Slashdot Mirror
Xbox Live Feature Upgrades Include Online Storage?
Flamingcheeze writes "According to a Reuters article: 'Microsoft Corp. is planning a number of new features for its Xbox Live online gaming service this year, including... something called 'title-managed online storage,' a way for game players to store and share data via Microsoft's network.' The piece goes on to note, without directly drawing a link: 'speculation within the industry that Microsoft may not include a hard drive in the next version of the Xbox console, in favor of network-based storage that would reduce the console's physical size and cost', as recently discussed on Slashdot Games." The article also mentions possible "indications... that Xbox Live would eventually allow players to leave each other brief voice messages", and a story at GameSpot has further, albeit brief details on this 'Tsunami' upgrade.
Yeah, except voicemail attached to an anonymous video game userID with no provision of personal information. It would permit you to leave a buddy a message telling them when you'd be online, or leaving a buddy a message about a high score, bad player, etc. Since Microsoft is avoiding the keyboard for Xbox, it makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense from a security point of view because, again, no personal information ever has to change hands in order to get some offline communication going.
Xbox Live games and the Xbox Live dashboard both use the Live API, of which the VoIP audio codecs have not significantly changed. The Live API VoIP framework has been rolled into the XDK for a long time now. Subsequently the implementations of VoIP are virtually identical between Xbox games as well as the Xbox Live dashboard.
What differences do occur, are usually in the networking code and initial VoIP settings. It's upto the developer to decide the compression window size for voice data, and how to deal with the VDP stream. Subsequently, voice performance will differ somewhat based upon processor usage, the bandwidth requirements of the game, and the applications network stack. However, they all use the same VoIP audio codecs, engine and protocols.
The point being that the difference in voice quality are due to the specific applications requirements, and not the implementation (unless the developers can't even use the voice framework correctly -- which I find very hard to believe). If bandwidth and processor resources are abundant, you can simply increase the granularity of the voice compression window and almost magically you have better voice quality.
The corrollary of all this is that there is no mess to fix. Any voice quality variance is due to very intentional decisions on how to use the provided VoIP framwork, or variance introduced by the network environment itself.
Antidotally, I haven't particularly had any problems with voice quality while using dashboard in comparison to that in games. I find both to be acceptable at best, which is to say about the same as most other VoIP applications used over a home connection.
Worse, you lose the ability to make custom mp3 soundtracks. Any new material for a game will have to be accessed anew every time, and possibly during play if it won't fit in local volatile storage.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951