Active downloads and playing games...

[rusty]

I tried this new active download malarky (exactly what i wanted all along!) and all was great until i loaded up oblivion....

the load times in the game become phenominally long for me if i have a download running (i assume because they both try to hog bandwidth to the hdd) - and i just wanted to see if anyone else had experienced the same?


so this needs yet another feature imo - a pause button! as far as i can tell, the only way to pause the downloading is to cancel it and then go and resume it later by going through marketplace and selectign the item again. Am i missing something there or is that right?

 

[Gubbi]

I tried this new active download malarky (exactly what i wanted all along!) and all was great until i loaded up oblivion....

the load times in the game become phenominally long for me if i have a download running (i assume because they both try to hog bandwidth to the hdd) - and i just wanted to see if anyone else had experienced the same?

Unless you have a 100mbit/s internet pipe, HDD contention can't possibly be the cause of your high load times.

It is more likely that it is the cache-thrashing-bug of Oblivion that kicks in to effect. Restart the game by going to the dashboard, and choose "start playing" and then hold down the "A" (green one) button until the Bethesda logo video segment starts displaying, - that clears the HDD cache.

Cheers

 

[Uncle]

I had no problems playing Burnout yesterday, but I'll try it with Oblivion tonight.

It is more likely that it is the cache-thrashing-bug of Oblivion that kicks in to effect. Restart the game by going to the dashboard, and choose "start playing" and then hold down the "A" (green one) button until the Bethesda logo video segment starts displaying, - that clears the HDD cache.

This reminds me. There is now a way to clear your cache in the dashborard. It'll remove all game updates as well.

Go to the system blade and then memory. Press Y on either the HDD or a MU and then press X,X,Left Bumper, Right Bumper, X,X.

http://www.gamersreports.com/news/2853/

 

[NavNucST3]

I tried this new active download malarky (exactly what i wanted all along!) and all was great until i loaded up oblivion....

the load times in the game become phenominally long for me if i have a download running (i assume because they both try to hog bandwidth to the hdd) - and i just wanted to see if anyone else had experienced the same?


so this needs yet another feature imo - a pause button! as far as i can tell, the only way to pause the downloading is to cancel it and then go and resume it later by going through marketplace and selectign the item again. Am i missing something there or is that right?

Looking around, it appears that the new Oblivion update seems to be thet culprit and not the dashboard update, or maybe it is a combination of the two.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Looking around, it appears that the new Oblivion update seems to be thet culprit and not the dashboard update, or maybe it is a combination of the two.

If this is a sign of things to come, I'll give up console gaming. Consoles mean you put in your game and it plays with a minimum of bugs. It's 'always' been that way. If we now have patches and updates that can break things that used to work, it's a mess I don't want to be involved with.

 

[scooby_dooby]

If this is a sign of things to come, I'll give up console gaming. Consoles mean you put in your game and it plays with a minimum of bugs. It's 'always' been that way. If we now have patches and updates that can break things that used to work, it's a mess I don't want to be involved with.

See ya!

This is a sign of things to come, at least the delivery of patches. I think the OP is seeing a correlation where there is none, I've had some extremely long load times in Oblivion as well, but they went away after clearing the cache.

 

[TheChefO]

If this is a sign of things to come, I'll give up console gaming. Consoles mean you put in your game and it plays with a minimum of bugs. It's 'always' been that way. If we now have patches and updates that can break things that used to work, it's a mess I don't want to be involved with.

Shifty - I agree we should demand that games ship complete and that patches should not be a crutch for buggy games becoming "the norm". With that said though, I'd say for how big Oblivion is, it is a remarkably clean game WRT bugs without any patching.

As far as I know there aren't any more bugs in 360 games than ps2 or xbox though.

 

[Sis]

If this is a sign of things to come, I'll give up console gaming. Consoles mean you put in your game and it plays with a minimum of bugs. It's 'always' been that way. If we now have patches and updates that can break things that used to work, it's a mess I don't want to be involved with.

As the complexity of a system increases, so does it's possible fail points. The solution would be towards either massively increase the testing phase, or create simpler games. I'm not sure what other options exist...

 

[NavNucST3]

If this is a sign of things to come, I'll give up console gaming. Consoles mean you put in your game and it plays with a minimum of bugs. It's 'always' been that way. If we now have patches and updates that can break things that used to work, it's a mess I don't want to be involved with.

The question I think people should ask themselves is whether we should go back to the old method of never having the game fixed, and with the internet the way it is now, where everyone has a bullhorn, I don't think that is an option. If we had the internet, in its current form, when the 2600 was around, it may have killed console gaming before it really even started. I think the real test will be when the average gaming public starts to play the games, will they notice at all, I'm going to say hardly, but I could be wrong. For the most part I don't think they will notice anything unless its pointed out.

Should a fix "break" something else, of course not, but we now have the ways and means to correct issues and mistakes, but I guess that leads us to the ever present "could/should" argument. I, for one, think that as we progress throughout the generation, and going forward, game patching will get better...but then I fall on the "should" side of the fence.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As the complexity of a system increases, so does it's possible fail points. The solution would be towards either massively increase the testing phase, or create simpler games. I'm not sure what other options exist...

1) Bugs are inevitable, and patches I can work with, as long as the QA before release is there, and patching isn't used to fix problems known about before release. That is, games aren't released as buggy messes with the intention to get it out there and makes sales now, and fix the problems later, which is something evident in a number of PC games. This is a matter of the console company not allowing buggy programs to be released without a minimum reliability - if it's obviously broken, don't let it ourt until fixed, rather than leave it to post-purchase patches to fix.

2) The system OS should be kept totally separate from the fundamental aspect of games, so a problem in one doesn't affect another. Patching your RPG to fix a broken quest shouldn't hang the machine whenever you try to view an online movie, and updating the system interface to allow background downloads shouldn't stop you from playing 'Extreme Racing 2006 Pushchair Edition'. No mater what patches and changes you make to the OS functions, you should still be able to put in a game disc and play a game with no difficulties. Switrch on, put in game, and play. Anything that stops that process is bad design and ruins the console experience IMO.

 

[rusty]

well you see i thought that it couldn't be the hdd contention, but once i cancelled the download it all went perfectly fine again... which also seems to rule out the cache bug as i didn't clear my cache for it to work as normal.

maybe as you say it is some conflict between the oblivion update and the new live update that only kicks in when downloads are active, or maybe i'm just unlucky!

 

[AntShaw]

well you see i thought that it couldn't be the hdd contention, but once i cancelled the download it all went perfectly fine again... which also seems to rule out the cache bug as i didn't clear my cache for it to work as normal.

maybe as you say it is some conflict between the oblivion update and the new live update that only kicks in when downloads are active, or maybe i'm just unlucky!

Games I have played since the dashboard update, while I had Active Downloads and multiple things queued:

Condemmed
PD0
PGR3
Call of Duty 2
Full Auto
Far Cry Predator


I have had Zero problems and have experienced no slow downs at all.

 

[Guden Oden]

(i assume because they both try to hog bandwidth to the hdd)

"Bandwidth" (stupid term really) is almost never a factor when dealing with HDDs, but rather the limiting factor is almost exclusively access time. The mechanics in a harddrive are so rediculously slow it totally overshadows everything else except for a few fairly niche situations.

Most of the time an internet connection isn't going to be fast enough to make any sizeable impact on access times, even on a dead-slow drive like the one in the 360. I guess, if the dash update had allowed multiple files downloading simultaneously, there might have been some disk thrashing when a game tries to load data. However, as files are fetched sequencially, I would look for other sources to your issue, such as the broken game caching scheme, like others have already pointed out...

 

[rusty]

but like i said the load performance instantly went back up to normal when i cancelled the download... just for the sake of it i tried clearing the cache and it didn't speed things up, so the problem is definately not related to that.

oh well, there's nowt interesting to download at the moment anyway

and just for clarification - i've tried active downloads with my other games (few live arcade, GRAW, PGR...) and no problemos there - only affected oblivion.