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Author Topic: Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat  (Read 1125 times)

Xbox-Scene

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« on: February 09, 2006, 10:17:00 PM »

Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat-- Posted by XanTium on February 10 00:10 EST
From the Xbox Development Team Blog:

Quote

The most consistent piece of feedback is "Why can't I talk with multiple people in QuickChat?"  The simple answer is that it was a user experience choice. The longer answer follows, but know that there isn't much in the lower level software that would stop us from letting users do this.  However, let's think about it some more...

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.  Voice chat in a game uses some of that bandwidth.  How much depends on the number of users, mostly.  All Xbox Live games have voice chat in some way, so there is at least one user worth of "chat bandwidth."
The Xbox 360 guide is not omniscient. It has a lot of info, but it can't know how many people are chatting inside a particular game. However, it knows that there's at least one user worth of bandwidth around being used for chat because we wrote that rule. When you use QuickChat, the Xbox 360 Guide mutes voice going to the game. That means the game no longer has any voice chat to transmit, and hence stops using the voice chat bandwidth.  That frees up the bandwidth for QuickChat to use.
Imagine QuickChat did let you speak with multiple people at a time. This means you'd need to send data to multiple people, thereby multiplying the amount of bandwidth you need. This may make QuickChat go over the 64kbps total that is available. 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.

Read More: Xbox Development Team Blog

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CAjr45

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #1 on: February 09, 2006, 11:04:00 PM »

I'm not that smart at this stuff but is there any way to increase the use of bandwidth from 64kbps to a more higher value?
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ebrunn

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #2 on: February 09, 2006, 11:05:00 PM »

i guess that makes sense. Would like to see just a voice chat section of the dashboard like in the original xbox. Not in the guide but in the live blade.
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trunkster

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #3 on: February 09, 2006, 11:34:00 PM »

So why couldn't they have noted the games that allow more then one person during playback to talk, for example perfect dark, and allow those games to have multiparty chat? You would only have one person talking at a time and if it works in a game I don't see why they couldn't have the feature in private chats.
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ILLusions0fGrander

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #4 on: February 09, 2006, 11:56:00 PM »

who only has 64kbps bandwidth? it should be a personal setting in the dash... personally, i have 256up so why cant i check an option for "optimal bandwidth"?????
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HSDEMONZ

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #5 on: February 10, 2006, 12:04:00 AM »

Even those with 256k up and higher.. as "guaranteed" by their ISPs.. many times.. do not actually have that. Sometimes.. ISP's lie. At other times.. it's throttled.

64k up was determined to be a nominal lowest common denominator for broadband access. Problably a very reasonable one.

It would be nice to have personal options to up our own bandwidth settings. I'm guessing though.. that we'd soon see an imbalanced LIVE experience.. where some would have.. and some wouldn't.

Personally.. if I got it to spare.. I want to use it. But.. at the same time I can see why the powers that be want a level and common field, as opposed to an sliding scale that shifts depending on your broadband supplier, time of day, and other hiccups.
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thejt

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #6 on: February 10, 2006, 12:19:00 AM »

Thats about all there is to it..
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diacronic

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #7 on: February 10, 2006, 12:21:00 AM »

I must be missing something here. As i recall the old xbox dashboard had a chat feature that you could up to 4 people into the chat room at once all talking. Why can't the 360 have something like this at the dash ?
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metaldevil

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #8 on: February 10, 2006, 03:07:00 AM »

QUOTE(diacronic @ Feb 10 2006, 02:21 AM) *
Why can't the 360 have something like this at the dash ?
All we can do is hope for a dash update. There's a laundry list of updates MS needs to get hot on.
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Master3xBOx

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #9 on: February 10, 2006, 03:15:00 AM »

That makes no sense. So let me get this straight. In a game, the system doesn't know how many are talking and allows multiple people all to talk in one "channel". The private chat is a single "channel" as well, but only allows 1 person talk to only 1 other person.  (IMG:style_emoticons/default/huh.gif)  (IMG:style_emoticons/default/blink.gif)

Then why can't they make the 1 private "channel" act like the channel from a game and not know how many people are there also. It just doesn't fit together for me.  (IMG:style_emoticons/default/huh.gif)

This post has been edited by Master3xBOx: Feb 10 2006, 11:16 AM
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Aurahead

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #10 on: February 10, 2006, 04:47:00 AM »

I would like to have more than just 2ppl on QuickChat. That would be nice.
I hate to creat 3QuickChat with 3differens ppl and have to jump between room.
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mitch2025

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« Reply #11 on: February 10, 2006, 05:29:00 AM »

if the reason they dont have multiparty quick chat is bandwidth then why dont they also make the games so only 1 person can talk? i have aroun 650-750 down and i could EASYLY host a server and have a full quickchat going with 8 people if they allowed me
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slartibartphast

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #12 on: February 10, 2006, 06:50:00 AM »

I don't know what quickchat is (no 360 here) but i read this and it makes no sense.

The real reason they don't do it is likely they didn't write a multi user peer chat in the dash, and they don't want to. It's kind of inefficient and wasteful to write a peer to peer type chat, the real solution is to use server based, which would be fixed bandwidth for users.
In game chat likely is server based, at least on the old xbox it seemed to be so.
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tutu

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« Reply #13 on: February 10, 2006, 07:06:00 AM »

I don't see why they can't let us have multiple people in the chat when we are in the dashboard only. In a game, they could still keep it to 1vs1.
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jfoster

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Xbox Team: Multiparty Chat
« Reply #14 on: February 10, 2006, 11:33:00 AM »

QUOTE(HSDEMONZ @ Feb 10 2006, 02:04 AM) *

Even those with 256k up and higher.. as "guaranteed" by their ISPs.. many times.. do not actually have that. Sometimes.. ISP's lie. At other times.. it's throttled.

64k up was determined to be a nominal lowest common denominator for broadband access. Problably a very reasonable one.

It would be nice to have personal options to up our own bandwidth settings. I'm guessing though.. that we'd soon see an imbalanced LIVE experience.. where some would have.. and some wouldn't.

Personally.. if I got it to spare.. I want to use it. But.. at the same time I can see why the powers that be want a level and common field, as opposed to an sliding scale that shifts depending on your broadband supplier, time of day, and other hiccups.


I don't agree.  There is already a lopsided response time based on bandwidth.  That would be like forcing everyone to have a 500 ping, just so that the fastest of us would be crippled to the slowest allowed speed.  Not very "forward looking", if you ask me...

I at least would like to see the option to add 1-2 friends to your private chat.  Wouldn't think that would be an issue, being that on the PC, I teamspeak with 30-40 people while playing a game online..

Jeff
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