Posts Tagged Microsoft
XBox 360 DRM Policies – Love it or Leave it
Posted by eric in Gaming, Hardware, Microsoft XNA on January 23, 2008
As I’m sure anyone with an XBox 360 knows, Microsoft had some stability issues with XBox LIVE over the Christmas Holidays and continued to have issues well into January. Even Major Nelson posted a message from Marc Whitten, General Manager of XBox LIVE discussing and apologizing for the issue.
During this period, users were unable to log into their XBox LIVE accounts. This combined with the DRM method which Microsoft uses on the XBox 360, users were unable to access Movies, TV Shows or In-Game Content they have downloaded to their console. This caused quite the uproar or people spouting off the usual consumer rights bullcrap. “I should be able to have full access to anything I buy!“, yelled the masses.
At first I joined the mob because I was frustrated that I wasn’t even able to continue my XNA development as even my own XNA created games for the 360 required me to be logged in before I could play them. It was both frustrating and laughable at the same time.
But as the debate and flames continued I started to think about what this really all means to me. Sure, I’m spending my own money for Microsoft Points on a virtual product tendered and stored by Microsoft. With this, you have to either accept that Microsoft is within its rights to protect this information in any way it sees fit, or seek out an alternative that has a license model that you agree with.
It all comes down to people complaining about the licensing model and how Microsoft chooses to enforce it. Older technologies had similar licensing models that were enforced differently. Even a standard DVD movie has it’s own licensing model:
- You’re only allowed to create X number of backups (DMCA)
- You can’t play it through another device (Macrovision)
- You can only play it in a the specified region (DVD Region Codes)
So limitations of use on purchased materials is nothing new to consumers, it’s just now that the product is completely virtual companies have to go to extra lengths to make sure that their property is protected and people can’t just go about stealing their product.
My point here is that Microsoft has made perfectly clear how they are handling the DRM and copy protection policies on the XBox 360. What every person in this position needs to weigh is What is this data worth to me?
If you feel that the XBox 360 content is worth the money and worth dealing with their DRM restrictions, then accept it and feel free to use the content as permitted by Microsoft. If you’re morraly against the restrictions or feel that they’re unfair, then thanks to a free market economy there are plenty of other options. Sony, Nintendo, PC Games, Mac Games, Arcade Games… outdoor sports?
“But Eric, I REALLY want to play Halo 3 and watch my movies no matter if I have internet access or not!“
Then perhaps an XBox 360 isn’t the device to be doing this on. I hear laptops have come a long way in the past few years 
2D WndrPong! using the Microsoft XNA Game Studio v2.0!
Posted by eric in C# Programming, Gaming, General Programming, Microsoft XNA on December 28, 2007
I decided to take some time this weekend to sit down and learn what I could about the latest release of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio. I started out with a book I purchased called Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creators Guide, which turned out to be a terrible book. Most of the examples in this book assume that you’re starting with a project the book provides on a Website, which already has hundreds of lines of code, custom shaders and everything built in… without even explaining how the code is working in the background.
After fumbling around with that for an hour or so an only succeeding in creating a small square on the screen, I headed over to Microsoft.com to see if any MSDN articles might exist to help me along in my ‘ground up’ learning of XNA. I was pleasantly surprised when I found a great article titled “Your First Game: Microsoft XNA Game Studio in 2D“. This was EXACTLY what I was looking for as it starts from the ground up, assuming the reader has never done game programming before, let alone 3D game programming. 
The example provided my Microsoft in this article is a simple 2D Texture of a cat that bounces around the window. I was so pleased with the ease of coding this, I thought to myself, “Heck, how hard could it be to recreate Pong?” So I set upon my task.
Several hours and many Coca-Cola bottles later I had not only my first XNA game running in Windows, but after purchasing the XNA Creators Club annual subscription from the XBox Live! marketplace for $99, I had it running on my XBox 360 as well I decided to take a little extra time and add a debug information screen as well as a small welcome screen
Controls (PC):
Up/Down for Player 1 Paddle (Left): Q/A
Up/Down for Player 2 Paddle (Right): Up Arrow/Down Arrow
Debug Information: F1
Controls (XBox 360):
Up/Down for Player 1 Paddle (Left): Left Thumbstick on Player 1 Remote
Up/Down for Player 2 Paddle (Right): Left Thumbstick on Player 2 Remote
I did run into a couple of ‘gotchas!’ while working with Game Studio. The major one I had trouble with was when you’re developing for the XBox 360 you have to account for overscan on the Television and have your game render within the ‘Safe Area‘. I noticed that when I was playing my Pong! game on my LCD TV at 720p, the edges of the game were cut off and it looked like it was stretched past the borders of my TV. After asking the fine folks in #XNA on IRC about this issue, they were able to help me out. Now I have my Pong! game account for this by setting up an XBox 360 macro which pads the edges of the play area by 50 pixels.
I’m including the Source Code for my version of Pong! which I’ve titled, “2D WndrPong!”. You can work in XNA Game Studio for free using Visual C# 2005 Express Edition along with XNA Game Studio 2.0 To deploy your games to an XBox 360, you must pair your XBox with your PC (using the “XNA Game Studio Device Center” tool) then you must purchase an XNA Creators Club Membership from the XBox 360 Marketplace. I believe the prices are $49.99 for 3 Months, $99.99 for a year. I opted for the entire year since I know it’s going to take me some time to learn
Baby Steps
2D WndrPong! Source Code – Download (36k)
World in Conflict is really cool.. if it didn’t crash all the god damned time!!!
Posted by eric in Gaming, General Software, Windows Vista on October 16, 2007
I recently purchased World in Conflict hoping that it would live up to the 9.3 rating that IGN gave it in the review. I recently had to go back and re-read the review hoping there was some nugget of information in there that would perhaps shed some light on how to run this game for more than 5 minutes without it crashing!!
First off, for those of you coming in from a search engine or wherever else, I am highly competent with computers. I’ve been a programmer for over 10 years and I do electrical engineering and small circuit projects as a hobby. My system specs are:
- Dell Dimension 9200
- Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 (2.13Ghz, 2MB L2)
- 4GB DDR2-800 Memory (Crucial)
- nVidia GeForce8 8800GTX 768MB
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
So let’s just go ahead and throw out the “zomg, noob” and “your system is teh suck, upgrade” comments right now.
I’m currently running the latest WHQL nVidia Graphics Driver (163.69) and have updated World in Conflict with the latest 1.001 patch.
When launching World of Conflict, there aren’t any issues with the opening videos. Those all play through to completion without issue. As soon as a rendered screen comes up (Main Menu, Campaign, Multi-Player, etc., etc.), that’s when the proverbial stability dice are rolled. Sometimes I get a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s really random when World of Conflict decides to crash.
I find that when I have DirectX10 rendering mode enabled, windows is able to recover from the error with “Your video drivers have stopped responding and the device has recovered.” message which pops up in the system tray. World in Conflict then says it’s “Reloading Resources” which takes usually 10 seconds when in the Main Menu but takes -for ever- while in game.
However, when DirectX9 rendering is enabled, the game just crashes out and generates a standard Windows application crash report. So it seems the issue is clearly a driver issue.
I’m currently in the process of downloading the latest beta Graphics Driver from nVidia (163.75), but I don’t hold up much hope for them. I read the release notes for this version and nowhere in the documentation is World in Conflict mentioned as a ‘fixed game’.
I’ll report back with my findings here. Please, if you’ve experienced the issue, let me know what’s happening to you and we can compare notes. Try and figure out perhaps if it’s a settings issue.
UPDATE: So, I upgraded to the latest nVidia Graphics Drivers (163.75) and rebooted my PC. I started up World in Conflict in DirectX9 mode and it seemed to run fine. I started the first campaign and it played for about 5 minutes. I then received a “Out of Memory” error. A window then informed me that I was out of memory and would need to close some programs in order to run World of Conflict. What the crap?!
I don’t have the display settings in the game cranked through the roof, or beyond a reasonable point for my hardware. 4xAA, 8xAF at 1680×1050. You’d think an 8800GTX could handle it??
I’m going to fiddle with the settings some more and figure out what’s causing World in Conflict to gobble up memory and system resources.
UPDATE 2: It seems I’ve found the right mix of updates, fixes and whatnot to finally get World in Conflict running stable. I now have the following installed and the game seems stable after playing through the first mission in campaign in DirectX10 mode:
- World in Conflict 1.001 Patch
- nVidia Graphics Driver v163.75 Beta
- Microsoft Vista Patch KB940105
I was actually lead to the KB940105 patch while researching the “Out of Memory” error. To sum up the issue, here’s a blurb from the Knowledge Base article:
“A modern graphics processing unit (GPU) can have 512 MB or more of video memory. Applications that try to take advantage of such large amounts of video memory can use a large proportion of their virtual address space for an in-memory copy of their video resources. On 32-bit systems, such applications may consume all the available virtual address space.”
and also:
“To address this problem, Microsoft is changing the way that the video memory manager maintains the content of video memory resources. This change is being made so that a permanent virtual address range does not have to be used for each virtualized allocation. With the new approach, only allocations that are created as “lockable” consume space in the virtual address space of the application. Allocations that are not created as “lockable” do not consume space. This approach significantly reduces the virtual address space that is used. Therefore, the application can run on large video memory configurations without reaching the limits.”
So basically the issue was a combination of Video Driver issues and then the way Windows Vista handles memory addressing for Video Cards with large amounts of Video Memory in 32-bit mode. Although the issue could show itself in 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, it seems more likely to show itself on the 32-bit versions due to the limitations in addressable memory.
I hope this is able to help anyone else running World of Conflict in Windows Vista resolve their issues!
Cheers!
Get Connected
