Private chat on 360

[rusty]

Hey guys, trying to find out an answer for this so if anyone could help it'd be appreciated.

In any given private chat channel is it only possible to have one single other person? Is there anyway in which to have a "group private chat" so to speak?

if so, how?

cheers

 

[Qroach]

You can just invite who you want to join a chat at any time thorugh the dashboard interface. you can even continue to talk even if you are playing different games which is a cool feature.

 

[rusty]

yeah, but i only ever seem to be able to speak to one person in any given chat... to speak to another person i have to create a seperate private chat on another channel, and obviously can't talk to the person i was originally talking to unless i switch back.

hope that makes sense!

 

[Qroach]

hmm I'm not sure I'll have to try it out

 

[Tap In]

I've only been able to speak to one person at a time, however you can have several chats with other people going but just on other chat lines. You can pause a session with one and go back and forth but unfortunately.... you can not all chat together.

hopefully this will be one of the addded features in the future of the dashboard.

 

[rusty]

tapin - that's what i was wondering... seems silly that it's not allowed!

as you say hopefully they'll change it in an update

 

[pipo]

That's correct. Only one, its a (reserved) bandwidth (aka design) issue.

 

[NavNucST3]

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/08/528321.aspx

 

[Tap In]

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/08/528321.aspx

whoa!

good to know, thanks

 

[scooby_dooby]

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/08/528321.aspx

Xbox Live requires users to have broadband connections that are at least 64kbps up & down. On the other side of the coin, Xbox Live requires games to work within 64kbps.

So they're capping the BW because of a minimum requirement that only affect a small percentage of highspeed users? Who has only 8kb/s download/upload speed? That's pretty dumb when most of North America easily hits 100+kb/s on broadband.

"If you have a much faster pipe, this would not be a problem. However, measuring available bandwidth is a non-trivial problem that has had many academic papers written about it."

Then why don't you let me select my desired bandwidth limit in my settings? They could have "Internet connection speed: Low / High" default to Low, keep that as the minimum for developers, but give other users the option to select High Bandwidth and get a more realistic cap like 40 or 50kb/s which would enable extra features. If you experience extra lag in your game, you can go back to low.

If their problem is really "measuring available bandwidth" then just make it user selectable,with a default to the lower value, very easy solution.

 

[Tap In]

....

If their problem is really "measuring available bandwidth" then just make it user selectable,with a default to the lower value, very easy solution.

K.I.S.S.

most people would just feck it up though.

 

[scooby_dooby]

HEy...who you callin stupid!!

jk, I totally understand making this decision in the short term to make the deadline of launch. I mean, they sure did keep it simple, doesn't even have background downloading and that's probably a much higher priority than multi-voice chat.

With that said, I sure hope they revisit these issues, there's no reason to be capping people at 64kbps if they have 100x's that available bandwidth(ya..my hi-speed rocks ).

Having it default to low would take care of 'most' people, it would be no different than the system is now. BUt people who wanted additional features, could turn on the hispeed setting, this could all easily be explained in the manual.

Either that or raise the limit, why the heck are people on Live! with only 8kb/s anyways? I dunno, single line chat just strikes me as lame. And how's the video gonna work? MS has stated the video will be totally integrated into the dashboard, so I'm actually expecting a fairly big upgrade to the dashboard.

 

[NavNucST3]

Just remember though scoob, most people don't have great upload speeds. I may have 6Mb down but my upload sucks... 384kbps.

 

[J_Saint]

Bandwidth is a BS excuse. If they can get up to 16 people chatting in a game lobby (8 in Marble Blast on Live Arcade) then there's no reason it they couldn't do it in a dashboard chat lobby. Xbox.com had some info posted about the upcoming web camera that included this little blurb...

Video Chat

To further illustrate the point, he mentioned, "It's not just the camera, we have the microphone as well." The microphone plugs directly into the controller and allows your voice to carry through to the recipient's TV or stereo speakers.

The microphone connected to the Xbox 360 Controller allows group chat, unlike the Xbox 360 Headset. Video chat and video messaging with your friends will become an integrated part of the Xbox Live experience.

They may want the webcam to have this feature as a selling point if they don't add group chat via free dash updates.

 

[pipo]

Bandwidth is a BS excuse. If they can get up to 16 people chatting in a game lobby (8 in Marble Blast on Live Arcade) then there's no reason it they couldn't do it in a dashboard chat lobby.

Not quite. The feature we are talking about works all the time and isn't a game lobby.

E.g. I can talk to a mate who's playing PGR, while I'm *booting* CoD2.

In a game lobby (the same game) you can pretty much take all the bandwidth you want...