What is Xbox Live?
I mean what are we really paying for?
I've been playing online for years and connected in various different ways.
Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike and their ilk all use a central dedicated server. That is to say, you can set up or rent a dedicated server for your clan or hop on to a public and get your frag on if your independant from a group and just looking to play with others.
Jedi Knight, Doom and their ilk are peer hosted, i was big in to both at one point (to the point of writing cog scripts and designing levels on JK and messing with wad's on doom), doom was insane in that connecting people was fairly hard work, it was IPX and designed primarily for lan play so you needed to set up certain external tools to interface IPX to a TCP/IP setting. It was a headache and was far from perfect.
Simmilarly with Jedi Knight, although JK was far easier to rig a game up, id download the Microsoft Zone Client hop on to the internet to zone.microsoft.com and browse to Nar Shaddaa to connect to other gamers and either host a game or join one.
This was still somewhat convolouted, in that all zone was was a glorified chatroom with an external launcher. If game versions differed things went badly wrong (ie if someone was running a custom map, custom textures or sabers pack or game mod like SBX everyone else had to run it) it would normaly work though, in all its 56k modem glory.
Enough history. Flash forward to today, i want to play Borderlands with a few friends i fire up my xbox, start a party and whichever one of us has the best connection hosts the rest join.
My Xbox it seems when i really think about it is merely running a glorified verrsion of the zone client.
Microsoft dont host dedicated servers, everything is peer hosted, they facilitate a chatroom which allows users to connect to each other, store very simple mail and allow streaming between units with video and audio.
Thats essentialy it.
Slap in a few news feeds and call them marketplaces and add in a hefty dose of automatic updates and youve got it sussed.
My point is this by hacking up an IRC server i could essentialy provide the same functionality for much less. The genius of this is that its neither fully central or peer driven, you can add servers as needed to scale the system and users themselves can run a server.
A few months of work and someone could provide an entire dashboard replacement that instead of logging into a LIVE server will log into my "XBOX DEAD" (where the bad boxes go) and develop an entirely free counterculture to live.
Add in a small scale irc server daemon that would quit once a game is running and youve got enough servers to makesure the uptime is continuous.
Slap a modchip into your xbox 360 to allow it to run the modified dashboard. (a bastard of a job, lots of epoxy to scrub to get to the contacts on the board) and your once banned xbox is now back online.
More than that you could release all the software under a pirate licence meaning anyone with the know how could patch the code free of charge, a few weeks later functionality would expand well beyond that of the LIVE experience, imagine browsers, expanded media center functionality like XBMC of old, instead of a marketplace you could have scene release news and configurable rss feeds.
The possibilities are endless.
My only question is WHY THE HELL HASNT IT BEEN THOUGHT OF SOONER?
I mean what are we really paying for?
I've been playing online for years and connected in various different ways.
Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike and their ilk all use a central dedicated server. That is to say, you can set up or rent a dedicated server for your clan or hop on to a public and get your frag on if your independant from a group and just looking to play with others.
Jedi Knight, Doom and their ilk are peer hosted, i was big in to both at one point (to the point of writing cog scripts and designing levels on JK and messing with wad's on doom), doom was insane in that connecting people was fairly hard work, it was IPX and designed primarily for lan play so you needed to set up certain external tools to interface IPX to a TCP/IP setting. It was a headache and was far from perfect.
Simmilarly with Jedi Knight, although JK was far easier to rig a game up, id download the Microsoft Zone Client hop on to the internet to zone.microsoft.com and browse to Nar Shaddaa to connect to other gamers and either host a game or join one.
This was still somewhat convolouted, in that all zone was was a glorified chatroom with an external launcher. If game versions differed things went badly wrong (ie if someone was running a custom map, custom textures or sabers pack or game mod like SBX everyone else had to run it) it would normaly work though, in all its 56k modem glory.
Enough history. Flash forward to today, i want to play Borderlands with a few friends i fire up my xbox, start a party and whichever one of us has the best connection hosts the rest join.
My Xbox it seems when i really think about it is merely running a glorified verrsion of the zone client.
Microsoft dont host dedicated servers, everything is peer hosted, they facilitate a chatroom which allows users to connect to each other, store very simple mail and allow streaming between units with video and audio.
Thats essentialy it.
Slap in a few news feeds and call them marketplaces and add in a hefty dose of automatic updates and youve got it sussed.
My point is this by hacking up an IRC server i could essentialy provide the same functionality for much less. The genius of this is that its neither fully central or peer driven, you can add servers as needed to scale the system and users themselves can run a server.
A few months of work and someone could provide an entire dashboard replacement that instead of logging into a LIVE server will log into my "XBOX DEAD" (where the bad boxes go) and develop an entirely free counterculture to live.
Add in a small scale irc server daemon that would quit once a game is running and youve got enough servers to makesure the uptime is continuous.
Slap a modchip into your xbox 360 to allow it to run the modified dashboard. (a bastard of a job, lots of epoxy to scrub to get to the contacts on the board) and your once banned xbox is now back online.
More than that you could release all the software under a pirate licence meaning anyone with the know how could patch the code free of charge, a few weeks later functionality would expand well beyond that of the LIVE experience, imagine browsers, expanded media center functionality like XBMC of old, instead of a marketplace you could have scene release news and configurable rss feeds.
The possibilities are endless.
My only question is WHY THE HELL HASNT IT BEEN THOUGHT OF SOONER?
...sigpic
screw you nag3 
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