So an update on how things are going with the next version of XBList. I’ve gotten a few questions about when I’ll support the new ability to do messaging between Xbox.com and Xbox 360, and I put out a bunch of questions in my last post, talking about how much overhaul to do to XBList. Well, I’m going full in. I’ve already done a lot of work on it, and there’s a lot to be done. I think the end result will be a cleaner, faster, prettier XBList. The bad news is that this is going to take time. The worse news is that I’ve gotten distracted with other projects, and other things (like Burnout Revenge, and enjoying the beautiful Northwest). It’s just been hard to sit down and crack open Visual Studio these days. I do expect to have a nice new version of XBList out before too much longer, however.
Archive for 2006
Why don’t more games get online multiplayer right?
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006It should be no surprise to people who have looked over BRH.numbera.com, or who know me even in passing, that I love Halo 2. The game is a lot of fun, and was obviously built with a lot of care. However, I’m always on the lookout for a good online game, especially one for the Xbox 360, since I really like what Microsoft has done with Live on their next-gen platform. However, no matter what game I’ve played, I’ve been disappointed. Halo 2′s approach to multiplayer has essentially spoiled me to all lesser implementations. From here on out, I expect three things from Live-enabled games. These three things have so far been present only in Halo 2:
- Matchmaking Parties
- Playlist Matchmaking
- Split Screen over Live
Matchmaking parties are a group of friends, who get together online to move through the matchmaking system as a unit. For example, me and three of my buddies can get together and join the Team Skirmish playlist in Halo 2. We’ll always be in the game together, no matter who else gets matched with us. This means we get to play 8-player matches, but we don’t need to set up a custom match. As a result, we get into matches quickly, and enjoy all the benefits of playlist matching. In contrast, while The Outfit allows me to play 2 on 2 and 3 on 3 team matches, it doesn’t allow me to enter the quick matchmaking with a friend as my teammate! This brings the likelyhood of me playing a team game down to about 0.
Playlist matchmaking was a feature of Halo 2 that actually received a lot of scorn early after the release of the game. The old way of getting a match going (and still the default way for many games) was to create a room, select the options, wait for people to join your room, wait for everybody to get ready, then play. With this strategy, getting a game together took a while, you have to make decisions about gametypes or maps or options, and you’re not very likely to switch things up between rounds, or play with different people. In Halo 2 (and some newer games) you simply select a playlist that contains the general type of games you want to play. A random, preconfigured game gets chosen from the playlist, you get matched with other people wanting to play that playlist, and you’re off. Combined with matchmaking parties, this means more time in the game, more variety, and a more diverse group of opponents.
Split screen over Live is one of those features that for the life of me I can’t understand why it isn’t default everywhere. In Halo 2, or Crimson Skies, or a small handful of other games, you can have two or more people connected to your console, on your TV, while you are online playing with other people. This means, for example, that me and my girlfriend can both play Halo 2 online with our friends back East simultaneously. Amazingly, this capability is rare in Live games. X-Men Legends 2, the online successor to a great party game, allows only one person online at once, even though it doesn’t even need to split the screen for multiple people. Burnout Revenge is the same way. The game has split screen multiplayer, and online multiplayer, but never the two shall meet. Perhaps it’s a good assumption that most gamers only play games by themselves, but I would imagine a situation where the Xbox is shared between members of a household is pretty common.
The lack of any one of these three features basically kills an online game for me. And I really can’t understand it – most game developers must have played Halo 2. Why can’t they just rip off these ideas? Why aren’t these features part of the Microsoft livensing guidelines? Can it really be that the designers of a great game like The Outfit, which is really a multiplayer-only game, never tried to play their game online with friends?
Here’s hoping the next generation of games truly understands online multiplayer the way Bungie does. And here’s hoping Bungie comes up with 3 new indispensable features for Halo 3.
Tags: Gaming, Halo 2, Online Gaming, xbox, xbox live
Thinking about the next XBList
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006Well, the new Xbox.com/Xbox Live update is out. It mostly introduces a Message Center for Xbox.com, where you can send and recieve messages just like on your Xbox. Of course, I’m already thinking about how best to integrate this into XBList, which is starting to see some strain from all the features I’ve added to it. Actually, it’s still pretty lean, but it’s more complicated now than I had ever intended.
I have two choices now. I can do what I usually do, and stay up all night cranking out a quick implementation of Message Center integration. You’ll be able to see how many messages you have from each friend, and send them messages and whatnot. Not exactly Adium level messaging, but it would get the job done. The other option is to go straight to XBList 3.0. By that I mean a bunch of new features, and a rewrite for a lot of the older stuff. Here are some of my ideas:
- Message Center integration, as I mentioned
- A new friends list display that’s not based on TreeView, which could be prettier and also include larger icons, gamer points, etc.
- Remove the IE control from the system, or at least everything but the gamertile popup. I’ll get back to this one later.
- Upgrade to the .NET Framework 2.0
- Plugin support, so people could write their own providers for pictures or other neat things.
Those last three require more explanation. Removing the IE ActiveX control would be the biggest change. If I can remove it completely (the Gamer Tile popup uses it to draw the tile, and it would be a bit of work to draw it by hand), the XBList download will be smaller and the program will take a lot less memory. Even if I can’t get rid of it completely, removing it in favor of a custom approach would mean XBList would be faster, more stable, and less prone to throwing up weird dialog boxes or making clicking sounds. In general, I think it would make the program much nicer. The down side is that I’d have to start prompting for your Passport login/password from XBList. While I know that I’m not going to take advantage of your info, or even store it anywhere, it’s a lot easier to convince people if they get to sign into Xbox.com from IE instead of entering their info into some random, possibly untrustworthy program. I’ve resisted this in the past, but I’d like to know what people think about the idea of switching to an XBList login dialog, maybe with some clear text that promises no harm will come to your information.
Upgrading to .NET 2.0 is mainly a perk for me. It would make XBList run faster, and would make it easier to develop, since I could use Visual Studio 2005. In addition, I could use the new managed WebBrowser control instead of Torsten Rendelmann’s excellent but undocumented IEControl wrapper. I could also use things like the new BackgroundWorker control to improve the admittedly shaky multithreading in XBList. The downside here is that you’d need the .NET Framework 2.0 installed. I hate to force people to download yet another thing, though I suspect most people will already have it by now.
The last one, plugin support, has been a pipe dream of mine since XBList 1.0. It could be used to support things like GamerPics.net, who could create a plugin to use your real photo instead of your gamer picture. This one is pretty open-ended, and I’d like to see more ideas of what sort of plugins people would want before I commit to putting a complicated infrastructure in place.
So, if you’re reading this, what I’d love is if you’d post in the comments here, or in my forums, what you think about these ideas. I’ll go back to trying to beat my high score in Geometry Wars until the comments start flooding in…
Windows Vista leads me to the Mac
Thursday, April 20th, 2006I’ve been meaning to write about my impressions of the various Windows Vista previews since I first tried it out in January. My thoughts (and my feedback to Microsoft’s beta site) have been piling up since then, but I never got around to putting virtual pen to even more virtual paper. However, Paul Thurrott’s recent article on where Vista fails really sums up a lot of my feelings here. Thurrott’s always been the type who’ll try his hardest to find the positive in even the worst Microsoft releases, but as a long time reader, I can tell that he’s very, very frustrated with Vista, and as a Windows journalist it really pains him to see something that promised so much deliver so little. He’s not alone. I’ve tried my hardest to like what I’ve seen of Vista so far, but it’s nearly impossible, especially when Mac OS X is out right now, and in many respects better than Microsoft’s late update to XP.
This is going to be a pretty long rant, so if you want more you’ll have to click inside.
Tags: Apple, Macintosh, Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista
Apple Finally Speaks to Me with BootCamp
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006The big news out of Cupertino this morning is BootCamp. It’s Apple’s beta bootloader for Windows on their previously-closed Mac platform. Now you can dual-boot Mac OSX and Windows XP, complete with drivers for the important bits of the system.
Putting aside why this is a great move for Apple, this really puts the company in a new light for me. I’ve never liked Apple’s marketing – they’ve always seemed more like a cold white plastic monolith than a warm fuzzy people company to me. To me the Mac, and Apple, is about lack of choice. They give you something, and that’s what you get. It’s good, but things are going to be their way or no way at all. I tend to think a lot of their growing success lies with the fact that their defaults (a stock OSX install and standard Mac hardware) are fantastic, while the default install of Windows or Linux (and the standard OEM boxes) are rather dismal. While this makes a Mac great for most people, I’ve never really cared. I can make Windows do what I want, and aside from my Thinkpad I’ve never bought a computer that was pre-assembled in a factory.
The first thing Apple did that made Macs interesting to me was embracing UNIX with OSX. That was not the sort of decision I expected from a company that had made previously shipped operating systems that show you frowny-faces on error. The fact that the Mac now had a command line suggested that it wasn’t just for playing that sliding-puzzle game anymore. Since then I’ve had a little bit of interest in the Mac, and I even have a rescued-from-the-garbage 350Mhz iMac that I test Safari on. The OS is interesting, but the hardware lockin has always stayed my had mere moments from the “Place Order” button at the Apple Store. Recently I’ve become enamoured of the Mac Mini, whose diminuative size makes it seem more like buying a toy than a computer. Coupled with the fact that it’s the cheapest Mac that comes without a built in display, it seems like the best choice for my tinkering, though the price hike for the new Intel models makes me wish for some additional customization options – do I really need to pay for Airport Express when it’ll be sitting 5 inches away from an ethernet switch?
Today’s introduction of BootCamp really got me though. All of a sudden the guys at Apple HQ are speaking directly to me – they’re letting me make a choice! Not just any choice, but the choice to run software from their sworn enemy, Microsoft, on their pristine white hardware. This from the iTunes company! It’s not really a choice, of course. I wouldn’t dream of putting XP on a Mac Mini when I could build a cheap PC for half the price. It’ll be nice for people who want a great laptop but can’t give up Windows. But for me it’s the fact that they’re opening up and letting me do something as radical as replace the operating system. I feel now that if I were to buy a Mini, I’d be getting it from Apple, a company full of cool engineers with good design sense, not Apple, a company full of snobby elitists who know what’s best for me.
Tags: Apple, BootCamp, Mac Mini, MacOSX, Windows
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