Top 10 downloaded maps:

1. CMT Snow Grove
2. Yoyorast Island
3. Ambush
4. Extinction
5. RPG Beta 6.2
6. Immure
7. Yoyorast Island v2
8. Coldsnap
9. Hugeass
10. [H3]Bloodgulch

As map downloading catches on for scrims and game nights hosted by various clans/groups, a number of the smaller/medium sized maps are quickly working their way up the ranks, especially with the more recent release of SAPP 5.6′s integrated map downloading for dedicated servers.

There’s still work to be done but so far it has been great to see the flurry of interest in playing and exploring the custom maps the game has to offer rather than having to stick to the handful of stock maps we’ve been playing ad nauseum for the past decade.

• Sometimes players would receive an “error reading from archive” message rather than the real error.
• Fixed an occasional problem where maps with spaces in their name could trigger an erroneous “map not found” message.
• Maps with dots in their names were failing to download. This has been mostly resolved, see below.

Some map creators have used dots in their map names to distinguish between different versions but Halo’s server doesn’t handle this convention correctly and as a result, reports a truncated map name to HAC. For example, Chronopolis_C3_Public_Beta0.2 gets reported as Chronopolis_C3_Public_Beta0, likely because the server assumes everything after the dot is the file extension. This causes download attempts for certain maps to result in a ‘map not found’ error.

A workaround has been put in place for now and a patch has been added to SAPP (hopefully other server mods will follow) to correct the server’s behaviour. However, a better solution would be for map makers to avoid using dots in their map names and to use underscores instead. For example, Chronopolis_C3_Public_Beta0_2.