Delivering game installation clips, asset via smooth streaming.

10-07-2009 2:12 PM |

Hi,

I am looking for a solution to enhance our silverlight game installation experience. The game binary stream is about 2.2MB, but it needs to download about 80MB of assets from server. The current installer implementation will play installation wmv clips from Azure blob while grabbing zip files from our server. Game asset will then be extracted from the zip files and copied onto the game's isolated storage.

All the process above do not make any use of real streaming, it just uses silverlight's webclient and playing remote media file with media element via HTTP progressive download. The end result is not very stable,  the wmv playing often skips frames, and it will depend on the bandwidth condition of Azure blob.

Is IIS 7 smooth streaming something could solve this problem for playing installation clips?  Could the technology be used to deliver the zip files I have in the server? What about the game binary itself? We are expect a lot of downloads for the demo, can the new smooth streaming technology provide a solution for us?

Regards,

Reggie

 

Re: Delivering game installation clips, asset via smooth streaming.

10-12-2009 5:16 AM |

Hi,

Smooth Streaming is used for providing best media experience according to the network traffic condition. You could try use it to optimize your meida clip, however, not like media , any other kind of file type should keep lossless while transmiting, so smooth streaming cannot help for downloading game data.

For your scenario, play game clip is not main target which downloading game data should be, I guess using smooth streaming on media clip may slow down the game data downloading process.

You could just have a test, and it would be better to share your experience on using smooth streaming.

Thanks,

Re: Delivering game installation clips, asset via smooth streaming.

10-12-2009 6:20 PM |

 

So my current delivery of HTTP progressive downloading, while sometimes skipping video frames, could actually be faster compared to streaming video? In streaming scenario, can I configure client end to reserve certain amount of bandwidth for game data transfering?

Is Microsoft's Silverlight Streaming Service just http progressive download? Can it help me?