Rumor: Xbox Live to be included in Windows 8

I hope this fails. HARD
Microsoft talks Xbox Live integration in Windows 8, says service will be 'pervasive' across devices -- Engadget
Thats just greedy of Microsoft. Didnt they already try this before?

 

If this means xbox games on windows....perhaps the positives balance out the negatives??

 

Rumor is nice but I'll believe it when I see it.
It would need some minimum system requirements that not everyone would have.

 

Xbox Live or Games for Widonws Live (GFWL)? I mean, GFWL is supposed to be the PC counterpart of Xbox Live... or wishes to.

 

GFWL is gone, it's being integrated into the XBox brand.

 

I think this will cause a conflict between console players and PC players who will be playing Xbox games.... especially on the multiplayer side. Unless Microsoft decides to do separate servers for Xbox console owners and PC owners... which doesn't really makes sense.....because only revenue that Microsoft will get is from Xbox exclusive titles...which is very limited.

What do you guys think?

 

I see as extending the life of the 360 while they get ready to roll out a new console. In theory and as a gamer it's a great idea.
Don't really care if there would be any online multiplayer feature but there are some 360 exclusives that it would be nice to pick up if this ever came to be.

 

You are going to have your Avatar and whatnot in Windows, this is just like the XBOX Live integration on the Windows Phone 7 (or whatever they are calling the phone OS these days). From what I have heard they are phasing out the Zune name and as someone said above the Games for Windows Live.

I seriously doubt this means 360 games on Windows 8.

 

Oh boy, I can listen to kids mouthing off or not using something like teamspeak/ventrilo while I play games now. There's a reason I don't touch CSS anymore. If they're doing this, they better include a hotkey to mute people.

 

can we beat the dead hoarse just 1 more time?


at least once a week there is a thread on this....

 

haha I love Office Space.

 

Although I also think that 360 games on PC are never gonna be supported by microsoft (at least not for a long time), I can see a way.

The main problem to start with is that 360's have a completely different instruction set to PC's. The same problem happens with PCSX2 which is why you need a beastly CPU to be able to interpret the instructions on the fly. However if you were to use directcompute or some other GPGPU solution to do that while on a loading screen and then buffer it all to RAM (which PC's have stupid amounts of compared to consoles).

That way they wouldn't have to do it on the fly. Even the highest end i7 probably couldn't do it in real time, and using graphics acceleration isn't possible either since begin able to multi thread a constant stream of instuctions that well. However, by doing it in the loading screens, they could break down the code into small chunks to operate on simultaneously which is where computing on graphics chips really shines. Then the rest should all be pretty simple since 360's use DX9.

 

Xbox Live's Major Nelson Xbox LIVE and Windows 8

It's official, gaming on Windows 8 is a no-go

 

They should make the original Xbox games available though. There were a handful that I really liked. Rallisport Challenge, Crimson Skies (original on PC was better though imho), and Midtown Madness. I really wish they continued with the Midtown Madness games. Those were fun. Don't even mention Halo. Played through both Halo 1 and Halo 2 and were nothing more than generic shooters to me. Did have fun playing online a bit though.

 

Two thoughts:

1- emulation isn't necessary unless you are trying to reverse engineer hardware to run static software. if you have access to the software, you can use other methods to run that software on various platforms.

2- you're precompute loading screen system doesn't make any sense.

 

i like the idea. xbox live is cool. i wish it had steam integration.

 

Yeah, I think it's a great idea - it can help pull more people into PC gaming however I think Windows 8 is going to flop pretty hard. It's too soon for a new Windows OS. Companies across the world are just NOW adopting Windows 7

 

it would be interesting to see how they intergrate it with pc games

 

I **HATE** GFWL! I guess having Xbox Live Community as an option is a good idea. But forcing it to play a game is stupid IMHO. It takes so long to update, and offers me no noticeable benefit that I can discern.

 

I guess the beating the dead horse continues...

 

OK, if you're going to interpret the 360 instuctions in real time, it's gonna be pretty compute intensive, right?

What I was proposing was that in the loading screens, the main blocks of code could be broken up and worked on simultaniously by the stream processors in your graphics card, and so porting ot over to x86. You'd have to break it up like that otherwise GPGPU would actually be slower than simply doing the same thing on a normal processor (for it to be effective, you have to be able to break it up into many threads). By doing this, all the main game files are already in x86 when you run them. That way you take some of the load off the processor. Hopefully this explains things better.

My main gripe with windows 8 is the stupid home screen thing and how the desktop is considered an "app". I know I could simply make a startup script to go to desktop immediately or something along the lines, but it seems a little silly to enforce it when very few PC owners will actually use it. They should simply give you the option of either loading the home screen at startup or loading the desktop, unless there's something I've missed then they've yet to think of that. Their reasoning behind the desktop "app" thing is that since it doesn't load it untill you ask then it means it's not lying in the background and hogging RAM and CPU time if you're never going to use it (for tablet users I can believe this). However the opposite applies to PC users, who will rarely use the home screen wih it simply sitting there consuming resources.

Also, I'm not too sure how their "app" store is gonna play out. Hopefully they just keep it to the tablet sector. Anything they can try to offer on PC has most likely already been made and has a free version available.