Xbox 360: List of Features

Interface/Functionality

• The console can be switched on and off wirelessly using the Media Remote control or the wireless game controller.
• You will definitely need a hard disk to play Xbox 1 games.
• Wherever you are - whether it\'s a game, film or piece of music - you can pull up the Guide (remember it from GDC?), which is a bit like a universal Start Menu, that allows you to look for friends, adjust playback and options, and even sort through people you\'ve played against recently - listing them by reputation or what-have-you.
• The pages of the Xbox 360 user interface are called "blades".
• The Live blade is the default if you have a Live account, and shows you your gamer-card including a selected image (or photograph), your gamertag, the number of games you\'ve played, your Gamerscore (more on that in a second), your achievements and your reputation.
• More on Gamerscore - each Xbox 360 game gives out certain points based on accomplishments, and as well as being able to view a list of your individual achievements ("Finished level 10," etc) you are also given a total based on this. Xbox 1 games will not contribute to these stats.
• The Game blade allows you to manage stuff like save-games, as well as accessing demos and trailers (standard and high-definition versions).
• The System blade offers greater control over your individual settings. You can specify, for example, that you prefer to invert the right analogue stick camera control and this will then be picked up on in any game you play.
• Likewise, the System blade allows greater control over family settings. Microsoft thinks this is very important, Satchell said, and will therefore allow all manner of controls at a system or individual profile level. You can choose to allow specific people or the whole system access to certain games, DVDs (based on ratings - apparently "99 per cent" of DVDs now supply that information direct to the console), and areas of Live. Online, you can opt to ban certain friends, voice messaging, video messaging (if the camera is available), downloadables or just control online play.
• If you yank the hard disk off the top of the Xbox 360 when it\'s in the middle of doing something, it will not corrupt it beyond repair or damage the File Allocation Table or anything like that - the hard disk uses a "transaction model" so that if you interrupt a transfer the data simply isn\'t present and the space is presumably reallocated when you next save data to it.
• The "ring of light" around the power button highlights which wireless controller is being used, highlighting player one\'s activity in the top-left quadrant. When the console is laid on its side, it senses this and starts using the top-left quadrant as you see it with the console laid flat. What\'s more, the ring of light motif is spread throughout the Xbox 360 interface, so you can see which player pulled up the "Guide" page as you\'re watching a film or playing a game and, in the words of Satchell, "slap him".
• Cross-platform development between Windows and Xbox is being actively pursued - in the future, Microsoft hopes that people will be able to play games against each other using either platform.
• On the issue of cooling - Satchell said he thought the system had three fans (he said he wasn\'t sure but thought it was three, so we\'d open to correction on that one), and we couldn\'t hear them at all as he spoke. When you play a DVD, it powers down to just one fan. It\'s "a lot" better than the "wind tunnel" alpha kits, he said.

Xbox Live

• Transferring your Xbox Live account to Xbox 360 will be part of the initial set-up procedure when you first plug in your console, and existing users have "Gold" membership.

People buying the Xbox 360 £279.99 package - the higher-end one - get a 30-day free trial of Gold membership on Xbox Live. Actual pricing has yet to be announced - although some would beg to differ.

• Your "reputation" stat is based on your activities online. Rather like an eBay rating, people who have encountered you can rate you positively or negatively, and this is reflected in your reputation.
• Xbox Live will allow you to play in various Zones - there will be causal, pro, family, and underground (where "anything goes") and perhaps more - and these will allow you to go for whatever kind of experience you like.
• Marketplace is also accessible through the Live blade. As you know, this is where you can download premium content and, in the future, content created by users and sold to other users via a micro-payment system. Marketplace does not require you to insert individual game discs to see content available for those games.

Multimedia

• DVDs can be played even if you don\'t have the remote control, unlike Xbox 1.
• DVDs will play back in progressive-scan, with the Xbox 360 up-sampling to prog-scan in the case of DVDs that don\'t support it.

When ripping music to the hard drive, album information is now stored on the HDD, with a huge amount there by default and more available from an online source - presumably something like CDDB, which will be familiar to people who rip their own CDs already.

• The Jeff Minter-created visualisation tool for music accepts input from all control pads and the video camera, allowing you to create various effects on-screen.
• iPods are detected by default, as are PSPs, and by our watch it took about 2 or 3 seconds for the Xbox 360 to notice they were there. With an iPod plugged in you can play music direct through the Dashboard software, with visualisations, or you can play a slideshow of photographs.
• For now, you can play music and access photographs on the PSP, but you can\'t do video yet. That may happen, but Satchell joked that Sony wasn\'t exactly giving them a helping hand there.

Interestingly, you can actually have that slideshow draw photographs from another external device, so - as in our demo - you could play music from an iPod while using a slideshow of photos from a PlayStation Portable simultaneously.

• All of these devices will be supported by default, and any firmware updates that are necessary - Microsoft is hoping for very few - can be made available via Live.
• You can also plug in a laptop or PC (or not plug it in - if you\'re using wireless networking) and play content direct from that. This is through Windows Media Player Extender, the software for which is pre-installed on the Xbox 360. In our example, Satchell first streamed a high-definition Project Gotham Racing 3 trailer, and then drew upon a high-definition recording of Star Wars: Episode II apparently captured on his home TV.

Official Peripherals

• RGB video output will only be possible if you purchase the £17.99 cable separately - regardless of whether you paid £209.99 or £279.99 for your Xbox 360 console.
• Video cables from Xbox 1 will not work with Xbox 360.
• The wireless networking adapter plugs into the USB 2.0 port on the back of the console and is "like a small pack of cigarettes" in terms of size.
• The camera is a separate peripheral that will plug into one of the USB 2.0 slots and will be released next year - date TBC.
• While the Media Remote will be bundled with Xbox 360\'s £279.99 offering, this will apparently only be for a limited time based on available units. We\'ll get more details on that when we can.
• You can plug in a keyboard but this is for text input only - including in massively-multiplayer games. You can\'t use it to play games and that was a design choice.
• If a third-party peripheral manufacturer or publisher wanted to let more than four players play on one game, Microsoft would be happy to help them create a peripheral to do that.

Offline Content

• Microsoft also plans to have kiosks available - presumably in game stores and other public locations - where you can download content. Whether this will be to the detachable hard

disk itself or a memory card is a detail that wasn\'t clarified.

Link

Lots of good stuff there.  I like the sound of the Guide, or Xbox 360 interface.  Lots of control, and it sounds very user friendly.  Gamescore, what a simple but cool feature.

This is my absolute favorite feature:  "The System blade offers greater control over your individual settings. You can specify, for example, that you prefer to invert the right analogue stick camera control and this will then be picked up on in any game you play." >>>Why wasn\'t this thought of before?  Neat!

"For now, you can play music and access photographs on the PSP, but you can\'t do video yet. That may happen, but Satchell joked that Sony wasn\'t exactly giving them a helping hand there.
Interestingly, you can actually have that slideshow draw photographs from another external device, so - as in our demo - you could play music from an iPod while using a slideshow of photos from a PlayStation Portable simultaneously."  >>>Now that would make the UMDs worth purchasing, being able to watch them on the go and on the TV.  I assume the PS3 will have this feature.

"You can also plug in a laptop or PC (or not plug it in - if you\'re using wireless networking) and play content direct from that. This is through Windows Media Player Extender, the software for which is pre-installed on the Xbox 360. In our example, Satchell first streamed a high-definition Project Gotham Racing 3 trailer, and then drew upon a high-definition recording of Star Wars: Episode II apparently captured on his home TV.">>>Play content...does that include playing games?

You will definitely need a hard disk to play Xbox 1 games.

meh

[Paul2]

If you yank the hard disk off the top of the Xbox 360 when it\'s in the middle of doing something, it will not corrupt it beyond repair or damage the File Allocation Table or anything like that - the hard disk uses a "transaction model" so that if you interrupt a transfer the data simply isn\'t present and the space is presumably reallocated when you next save data to it.

cool.  I like that but I don\'t like paying more for the HDD.

Originally posted by mm
meh

I forgot how avid a fan you are of the Xbox and all its games.  I\'m sure you\'ll manage to get together the extra money so you can continue playing Halo for the next few years.  Worry not, mm.

you\'re right
only reason to buy it, halo 3

Originally posted by mm
you\'re right
only reason to buy it, halo 3

Right about what, that there\'s no need for you to worry?  

Halo 3 wasn\'t in the context of my post, not even a little bit.  Now, if you had said that Halo or Halo 2 were the only reasons to consider backwards compatability then you\'d make some sense.

I\'m sure you\'ll manage to get together the extra money so you can continue playing Halo for the next few years. Worry not, mm.

I guarantee he will own a 360 premium well before I ever do, and that says alot.

Originally posted by Paul2
cool.  I like that but I don\'t like paying more for the HDD.

That\'s why they got the core version Paul for guys like you and me.

The iPod hookup sounds great.  Who needs to rip songs to the Xbox when you can just have a videogame playlist on your ipod and select it as your soundtrack?

Surprised the PSP even works with it.  Glad to see they aren\'t being so close-minded this time around.  Probably trying to cater to the mod crowd a lil.

A more detailed article on the features of the Xbox 360...

Link

Here are some highlights:

However, he was eager to differentiate between the Dashboard functionality, which runs on boot-up as a separate application, like on Xbox, and the Xbox 360 Guide. In the Dashboard, players who have not booted a game can alter master audio and video configuration, manage their storage devices (such as hard disc and memory unit), adjust peripherals such as the Xbox 360 camera, which was indicated as arriving in 2006, and also keep a master player profile with basic, overarching options - Vrignaud commented further on this later in the lecture.

In contrast, the Xbox 360 Guide program runs concurrently with all games, and a player can press the \'Guide\' button in the center of his Xbox 360 gamepad at any time. The guide will then slide in from the left. Whereas the Dashboard covers more general options, the Guide covers player sign-in and sign-out to Xbox Live, viewing of a player\'s friends list, including gamercards, achievements, a chance to see a recent players list, incorporating feedback and reviews, and a message center which has game invites and friend requests. It also handles system notifications for events such as controller removal, music playback, storage device enumeration, access to the top menu for the downloadable content Marketplace, the ability to 1:1 voice chat to anyone on your friends list, access to a virtual keyboard, and finally, deals with system-specific error messages.

As well as these more general options, one of the most interesting elements of the Xbox 360 player profile is its title-specific data, which is created and managed by an individual game, and includes achievements, in which the game decides what in-game elements are worth rewarding, as well as points allocated for completing each achievement. These achievements will be viewable on the player\'s own machine, but also over Xbox Live and on the Web, and those playing will be able to compare achievements with their friends.

There will be a minimum of 5 \'achievements\' per game title, set by the creators of that game, but if desired, the developer can set up to 50 achievements. Since a gamer will have an overall cumulative score over all the games that he plays, each achievement can have a score associated with it, up to a total of 1,000 points for the game. He told attendees that Xbox 360 developers can also hold back points from the 1,000 total if they want to associate some with downloadable content or updates, but those points must be tied to accomplishments within the updates - it\'s not possible to simply give people points for buying extra content! Developers will use part of a special XLAST (Xbox Authoring and Submissions Tool) program to define the achievements and make sure the right achievement and point flags are passed to Microsoft.

...

Finally, Vrignaud explained the broad, optional settings attached to a gamer profile which all games will monitor. These include difficulty levels, Y-axis inversion setting, preferred car transmission type (automatic or manual), and a handful of other extremely common game settings. There is then a requirement that game, on its first boot, checks those optional settings, so if the player always uses FPSes with inverted controls, he will never have to reset it in individual game cases - a welcome innovation for many.

An additional help inter-related to this is the fact that, when playing against other gamers on Xbox Live for the 360, players will be able to self-rate themselves as one of four main user types, including \'Competitive\' and \'Social\', so even when picking random opponents, Xbox 360 Live will be able to choose from other gamers who want broadly similar types of foes, from the hardcore to the casual. In all multiplayer games, there will be 4 required modes that branch out from this, as follows: Quick: profile match; Quick: ranked match; Optimatch: profile match; Optimatch: ranked match. Obviously, the Optimatch-related profiles will take advantage of this matching by \'play style\'.

Toward the end of his talk, Vrignaud spoke a little on Microsoft\'s concept of \'rich presence\' for the Xbox 360, in terms of the player\'s status being displayed to everyone on the Xbox Live network. Obviously, IM software can have a number of complex states apart from a user simply being offline and online, and Microsoft is keen to give the idea that all players are part of a living, breathing network by broadcasting more information on their whereabouts.

To this end, obvious information about the current/last-known status of player will be available to all and displayed on friends list, notifications, and on the Xbox.com website. Some portions of this will be automatically maintained by Microsoft, including online status, current game being played, and the time that the user was last seen playing. However, some portions require work in-game by developers, with strings to be defined by the game creators in the XLAST tool.

This is particularly interesting because even single-player games may feed information on the state of play up to the network, should they desire (and if the Xbox 360\'s Ethernet connection is plugged in). So, with 2 lines of 22 characters each, developers can present a succinct state of the game to external sources - the example given was for a baseball game: \'Red vs. Cubs, 5-3, Bottom 8th\'.

Vrignaud suggested that this could become a great advertisement for the game, and urged developers to consider details including level names, creature names, special mode names and other teasers to get other players intrigued about the game that their friend was playing.

Next, the lecture discussed Marketplace, which is essentially the player\'s download shop and manager for additional content. Vrignaud explained that, when people started selling content for the first version of the Xbox, it was easy to do simply using a program called Downloader, but didn\'t present much of a sophisticated shopfront, and the low scale and other difficulties meant games couldn\'t really charge much under $5 for new content.

However, the Xbox 360 Marketplace is clearly designed to deal with massive amount of items, and those that cost much less than $5. It was explained that an Xbox 360 game can determine the total number of content items. You see just that game\'s marketplace if you enter it from that particular game - so there won\'t be a mass of extraneous things to buy unrelated to the title you\'re currently playing. But if you enter the Marketplace from the Xbox 360 Dashboard, you can see demos, trailers, downloadable Arcade titles, and the full gamut of shops with digital content to purchase.

Touching on Xbox 360 storage, it was pointed out that the storage medium is abstracted, so games will need to chose between multiple resources, but it shouldn\'t necessarily presume what that resource is. Nestled in here was perhaps a hint that Microsoft may eventually have a network-resident Xbox Live storage unit to store Xbox 360-related data, but all that is currently being said is that the system "automatically handles future devices".

In addition, it was pointed out that the Xbox 360 music player allows players to choose their own music, effectively a \'free\' jukebox for all games, and supporting the music player is compulsory. Game developers will need to flag background music with XACT or XAudio, and it will be removed and replaced with music stored elsewhere if gamers choose that option. Vrignaud acknowledged that many soundtracks are extremely game-specific, but indicated that Microsoft wanted to give gamers choice - he pointed out that they could turn down the volume and play music from another audio source if they wanted to anyhow, and this was a more elegant solution.

And some sexy faceplates to wrap this up...



All this stuff sounds really good; the extensive list of Xbox Live features and the fact that all games will be Live aware makes me genuinely interested in the service.  I hope developers take advantage of it and customers get hooked on it.

you\'re right
only reason to buy it, halo 3

Yea, I put money down on it. Already a small fortune and I\'m only half way there, not even.

But there\'s no reason to. I\'m getting Perfect Dark just because, not because I want it...

Shitty thing is, I don\'t like Halo, heh.

-Dan

Originally posted by THX
The iPod hookup sounds great.  Who needs to rip songs to the Xbox when you can just have a videogame playlist on your ipod and select it as your soundtrack?

People who don\'t have an iPod.  

Surprised the PSP even works with it.  Glad to see they aren\'t being so close-minded this time around.  Probably trying to cater to the mod crowd a lil.

Yeah, I\'ve read that Sony wasn\'t too thrilled about this.  I\'m sure the PS3 will have greater functionality with the PSP than the 360 ever will, but it\'s a nice bonus.

Originally posted by Eiksirf
Yea, I put money down on it. Already a small fortune and I\'m only half way there, not even.

But there\'s no reason to. I\'m getting Perfect Dark just because, not because I want it...

Shitty thing is, I don\'t like Halo, heh.

-Dan

I can\'t help but ask, why are you buying an Xbox 360?

came reason i am
cause he\'s a gamer

..and there\'s sure to be some sleeper titles tho every now and then

[Evi]

People who don\'t have an iPod.

Like me...but I\'ll probably be buying something that doesn\'t have a sh^tty battery life.

Originally posted by EviscerationX
Like me...but I\'ll probably be buying something that doesn\'t have a sh^tty battery life.

If you use yours as much as me I\'ll be surprised, but I use it both going to and from work, and while working.  Have yet to run out of juice.  But let\'s not make this another anti-ipod discussion.

Those faceplates sitting next to the white one make the stock look like crap.  Also hate the look of the new dashboard.  Xbox 1\'s dash looks cooler.