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XBox Netplay Already
ElectusUnum writes "Well, it's been a little while since the XBox was released and people are already playing online! The folks at xboxgw.com have written a program to create an ethernet bridge between xbox's over the net, fooling the xbox's into thinking they're on a LAN. 1v1 seems to create no major lag and reports have come in like this one that claim up to four xbox's work fine. It seems a DSL connection is preferred for hosting the server." I want an X-Box so bad, or as I would call it, a DOA3-Box.
It's nice to see so many people interested in this. I have been on the development team and would just like to let you all know where this project is headed. We are currently working on a matching server to hook people up to each other. The software is highly stable and fast. I just finished a 3xbox game less than a half hour ago. Pings were about 150ms, and there was NO lag. We are also working to implement chat. Expect another release in the next couple of days.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
using the standard TAP/TUN driver for linux, I was able to set up an ethernet TAP tunnel between my friends house and mine. (128K ISDN links).
Just pop the ethernet cards into promisc mode, set up a kernel IP filter to filter out any unnecessary traffic, and bridge the TAP to the ethernet card! works great! no noticible lag!
Ah, but it's not a celeron. You'd know this, had you read Anandtech's article yesterday. And while it is an nVidia video card, it's not one you can go out and buy for your PC. Sure, it's somewhere between the GF3 and GF3ti500 in terms of clock and memory speed, but that's ignoring the extra shaders on the card. And it's also ignoring the fact that the XBox IS A CONSOLE. What that means is that it's hardware that won't change for 5+ years. Developers can write directly to that hardware, and do many other programming tricks that they can't do with a PC because they don't know what hardware their game will run on. Yes, it uses some PC hardware. That doesn't make it a PC (if that were the case, then the GameCube is a Macintosh).
And the XBox IS different than the PC, where the games are concerned. While you might find Halo on a PC, you're not going to find Munch's Oddysey, Amped, DOA3, Cel Damage, SSX Trickey, and more. And as far as Halo goes, the XBox isn't the only console to have FPS games on it (nor is it the first). Hell, the old Super Nintendo had a port of Wolf3D. The PS2 has ports of NOLF and Half-Life , among many others. So just because you think that the FPS is the realm of computers doesn't make it so. But rarely will you play a fighting game or party game, for instance, on a PC. Oh, and you might want to go re-price HDTV's. You can get good ones for $2000 or so these days.
And play Halo before you write off the XBox for good. Then again, there's nothing saying you can't have both an XBox and a PS2. or an XBox and a Gamecube, or PS2 and Gamecube, or even all three.
PC = lets say 64 megs of RAM, 64 megs of Video RAM and an AGP bus that lets you copy between the two (think having two buckets and a hose) Unified Memory Arch = 64 megs of RAM which both your video chips and processor are plugged into. Note that originally AGP was designed to work as a poor man's UMA; the card would go directly to system RAM over the AGP bus, obviating the need for on-board RAM. Nobody actually does this. :-)
So lets say you want to create a texture on the fly. On the PC, your processor creates it, dumps it in RAM, and it's then copied (and this is the bit that takes time) over to the video card's RAM, where it's read and displayed.
On a UMA machine, the processor creates it, dumps it in RAM, and the video card reads it and displays it.
Now, IIRC, the PlayStation2 does this the exact opposite way; lots of little bitty cup sized RAM caches, and a firehose of a bus. The idea being grab some data, use it, get rid of it. You need it later? Just grab it again, you've got bandwidth to spare.
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don't you think that it might be a good thing for them, since if it becomes this open, then more people will buy them
I think you've read enough replies to your post, but I wanted to add this. I saw the Microsoft "CXO" being interviewed on CBNC, and Mark Haines *grilled* him about, "how do you expect to make any money if you're losing big bucks on every single unit?" The CXO replied that the unit ships ready for broadband access, and they plan make all their money selling online services.
I say be prepared for MSFT to attack anything and everything threatening their main source of income. They're banking on it.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I can safely say that these launch titles were not supposed to be on the Internet in the first place. Now, I have a cable modem, which is second tier to the DSL's I was running agianst. I realize this. But, the game was created with LAN play in mind, with 1ms ping times. However, when I was getting a 350ms ping time (awful, I know), it wasn't compensating at all.
For instance, you can look around when you lag, but can't move or shoot in Halo. Since there's no error detection built into these games, you wind up in strange places when you resync with the server, and then get blown to bits. Many times.
The server doesn't lag, obviously. But the clients do.
Now, the game isn't bad multiplayer, but it was made with a LAN in mind. So, before everybody goes out and buys XBox's because of this, have that in mind. The programmers didn't think they would have to deal with Internet Latency in Halo, so there is nothing to help you if you have a high ping.