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.

Comments

Will technology wonders ever cease?!?

[Anthony Boyd]

The article also mentions possible "indications... that Xbox Live would eventually allow players to leave each other brief voice messages"

Wow, you mean, like voicemail?

Re:Will technology wonders ever cease?!?

[Babbster]

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.

Re:Will technology wonders ever cease?!?

[Cebu]

I would hope the intention would be to finally integrate MSN Messenger functionality into Xbox live allowing users to communicate seamlessly between the desktop environment (via MSN Messenger's VoIP capabilities) and Xbox Live. Voicemail would be kind of nice too I suppose.

Most game developers, and a host of non-game developers, have been thinking about better communication integration for quite sometime now. The utility of communication services is directly proportionate with the number of users. Subsequently, it makes a lot of sense to try to increase your user base. Similar efforts have been made in Valve's Steam, and if you want a far older example look at how wireless text messaging systems have evolved -- communicating between wireless phones, landline phones, and desktop computers may not be ubiquitous, but it's certain availible.

Sensitive personal information

[AtariAmarok]

Yes, trust Microsoft to store your sensitive personal information, like "does not signal left turns in "Gotham" race game" and "would rather play as dwarf than elf". A violation of privacy, I tell you!

Re:Sensitive personal information

[NanoGator]

"Yes, trust Microsoft to store your sensitive personal information, like "does not signal left turns in "Gotham" race game" and "would rather play as dwarf than elf". A violation of privacy, I tell you! "

One man's troll is another man's +5, Satire.

I think

[Lemental]

This would make an already great service better. I still dont like the idea of the next one not having a HD though. Not everyone lives in a boradband area, maybe they will put a dual adapter in the next one, like Sony. Not that online gaming has been that sucessful for Sony. I think it wont hurt things to even offer ISP service, give them something to do with all those MSN nodes out there.

Re:I think

[Babbster]

Assuming they once again include a network adapter, not including a hard drive could be turned into a nice thing for gamers. What if the Xbox OS allowed you to set aside a fixed amount of space on the hard drive of another PC and access that just as we currently can the Xbox HD? That would allow the same facilities in terms of ripping songs for custom soundtracks, saving games, etc., and it would make the next Xbox cheaper [to build] with one less part to fail. They've already tested this to some extent with their Music Mixer software which allows the transfer of pre-existing music files on a PC over to the Xbox.

Re:I think

[Babbster]

Actually, I think companies are outsourcing because those British accents sound so intelligent and dignified when the Indians come in to make their proposals. =P

Re:I think

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Outside the ten people in slashdot who actually have Linux installed in their slashdot just for the sake of it, no one gives a shit about Xbox Linux except, that is, for the mod chip manufacturers who found an excellent argument for saying the modchip has uses other than playing pirate games.

Ah.... come on people!!!

[JFMulder]

Why does people even think that the Xbox Next would actually have savegames on a remote location? This is such a ridiculous idea. I mean, games would take a lot longer to load and save, especially around 8 o'clock in the evening when everybody is playing. It would totally kill backward compatibility if there is any. Not only online games couldn't be playable when your Internet connection is down, but offline games too. And you'd definitely need broadband to have a somewhat acceptable performance. Games like KOTOR would be impossible (savegames are over 8 megs!).

People writing these articles really need to get a clue.

Re:Ah.... come on people!!!

[xenocide2]

Well, I'm reasonably certain the XBox PowerPC chip won't be compatible with your current x86 chip. But the xbox people seem to keep pushing broadband required features. Every time I turn around someone's betting on the prevailance of broadband and it never works. So it wouldn't suprise me to see them bet on it as stupidly as 8 megabyte files across a cable modem.

Re:Ah.... come on people!!!

[Maserati]

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.

Re:Ah.... come on people!!!

[DeadScreenSky]

Well yeah, and then you can't do stuff like the KOTOR saves, really. The ability to have big save games is a really nice feature, and games like KOTOR or Fable (or even Halo in-mission saves) would be very difficult to do with a memory card, even assuming it is four times bigger than current cards (which was the jump last gen IIRC, so 2 meg -> 8 meg -> 64 meg). Sure, you can do some clever optimizing to allieviate part of the problem, but game saves are only going to get bigger.

Non-obtrusive autosaves are also a nice feature that I assume isn't being done on other consoles without hard disks (since poorly programmed multiplatform titles like Tony Hawk feature long pauses for saving, something you really don't find in the better Xbox games).

Wouldn't Get Too Excited

[illuminata]

Their last feature upgrade did offer a little bit of an improvement in the dashboard (GUI), but their out of game voice chat is a complete mess. It sounds terrible in comparison to chatting in a game! Voices are heard gurgled and staticky even with a first party microphone (for those who don't go on XBox Live, most third party microphones are horrible). I hope that this time around the new features are better.

In fact, I think that they should worry more about improving upon the ideas that they've already implemented. For one, get the voice chat to work right. Then, how about adding some card games or board games for the people to play while chatting? It's not very fun to stare at a menu when you could be doing something in the meantime.

As of now, most people just set up an empty private server to chat in a game where they met their friend. Hell, it sounds better that way and you have something to do.

Re:Wouldn't Get Too Excited

[Cebu]

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.

Where's The Broadband?

[Bruha]

With the current dismal speeds of broadband in the US and antiquated pricing structures for mass bandwidth on the backbones I doubt even MicroSoft could pressure the DSL and Cable providers to provide more robust links to homes. Players no doubt would rather save to their systems than wait a few minutes of their playtime watching a counter tick away while uploading the data and for their friends to download the data.

Even on 768k DSL it takes up to 5 minutes or longer in some cases to download necessary game patches to even allow online play on XboxLive. Until the broadband speeds pony up to the challenge I think the next Xbox and even the PS3 will be hard pressed to provide the stated functionality sought by gamer for online gaming.

Linux...

[Lord Graga]

By excluding a harddrive they exclude any kind of pirate material, except for bootchips. This means that it might be impossible to run Linux on future versions of the XBox.