Why Steam is Awesome, and How You Can Make Live Free

[MaxwellGT2000]

JaggedSac said:

Some good discussions going on here.  I am about to head to lunch but I will contribute some comments afterwards.  Would just like to post a link to an MS engineering blog about the XBox Live architecture and how developers can customize their use of it.  Doesn't directly relate to the discussion, but it just gives people a better idea of the Live architecture.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/EngineeringBlog/072810-DevelopersCustomizeLive

 

And Squilliam, here is a little tidbit on how MS makes party chat work effectively.  It is similar to how a donnybrook multiplayer system would work.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/EngineeringBlog/032310-XboxLiveParties

Distributed Voice

The network traffic from your game and your party both take up one of the console’s limited resources: network bandwidth.  One of the biggest optimizations we made to the code was to limit the amount of upload bandwidth that Xbox LIVE Parties use.  Upload bandwidth is the data being sent from your console (as opposed to download bandwidth when data is sent to your console).  In most game scenarios, upload bandwidth is scarcer than download bandwidth.  When you speak into your microphone, the party system needs to send your voice data to up to seven other consoles.  That means that speaking causes a huge upload spike – identical data is sent seven times, once per remote console.

To reduce that bandwidth usage, the party system employs a neat trick to distribute the upload bandwidth.  If there are seven other people in my party, my console only sends data to three of them.  That means roughly 60% less upload bandwidth is used.  When those three consoles receive my voice data, they act as ‘repeaters’.  That means that in addition to playing my voice back, they may also send it to the remaining consoles.  With this algorithm, each console sends voice data to at most three other consoles.  That limits the total amount of data uploaded in normal situations and spreads the bandwidth among party members.

Cool stuff there, still dislike peer to peer a lot and always have lol but that chat trick is impressive.

It really pisses me off that they're not actually handling the bandwidth of your games but making it run off your own connection, which then leads to host advantage, I rage about it in Super Smash Bros Brawl online but at least there I'm not required to pay if I want to play it.  

Like personally I really want Reach and the local multiplayer is really tempting me, but if XBL was free Reach would have been a day 1 done deal, it's really hard to sell myself on something when one of the biggest components of the product is closed off to me unless I pay extra