New features
Controller dead zones and separate horizontal and vertical look sensitivity
Settings > Controller now has Horizontal sensitivity and Vertical sensitivity in place of the single look sensitivity, so turning and looking up and down can have their own speeds. Your old look sensitivity carries over to both.
A new Dead zones section sets how far a stick must lean before it counts:
- Look dead zone: the look stick, measured left-right and up-down separately (Halo 3 uses 20%). Lower it if aiming feels slow to start, raise it if your view drifts on its own.
- Look radial dead zone: a second look dead zone, the same in every direction, as MCC offers (off by default). It catches a stick that drifts a little both ways at once.
- Move dead zone: the move stick (Halo 3 uses 24%; MCC has no setting for it). The legacy stick layouts use the look dead zones on both sticks. With Southpaw, the move stick used to start at 20%; it now follows this setting too.
While you are on a dead zone setting, the panel shows the stick's travel with the part the game ignores shaded, and where your stick leans right now, so you can see whether it drifts out of the dead zone.
Choose the graphics card the game draws with
Laptops with two graphics cards now give the game their faster one, as they do for MCC. Before, Project Reclaimer could end up on the slower graphics built into the processor, which struggles with big games and large mod maps.
To see or change the card, open Settings > Graphics > Graphics card. The line under it shows the card drawing the game now and its video memory. Automatic leaves the choice to Windows and your graphics driver. Choose a card to always use it; the game switches to it the next time you start it.
Kick stalled players when you host
Host Game > Host Settings has a new Kick stalled players setting (After 30 s by default; Never, or 15 to 120 seconds). When a player's game stalls while the next game loads ("Synchronizing players"), for example on a computer that has half gone to sleep, everyone else used to wait until it caught up. Now that player is removed after the chosen time so the game can start, and they can join again straight away. You, the host, are never removed, and a player who is simply loading a little slower than you is not affected. Dedicated servers already did this with their load_timeout setting (30 seconds by default); games hosted from the game itself now do too.
Choose the game's languages and subtitles
Settings > Language is a new category. Text language sets the language of Halo 3's own text (the HUD, objectives, button prompts, medals and subtitles) to any of the eleven languages the game has. Voice language sets the language the characters speak, from the voices your MCC installation has (English, French, German, Italian and both Spanish versions). Subtitles turns subtitles for cutscenes and scripted mission dialogue on or off; Automatic shows them when the voices speak another language than the text.
Until now the game took its language from your Windows region settings, so a region or keyboard set to another country could switch the game's text and voices to that language. Automatic, the default, now follows your Windows display language instead, and falls back to English. Text and voice changes take effect the next time you start the game; subtitles change when you apply them. Picking Chinese, Japanese or Korean text adds those characters to the game's fonts at the next start.
The Chinese, Japanese and Korean character options moved from Graphics to Settings > Language > Alphabets.
Toggle crouch
Settings > Keyboard & Mouse and Settings > Controller each have a Toggle crouch switch under Crouch: turn it on to press crouch once to stay crouched and again to stand, instead of holding the button. This is Halo 3's own crouch lock, so holding crouch still works (letting go after half a second stands you up), and jumping stands you up too. The keyboard and the controller each have their own switch.
Changes
- Joining a co-op mission in progress is quicker. When you join a campaign mission that is already being played, the host now sends you the game while your map is still loading, instead of once it has loaded. Once the map has loaded you are usually in the game within a second, where it used to take several seconds more (and longer over a slow connection). Players who join at the same time now share one hand-off, so the players already in the game see one short hitch instead of one for each newcomer, and the brief stall everyone could feel just as a newcomer arrived is gone. The host and every player need this update.
- Chat sits higher during play. During a game the chat now sits a little higher on the left, under the grenade counts and above Halo 3's own messages such as kills and players joining, so the two no longer cover each other.
- Forge object source tags follow the object name. In the Forge object list, the STOCK, BUILT-IN and MOD tags now come after each object's name instead of in front of it, so the names line up and are easier to scan.
Bug fixes
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No more burning at the start of Tsavo Highway with more than four players. Halo 3 starts every co-op player at one spot and fits the others around the first. With more than four players the spot overflowed, and in Tsavo Highway's elevator players were pushed into the burning debris and died before they could move (eight-player deathless runs ended right there). Players past the fourth, and anyone the game moves to a teammate when the first places are taken, now get a place of their own on solid ground, clear of the mission's fires and of the other players.
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Co-op players no longer get stuck on a white screen. Since 0.9.0, a co-op player who wasn't hosting lost their view whenever the mission went back to a saved point: the screen went white (or stayed on a cutscene's camera) while the game went on without them. That happens more often than it sounds: Halo 3 ends every cutscene you can skip by returning to the point saved as it began, so cutscenes at a mission's start and in its middle (The Ark's terminal, The Covenant's towers and Truth's hallway) all did it, as did the team dying and the host's Revert to checkpoint. A player who joined a mission in progress got the same white screen once they caught up, and the players already there could get it too. Everyone now keeps their view through all of these.
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Your Spartans & Elites in mods' campaigns. Your Spartans & Elites now works on missions of mods' campaigns made with the Halo 3 Editing Kit, and such a mission loads about as fast as with the story's characters. Before, these missions loaded with the story's characters instead, or took minutes to load and could close the game. When a mod's mission can't have your own characters, the Campaign page now says so on the option, and a co-op lobby that chose them shows a notice.
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A graphics card that stops responding now says so. When Windows reset a graphics card that stopped responding, the game crashed with only "Engine probe worker failed: exit code: 1". It now closes with a message naming the card and what Windows reported, and suggests choosing a faster card under Settings > Graphics > Graphics card.
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Forge on large Workshop maps such as Hugegrass and Permafrost. Forge works on large Workshop maps again. Before, Hugegrass offered no primitives because its Forge objects could not be prepared, and on large mods the game could close while Forge loaded or when a Hill Marker or kill volume was placed.
Mod maps now gain the primitives and kill and garbage volumes in Forge, but no longer other maps' objects: large mods use nearly all of the game's memory themselves. Maps saved with primitives and volumes on a mod map load with them in any game type.
Mods whose own Forge palette used up every kind of object a map can hold, such as Hugegrass, now leave room for players to place new kinds, and kill and garbage volumes appear on mods that list their markers under Spawning.
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Spawning works exactly as in Halo 3 again. On maps without a spawn point a player may use, players spawn at another object on the map again, as in Halo 3, instead of waiting to respawn. Team spawn rules also match Halo 3 in every game again.
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Servers no longer drop every player at once. Dedicated servers running in Docker or on Linux could suddenly disconnect everyone in the same moment, mid-game and outside any map change, and then let nobody back in until they were restarted. The cause was in how these servers read network traffic under Wine, and it is fixed. Players on Linux and Steam Deck (Proton) could lose their own connection the same way, and that is fixed too.
Install
The game client requires Halo: The Master Chief Collection with Halo 3 installed; no game files are included.
Double-click project-reclaimer-v0.9.3.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-v0.9.3.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.