Marcus Hass' [MS] Blog : Gaming

My Xbox is blabbing about me

mhass — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:37:00 GMT

I made a change to my blog site that now shows my Xbox Live Gamer Card instead of that goofy picture that I had, check it out:

Yes that is Johnny Drama from Entourage

I also see now that my Xbox is blogging about me, feel free to see what my smart lipped punk of an Xbox is saying about me. I have been playing more Xbox Live since Texas Holdem’ came out, somehow I feel less slimy about playing poker on Xbox 360 than I would on something like PokerStars.net. I have met some very cool people on Texas Holdem’ and the occasional 12 year old that won’t shut up (thank god for the mute button). I try and jump into tables where I know a few people because it helps with winning and with conversations.

Feel free to add me to your friend’s list, my gamertag is QuatoQuato.

Xbox Live Connectivity, NAT, Voice Problems, Windows Connect now explained

mhass — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 07:19:00 GMT

I just saw that Major Nelson posted links to an interview with Jim Barber, Xbox Connectivity Program Manager. Jim and I worked as consultants about 3 years ago to make sure Xbox Live would work with DSL/Cable providers as well as home gateway/routers manufacturers. This became the Xbox Live Compatible logo program. We built a lab that lets us test the most common routers with some special tools, and allows our partners world wide to test their routers over the Internet.

Jim continued and moved over to the product team and is busy working on connectivity for Xbox 360 and the Live Service that will accompany Xbox 360.

This is a pretty cool talk about what we do with the logo program, NAT, Voice, Windows Connect Now, AOL broadband, Wireless, and how you can make sure that you have a router that behaves well with gaming (not just Xbox).

Forza Sounds: The Answer

mhass — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:44:00 GMT

I wrote about this a little while ago, that I was intrigued at how good the real car sounds were in Forza. Having driven a few of the cars, they were spot-on. I got a hold of someone at Xbox/MS Game Studios and they gave me this response:

“Those are actual soundclips from the real cars. They borrowed cars,
used ones owned by team members, even sent out emails to folks on the
Xbox team looking for certain models, and recorded everything from door
slams to engine noise for each car.”

Cool!

Halo, the movie

mhass — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 20:30:00 GMT

Looks like Halo the movie is getting closer to becoming reality. I saw this blurb on MSNBC about the script being delivered by guys wearing Halo outfits.

Not quite sure how I feel about this, it might be pretty cool. Now, who to play Master Chief and Kortana (that little hologram of a computer)?

Woops, dad I didn't mean to post a picture of your Xbox 360 dev box on the Internet

mhass — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 01:37:00 GMT

Great, now I am going to have to have a talk with my son Mason. Don't take pictures of the stuff daddy works with at Microsoft.

I had to laugh, but you never think to tell your kids not to brag or show someone the cool things you get to work with before they are released. Certainly, this parent didn't.

I remember having the same issues when I was beta testing Halo 2. It was for Microsoft employees only, no kids. But every once and a while you would here the high pitch squeal of an 11 year old. We got warned, and the NDA was repeatedly shown that kids are not allowed to play with it.

What can you do? I know if I had one, Mason would be all over it when I wasn’t looking.

Forza Motorsports: How did they do that?

mhass — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 07:47:00 GMT

I have been playing Forza for the last couple weeks. I have to admit that this is the best racing game I have ever played. The modifying of cars, the classes is keeps you in, it is just a great all around game.

I am not as a hardcore Xbox player as I could be, but I really enjoy car games on Xbox. I prefer action and first player games on my PC (that is why I only made it about half way through Halo 2). BTW, did you see that Valve switched to EA for distribution? Man, from one bad distributor to another, please see my thoughts on EA in my previous blog.

What I need to find out pretty quick is how did they get the exhaust notes of the cars so close to the real thing? There are tons of cars in this game, surely they didn't go record every exhaust note? But, they are spot on! I can attest that the sounds of the Acura Integra, Lotus Elise, Dodge Viper ACR, and the Datsun 240z are the real deal as I have been around those cars enough to recognize them. On top of that, I love how if you upgrade the headers and exhaust it changes the sounds in the game.

I’m going to try and ask around at Microsoft Game Studios to see if someone can give me the scoop on how the sounds were put into the game. Hopefully, to be continued…

PS3 will NOT have router capability

mhass — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 22:08:00 GMT

Looks like the guys at Sony have given up their dream of dominating the router market (through proprietary means of course). The new PS3 will not have router functionality through its 3 gigabit ports.

I can see some advantages in terms of not having to count on random NAT traversal, but I can’t imagine having to configure DHCP, static routes or PPPoE setting in the console.

Xbox Live, no gamer left behind

mhass — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 23:14:00 GMT

I was fortunate enough about 3 years ago to work for the Xbox Live team, where I was a hired gun to work with Telco and router (home gateway) manufacturers to make sure their stuff worked with Xbox Live when we launched the Live service. Me and my good fiend Jim Barber (now an Xbox Live Program Manager) split up the work so that he took on the Telco's and I developed a router testing program.

My job was to work with the most popular home gateway manufacturers to ensure that their implementation of NAT worked well with Xbox Live. The developers at Xbox Live created some tools that let us simulate peer to peer games, UPNP, and IP simulations such as Port Unreachable commands. We also do 24 hour traffic tests to make sure that gateways don’t flip ports, etc. We built a lab that keeps growing, but has about 200 of the most popular routers in the US. We also expanded into other geographies as the Xbox Live service launched in those markets. The results of the work we did there is an Xbox Live Compatible Logo program, which you can check out at the Xbox Connectivity web site. I highly recommend that anyone buying a home gateway, regardless if you have Xbox Live make sure that your router passes our tests.

Jim moved out of consulting and is now with Xbox Live, continuing the work that we started and taking it to the next level with the launch of Xbox 360. Jim’s is usually overloaded with things to do, especially because the culture at Xbox Live is “no one gets left behind”. The mentality there is, if you have an Xbox Compatible gateway and you are using an Xbox Live Compatible provider, it should work out of the box. I have been in meetings were we have a 12 year old kid in Nowhere, Illinois having problems playing with his buddies on Xbox Live Compatible gear and lines, and we actually call him directly to troubleshoot or have the provider roll a truck.

BTW, when I talked to Jim this week he had to move to another room to talk because the fans in his latest Xbox 360 sounded like Jet Engines. He assured me the consumer models will be MUCH quieter.

I think that everyone at Xbox and Xbox Live are some of the most passionate people at Microsoft, and I can’t wait to see what they do with Xbox 360.

RANT: Unhappy with EA, BF2

mhass — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:41:00 GMT

I have really been looking forward to Battlefield 2 (BF2) since I played the Desert Combat mod on the original Battlefield 1942. I installed it, and played about a week of single player games, trying to get used to flying and driving various vehicles before I went and got my butt kicked online by a 12 year old girl. After adjusting my ISA firewall to allow the BF2/EA traffic, I finally got up the courage to go online and went to our own public, non ranked server and had a good time.

A couple days later, I wanted to play some single player and it wouldn't work. I tried to start the map, it would dim the screen, music would get lower and it would try to start the map but go right back to the map select screen. The only thing that changed on my system was the update to the latest version of iTunes. Yes, I have a couple iPods, I am training for a marathon and they are absolutely necessary.

I called EA and after spending an hour between hold times and their tier 1 support (have you rebooted?) I was escalated to tier 2. They spent more time looking at Direct X diagnostics, had me delete profiles, update drivers, uninstall/reinstall and basically said they had never seen the problem, contact our warranty group for a refund (transcript below).

Huh? Because you haven’t seen it you say give them their money back? I would think that any software company would want to get to the bottom of any issue if it is easily reproducible on a clean, stable system. I wrote them back (god forbid they ever pick up a phone and call me) and asked why they wouldn’t want to continue trouble shooting. No response yet.

Transcript:

Subject

ESCALATION.same issue

Discussion Thread

Response (Landon F.) 07/04/2005 10:29 AM

Hello,

I am very sorry, however unfortunately at this point there may not be a fix for this issue. It may be a conflict with a file, utility, program, or hardware setting that we are not able to find and/or check.

We do not issue refunds directly, however we can exchange your game for a sealed copy that you can return to the store from which it was purchased. You can contact our warranty department at (xxx) xxx-xxxx to exchange your disk for a new one.

Xbox 360, the world has no idea

mhass — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 19:43:00 GMT

The Xbox team this morning presented a first look into the Xbox 360 for Microsoft employees. Sitting here in the Denver office, watching it over web cast, I think I annoyed the people around me by saying out loud, "Wow", "Oh my god", and maybe a profanity or two.

I wish I could say more, but all I can say is that gamers and our competitors are in for a massive surprise.

PC Gaming Ideas into Xbox Live?

mhass — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 06:18:00 GMT

I used to be a big PC Gamer when I didn't have kids or when I only had kid. These days, I occasionally fire up Counter Strike or better yet Team Fortress Classic (if anyone wants to play), and hang out with my buddies from Team Pfeffer (www.teampfeffer.com). My buddies and me have been running Valve based game servers since 1999, and dabbled in other such as Battlefield 1942/Desert Combat, Unreal, etc.

One of our Pfeffer guys (Mr, Bobby Peru), has written a lot of our own plugins using the SDK from Valve. This allows us to do things like limit the firepower of the winning team, or run a profanity filter. There are a lot of options "out of the box" on Valve's dedicated server, but the cool things come from writing our own plugins, etc. The big pain in the butt is that Valve games aren't really federated, and you need to sort through logs in order to pull stats on player performance.

Xbox Live provides an outstanding infrastructure for game developers to leverage, but it is unfortunate that it can't be tweaked. Xbox Live centrally collects stats, and lets game developers expose that through leader boards and their own GUI, but the engine is provided as part of the Xbox Live service to the developer. This doesn't allow much flexibility to implement new metrics or people the host games "tweak" the game to the point where you can consider it a "mod".

Xbox and Xbox Live is locked down for a reason, to tightly control the rampant cheating prevalent in PC based games where the host and server are loaded on your own client or server. A lot of the cheating that occurs is because someone finds a way to hack a DLL or memory and see through walls or write a script to aim quickly. Since the hardware and software on Xbox Live is locked down pretty well, most of the cheating that occurs is a bug in the game software and can easily be shimmed by a content download.

But..... A service such as Valve's Steam is delivering most of the feature Xbox Live delivers now, plus some very cool features such as never having to ever go to a store to buy a Valve game. Steam let's you purchase software online, chat with your buddies (although this is the lease reliable portion of Steam), and most importantly annoys cheaters so much by a fancy mechanism that changes server code constantly. Write a hack? It's worthless in a few days.

So, Valve to me is delivering the best of both worlds, and I would love the Xbox Live team to take a deeper look into the really cool features that are delivered through Steam. I think that a content deliver mechanism like Steam would only help Xbox consumers get what they want right now, and throw in some DRM to keep those games from ending up back at the used Game Store and you have a way to ensure that everyone always buys a full copy. Not to mention, that when you deliver content via Steam, the game developer gets a lot more $$ because they don't have to use a publisher.

BTW, looking forward to BF2 this week.