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[LowProfileWurm]

QUOTE

GI: I was wondering if you had any office pools going around yet for how many hours it’ll take modders to hack your system?

Allard: No, we don’t have any office pools like that (laughs). We do know that they’re already being very ambitious with it, and it’s flattering in a way. It’s kind of funny. A lot of the modders… First, game piracy is bad. Right? Shame, shame, shame. But if we all look at it, you know, half of us in the room would not be employed if game piracy was more rampant than it was. It’s bad for the industry. As it is the industry’s not in the best financial shape. Piracy only makes that worse.

So putting piracy aside what did most of them do? They made it a media player. They had it connect to portable devices. They had it copy my music off of my PC so I could get it here. They did visualizers. They made themes. They made it something they could actually participate in. Well, we took a lot of those great ideas and said, “You want to make a theme? We’ll give you a theme editor. Go put themes on.” You don’t have to chip your box to make your box yours. You don’t have to unscrew it to put little green lights in it. Just rip off the faceplate and go put on a theme. Because everyone wants to do a lot of what legitimate modders wanted to do. There will still be the hobbyists that want to rip it apart. There will still be the pirates that want to rip it off. We can’t avoid that.

The philosophy that we applied on 360 is “It’s going to happen.” With Xbox 1 we were, not in denial, but we said, “Let’s build a system and we’ll assume that we can stop it.” With 360 we said, ”Let’s assume we can’t stop it. How are we going to manage it?” Because it is going to happen. They are going to attack. They are going to have some form of success. What can we do in the Live business and community, with the media, at retail. What can we do with connectivity and even the peripherals to try to put a really big speed bump in place and most importantly protect the gamers from the hackers making it a crappy experience for them?

Because that’s my biggest nightmare. You know, we lose 5% of our revenue. That’s bad. I’d rather it be 4%, 3%, or zero. But if Xbox Live gets distorted and destroyed because of three or four bad people that just want to have a grudge against MS or someone that they’re playing against – just want to ruin and wreak havoc on Live, that would really suck. That’s what we’re more sensitive to than the money.

Thanks J.  

On the flipside... here are some ideas that I'd like to see implemented when the 360 is modded (so MS can steal them for Xbox720 )

1. Picture-In-Picture functionality.  Since the Guide is stored in memory during gameplay, would it be possible to have some kind of *other* feature overlaid during gameplay?  As long as it's less than the allocated 40Mb, I don't see why not.  

2. The ability to move music off of my iPod or thumbdrive and onto the HDD.  Sure, the RIAA would be pissed, but it's my music... I should be allowed to store it on whatever HDD I want.

3. DVDripping to HDD.  This is more for when larger HDD's come out for 360.  I'd just like to store a virtual collection of my 10-20 favorite DVD's on the 360 so I can access them from the movie section of the Guide whenever I want.  This could be akin to Tivo functionality... but I'm sure that's already being planned for.

That's it really, for now.  Anythoughts?

[twistedsymphony]

I'd like to  see DVD up-scaling, the 360 has the functionality it baffles me why they wouldn't implement it.

I'd also like to see more open-sourceyness like the ability to add my own codecs to the media player, or the ability to create my own maps, characters, etc. in games and use those online. Heck if they allowed for that from the get-go it would be much easier to manage. by blocking it the only way to do it is hacking the game, then the game can't manage the new content because it's not designed to do so and you get problems online like the whole Halo 2 Live fiasco.

If they make the game open enough to create your own mods then games would know what to expect from the mods and could handel them accordingly, for instance allow you to only play against people using them or not using them. Mods will always exist... why not embrace it.

MS has said they will have some of these ability but I wonder to what extent. My guess is it wont be very much.

How about native AV outputs on the back of the console, that would be nice.

What about corporate sponsored emulators... Let Atari give you the rights to make a Jaguar Emulator and allow people to buy it for $5 and roms for $1 a piece...

Heck if they could make an Xbox Emulator they could make a Dreamcast emulator easily, with official technical documents it wouldn't be that difficult to make the DVD drive firmware read the discs, What about Saturn Games or SegaCD... 3D0... all the dead consoles that could be revived by official emulators.

IMO Bleem was the best emulator ever.... it cranked up the graphical resolution and played games wonderfully... It was good because it had professional programmers working full time on it.
The Genesis emulator for dreamcast built by Sega was close to flawless and I'm sure the Xbox emulator on the 360 will be amazing as well. Both because they had professional programmers and access to technical documents.

I'm not saying the emulators we have are bad but there's a lot more you can do with full access to the technical documents and a team of people working full time on it.

I use my Xbox for 3 things really

Xbox gaming
-Playing the games
-Making game mods

Media
-DVD playback
-Music Playback/streaming
-Video Playback/streaming
-Modifying software to make the console up-scale, region-free etc.
-integrating peripherals like the DVD dongle and AV outputs

Emulation
-Play my classic games.

MS has come a long way to improve the media capabilities, they could still go a lot further (TiVo functionality, native AV outs, open ended codecs, stream anything, etc.) but in aspects of software like emulators and game mods I think they still have a long way to go.

[deftonesmx17]

I agree with you twisted, EMU's made by professionals would be great.

IMO they should just make it like a PC. Nothing should be blocked, it should not be a closed system. I should be able to mod a game with ease. What they should do to protect live is make you use all original files for live. Example, you add mods to a game and they are on the hard drive in a mod partition. They should set the Hard drive to ignore those mods while online. Anyone get what I am saying?

[LowProfileWurm]

Interesting thought about the emulators.  I don't know how well the opensource would fly with MS... do they make ANYTHING that's opensource?  Plus the cost to profit wouldn't make it worth their while as most people don't know how to deal with it.  Hell, I don't even know how to deal with it really and I love goofing around with my modded Xbox.  

I do think the professional emulation would be great.  I have bunches of Dreamcast games that I'd like to have "bleemed".  Then again, I have alot of PS1 and PS2 games I'd like to see emulated on 360.  That's probably way too difficult without the techincal documentation though.  

As for the mods, deftones, I don't think MS could police that well enough to keep the sanctity of Live as pure as they want it.  It would be awesome though to see some more Halo-NMP-like stuff on Xbox.

Sadly, I'm pretty sure none of this will make it into Xbox720 because it's not commercializable... but at least MS recognizes the modding community!

[Heet]

[LowProfileWurm]

QUOTE(Heet @ Oct 12 2005, 03:10 AM)

I still dont get why they are trying to force people to buy 2000$ media center pc's to stream friggin video to a 360. 

[mirx999]

QUOTE(jaskerzada006 @ Oct 13 2005, 05:41 PM)

Yeah!

[incognegro]

I didnt I thought it was stupid, i got my copy of windows MCE for free.........anyways

lot of interesting ideas you guys got but alot of them will never reach commercial gaming cause its not marketable to the general public. its only marketable to YOU. Personally I hate codecs, thats why i play movies on xbmc (where i dont have to search for them, theyre already there). I dont really care about anything else, just as long as it plays good games, all that other stuff will always come second. The emulater thing will come out eventually i guarrantee, nintendo started it so lets see who follows. Live arcade has good potential.

all the other stuff just doesnt seem like a necessity for a game system so........ill leave it alone.

[LowProfileWurm]

QUOTE(jaskerzada006 @ Oct 13 2005, 05:41 PM)

Yeah!

[twistedsymphony]

QUOTE(incognegro @ Oct 14 2005, 01:29 PM)

I didnt I thought it was stupid, i got my copy of windows MCE for free.........anyways

[nj12nets]

yea klite codec pack is pretty good.  it covers most of the avi.divx ones

[biosehnsucht]

I just read an article in the newspaper here (forget if it was Business or whatever) about how MCE is taking off w/ retailers, interestingly All of Gateway's desktop line uses it and some of their eMachines too, and apparently Dell's new (as in now current models) line of XPS desktops do too, from that article. It mentioned that there are MCE PCs available for under $600 (didn't say where or how stripped down it is) and that the average has gone down from ~$1200 to ~$700 (forgot exact figures).

So yeah, its not so bad now.

Granted, it would still mean buying a freaking prebuilt system, unless they relaxed that too.. haven't paid much attention until now. I know they relaxed the HW requirements for bundling remotes and TV tuners etc (from that article) to help get the systems moving ..

Also, apparently the x360 can talk to normal XP machines w/ Windows Media Connect installed, or at least a few places have mentioned it.. I acquired a copy of the latest version of it from my p2p client of choice (since it's a windows genuine wtf it is thing, can't DL it online.. don't ask why, if you don't know lol).. installed it, of course I have no extenders to test it with, but it looks like it'll share mp3s, wavs (I think), avis, mpeg1/2 videos, wmv/wma stuff.. none of their docs I can find indicate required/supported codecs for avi, obviously wmv will be wmv, and mpeg is mpeg.

They made an Extender for the original xbox didn't they? Maybe I'll locate a copy of that to see how kludgey it is.. lol. I'm sure XBMC will still be > MCE tho since there'll be no xvid/divx/non-ms mpeg4/ogg/mkv/etc support, and I sure as hell ain't gonna start re-encoding everything..

Hrm, I did some poking around and the Media Connect interfaces are sort-of kind-of publicly available, it's based on UPnP (which makes my head hurt trying to read the specs) and they list their variation on the MediaRenderer and MediaServer (? forgot the source/server name) interfaces along with the HTTP type streaming it uses for data, of course they don't give you any wmv/wma decoding info but hey..

It would be nice if someone cooked up an open source (or otherwise free anyhow, beggers can't be choosers) Media Connect server that could on the fly re-encode to say, stupid high CBR or CQ mpeg2 or something (so minimal CPU load to do it) and just give a list of all your shared videos as if they were mpeg2's.. of course it'd have to do subtitle compositing and you'd need to have some sort of remote option for choosing them, hrm.. same could be done to audio for wavs.. just decode and stream! now you can keep your audio in ogg, flac, whatever.

I'd volunteer to try cooking the underlying network code (I hate UI stuff) but the UPnP stuff along gave me suicidal urges. I couldn't even find an overview of the spec describing the basis of it when I DL'd it, just all the interface descriptions and shit.. I'm sure its there someplace but not in the "full" documentation pkg I dl'd from the UPnP site.