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The Truth About Lack Of Custom Music on PS4/Xbone


CONight

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I've read about the 2k16 devs saying they still can't get the custom music option into games on PS4 and Xbox One. Both consoles can now play media off of external USB devices, but running custom music that way isn't an option, (Ok that's a little plausible), and Sony/MS is having trouble making media playable from internal storage. (So the external USB thing is a supposed temporary fix.)

 

I know people here don't buy this, and you're correct. It's downright laughable and frankly insulting to us to suggest that two companies that I would hope employ fairly competent programmers/software engineers capable of handling software technology that has existed for 20 years.

 

I have explained on here once before what is really going on, but I may not have gone into much detail, so here's a more thorough explanation of the situation:

 

To understand the situation we have to go back 10 years to the Sony Playstation Portable, AKA the PSP. The PSP was hacked very quickly for a console of its era, in fact the original version 1.50 firmware that it launched with was able to run homebrew software without any modification at all. Oops. Subsequent firmware updates patched this security flaw, and from then on you had to hack your PSP to run homebrew on firmware above 1.50. Fast forward to the end of the PSP's life cycle and the hacking community has 100% control of the system, such that it is even possible to create "signed" software, which basically means software that can run natively on any PSP firmware as if it was published by Sony themselves.

 

One of the keys to the situation is that the PSP used a relatively standard type of memory card called memory pro duo. The same memory cards used by sony cameras of the time, and card readers for your PC were readily available. This means you could easily write to the memory cards--a great entry-point for hacking. The Xbox 360 hard drive, while it is partitioned differently than a typical computer hard drive, it can be still be read on your PC with the proper free software and data can be added or edited, etc. The PS3 hard drive is encrypted, quite effectively, and can only be properly read by the PS3 system that wrote data to it. However, both the 360 and PS3 have USB ports and the ability to copy data from an external source to the internal hard drive. While hacking didn't run as rampant on these platforms as it did on the PSP, the ability to transfer data from a USB device onto the internal hard drive is still a security flaw.

 

Sony made it very clear with their next hardware release that they were going to seal this hole. The Playstation Vita uses proprietary memory cards that are exclusive to the Vita itself. You can't even access the memory card by connecting the Vita to a PC via USB. To transfer data from your PC to your vita memory card, you have to use a utility from Sony not unlike being forced to use iTunes with any Apple product. You can only transfer compatible games, music, and videos to the Vita. If the software can't read it, you can't transfer it. Furthermore, any games/vita software you transfer from the vita to your PC becomes encrypted. So you can't do anything with it on your PC. Even if you transfer software from the Vita to a PS3, those games--even if they're PS3 compatible--won't run. They are stored in an archived form, and the only thing you can do with them is transfer them back to your Vita.

 

So in a nutshell, the Vita is as locked up as Fort Knox compared to the PSP, and Sony continued this trend with the design of the PS4. Microsoft followed suit in their own way. You remember all the controversy about the Xbox One's DRM features and lack of used games playability right? There were rumours, which had some merit, that Sony was planning to do something similar until they saw it blow up in Microsoft's face. As I predicted from that fall out, both consoles launched missing a lot of standard features that we grew accustomed to with their predecessors. This was in part due to the backpedaling on all that DRM stuff. I figured they weren't giving themselves enough time to change everything back to "normal", if you will.

 

Long story short, you cannot copy media to the PS4 and Xbone internal hard drives. Like I said, they locked them down in the same way and for the same reason the Vita was locked down by design: Security. Neither company wants to see what happened to the PSP happen to any of their systems ever again.

 

Maybe they do want to give us the ability to store media internally, likely because we've all been demanding it amongst communities for multiple game franchises. The problem is NOT how to actually play music and videos internally. That's a joke and an insult, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that sees this. Not only that, but even with the USB media players that both companies have given us, the PS4 and Xbone both support a larger variety of audio and video formats that their predecessors did not. (Ie. MKV videos. Both PS4 and Xbox One can play them natively, the PS3 and 360 could not.) The real problem Sony and Microsoft is having is figuring out how to let us copy media to the internal hard drives without re-opening pandora's box. Security.

 

So does this mean 2K is innocent in all of this? No, not entirely. They're not to blame for the PS4 and Xbone versions of the game. We've covered that. However, the PC version falls entirely on 2K's shoulders. As I mentioned before, this is NOT rocket science. The Mp3 has been around for 20 years. It's not that hard to make a PC game play mp3s. As indicated by WWE 2k15, 2K is just being lazy and giving us a console-to-PC port. There is no excuse for WWE 2k16 on PC to not have the ability to play custom music.

 

If it doesn't, well here's a little news update from the WWE 2k15 PC modding community: A group of modders are working together on what they are calling "community DLC." When the DLC for the PC version dropped, they took note of how the DLC content was added to the game and are now working to replicate the process to add (not replace) new content to the game as custom DLC. I can promise you that everything the modding community learns from WWE 2k15 will carry over to WWE 2k16 on PC. They won't be able to change the engine that much in one year.

 

To conclude, I guess until Sony and Microsoft have solved their security problem, I'll stick to buying future WWE games on PC. I just hope 2K stops being lazy with the PC versions, because we'll have our custom music on PC either way. 8-)

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Yeah, I tried it out on PC and it's lack of real optimization alone pretty much showed that it was a direct port. At least 2K isn't desperately trying to lock down the modding on PC, so we can just hope that they take notes and make it more open instead of less for 2K16, and hope that Sony and Microsoft pull their heads from their collective anuses and figure this shyte out.

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Regardless custom music should be available on PS3 360 and PC versions. i would just enjoy some exhibition and my career and story modes on my ps4 but enjoy an expanded universe on PC. Or 2k offer streaming support from spotify or something.

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Actually, it's kinda more likely that they just want to push their internal music services and therefore don't implement harddrive/medium support.

This is my guess also. They knew how many people listen to music and use custom music in game in their console...they claim they didnt but they're full of it

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Regardless custom music should be available on PS3 360 and PC versions. i would just enjoy some exhibition and my career and story modes on my ps4 but enjoy an expanded universe on PC. Or 2k offer streaming support from spotify or something.

 

no no no no no no, god forbid last gen has ANYTHING over current gen

 

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Actually, it's kinda more likely that they just want to push their internal music services and therefore don't implement harddrive/medium support.

This is my guess also. They knew how many people listen to music and use custom music in game in their console...they claim they didnt but they're full of it

 

 

Yes, that may play a small part in the situation as well. Nonetheless, the main issue is security. There are a lot of informative articles discussing console security & software engineering on http://wololo.net Most of their focus is on Playstation consoles, but they touch on other platforms as well. While hacking is discussed there, it is NOT a site pertaining to piracy, but more of an educational resource. They've touched on the security issues I've mentioned in the OP, so if you want to learn more, they're a good place to start.

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