PS3 Firmware 2.40 - In-game XMB, user-music and Trophies will not work with all PS3 titles
May 30th, 2008 @ 09:25
Videogaming247 has learnt that the upcoming in-game XMB - heavily rumoured to be included in PS3’s Firmware 2.40 - may not work with all PS3 titles, and that user-music and Trophies functionality is only being included as an option for Sony developers from this point on.
By point:
- Sony’s currently going through PS3’s library to check whether or not in-game XMB’s full compatible. While it’s expected that the the new menu system, in-game messaging, and so forth, will work with virtually all games, for a minority of titles the current black menu screen will be retained. It’s not known yet which games, if any, won’t be able to use in-game XMB.
- The user-music functionality is only included in the new development tools, which have now gone out to coders. This means that existing games won’t support it unless they’re patched. That’s right: you won’t be able to play GTA IV with your own music unless Rockstar updates the game, if what we’ve been told this morning is true.
- Same for Trophies. They tools required to add these are only just in the hands of developers, which means it’s going to be some time before you see the feature appear in a major game.
- Some aspects of the XMB, such as the photo viewer, won’t be available in-game after the 2.40 Firmware update. If you select these features in-game, you’ll be asked if you want to drop out of your game to access them.
There’s still no release date for Firmware 2.40 as yet, with Sony sticking to “summer” for now. We’ll have more soon, hopefully.
Posted in: Development, PS3, Rumour, Sony
Tags: firmware 2.40, in-game xmb
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May 30th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Well that’s… crap.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Well… duh? Isn’t this mostly to be expected? How would old games ever support trophies or user music unless they were changed to do so? Magic?
May 30th, 2008 at 9:38 am
A lot of people had just sort of assumed that they’d be able to play their own music with their games after the update. Mad, I know
May 30th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Blerk: Trophies… obviously. But as soon as you start relying on devs to implement custom soundtracks etc you might as well not have it. I guarantee that a chunk of them will choose the extra memory rather than the features.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:54 am
But if the back-end stuff isn’t there, you obviously can’t use it. Now it’s there it’ll probably be (relatively) simple (considering it’s Sony) to implement. It’s not saying that devs have to do loads of work to implement it in the future, just that they’ll have to retro-fit it into their older titles if they want it to appear there. Surely it could never have been any other way?
May 30th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I suppose you can’t just turn the music in the game “off” and have new music over it. Or can you? It would seem not.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Maybe they should gray out all the stuff you cant use on the XMB otherwise it could get annoying for new people trying to see what they can do.
Something doesn’t sound right. Games like Burnout already have custom soundtracks implemented by the developer using a special OS screen. So whats different…
May 30th, 2008 at 10:17 am
The difference is quite simple:
Before this, the developers had to implement custom soundtracks, ‘achievements’, etc. all on their own if they wanted their game to have them. This is what Burnout did.
After this, the PS3 firmware itself will offer subsystems to allow these features. So rather than do everything themselves, the developers just need to hook into what’s there.
Obviously this is fairly straight-forward (you would hope) for future games which will be built with this in mind, for older games you’re basically screwed because who can be bothered going back to update their old stuff when there’s no money in doing so?
May 30th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I thought this would be the case, all of Sony’s 1st and 2nd parties games will be patched but I wouldn’t hold my breath on most of the other devs to release any patches.
Criterion will for burnout (I think they already announced custom soundtracks), maybe epic,probably Rockstar Infinity Ward won’t .
Messaging is all I want
May 30th, 2008 at 10:21 am
How hard can it possibly be to do a little patch, though? It must be a trivial update, surely?
May 30th, 2008 at 10:22 am
also uncharted had it’s own internal achievements which o doubt will carry over easily.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Not necessarily. You’re basically handing control of music-playing over to the PS3’s firmware. If a company has implemented their own sound-playing routines, etc. then there may be all kinds of issues switching it over - timing, for one. Plus the PS3’s firmware might not be able to play the game’s own music files, so you’d basically be supporting two different solutions at once.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:25 am
That makes a lot of sense. I’ll consider myself pwned.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Patches are trivial - you’d think that in most cases it might be as simple as taking the existing codebase and recompiling it in the new development environment.
The time it takes for Sony to approve them and get on the PSN are the real issue.
I think this whole situation is one of those things where there’ll be a 1-2 months of confusion, then everything will work with everything. That time period would also have Sony well-positioned for the Q4 mega-selling season.
Seems to me that Sony is making the best of a bad job really. All of this functionality was in Xbox 360 at launch - why it’s taken quite so long to actually get done is mystery straight from the files of Arthur C Clarke.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Yes, they really ought to have paid more attention to what Microsoft was doing in the run-up to the PS3 launch rather than fire-fighting it all in after the event.
Now… where’s that fucking DualShock3, SCEE?
May 30th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I would like to find out the memory budget on these features. I know they’ve trimmed the OS quite a lot but I’m guessing that custom soundtracks will take up a fair chunk if you choose to use it.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I guess it depends on whether the ’sound-playing’ bit of the OS was already loaded before or whether it now needs to be patched in when it previously wasn’t. If you see what I mean.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:25 am
still a waiting game then
May 30th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Actually Burnout does use a OS screen.
June 1st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
I guess the problem is more related to coding stuff than to actively implementing support for user music / XMB.
For example, just think about timing issues when the XMB is opened. Without knowing the PS3 SDK details, I guess a game that uses the normal system time for whatever reason would be screwed up by opening the XMB.
The same goes for using the audio subsystem exclusively.
So the reason why only newly developed games will support XMB/music might be that Sony published some new SDK version that allows for checking stuff like “XMB open” and “user music playing”, and not that every developer has to actively support those features.