The Halo PC Engine

[{XG}Gijs007]

For me this game has made me learn quite some things about computers, especially networking and basic logic of servers which I found useful later. and it even made me start hosting servers for my clan and later (after some requests) to host for other people as well.

It was also the main reason I decided to learn a bit of c++ and made an new version of Server checker, Which is an open source program that checks if a server is still running and if not reboots it automatically.

I did this because halo servers tend to crash sometimes and Serverdoc (which has the same purpose as server checker) didn't always reboot them because sometimes they just "hang" without closing.

See my forum for more info about server checker:
http://www.1xgclan.com/forum/viewtop...83848a509e7400

Also those projects stimulate the community feeling for example:
I help with the development of sapp (Mostly testing and giving feedback and sometimes coming up with new idea's) and im currently hosting his website as well because his old host had some issues.
Also my clan members and especially the admins are always here when Sehe needs some players to test something and they like to help.

Btw: I hope Microsoft will release public dedicated server files for their games on the pc platform in the future. (Instead of what EA Games and Activision are doing by keeping the executables private to hosting companies).

This allows the community to host much more servers for a lower price (running a dedicated server with 20 or 30 halo servers is cheaper then renting 20 or 30 servers from gameservers.com for example)
And it also allowed us to create new server programs which can do amazing things (look at Gandanur and Sapp).

This also happens with other games look for example to Battlefield 2 which has its own server tools and mods as well.
Games which do not have public server files tend to have less of an active community and also die a lot quicker.