News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[Scott_Arm]

Custom voip solution for each game? I find that doubtful. If true, it's a terrible decision.

“Let me get into some technical detail regarding it – on 360, the OS handles all of the party and chat functionality. All you do is hook up the XBL VOiP OS API into your game, and it does most of the work for you. With it results in is a shared experience across multiple entertainment. If you’re watching movies or playing games, you can do it together. However, this system is entirely different on Xbox One. So, lets say me, you, and Thuway have xbox one’s that are online. We are signed in our profiles. Sitting at the home screen, we are considered to be in a “Xbox Party” on the server. There are no more ‘party leaders’. With that said if any one of us decide to start a game, the party is shifted over to that game’s party system. Each game now has their custom written VOIP.” (Pete note: shoutout to thuway!)

Seems very doubtful, and makes me skeptical of the entire rumour, but sometimes companies do dumb things.

Edit: Thinking about this more, how would it even work. If I'm watching a movie, and my friend is playing a game, are we using the Xbox Live VOIP or the games VOIP, or are the two somehow hooked together and talking to eachother. What if we're each playing different games? ... unless they removed the ability to talk across apps, which is clearly not the case. I think a little more explanation is in order.

Also, the rest of it just amounts to, sometimes "messages" are being lost. They say it'll take months to fix, but there's really no explanation of how severe the issue is, or why it would take that long to fix, or what's even causing it. There's not a lot of meat. I can believe a huge online launch could have some bugs, or even serious problems. Maybe MS missed the mark on this one. Not sure how much I can take that rumour as credible though. It's so vague they can easily claim they were right even if there are only minor issues. Dropped parties and lost messages isn't exactly a totally outrageous prediction.

 

[eastmen]

My thought come down to this. We don't know how long ago this was or what build. They have about a month till launch (a little less now). So who knows how much of this is fixed in later builds not seen outside of ms and also what more can be fixed by launch.

 

[XpiderMX]

Custom voip solution for each game? I find that doubtful. If true, it's a terrible decision.



Seems very doubtful, and makes me skeptical of the entire rumour, but sometimes companies do dumb things.

Edit: Thinking about this more, how would it even work. If I'm watching a movie, and my friend is playing a game, are we using the Xbox Live VOIP or the games VOIP, or are the two somehow hooked together and talking to eachother. What if we're each playing different games? ... unless they removed the ability to talk across apps, which is clearly not the case. I think a little more explanation is in order.

Also, the rest of it just amounts to, sometimes "messages" are being lost. They say it'll take months to fix, but there's really no explanation of how severe the issue is, or why it would take that long to fix, or what's even causing it. There's not a lot of meat. I can believe a huge online launch could have some bugs, or even serious problems. Maybe MS missed the mark on this one. Not sure how much I can take that rumour as credible though. It's so vague they can easily claim they were right even if there are only minor issues. Dropped parties and lost messages isn't exactly a totally outrageous prediction.

I don't know is it is related but MS engineer on digital foundry article said something like "each game has their own OS on disk", I don't know if it can be an issue. The exact quote:

We can do things like update the operating system on the system side of things while retaining very good compatibility with the portion running on the titles, so we're not breaking back-compat with titles because titles have their own entire operating system that ships with the game.

 

[steveOrino]

Rumors are rumors after all but its interesting that many of them point to the rumor that the X1 being rushed to market ahead of its intended schedule, whatever that was.

 

[MrFox]

I don't know is it is related but MS engineer on digital foundry article said something like "each game has their own OS on disk", I don't know if it can be an issue. The exact quote:

Wasn't this what MS tried to do with the Dreamcast? Each game disk had it's own version of Windows CE?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I don't know is it is related but MS engineer on digital foundry article said something like "each game has their own OS on disk", I don't know if it can be an issue. The exact quote:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that exactly as it is now on PS360? When you launch a game, your console reboots into a lightweight OS that provides the most basic OS features for online connectivity and access to local resources like the HDD filesystem and peripherals. The difference with Xbox One, is the full OS remains in memory running as one VM and the lightweight OS runs in another. Maybe there is an issue syncing the state of your Live account between the two?

This also raises another question: If the game VM includes a light-weight OS, which is verified and has been known for quite a long time, why would they remove VOIP as one of those OS features and make the devs roll their own solution? Even if they did, why would you be forced out of party chat running on the System OS, since the System OS is still running?

I can see handshaking issues, or just general issues with Live dropping messages (text, voice, friend and game requests), but the part about VOIP doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

[XpiderMX]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that exactly as it is now on PS360? When you launch a game, your console reboots into a lightweight OS that provides the most basic OS features for online connectivity and access to local resources like the HDD filesystem and peripherals. The difference with Xbox One, is the full OS remains in memory running as one VM and the lightweight OS runs in another. Maybe there is an issue syncing the state of your Live account between the two?

But the Xbox 360 "mini-OS" (the lightweight OS) is always the same for all games and it live on the console side, right? If Xbox One is based on virtualization, and each game has their own OS (not the same for all games), IMO it is not the same than Xbox 360 OS.

Can the game OS communicate with the other OSes?

 

[Scott_Arm]

But the Xbox 360 "mini-OS" (the lightweight OS) is always the same for all games and it live on the console side, right? If Xbox One is based on virtualization, and each game has their own OS (not the same for all games), IMO it is not the same than Xbox 360 OS.

Can the game OS communicate with the other OSes?

What does it matter if each game has the OS packaged with it? They're just packaging the latest version of the game OS that Microsoft is giving them. They aren't writing their own. For launch they will all have exactly the same version. And yes, the OSes should be able to talk to each other, but for the most part I would think that anything related to online would be synced through "the cloud" not locally. Things like achievements would probably be done locally, because they work offline. Your party state, chat state, friends list, messaging etc, should all be synced through the cloud (at least that's what would make sense).

To be honest, if there are issues with migrating between party chat and game chat, and sending messages etc, I'd expect they're issues with the online services, not the local software (unless the APIs are broken, which they could be). Still, the problem they're describing relating to VOIP doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

 

[XpiderMX]

What does it matter if each game has the OS packaged with it? They're just packaging the latest version of the game OS that Microsoft is giving them. They aren't writing their own. For launch they will all have exactly the same version. And yes, the OSes should be able to talk to each other, but for the most part I would think that anything related to online would be synced through "the cloud" not locally. Things like achievements would probably be done locally, because they work offline. Your party state, chat state, friends list, messaging etc, should all be synced through the cloud (at least that's what would make sense).

Oh ok, I was thinking in different OS for each game xD (just like virtualization on PC).

 

[Scott_Arm]

Oh ok, I was thinking in different OS for each game xD (just like virtualization on PC).

They're forced into using all of those Microsoft APIs, like DirectX, which would be sitting on top of the virtual device driver, which would be sitting on top of the OS. Microsoft should be providing all of that.

 

[aaaaa00]

But the Xbox 360 "mini-OS" (the lightweight OS) is always the same for all games and it live on the console side, right? If Xbox One is based on virtualization, and each game has their own OS (not the same for all games), IMO it is not the same than Xbox 360 OS.

On 360, the game always comes with a set of drivers and libraries on the disc. Call it the "Game OS". That way driver updates can never screw up an old game, unlike on PC.

There is a second "mini-OS" that runs the Xbox "Guide", which is the thing that pops up when you press the big (X) button in the center of the 360 controller. It also runs background tasks like downloading and chat. That "mini-OS" is part of the 360 firmware, and never changes no matter what game you put in.

Both "OSes" on the 360 are multitasked by a simple hypervisor.

The 360 "dashboard" (the thing with all the tiles) is not actually part of the "mini-OS ", and is unloaded when a game is launched, and reloaded when a game is exited.

I would expect that the Xbox One is a very similar setup, except the "mini-OS" is some full blown derivative of Windows 8, and can run the full Xbox One dashboard + some apps, even while a game is running.

 

[-tkf-]

the latest is that the os is a mess

Interesting. I expect problems at launch but not like that. Of course we don't know what verison of the os they have acess to , its obviously not the nov 22nd verison.

But afaik you haven't heard anything about this? At least not in the sense that it's causing problems for the guys/girls/aliens you know that develop on the machine?

If we look a the bigger picture it seems.. unlikely that there is major issues, smaller issues.. of course it's more or less part of any development of complex soft and hardware. But, the release can not be that far off any original plan, i doubt that Microsoft planned to have final hardware months before the software was ready, that would risk putting them behind Sony from the get go. And since both consoles more or less use the same hardware the release of the PS4 was almost a given. Sure, the XBONE does feature more hardware "stuff" but they would have been on the same development schedule as the rest of the hardware.

Maybe Microsoft was spread thin thanks to Windows 8 and 8.1, RT Surface, Windows Phone etc. that could be an explanation if there is anything true about these rumours. But i doubt very much that the release date could have come as a surprise.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Software still needing to be worked out on a new os leading up to launch?

shocking

No. The shocking thing, if true, is MS has lost their already robust online solution in Live and replaced it with something broken, meaning one of the major plus points for the XBox platform has been lost at launch. No-one would have suspected that, and probably many have trouble believing it, so *if* true, it will be shocking, that MS could screw up so royally and decide to copy Sony's rubbish system.

 

[blakjedi]

Ps4 is also doing a major day one update/patch.

 

[Cjail]

Do we know the size of the XBO day one update?

 

[Deleted member 7537]

Do we know the size of the XBO day one update?

1.4 GB

 

[fehu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aWrjuBo70o&feature=player_embedded#t=0

 

[Deleted member 7537]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aWrjuBo70o&feature=player_embedded#t=0

Well, that's clearly not live. Just like the demo at the May event.

 

[fehu]

It's more a concept, interesting and confusing (like the ui :S)

 

[BoardBonobo]

Perhaps the VoIP issue is down to the use of Skype? They said that the team who wrote the network code aren't gamers and didn't understand the 2005 setup, perhaps they failed to see the reason why someone watching a movie or TV would want to chat to someone playing a game? So perhaps you have two different instances of VoIP running, one bound to the OS stack the other to the game OS stack. Both unable to talk to each other.

The knock on effect would be the lack of any system of passing messages back and forth. It simply wouldn't have been created.