[Official] New Xbox Experience (or Fall 2008 Update)

By BajiRav
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Veteran

Smashing Pumpkin

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Often getting status code errors on marketplace content and just game categories in general - but that's to be expected.

My Xbox hung on the Friends ina party-ma-jig too.

I expect these problems will be ironed out soon. I'm absolutely lovin' NXE!

Grand Master

+John. Subscriber¹

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  • Subscriber¹
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Often getting status code errors on marketplace content and just game categories in general - but that's to be expected.

My Xbox hung on the Friends ina party-ma-jig too.

I expect these problems will be ironed out soon. I'm absolutely lovin' NXE!

As am I, it's pretty damned good.

Grand Master

Kushan

Posted
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Trumpet blowing time!

Actually it makes a lot of sense that certain games will load slower off of the hard drive. Think about it, a game like Halo is almost certain to cache stuff to the hard drive as it is, so when it comes to loading screens, it can load some stuff from the hard drive and other stuff from the DVD at the same time. However, if you install the whole game to the Hard Drive, it has to load the same cached stuff AND the stuff from the DVD, which is ultimately going to take longer. I believe that's what Microsoft was referring to when they said that the HDD installs wouldn't make much difference to some games that were already "optimised" or something.

Has anyone tried playing Halo 3 without a hard drive and timing the loading screens then?

The Xbox 360 HDD has a section for games to use called the utility partition. Games can use this section for whatever they want to; Halo 3 uses the utility partition to cache maps as they will load faster off the HDD than off the DVD. As a side note, the utility partition can be deleted when other games are played. This is why maps can take longer to load when you play another game in between various Halo 3 sessions. (As was the case with Halo 1 and Halo 2.)

So when Halo 3 runs, if a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition (on the HDD). Think of it as an on demand install of Halo 3 to some scratch space on the HDD. Halo 3 doesn?t actually know where it?s running from, so it always assumes it?s running from a DVD. This is an unfortunate consequence of new features (namely, install to HDD) being added to the Xbox 360 after Halo 3 shipped. And as a result, it means that even if Halo 3 is already installed to the HDD, it will still copy maps to the utility partition.

So then the real question is why is copying from HDD to HDD slower than copying from DVD to HDD? In the first case, you are reading from one I/O device (HDD) and writing to the same I/O device (HDD). In the second case, you are reading from one I/O device (DVD) and writing to a different I/O device (HDD). In the first case, because we are reading and writing to the same device, the total copy time is the amount of time it takes to read the map plus the time it takes to write the map. Ultimately this is because for the HDD, you read and write through the same mechanism, i.e., the hard drive read/write head, and those reads and writes cannot occur simultaneously through a single mechanism. (If they could, it would be awesome, and I wouldn?t have to document any of this. Unfortunately, it?s not easy to do for other reasons.) For the second case, because we are reading and writing from different devices, the total copy time is the larger of the total time to read the map and the total time to write the map. This is because we can read from one device (DVD) at the same time we are writing to another device (HDD). There is some overhead because you can?t start writing data until you read it, but it is dwarfed by the time to copy a map. (About 128k vs. 500 MB or a ratio of 4000:1.)

Source: http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?ty...s&cid=16252

Take THAT, non-believers ;P

Grand Master

Kushan

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I dare say the vast majority of games will certainly benefit from it, there will always be a few exceptions (I believe Farcry 2 is one such exception) for the reason outlined above. Only one way to find out, really.

Hopefully, future games that do the disk-caching stuff will be "NXE-aware" and can tell when they've been installed or not.

Grand Master

Ricardo Gil

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So my annoyance is, if someone logs in to live, and you have the toast saying "sethos is online" for example, pressing the guide button is no longer conext sensitive, and it just opens the guide instead of opening Sethos Profile. Same for when you login and it says 16 friends online, it does not take you to your friends list.

Will try it later when I get an achievement to see if that works still.

Achievements and messages are context sensitive atm.

Grand Master

LightIdea

Posted
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Ahh ok then, that's a shame, for a while (For me) it looked like the ripples were changing based on what I was doing.

Try it though, because I may be wrong. The ripples were there when I had the leaked version of the NXE and I was offline.

I can't wait until they bring out some awesome looking 2.0 theme :D

Proficient

Apple-a-Day

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Unsure what to think yet....

The avitars seem to be taking over everything these days....

I do find it laggy when trying to connect to online data though.... much more so then before.

Hope this is just due to the strain on the live servers at the time.

Will have to play more but still prefer the old blades just for the comfort level

I have no need for netix... really dont care about making a "Mini Me"

But the loading game on the drive I say is a nice feature.

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