming PC release of Halo by Gearbox to the original game on the Xbox.

In an interview over at Telefragged, Randy Pitchford from Gearbox gives us some hope that even if Halo for the PC doesn't have cooperative play at launch, it might gain it later on: