Long Live Halo CE! New Servers Set To Replace GameSpy

Good news everyone! Despite the impending closure of the long-running GameSpy servers, the Halo: Combat Evolved community as well as the development team at Bungie have taken steps to keep their classic FPS up and running. The game may have seen better days, but it still has a lot of fans, it’s online multiplayer is still great fun and the modding community is far from done with it.

A new patch will see the game switch to a new master server which will be hosted by Bungie as well as fixing a few in game bugs to make sure the game keeps running smoothly in the future.

This is pretty awesome of them, especially given that the company no longer makes money from the title and it’s a great way of showing they still care about the fan base they worked so hard to accumulate.

Check out the full press release below.

Bungie is pleased to present a new update to Halo PC (and Custom Edition). The patches and dedicated servers are linked below. In a couple days once more servers have come online, the auto-update notice will be displayed in game.

As you might have heard, the Gamespy service that has provided our server list these 11 years is shutting down at the end of the month, and prior versions of the game will no longer be able to browse for internet multiplayer games. Community member btcc22 has valiantly written a new server-browser application for Bungie to host and support in-game via this patch.

This update also contains a number of other small bugfixes, mostly relating to security or compatibility with newer hardware. Big thanks to community members Technut and kornman00, and btcc22 again, for helping to catalog and investigate these problems, making the job of fixing them much easier, and to the community who has helped test the patches.

Bungie believes in creating lasting social experiences, and while we’re all enormously excited for the upcoming release of Destiny and hope you’ll join us for that ride, we’re also gratified by the ongoing enthusiasm for the original Halo, and glad to be able to help keep a good thing going.

Roger Wolfson
Online Services Engineering Lead

Links:
Halo PC 1.0.10
Halo CE 1.0.10
Halo PC Dedicated Server 1.0.10
Halo CE Dedicated Server 1.0.10

Patch notes:
Bumped version to 1.0.10.0621
Moved Gamespy services to use new non-Gamespy server
Fixed a family of index-out-of-bounds bugs which had been exploited to crash clients
Made banlist parsing not case-sensitive
Removed halt on cache file verify error
Removed some verbose debug logging of gamespy connections
Fixed handling of video cards with >= 2GB of memory
Enabled refractive Active Camo on Nvidia cards, which had previously used an alpha fade. (AMD cards already have this)
Updated 2003-era upper bound on the video resolution picker. Use at your own risk; the game is untested at 4800×3600.
Updated chatbox settings to work with newer resolutions
Models node limit updated to 63
Fixed reading sv_ban_penalty from init.txt
Disabled executable_is_valid checksum from strings.dll
Allowed network access in devmode
Fixed parsing of custom map names containing a “.”

Edit: The CD Key database is now online too, to assist people in creating meaningful banlists for their dedicated servers.

Thank you Bungie for providing us with this information.