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"The Power of the Cloud" - what happened?

Alx said:
The engine and the service are probably two different things. MS will certainly provide the servers and API, while Cloudgine is developing the engine for doing server-side processing in a game. A bit like the Unreal Engine or Unity are using the console graphics API to do their thing.
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Which means it'll run on any server.
 
benny_a said:
You're just making excuses for deliberate misleading statements being made.
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I'm not really excusing it, but PR stuff is always intentionally misleading to have things appear better than they really are. That's mostly advertising, and just like in advertising they won't straight out lie. But you have to learn to see through those tricks. In the end it's never "bullshit" nor "best tech ever !", just something in the middle.
 
Alx said:
That depends a lot on what people "fell for". PR know their job, they just throw vague terms knowing people may misunderstand them. Did MS explicitly say the cloud could fill the power gap with the competition ? No. Do people believe they did ? Of course.
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Ya, poor Microsoft, it's all people's fault they fell for statements like
a rule of thumb we like to use is that [for] every Xbox One available in your living room we'll have three of those devices in the cloud available
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or
"We're provisioning for developers for every physical Xbox One we build, we're provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud," he told OXM. "We're doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. They can do that out of the gate."
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or
It’s also about cloud processing and AI. This is where some of the computational effort of a game can be offloaded to the dedicated CPUs on the cloud, to make your game experience even better, better graphics, better lighting, better physics.
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Silly people completely misunderstood ...
 
They changed "Power of the Cloud" to other words like "dedicated servers" once Phil started to run things.
They are still actively incorporating Azure into Xbox, they haven't gotten rid of it.

They just changed the language so it's more rateable to gamers, not businesses.
 
Hans.Gruber said:
It's not about what can or can't be done on paper, it's about how well it works in the real world. You can look at the GAF page 1 the next couple of weeks and count how many threads are about PSN problems vs. XBL problems.
"Power of the cloud" is marketing BS. MS having a way superior online infrastructure than the competition should be common knowledge.
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Clearly you've missed or ignored the XBL problems threads.
 
Alx said:
That's true, but part of the benefit of more recent "cloud" services is that those servers are allocated dynamically depending on the requirements.
As a matter of fact the server status of Titanfall has been really smooth all along, even during launch. Very few games can claim the same on this gen...
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Very few people owned an Xbox at the time and even less bought Titanfall,

Wouldn't have been much of a stretch to run a 6v6 game for anyone to run servers at that point.
 
There's an advert for Microsoft Cloud in this weeks Economist - "the cloud that turns gamers into Titans" - so apparently they haven't forgotten about it.
 
benny_a said:
And then using a banned poster that was banned for deception about working at Cloudgine is used as evidence that the power of the cloud is real. This thread is embarrassing.
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bishoptl said:
Oh man those were good times, I remember it like it was 2 weeks ago
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Saw your comments and then I I looked up that thread. Holy shit...how did I miss that? What sort of rock was I living under during that time? O_O
 
Right now it just means dedicated servers (which is pretty rad btw). But in the future it's eyes on crackdown since that is calculating physics on the server end and sending location data allowing for possibly big destruction.

But alot of people are right, microsoft at the time had nothing going for them at the time and decided to talk about a technology that wouldn't be ready for another few years.

In the end it's pretty cool tech and i hope to see more games use it, but it's not gonna revolutionize gaming and put the xbox one above the PS4 as they tried to spin it.
 
They still run the Titanfall add in the UK ( the "Respawn Entertainment uses the Microsoft Cloud to deliver Titanfall " one)

It's hilarious because they show the devs labouring over all these giant monitors with a "simulated screens" disclaimer along the bottom.
 
AmFreak said:
Ya, poor Microsoft, it's all people's fault they fell for statements like

or

or


Silly people completely misunderstood ...
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What part of that do you think is a lie ?
I'm pretty sure those numbers they're throwing around don't come out of nowhere. Yeah they probably have a lot of CPU and storage allocated on their servers (3 times an X1 isn't that much actually). They could certainly back it up (especially if they use loopholes like peak vs constant availability for example... or the fact that not all consoles will be online at the same time).
The misunderstanding would be to believe that it would allow for the same games that could run on hardware 4 times as powerful.
 
It's still real to me dammit!

Nwns7DV.gif
 
Goldfishking said:
Right now it just means dedicated servers (which is pretty rad btw). But in the future it's eyes on crackdown since that is calculating physics on the server end and sending location data allowing for possibly big destruction.
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What's "rad" about it? Games have offered dedicated servers for years and current AAA releases don't seem to utilize Microsoft's technology? Advanced Warfare is P2P for the most part, as seems Microsoft's own Halo Anniversary. Battlefield is running on EA's own technology stack.
 
FZZpure said:
For some reason this thread made me think of next gen

And then I thought of the next gen console names

Does PS5 sound and look weird as fuck to anyone else? I mean PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4 all kinda roll off the tongue and look normal, but PS5 sounds weird as fuck and looks like PSS.

Damn.
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Just stopping by to say I agree with you so you don't leave this thread feeling like you're a madman. Unless we both are.
 
kitch9 said:
An article waffling on about 1gb of storage and Titanfall?

Dude sounds like he's only just had MS pr book from last year rimmed up his ass.
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Lol, probably right. If anything it shows that 'the cloud' is more to do with business hosting/storage (which makes sense for Microsoft and Azure) than being anywhere nearer to being useful for gaming.
 
We live in a world where the general Internet infrastructure is so laughably piss poor that the kinds of things Microsoft was talking about are not feasible on a large scale for even the most privileged downloaders and uploaders in large cities today.

Meanwhile, the rest of the people who don't live in urban areas can expect to maybe hopefully reach average download/upload speeds of ~30/10 mbps sometime before 2020 (not even that much of an exaggeration).

So yeah, most people are living in the up/down speed dark ages, and the ones who are lucky enough to live somewhere else aren't even properly equipped for this.

It's bullshit, and it will be bullshit until competent Internet access is actually something people begin to fight for fair/equal access to.
 
My connection to Titanfall servers has been the best so far for me this generation, providing a smooth gameplay experience, moreso than other games.

I average around an 18-25 ms ping, nothing else I play comes close to that. With that said, is this quality experience due to the "cloud", or without marketing the jargon, Azure? Will we see this type of connection with Titanfall 2 when it debuts on Sony? If we will, then whole cloud nonsense will finally be put to rest, if not, then what will the naysayers attribute it to?
 
Alx said:
What part of that do you think is a lie ?
I'm pretty sure those numbers they're throwing around don't come out of nowhere. Yeah they probably have a lot of CPU and storage allocated on their servers (3 times an X1 isn't that much actually). They could certainly back it up (especially if they use loopholes like peak vs constant availability for example... or the fact that not all consoles will be online at the same time).
The misunderstanding would be to believe that it would allow for the same games that could run on hardware 4 times as powerful.
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The quote is just really out of context. Not misquoting of the person who made it but the person who made it didn't provide the necessary context for marketing purposes.

There may be 3 times the CPU power in the cloud but what can you use it for? Most games need GPU power to do something like PS-Now and Azure isn't into building out those sort of machines.

Gamers with some programming experience are incredulous because the application of that power won't lead to the ends they were pushing. At best it means a robust online environment; not 4k60fps.
 
I am currently replaying Red Faction Guerrilla on steam, and man if cloud based stuff gets us more of these kind of games, but entire cities instead of a few buildings clustered together and dotted around a huge barren landscape, sign me up!

kitch9 said:
Yes uploading and downloading stuff truely was a revelation in server technology.
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I like you lol.
 
Alx said:
What part of that do you think is a lie ?
I'm pretty sure those numbers they're throwing around don't come out of nowhere. Yeah they probably have a lot of CPU and storage allocated on their servers (3 times an X1 isn't that much actually). They could certainly back it up (especially if they use loopholes like peak vs constant availability for example... or the fact that not all consoles will be online at the same time).
The misunderstanding would be to believe that it would allow for the same games that could run on hardware 4 times as powerful.
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You act like MS were innocent what people believed cause they didn't explicitly say that the cloud would close the gap.
Of course they wouldn't say this directly, cause that would mean they had to admit that there is a gap in the first place.
But these statements obviously had the intention to tell people that there is a huge amount of power in the cloud only waiting for devs to be tapped.
This is where some of the computational effort of a game can be offloaded to the dedicated CPUs on the cloud, to make your game experience even better, better graphics, better lighting, better physics.
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This quote together with the 3x amount of Xbox One power is enough for that.
 
It was marketing bullshit.
Technically it's imposible to send data to process to an exterior server and get it back in order to process at least 30fps..
 
Alx said:
What part of that do you think is a lie ?
I'm pretty sure those numbers they're throwing around don't come out of nowhere. Yeah they probably have a lot of CPU and storage allocated on their servers (3 times an X1 isn't that much actually). They could certainly back it up (especially if they use loopholes like peak vs constant availability for example... or the fact that not all consoles will be online at the same time).
The misunderstanding would be to believe that it would allow for the same games that could run on hardware 4 times as powerful.
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It was deliberately misleading. You seriously can't try to argue that them throwing countless charts showing equivalents of entire consoles, or giving many examples of GPU-heavy tasks, was all a big misunderstanding.
 
The Cloud isn't bullshit, I'ave got a bunch of PS4 saves on there, I swear

or maybe they were transfarred
 
The cloud is legit for dedis, problem is MS got greedy and tried to lie to consumers that it would benefit graphics and physics and what not. I would say 99% of the people here on GAF are pretty bright and knew that part of it was total BS.
 
"Fugazi, fogazi. It's a wazi, it's a woozi. It's...fairy dust. It doesn't exist, it's never landed, it is no matter, it's not on the elemental charge. It's not fucking real."
 
Average internet latency isn't good enough for distributed processing on a massive scale to begin with. Even simple things like AI across networks can spaz out.

It'll come, but still have awhile. It's not a dream type thing but a matter of time type thing. This is what Ken Kutaragi envisioned with Cell technology. Combining the power of broadband connected Cell processors all working together to up the capabilities of a host machine. It's just network latency doesn't allow for such a thing yet.

I'm sure little things can be done here and there. Heavily scripted gameplay events or something like that maybe? Or things that wouldn't mind some latency or have enough computers sending in the information so that even with the lag it will still get completed in time. Like P2P downloading but instead of downloading a file extra fast from many other systems you are rendering light sources or something
 
Jomjom said:
The cloud is legit for dedis, problem is MS got greedy and tried to lie to consumers that it would benefit graphics and physics and what not. I would say 99% of the people here on GAF are pretty bright and knew that part of it was total BS.
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It isn't a lie, there is already a game in production that uses servers for physics calculations.

Forza Motorsport 5 and Forza Horizon 2 also both send data to servers that is calculated and sent back on request.

IAmRandom31 said:
Average internet latency isn't good enough for distributed processing on a massive scale to begin with. Even simple things like AI across networks can spaz out.

It'll come, but still have awhile. It's not a dream type thing but a matter of time type thing. This is what Ken Kutaragi envisioned with Cell technology. Combining the power of broadband connected Cell processors all working together to up the capabilities of a host machine. It's just network latency doesn't allow for such a thing yet.

I'm sure little things can be done here and there. Heavily scripted gameplay events or something like that maybe?
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This isn't true at all, it doesn't require huge bandwidth for physics calculations.
 
LilWayneSuckz said:
I'm pretty sure it was an excuse to convince people that always online DRM would be beneficial
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It had nothing to do with the always online DRM, the point of always online DRM was being able to treat all of your physical games as if they were digital. It also allowed game sharing of your physical games with people across the country instantly.

Where do people even come up with this stuff?
 
FordGTGuy said:
It isn't a lie, there is already a game in production that uses servers for physics calculations.

Forza Motorsport 5 and Forza Horizon 2 also both send data to servers that is calculated and sent back on request.



This isn't true at all, it doesn't require huge bandwidth for physics calculations.
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They also marketed that the cloud would make the Xbox one multiple times more powerful the without, and affect things like AI, graphics along with physics.
 
FordGTGuy said:
This isn't true at all, it doesn't require huge bandwidth for physics calculations.
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He didn't say anything about bandwidth, but latency.

Now, I haven't personally researched that much into the issues, but from what I gather the biggest problems are the latency (it's not a very good way to do real-time operations on something that needs to be updated without much latency, like most graphics operations), the huge amount of work (setting it up with or withou cloudgine can be a massive investment with questionable ROI), the questionable benefits (honestly, there isn't that much stuff you can offload that doesn't need a quick response yet to provides real value to the player). It can work in some cases, but usually it simply isn't feasible for 99% developers out there.
 
Armaros said:
They also marketed that the cloud would make the Xbox one multiple times more powerful the without, and affect things like AI, graphics along with physics.
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The physics part seems true since, yk, Crackdown and if it is, that means the cloud makes the xbox more powerful than a xbox not connected to the cloud
 
Armaros said:
They also marketed that the cloud would make the Xbox one multiple times more powerful the without, and affect things like AI, graphics along with physics.
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They said it makes the available calculation power for a single Xbox One three times as powerful. In other words the server you're sending information to has the ability to run calculations three times as fast as your Xbox One.

It's affected AI since launch with Forza Motorsport and it will affect physics with Crackdown. Will it ever affect graphics? Who knows? Most likely in the form of adding particle effects by taking away the CPU bottleneck by sending the work to servers.

_machine said:
He didn't say anything about bandwidth, but latency.

Now, I haven't personally researched that much into the issues, but from what I gather the biggest problems are the latency (it's not a very good way to do real-time operations on something that needs to be updated without much latency, like most graphics operations), the huge amount of work (setting it up with or withou cloudgine can be a massive investment with questionable ROI), the questionable benefits (honestly, there isn't that much stuff you can offload that doesn't need a quick response yet to provides real value to the player). It can work in some cases, but usually it simply isn't feasible for 99% developers out there.
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No everything is based on latency and there is a lot of non-latency sensitive stuff that eats through CPU power in games, a huge one being weather. Latency can be beat in certain scenarios too, for instance. You shoot a rocket at a building, the Xbox One sends this to the server and the server can quickly figure out where that rocket will hit and correctly display the correct destruction. Since it will take far longer for the rocket to hit the building than your actual latency you wouldn't really notice any discernible lag.

That's the point of DX12 and making their servers available to all developers on their platform, it does make it feasible to developers.
 
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