A few months ago, in an ace PR move, Sony’s feature list for its 2.0 firmware update happened to leak out. Before it was retracted, the list had been copied and disseminated widely by avid fans and bloggers alike. One item in the list drew the most attention: “XMB™ (XrossMediaBar) is now accessible during gameplay”. We’ve argued in the past that the memory constraints Sony has already placed on itself and PS3 developers could not conceivably allow for such a feature without major restructuring. Instead of taking our a skeptic stance on this issue, we decided to examine how such a feature could be accomplished. Here’s the current theory we’ve come up with.
As of yet, no major restructuring of the memory management has occurred. Our research indicates that XMB takes up too much memory to fit in reserved OS memory while a game is being played. It is theoretically possible for Sony to rework the XMB so that it is much slimmer in terms of memory usage, in order to make it fit in the reserved memory, but we doubt this will happen. All memory improvements have come incrementally so far. The XMB has too much impact on other components to undergo such an upheaval of its fundamental architecture without severely impacting other areas.
The PS3 currently uses a lot of extra memory in order for developers to use fundamental online features. We argue that the Sony online experience won’t match Microsoft’s Xbox Live until it does so in terms of functionality and ease of use. This means primarily not dropping out of the game in order to do simple things such as messaging your friends.
Most mainstream users are either ignorant of the issues surrounding the memory constraints on the PS3 or simply won’t care. As such, the bad press from the past year will not affect them. Only some of them will compare their experiences with those on an Xbox Live (either because they’re loyal to Sony, don’t have 360 owning friends, or are not hardcore gamers).
Still, it is in Sony’s interest to make the experience as user-friendly and functional as possible. Sony understands this now. Regardless of what the competitors do, Sony needs to grab that online pie, which is only going to continue growing for the next 10-15 years. If they fall too far behind, the publishers will bail and look at other delivery platforms for their online content.
Sony knows this, which is why they are hard at work with Home and the spec list for a future software update was “accidentally” leaked. This was a genius move in terms of PR. Leak it, retract it, don’t comment on it, and let the public speculate and get excited over the possibilities.
We fully believe Sony is dedicated to this effort. The central issue remains how to get developer support despite the required extra cost in memory. The only viable solution would be to force developer support, rather than try to entice it. That ought to have been the approach from the start and can still be done..
As for the memory issues, simply swap it out.
Every PS3 SKU released to this day has a hard drive by default. It is fair to assume that over the PS3’s timeline, it has become a core component of the PS3. Every PS3 has one. You can guarantee a hard drive will be present. So, why not just swap the game’s memory out when the PS3 button is pressed and the XMB is brought up. Swapping out 50-60 MBs of memory should not take long at all. Modern PCs do it all the time.
We don’t have any confirmation that Sony is considering this option, so this is purely speculative. However, our analysis and study of the PS3’s architecture, our discussions with other developers, and the stated goals Sony is trying to achieve all point to this solution. We welcome any discussion on its feasibility. Have we overlooked any major stumbling blocks?
This solution doesn’t address all the potential problems. Sony would have to minimize the latency of popping up the XMB menu, and returning back to the game. They would have to test extensively to make sure they don’t break games (we know for a fact that currently released titles have had new bugs introduced solely through the release of a system software update).
It does however allow Sony to address both the developer and memory constraints. Let’s see how this issue plays out in the next few months.
Sony needs to use the fact that every PS3 has a HDD to it’s advantage, there are some really cool things they can accomplish, if they wanted to.
How about a Hibernate feature? Rather than quitting your game and shutting the PS3 down, simply hibernate it, like your PC. All it does it copy all the memory contents to the HDD, and then switch off. When it boots back up, it reverses the process, and refills the memory from the HDD file. Your game will instantly resume where you left off. No boot times to worry about, instant gaming.
This would be a killer feature, that even the 360 would not be copy, due to lack of standard HDD.
Left by Mark Gillespie on September 13th, 2007