Xfire

Xfire (pronounced X-Fire, not Crossfire loud English and German homepage) is a free instant messenger for communication between computer players via the Internet. The program uses a proprietary network protocol.

Introduction

As a unique feature, the program has the ability to determine the currently opened by the player games and to display the contacts to other friends instant messages ingame (English in game: ' the game ') to send to. The Messenger was originally available only for Windows, but there are now also unofficial versions for Mac OS, iOS ( Xblaze ) and Android ( XFMobile ). In addition, open source plug-in for Pidgin, Miranda IM, NG Miranda, Adium and Trillian available.

Technology

By analyzing Xfire running processes, the program can determine the active game and sends this information to the Xfire server. This additional metadata to be transmitted, such as the currently used game server, the Level, Map (English Map: ' Map ') and which and how many players spend there. If desired, Xfire makes this information on to other users on your contact list or visible to all users, so a friend can join to the respective server. This made for a long time managed practice of Copy'n'Paste and exchange server information such as IP address among the players, if someone wanted to play together with his friend on a server, redundant.

The program supports immediate connect to a game server with lots of games. This means that a contact may enter it even on the server in a matter to make predictions directly. Xfire allows users messages from outside - for example, friends - to write directly to the game as it is an independent application. Xfire specifies, among other things, how many hours you have what games played. You can also make screenshots ( standard combination " Scroll Lock S " ) and videos in the game, which can then be published on the Xfire profile page.

Furthermore, it is possible to stream a video of the ongoing game. Here, the video stream is transmitted to twitch.tv. In the Friends list, will the message " Broadcasting: Game name". You can then watch the stream using the context menu and on the Xfire website.

Another feature of Xfire is the download part. One can get into so-called Channels enroll any themes (eg " eSports Movies", " WOW Movies", " First Person Shooters Trailers " ) will that automatically downloaded to the subject matter, films that have been added by moderators. In addition to the automatic channels can also files from a database of movies, trailers, demos etc. easily accessible via Xfire download.

In addition to automatically download updates for some games. The charging process itself is to be compared with BitTorrent or a file-sharing network (see P2P). While a file at the beginning of " seeded " by the Xfire servers ( ie distributed ) will be all downloaders themselves to servers and bear a part to the very high data transfer speed in Xfire network with. The down / upload limit can be preset depending on their status ( Play, PC and absent ).

Xfire supports over 3500 games and over 200 into which you can enter the same with the Xfire client. This supported games are of different genres and include popular games such as parts of Counter-Strike, the complete Call of Duty and Battlefield series, World of Warcraft and Guild Wars - but also lesser-known games such as the open source game Warsow.

History

Xfire was developed in early 2004. Since then, over 21 million users have registered.

With Version 1.43 in August 2005 Xfire Inc. introduced a beta voice chat via VoIP a similar (among others) TeamSpeak. Also the file transfer has been added via an update. Since January 2008, it is now possible to make video recordings of the running game and make them either on the Xfire website similar to YouTube other players available to, or streamed friends allow the events to watch live.

Due to a very long failure of the " Steam Friends" Messengers, with which one could chat within the support of Steam games, often Xfire was used as a substitute and was able to achieve a higher penetration rate.

End of April 2006 Xfire was sold to Viacom for 102 million U.S. dollars. It is hoped that by the online community continues to expand.

The protocol was partially documented and implemented by gfire, an open source plugin for Pidgin.

With XfirePlus since November 2006 are now being considered small plug-ins to Xfire to showing among other things the other players what music is on the PC currently listening to, but XFire offers itself for some time the possibility of current title information of the most common media players such as iTunes, Windows Media Player or Winamp to take over. There are more to come, with the ultimate goal that the user must not have Teamspeak, ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc. run more parallel because Xfire is compatible with all of these. XFire currently supports by now many of them, such as AIM (and hence ICQ), the Windows Live Messaging Service ( MSN), Yahoo Messenger ( Y! M) and even offers a built-in VoIP integration.

On 2 August 2010 Xfire was acquired by Titan Gaming. The following message was sent to all users in the evening, " what Xfire bought by new owners today. Most of the team did Has built Xfire over the load- six years is leaving. We enjoyed working for you for the load 127 releases and wish we could stay to create the next 127 Good bye, good luck, and game on. --- The Xfire Team ".