New features
Play the campaign as your own Spartan or Elite
Players can now play Halo 3's campaign as the Spartan or Elite they made in Customize, in their own armor, colors and emblem, instead of the Master Chief, the Arbiter and the co-op Elites. On the Campaign page, choose Your Spartans & Elites under CHARACTERS before PLAY SOLO or HOST CO-OP. A co-op host can switch it in the lobby's CHARACTERS row, and everyone in the game plays as their own character. Master Chief & Arbiter keeps the campaign as it was. Saved games remember the choice. Cutscenes still show the Master Chief.
Manage dedicated servers with the Reclaimer RCON desktop client
Releases now include reclaimer-rcon-v0.8.11.exe, also available from the RCON client downloads. Open it, enter your server's host, RCON port and password, and connect to see players, send commands and follow live chat and server events. Select a player to prepare moderation commands, or use Status, Players, Bans and Help. No game installation is required. The attached RCON guide explains server setup.
Bug fixes
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The asset library builds about three times as fast. The asset library holds every map's Forge objects. The game builds it on the loading screen the first time each version of the game starts, and again when your maps or mods change. That build had grown to a minute and a half or more. It now uses several cores and reads the maps far less often, so it takes about half a minute on a typical PC.
A mod map the game cannot read no longer stops the library from being built. It is left out, and the game does not try it again on every start: only when the map changes or the game is updated. Libraries built by other versions of the game are removed.
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HUD text is no longer too bold. The HUD font added in 0.8.10 used a heavier weight of Halo 3's HUD font than the game was designed with, so names, scores and other HUD text looked too bold. HUD text now uses the light weight Halo 3's HUD uses, read from your installed game as before. The font cache rebuilds once on the next launch.
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Mouse sensitivity now uses MCC's scale. Mouse sensitivity was far too fast: even the lowest setting, 0.001, turned the view as fast as 2.6 does in MCC, too fast for many mice. Sensitivity now uses MCC's own scale, so the value you play with in MCC feels the same here. It runs from 0.05 to 20 and starts at 1.5. Settings → Keyboard & Mouse also shows how far the mouse moves for a full turn at 800 and 1600 DPI.
Sensitivities saved on the old scale are reset to the new default, 1.5: set yours again in Settings, for example to the value you use in MCC. F2 and F3 still halve and double it in a game.
Install
The game client requires Halo: The Master Chief Collection with Halo 3 installed; no game files are included.
Double-click project-reclaimer-v0.8.11.exe to start the game. It finds Halo 3 in any Steam library and opens without a console window; its log is Documents\My Games\Project Reclaimer\Logs\client.log.
For remote server administration, double-click reclaimer-rcon-v0.8.11.exe, enter the host, RCON port and password, and connect. The RCON client needs no game installation. See the attached RCON.md for setup and commands.