Please read our update on this subject.
We have recently obtained through our contacts in the industry a summary of a high level meeting of the major players involved in Sony’s network platform (NP). This meeting took place in early February and involved representatives from Sony Japan, Sony America, 1st party and world wide studios (WWS) developers as well SCE-RT.
The meeting primarily revolved around the upcoming 1.60 SDK update, due in late March (to coincide with the European launch of the PS3. Clarifications on the features which would and would not be present in the update were discussed, as well as future plans for further features. This week, we’ll be bringing you daily updates on a variety of areas addressed in this meeting. This will help form a clearer picture of where Sony is heading with its online platform, and how far it has come along in the few months since it launched.
Today we start with background downloading. Sony has let slip that background downloading will finally be made available in the 1.60 firmware update. Unfortunately, users will end up being a bit confused, and then frustrated by what background downloading actually entails. Background downloading only functions within the context of the Cross Media Bar (XMB). Specifically, there will be no downloading while the user is a playing a game.
Users of the Xbox 360 will be familiar with how background downloading is supposed to be implemented. On the 360, the only time a download is interrupted is when you are playing an actual online game (where your latency could be affected by a concurrent download), or when you are downloading a game update. The rest of the time, whether you’re in the dashboard, messaging or chatting to your friends, or playing a game, your background downloads continue.
On the PS3, when you enter a game, your downloads will be paused and queued up, to be restarted later when you exit back to the XMB. The reason for this is that the PS3 needs extra system resources (primarily memory) to do background downloading, and as such could affect game play.
New APIs were discussed which allow background downloading during less resource intensive sections of a game (such as the front end menu), but such functionality will only be considered once the 1.60 update is out the door. Even so, games would have to allocate extra memory need to be able to support this.
So, background downloading is coming in the 1.60 update, but only in an extremely limited fashion. Essentially, you have to remain in the XMB to make use of it. This is bound to rub some people the wrong way.
Check in tomorrow where we’ll examine Sony’s Commerce system.
If this is true, it does not seem much like background downloading at all.
Left by modeps on February 27th, 2007