Xbox gamers playing online with their PC counterparts

[Wuggles]

Do you think Microsoft will make an effort to allow Xbox 2 games to play online with pc counterpart games? (Unreal Championship and UT2003, Halo and...Halo, etc...) And do you think XNA would play a part in that?

[madphilb]

It would be nice, I'm not completely sure why Microsoft hasn't put more of an effort toward this, maybe even as an add-on to those games as a different network plug-in. There would have to be some sort of subscription service for Live for non-XBox players for PC users to join Live games, that or they would have to add an option that you can find and join a regular game by using non-Live resources to connect via the Internet to regular games on normal servers.

I was disapointed to find that this sort of ability wasn't included in the current Live package, I can understand the closed circuit for Live servers (keeps the riff-raff out), but it would have been good if they included the option to allow XBox players to join non Live games.

[Salvage]

It seems that it will be possible for XNA to allow this to happen, whether or not it will work will depend on how it's implemented. It's the reason XNA was built: to bring xBox and pc programming/graphics together under a unified development standard.

I have my doubts that I'll ever pay to play a multiplayer game beyond the cost of the game, though.

[belboz]

There's a report about splinter cell 2, where it says the x-box can only handle multiplaying, as long as there is no more than 4 players playing at a time, kind of fecking fecks up the multiplaying on something like unreal, seeing the size of some of those maps, you'll be playing, hunt the other players instead of killing them.

[Salvage]

That just means that SC2 uses way more bandwidth than most games. You need a minumum of 64kbps to play the pc version multiplayer which cuts out all of the 56kers.

It's all in the network code. The question though is what the heck they need 64k for only four players?

[SubJeff]

I'd be more interested in the XBox2 anyway. XBox is going to be so technologically outdated compared to PCs in a year, when we are all play new FMS, HL2 and Doom3 mods.

[ravenseye13]

Originally posted by Salvage
That just means that SC2 uses way more bandwidth than most games. You need a minumum of 64kbps to play the pc version multiplayer which cuts out all of the 56kers.

It's all in the network code. The question though is what the heck they need 64k for only four players?

Poor netcode I would guess.

[Lawrence Heffernan]

Even UnrealTournament wasn't perfect on Dialup, it needs 64kbps ISDN to be happy

[Shug]

Wouldn't be bad playing online shooters against console players, if only to prove how much more intuitive a keyboard/mouse setup is in terms of speed and accuracy when compared to a gamepad.

Then again I don't know why I even posted, seeing as this forum may not be alive for long

[NeoPendragon]

Originally posted by Salvage
That just means that SC2 uses way more bandwidth than most games. You need a minumum of 64kbps to play the pc version multiplayer which cuts out all of the 56kers.

It's all in the network code. The question though is what the heck they need 64k for only four players?

Maybe because the mic is on constantly. Personally, I think the multi part of SC2 is one of the most unprofessional games I've seen come from a professional developer in a good while. The server browser is clunky and buggy, there's a lot of spelling errors throughout the game (Show mire, Trap Desactivated, grenade releases toxic gaz), and anyone in their right mind would implement a button to activate the mic when pressed insted of leaving it on constantly. But I digress. At least its pretty fun.

[Salvage]

Right, forgot about the mic being on all the time.