Sony Is the Only Remaining Obstacle To PS4-Xbox Cross-Play (kotaku.com) 57
In March, Microsoft announced native support for cross-platform play between Xbox One and Windows 10. At the time, the company also added that this support could be extended to "other console and PC networks," something which led people to wonder if truly cross-platform gaming, on any platform, was next. When asked, Sony did say that it was open to the idea. "PlayStation has been supporting cross-platform play between PC on several software titles starting with Final Fantasy 11 on PS2 and PC back in 2002. We would be happy to have the conversation with any publishers or developers who are interested in cross-platform play." But since then, it appears that Sony has had a change of heart, which has resulted in developers asking the company for an update. Kotaku reports: In recent days, the developers behind Rocket League and The Witcher 3 have both called for Sony to break down the walls separating PlayStation Network and Xbox Live and allow cross-platform multiplayer. What's changed in the last few days are developers making an open call for Sony to make good on having that conversation with publishers and developers. In an interview with IGN, Psyonix president Jeremy Dunham explained how the Rocket League developer had already taken care of the technical side of things. "We're literally at the point where all we need is the go-ahead on the Sony side," said Dunham, "and we can, in less than a business day, turn it on and have it up and working no problem. It'd literally take a few hours to propagate throughout the whole world, so really we're just waiting on the permission to do so." In another statement to IGN, CD Projekt RED CEO Marcin Iwinski supported Psyonix.
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Re:Leader at the top is probably clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason that MS came up with this idea, and its not because they're such great guys. Its because this benefits the weaker player and they're that guy this time. The advantage of the dominate position is people will buy games for your system first because these systems are multiplayer and other players are part of the value. Less players on the less popular console, less valuable. I wouldn't accuse the Sony execs of not being dumb enough to take the bait, but I think they're greedy enough they won't.
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Last generation, Sony was pushing for it and MS were balking. Because of exactly what you said. The higher selling system doesn't see any need for it.
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Last generation, Sony was pushing for it and MS were balking. Because of exactly what you said. The higher selling system doesn't see any need for it.
The funny part of this statement is the XB360 outsold the PS3 ~2:1 in the first few years. The later years devs caught on that the PS3 was a very capable machine and it eventually caught up to (or depending on source, outsold) the XB360. The last generation wasn't just the little guy asking for a part of the big guys multiplayer fun to try to push more hardware.
First Past the Post (Score:2)
Like so many things, this is a general principle of why change is hard. Take electoral reform. The weaker party always wants electoral reform because they have trouble getting elected in the current system. However the folks that more less have the ability to make the change just used said system to get elected so why would it be in their best interest to change anything? Hence we've been stuck with first past the post electoral system for so long. Reverse the situation, and now the once weaker party will h
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Not to mention how Microsoft has treated its past business "partners".
Weak? (Score:1)
I don't think it's because they're weak, but more because they already control two platforms (both PC and XBox) so can benefit from sales and play on both.
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Potential PS4 buyers may have Xbox One and/or PC friends and still want to play with their friends.
Let's say you have four friends with Xbox One and twelve friends with PCs. Right now, with Sony's decision, buying a PS4 means you're not being to play your friends. To do that you must buy either Xbox One or PC. You're not going to force your 16 friends to buy a PS4.
And that's how it benefits Sony: staying a valid buying option.
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Microsoft is hoping its negative PR campaign will spur Sony to give its one-third of console gamers access to the two-thirds of
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PS4 sales may exceed Xbox One sales but that depends heavily on the region and most of all it depends on your friends.
I have four friends with an Xbox One and one of them also has a PS4. I don't know anyone who only has a PS4.
Re:Leader at the top is probably clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
Common Ground (Score:2)
This destroys what consoles gave, common ground.
No longer will everyone playing a single game be running the same hardware. With these cross-platform features, consumers will be looking at which platform provides more frag than lag.
Sony has historically provided better hardware, but Microsoft has provided a better network.
Decisions, decisions...
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You ISP / network is driving the lag not ps or xbox.
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Xbox Live has historically been a much better service than PSN, based on speed and availability.
I work at an ISP and I often I hear about XBox Live being down, I rarely hear the same about PSN.
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? How does Microsoft's "network" come into it when someone plays Rocket League? I play Rocket League on a PC against Psynet (PS4) players all the time and there's not material difference. They are not routing through Sony's network, the connection is from their PS4 through their ISP to the Rocket League server directly, just like my PC's is. Xbox would work the same.
There's the side issue of the console players not being able to properly compete with the PC Master Race in things like 1st person shooters
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Sony used the psn account name as a primary key; it's obviously a major fsck-up. Apparently their retarded developers do not know how to create proper databases, nor can they handle history changes [admitted by their CEO].
If you guarantee it's unique, what's the issue? You can even allow it to be changed. Your relationships will cascade the change to any other table referencing it.
What would you propose?
An unnecessarily long UUID that penalizes performance on every direct lookup, join, or LIKE query?
An integer with the IDENTITY flag set that auto increments and has no actual meaning?
Change tracking / historical retention can be achieved in many ways. Depending on what you want to preserve and how you expect to need to rec
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sexconker ( 1179573 ) wrote:
What would you propose?
An integer with the IDENTITY flag set that auto increments and has no actual meaning?
Yes. For example, a user with username sexconker could have user ID 1179573. Store user ID in most places, and the username is an INNER JOIN psn_users_basic away. Here, psn_users_basic holds the most commonly used columns of a user's profile, with less commonly used ones in a separate table, whether flat or sparse (EAV).
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You're adding a useless column that has no actual meaning.
It's simpler to use the actual user name and make it unique. Your PK index then also serves as an index on the user name for sorting/searching purposes against the user name.
The downsides are that the tables referencing the user name have to store the user name (but that's probably capped at 30 characters or so) and that equality comparisons for a string are worse than for an int (but only by a few cycles since you'll return a false 99.999% of the t
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You're adding a useless column that has no actual meaning.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're saying you're opposed to surrogate keys [wikipedia.org] in principle. The foreign key link to the users table is what gives a surrogate key meaning.
The downsides are that the tables referencing the user name have to store the user name (but that's probably capped at 30 characters or so)
A column holding up to 30 UTF-32 characters takes 120 bytes, compared to an integer that takes 8, or 4 if you don't expect half the global population to create an account. Even if you use UTF-8, you still have to allocate 120 bytes because code points above U+10000 (mostly emoji and lesser-used Chinese and Japanese ideograms) t
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Change tracking / historical retention can be achieved in many ways. Depending on what you want to preserve and how you expect to need to recover it, you can simply backup the transaction logs, regularly backup the database itself, or create a history table for each table you need historical data on and create a trigger that copies affected rows, along with a timestamp column with a default of SYSDATETIME() or similar, on UPDATE or DELETE.
Or... instead of triggering a database wide update because a user changed their name.. just use a key like everybody else in every other database schema.
Bad business for Sony (Score:3)
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So instead of half-baked console ports that are near unplayable with a keyboard/mouse setup with a "one resolution fits all" mentality that act like there is nothing running but THAT very game (perish the thought that you'd want a firewall), we now get half-baked console games that are shoveled onto the PC without any care because you don't even have to PORT anymore.
Please excuse me when I don't jump in joy.
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we now get half-baked console games that are shoveled onto the PC without any care because you don't even have to PORT anymore.
Or vice versa! There are some half-baked buggy and/or badly designed indie/kickstarter/unity/budget game crap that was first released on PC and then later on PSN.
Please excuse ME while I don't jump for joy for that sort of thing.
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You don't expect sympathy that you don't get a decent port of some half-baked kickstarter project when I don't get a decent port of AAA games, do you?
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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Also the game they mention (Final Fantasy XI) was forced to drop console support earlier this year for some reason. As of April this year, it's now PC-only. Maybe Sony isn't quite as open to cross-platform play any more as they once were.
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I don't buy that explanation because they already stopped updating the game last year. If they're keeping the servers running (they are) and they're no longer doing any development (they aren't) there's no reason to arbitrarily kill cross platform support. Unless they're being forced to by some outside party.
It's not like they updated the PC client in such a way that the PS2 client stopped working. They actively removed support for a previously functional PS2 client, for no explained reason.
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They also supported a client for Xbox 360 which they dropped support for at the same time as PS2. Rumors I had heard were that MS wasn't happy (at the time) that it supported cross-platform play, but somehow it happened. Both clients could be easily overloaded with lots of players and effects nearby, and good luck finding a working fat PS2 with a hard drive. You could use a first gen PS3 in emulation mode, but it had the same poor performance.
As for just stop updating the PS2 version, they had sort of alre
Microsoft just trying to level the playing field (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft has been uninterested in cross-platform gameplay since....well, forever. They've actively tried to kill PC gaming (or at the very least, make it a second-class gaming experience to the Xbox). Not to mention they double-dip with their accessories ( For example, Xbox One Kinect having a proprietary connector so they can sell the USB 3.0 Windows Kinect).
Now Microsoft has suddenly seen the light! They want to enable cross-platform play with Sony! Hmm, I wonder if that has anything to do with the low s
What about Win 7,8, Linux, Mac? (Score:3)
thats what we need (Score:1)
May not be as exciting as it seems (Score:2)
The PS4/PC cross-play in Rocket League just means that you randomly get some PC players in the mix. Not only isn't their cross-platform voice chat, there isn't even the ability to group up with friends on the other platform. It is a good thing anyway because it means more players in the community, but if this is all we get with PS4/Xbone cross-play, it's not something to get terribly excited about.
Playing X-platform FFXIV (Score:2)
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You can be sure that even if there were not technical reasons under control of Sony which would prevent this, part of the agreement allowing games to be made for the PS4 includes requiring Sony's approval for such a feature.
Like the other poster said, cross platform play is only an advantage to the console with less market share. It does not matter if Sony would gain from this even if they gained more than Microsoft; what matters is that Sony has all of a smaller market. To Sony, good will means fucking t
EVE/Dust514 (Score:1)