heyya, to my previous knowledge I didnt think you could use Xbox live in creators games. And assumed all examples of it were for the windows platform.

until i read this

Quote: Wikipedia on XNA

  XNA Game Studio 2.0 features the ability to be used with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 (including the free Visual C# 2005 Express Edition), a networking API using Xbox Live on both Windows and Xbox 360 and better device handling.

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so we can make say leader boards.. or online coop games? would we have to buy server space to hold player lists / highscore lists? or is MS nice enough to provide methods to do it all through their servers?

thanks, Dead.Rabit

You'd have to make your own on both platforms. On the 360 you get 150MB of space so can store the lists with your game, create the file the first time a player plays. On the PC I would suggest tying into a web service so you can do universal lists.

To clarify a bit on Jim's point, on the Xbox 360 you can make your own leaderboards, but they will not be online and global like most Xbox and XBLA games. You might be able to fake them by running some background networking during main menus and things to sync up leaderboards, but it will never be truly global. You do not get to access outside websites or servers from the Xbox and this is, in fact, a restriction applied to XBLA and retail games as well (the MMOs obviously worked something out with Microsoft, but by and large the reason Xbox LIVE is so secure is because Microsoft doesn't allow you to connect to any old server).

Also, the 150MB is the deployed limit through XBLCG. I don't believe that includes game save data, though I'd love to hear a clarification on that.

judging from how the game profiles and game lists are stored seporately on the Xbox hard drive you can conclude that save files are stored outside of the cc game file. and therefor shouldnt count towards the 150 MB limit. however there could be a size limitation on savegame file size.

if online leaderboards are out of the question. what about coop and online. can you access lists of all online players or all online players in the friend list with some form of sockets API?

if so the leaderlist wouldnt be permenantly up to date but you could make some form of DHT network to run in the background to pass around the data. the normal cheating issue shouldnt be a problem given the security that the xbox gives.

Dead.Rabit

*bump*

heyya its been over a week so i guess the bump is ok... just wanna re-iterate my questions

1) with reguard to xbox live what/who can you connect too. (i.e. servers? all online xbox live players currently playing?)

2) what info can you draw from these. (i.e. can you get a list of online friends?)

3) is it your average "sockets" style in terms of code?

4) from the above can you make online coop/ mmo/ leaderboards/ create-share-play games by implimenting DHT?

thanks... and sorry if bumping is a complete taboo here... most forums i use its ok after 3 days to a week if you feel your question is unanswered...

thanks

D.R

DeadRabit:

1) with reguard to xbox live what/who can you connect too. (i.e. servers? all online xbox live players currently playing?)

You create a match and play. You can host a match or search for matches. You do not get to just randomly connect to arbitrary servers.

2) what info can you draw from these. (i.e. can you get a list of online friends?)

I believe the friends list is exposed through the Gamer APIs, sure.

3) is it your average "sockets" style in terms of code?

Much higher level than plain old sockets.

4) from the above can you make online coop/ mmo/ leaderboards/ create-share-play games by implimenting DHT?

Not sure what DHT is, but here's my thoughts on the rest:

- coop - yes
- mmo - not unless your definition of massive includes a game capped at 31 players
- leaderboards - as mentioned above you can do local or try some sort of background networking trick (keeping in mind an Xbox can only be connected to a single network session at a time).
- create-share-play - I guess you mean user generated content. Sure, you can do that. Player creates it, two players join a session together, the game shares the data. Not really hard to do.

DHT is how torrents work, was drawn from napster and kazaa and other filesharing things. i forget the acronym however...

normally works on top of a sockets api. iirc... anyway i'd say its probably the best way to share a leaderboard and for create-share-play if it works... =]

sorry just realised that I missed a post before writing the bump and already had some of the answers =p.... sorry =]

D.R

There is no way to do anything with basic sockets. You wouldn't get to run anything as a true background process (in the sense of having it run while the user plays a different game) and you can't connect to arbitrary servers. So the service could only run as a background during your game and since Xbox LIVE only allows your box to be connected to one network session, it means the process cannot run if the user is playing over LIVE in your game. It's all very hard to do and very hard to make work well. Your system could only connect 31 players max which, at that rate, would take a long time to aggregate those leaderboards and content across all the gamers.

It doesn't need to be perfect, though. Just aggregating the leaderboards that any other player has that you play in a session is a great start. The main point is to have other people show up, and be able to compare.