Site News Blog

It's been quite a while since we have had a game night. Some of us have been quite busy with megalo recently. So, let's have a megalo based game night on Xbox LIVE.

In order to register for this event, simply PMThunder your gamertag. We will send you an invite when we are ready to begin. There is a minimum post count of 5 to attend this event!

The game night will begin around 8 PM CDT on August 3rd. Please be ready about 10 minutes beforehand so you can receive your invite.

We look forward to seeing you there!

This event has been canceled due to low interest.

Yes you read that right! Halo 2!

We are going to be having a Halo 2 Game Night on May 11th at 2 PM CDT. This is in honor of the Xbox's history as seeing the next generation of Xbox is going to be announced very soon. For most of this game night, we will simply be playing Halo 2 to relive what the game is like. Please note that this will be on the Xbox. I do believe that original Xbox games do not have a ping limit (correct me if I am wrong) so theoretically, one could play this game night with a retail Xbox or Xbox 360. I hope to have some mods at the end involving the phantom map pack, however, I need to work out the logistics of that.

We should be playing on XBSLink, however I will also open up XBConnect if need be. Hope to see many of you there

Please go to the Calendar Event link below and RSVP!

http://www.xboxchaos.com/calendar/event/7-halo-2-game-night/

(If some of you really want, maybe we can sneak in a bit of Halo 3 Beta stuff once people get tired of Halo 2)

Since getting donator status is rather difficult to do, I have decided to add a donation system. In no way do I want anyone to think that this is supposed to be like a premium service. This is simply just some very basic changes to site functions that I think people who pay into helping pay site bills should get. The set donating price is currently 5 dollars. Donating this will allow you to hold the donator group name for 6 months. I have decided to go a time based route so that I can offer donators to this site more features than what are currently implemented now. These are listed below.

• No site search flood control
  
• PM box size increased to 1000 as opposed to 50
  
• No limit on the amount of pictures in a signature (provided it isn't ridiculous and takes up too much space)
  
• Each signature picture can now have a width of 300 pixels as opposed to 250
  
• Double the amount of people you can have in a PM
  
• Increased global forum storage space
  
• No download section restrictions
  
• Ability to change display name up to 3 times a month
  
• Donator award badge (this you keep forever)
  
• Ability to hide your own posts and topics rather than just deleting them (very useful if you want to work a post in little bits a time).
  
• Ability to delete your own shouts in the shoutbox
  
• No shoutbox post count requirements
  
• Access to site donator forum
  
• Knowing you helped make a difference for this awesome website!
  

Also for previous heroics, you can also PM me and ask for this status since I feel you deserve a gift because of all the content you have donated (1 year). Current donators will get a year from me as well. You may have received an email stating a transaction was completed. Please ignore this, you haven't been charged.

Finally, no one should feel that they should have to purchase this. The last thing I want to see become of this is people getting criticized for not donating or vice versa. This is simply here to help us pay for site hosting. In order to get this, simply click on donations in the navigation bar. Donations are handled through paypal. Once you purchase, the status should activate immediately. If it does not, PM

Thanks,

Dovahkiin

Hello to all!

We are going to be having a Halo: Reach Mod Night on April 13th at 7 PM CDT. We will be providing necessary patches and mapInfos to use for the gamenight. Having these installed will be required. These will be available by Thursday Evening, 4/11 in the downloads section (full installation instructions will be included in the download). Please have all your maps ready to go by the start of play time. Please also note that these patches will be patches for assembly and not alteration/ascension. If you do not have Assembly, you can grab it HERE.

Please note, we will be on xbslink and this mod night requires a JTAG/RGH/Devkit

Hope to see many of you there

Please go to the Calendar Event link below and RSVP!

http://www.xboxchaos.com/calendar/event/6-halo-reach-mod-night/

Gamenight files are available now! Please go here to get them:

http://www.xboxchaos.com/files/file/121-halo-reach-gamenight-files-4132013/

Congratulations to Xbox Chaos for reaching 8,000 members today! We couldn't have ever reached this goal without the members who come here every day so thank you!

Also, to keep this site in order for new members, we will be doubling down on enforcing the rules. Stuff that has slid in the past, will not any longer. This will help with organization in the long term to help us have more long term content going forward.

Once again thank you for being here and I hope you stick around.

UPDATE: If you feel that you deserve an award you do not have, please just PM AMD or I and we'll add if you deserve it. The first level modding award is now objective. You need to just release some original mod or modding utility.

Finally, heroics have been removed. This group is honestly way to subjective. It also appears as if the staff just picks favorites which we don't want to be the case.

Server changes and upgrades happen naturally as needs change. We found the need to change to a host that provides Windows Server as a choice because we want to explore ASP.NET for some stuff with Assembly. ASP will allow us some new functionality for development. I have almost completely solidified the changes over to the new server. If you are browsing the site and encounter any sort of error or driver error, please email [email protected] with your Username and approximate time the error occurred and what you were doing at that moment.

Thank you supporting us!

After eight months of development, we are proud to announce the first stable release of Assembly, a 100% open-source Blam/Halo research tool and map editor. It enables users to both research how the Halo games work and also share creative modifications that are made. Assembly was built from the ground up with four goals in mind:

• Flexibility - Assembly is capable of seamlessly opening and editing .map, .mapinfo, and .blf files from Halo 2: Vista, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, and Halo 4, with support for more games coming soon.
  
• Speed - Spend more time modding and less time waiting for trivial tasks to complete. Even the largest tags load extremely quickly with invisible fields enabled, and search and autocomplete features throughout the program allow you to find what you need quickly
  
• Usability - We built Assembly using Windows Presentation Foundation and utilized modern UI design concepts. Thus, assembly is both easy to use and easy to look at.
  
• Customizability - Don't like the default blue look? Select from one of four different UI themes. Don't like how the View Value As tool is laid out? Make your own meta editor plugin for it. Almost everything in Assembly can be customized in some way. Not to mention that the source code is freely available on GitHub to give you even more control.
  

View the Full Post to Download

Most likely this weekend, we will be migrating to a new box running windows server 2012. I would like to have the flexibility to run ASP, and for that, windows is the way to go. The admins and I will try to minimize downtime as much as possible.

These are recorded videos from the mod night.

Hello to all!

We are going to be having a Halo 3 Mod Night again. However, this time we will be providing necessary patches and mapInfos to use that you will be required to have. These will be available on Friday Afternoon, 2/15 in the downloads section (full installation instructions will be included at that time). Please have all your maps ready to go by the start of play time. Please also note. These patches will be patches for assembly and not alteration/ascension. Those who sign up will be PM'ed a link to download a build of assembly. Please note, this build of assembly does not reflect the initial release.

We will be using xbslink to connect to each other: http://www.secudb.de/~seuffert/xbslink/xbslink-download

JTAG/RGH/Devkit required.

The gamenight has completed! Thank you to all who showed up! Videos of highlights of the game night will be up soon.

So for the past month I've been working with a friend to look into the Halo 4 Stats website on http://app.halowaypoint.com/. And finally, after a lot of work, we're ready to release the Source Code, how to access and use the internal API and a small example website to show off basics of what can be done.

Developers - We have a wiki of information on how to Authenticate Endpoints, and send requests - We have examples on how to use the API

Users - We have a couple of examples that are ready for users to use - http://auntiedot.net/ - http://leafapp.co/

For more information, visit: http://auntiedot.net

Some good ideas may not be so useful after all.

As such, we are retiring the Wiki portion of Xbox Chaos. The complete decommissioning of the wiki will take place on March 1st, 2013. Once this happens, you will no longer be able to access the wiki. If you need to grab anything, please do so before then.

Thanks

UPDATE: Wiki is officially offline. I am keeping the database of entries however. If anyone needs something, please contact me.

First of all, thank you all for you patience. I was just as anxious as you to be back up and running. I'll cut to the chase now.

The node that this site is hosted off of had to go into an FSCK (File System Check) unexpectedly. This can take a very long time when multiple accounts are on one server. Sadly it ended up in having downtime for over 24 hours. Hopefully, we should be back up for a while now though.

Secondly, before we went down, I know some of you were having speed issues. I figured out that the script that I have installed to block DDoS attacks actually blocked one of the CDN servers from retrieving files. I removed that server's IP from blacklist and that CDN is now able to get files again.

Once again, I can't thank you all enough for being loyal to this site during the downtime. You are all the best

Dovahkiin/Thunder

The event has now concluded. Thanks to everyone who showed up!

If you want to see some awesome screenshots of the gamenight, you can go to the topic of screenshots in the link below.

http://www.xboxchaos.com/topic/3174-community-modding-january-19th/

This is going to be our first Halo 4 game night! This time, we will be working on getting some of these pesky Crimson DLC achievements. If you would like to join on Sunday night make sure you are available at 12/23/12 at 4 PM CST. That should be around 10 PM UK time.

I realize this is relatively close to Christmas. If you are going to not be able to make it because you are visiting family, we hope you have a great holiday!

**The game night has concluded! Big thanks to those who made it and I hope you had fun!**

The racing tournament has been canceled. This just requires way too much micromanaging for one person.

Hello everyone!

We have a "game night" coming up, however it isn't really a game night. Instead we are going to try to have a giant bracket of people to compete in a racing tournament. This will have to take place on Halo: Reach since Reach has more racing maps and comes with a built in Race game type.

For now, all I need for people to do is simply enroll in the tournament on Challonge.com. You do not need an account to register or participate in the tournament, however making an account will streamline the process. If we get 16 people, the bracket will be double elimination (requires you to lose twice to be eliminated). The real goal however, is to get at least 32 people to participate in this. In this case, the bracket will be single elimination. This is subject to change.

When you register for the event, it will ask you for a name or team to register under. Please use your Xbox Chaos display name in this field. If you do not use your display name, your entry will be deleted and your spot maybe forfeited to the next in line! Once I have enough people, I will randomize the bracket and publish final first round pairings. At this point, there will be a new blog post with more information about times.

Do not worry about the time of the event right now as this will only require 3 people to present (the two opponents and the judge, me) and the matches won't all be on the same day. It will be spaced out.

If you have any interest whatsoever, Please Sign Up.

The link to sign up is: http://challonge.com...gnup/ykmsujeheu

For all you wondering, since I am judging, I will not be participating in the tournament unless there is a need for more people.

This is being moved since some people don't own the game yet. I want everyone to able to play and not leave out some people.

A CDN (or Content Delivery Network) is a system for distributing static web content to multiple servers at once. This allows for servers all across the world to host the same files to decrease load times due to latency.

CDN's cut load times by 50% or more easily in several cases which is why we implemented one about 1 year ago today.

The problem nowadays is financing a renew. We are close to the time of renewal (Monday). I need to raise some money to help finance part of it. I'm going to need to raise about 40 dollars to cover the costs of it.

THANK YOU SO MUCH GUYS! We reached the goal of money to raise already. I'm very impressed at your generosity to this site.

Just so you all know, the recent downtime on September 30th was caused by a DDOS attack. The problem is mostly under control now, because we set up a bunch of server rules to block the bots and also integrated a third-party service to help. We do not know anything about who is responsible for the attack or what the motivation behind it was (other than some skid possibly wanting Halo 4, which we don't even have). Hopefully things can return to normal now. Let's all play nice.

Our first Podcast has arrived. This one features Assembly. We hope you enjoy learning about it!

Hope you enjoyed Labor Day if you are in the US and Canada!

I want to start off by talking about some member group changes for the site. For starters, we have removed 2 groups from the website which are listed below.

1. Reclaimers
   
2. +Members
   

We do not have a need for Forum Moderators at this time so this group has been retired. +Members has also been removed because I can enforce shout-box permissions in other ways now. Also adminstrator and heroic colors have changed. They are now silver and lime-green, respectively.

Secondly I would like to congratulate on becoming a Heroic. He has been a very active member recently and deserves rewarding .

I want to acknowledge some site maintenance stuff as well now. IP.Blog was upgraded to version 2.6 (More info can be found in my personal blog post here). We have also fixed and changed some stuff involving reputation. Reputations are now called "Likes" and the Likes tab in Profiles has finally been fixed to go along with it. We also fixed a few other skin bugs so hopefully the site will be an overall better experience.

Finally I have game night news... We will be having a game night for two games. These games are Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach. This will be held on Saturday September 8th at 7 PM CDT. Rather than doing a signup on google docs this time, just come on the site around 6:50 PM CDT or later on into the gamenight and PM me your gamer tag for an invite.

Hopefully that was enough information...

Hey everyone!

We are going to have community gaming once again on 7/20 around 9 PM CDT. This time it will be a little different though. We are going to focus on unlocking achievements in Halo 3 that are practically impossible to unlock nowadays. To do this, we ask that you have all Halo 3 DLC downloaded or a Halo 3: Mythic disc from ODST. We will probably also do some custom games in between games.

To sign up, simply fill out the Google Form by clicking HERE

We hope to see you then!

As many of you may know, we have been talking for a long time about adding a blogging system to the site. Thanks to your donations (thanks ), this has finally become a reality. In the spirit of our new "modding evolved" motto, we are pleased to announce that we have integrated blogs into Xbox Chaos. It's a very simple system: with the push of a button, you can create a blog about anything you want (as long as it follows the site rules, of course) and then write away. You even have the flexibility to blog about posts that you see by clicking a "Blog This" link at the bottom of them. Other features include the ability to customize your blog's sidebar, feature posts, specify other members who can edit your blog, have per-blog RSS feeds, trackbacks, and more.

We encourage every active member here to start a blog and post about research that you do or whatever you feel like. It's a very informal environment and works well for sharing thoughts that wouldn't be very appealing in a forum post.

This new system will be replacing the old announcements forum. This means that our old forum-based announcements will no longer be available, but that should not be an issue. For those of you who are interested, we will be maintaining an Argon development blog as well.

Also, we'd like to give a huge shout out to , who gave us the inspiration to add this feature in the first place. Because of this, he will be a moderator for the new system.

Finally, it is our duty to announce that Derek has stepped away from his position as a community manager. Unless somebody is really willing to take his place, we will not be looking for a replacement anytime soon. Community info will now come from all current staff through this blog. Additionally, we have dropped the very ugly and unprofessional Xbox Metro Light theme. As you would expect, the Xbox Metro Dark and Xbox Chaos v2.1 themes will still be available for use.

So...why wait any longer? Click the Blogs link at the top and get started! If you have any more questions, feel free to contact us!

~ The Xbox Chaos Staff