Pathfinder
Member
Posts like these will be fun to look back on in a couple years.
-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
"The Power of the Cloud" - what happened?
- Thread starter JohnnyFootball
- Start date
Posts like these will be fun to look back on in a couple years.
slavesnyder
Member
If cloud computing will be as important and brilliant as we are told I pity the people with poor internet connection. There should be a warning on the boxes.
joecanada
Member
I saw what crackdown 2 could do ....... about as much as a cloud but twice as ugly.
There is no benefit from cloud computing that MS can claim is exclusive to the Xbone anyway, even the 3DS could use these features. It's not like these services are expensive either. The question really is whether you want to compromise the reliability of your gameplay to try and do something worth a damn.
The past year has affirmed all the things the skeptics were saying. So you're betting the coming 2 years will change that? What has changed? Why would the next 2 be different from the last year?
Lanrutcon
Member
You mean in a couple of years when the tech actually does what they say it does?
I'd be very interested to know what sort of response times you think typically exist in games today, to create AI that you don't scream "that's bullshit!" to. You think believable AI reacts to your input in 3-5 frames? That would come across as an instant "button reading" response in pretty much any game. A single light jab in Street Fighter is on screen for about 12 frames, how often do you see people react to that?
AI would have PLENTY of time online to process the situation, and respond long before even the fastest of comparable humans could.
It wouldn't need anything to hide it. Why would that be the case? The calculation would be completely invisible to you. Your screen only draws the result. It's no different from how the same sort of scenario would happen locally, only that the player would need to not be essentially kissing the target (it's gonna take a bit of time to get the result ready).
The reason you may not want to precompute thisis simply that it may just have too many different variables. Maybe the structure is player created in the first place. Maybe after shooting it once, you can shoot what remains again, thus multiplying all the scenarios you need to precompute. Maybe there's 100 different structures. Maybe one structure can collapse onto another. Etc.
Yea, they're different solutions to different problems. The PSNow stuff is a lot easier to conceptualise, because it's simply "what we do offline, but online". I don't think games should be designed with cloud utilisation as a targeted bullet point (and I'm worried about Crackdown for this reason), but there are probably some very interesting uses waiting to be discovered. My point in that paragraph though, is that you can't compare latency and bandwidth requirements to something like PSNow, as what needs to be transferred for a cloud enhanced game is likely to be much smaller than a constant 720p video stream, what needs to be updated will almost certainly be less time critical than character movement, and what needs to be processed won't have the constant overhead of running an entire game at all times. It's completely incomparable.
I pity the people with poor internet connections regardless. Gaming is already a fucking disaster for anything non-Nintendo in that case.
Slangblade
Member
This. I cant believe people are still defending Microsoft. It was nothing but PR talk.
Why? You enjoy confirming that other peoples statements are correct post tense or something? Weird hobby, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.
aspiegamer
Member
Collectively it's been so laughed off for gaming that I'm back to being annoyed with it as a business buzzword. None of this is magical. It's a modern day FTP server. What today's services do is an awesome job of taking out any of the handling in the middle of "upload one place download a different place". They do a damn good job of that now, mind you, but I miss the days of having nerd cred for running my own server so friends could transport their homework around without carrying a bunch of damn floppy drives.
XBL and PS+ are the same but for entertainment value they have to make it sound cooler. The idea of downloading a "driveatar" sounds way more awesome than downloading a spreadsheet file to plop into the game's AI algorithm, even though that's all you're doing. Seeing a warning message left by other players sounds awesome but it's really just a text file with coordinates the server sends you.
I love how almost precisely 2 years ago at the XB1 reveal that everyone said "just wait a few years!". And here we are again. Can we agree to just check back in another 2? Let's talk about this again when your average internet user has access to a gigabit connection and a tiny ping. Wondrous things can surely be done if you don't have to limit your data and your latency is only equivalent to a frame or two, and there's so much free processing time around the globe that it can all be done on demand.
XBL and PS+ are the same but for entertainment value they have to make it sound cooler. The idea of downloading a "driveatar" sounds way more awesome than downloading a spreadsheet file to plop into the game's AI algorithm, even though that's all you're doing. Seeing a warning message left by other players sounds awesome but it's really just a text file with coordinates the server sends you.
I love how almost precisely 2 years ago at the XB1 reveal that everyone said "just wait a few years!". And here we are again. Can we agree to just check back in another 2? Let's talk about this again when your average internet user has access to a gigabit connection and a tiny ping. Wondrous things can surely be done if you don't have to limit your data and your latency is only equivalent to a frame or two, and there's so much free processing time around the globe that it can all be done on demand.
Have a Nice Day
Member
Where the hell did I say that? And please, for the love of God, don't tell that me that Microsoft formed and revolutionized server side rendering and processing and the world never heard of such a thing before they talked about it....
semiconscious
Member
Pathfinder
Member
Why so defensive?
the new 'have you seen titanfall'?...
funny because tons of people still think that game was a failure, lmao.
100ms vs 30ms delay has a perceivable impact on game play for SF4 to SC2 to LoL.
As for SF, you do know people react to jabs. so all the time? Right, I'm not on crazy pills here? being half of a jab behind would have game play consequences?
The key benefit is that unlike canned animation; a cloud one could render something that accounts for player variables. But you have a lag sending the data up and receiving the data. You would absolutely need to hide that latency with something. If the player isn't interacting with it; then why not use canned animation?
Plenty of games use rough approximations calculate locally and have done fine. Halo, Crackdown, GTA, etc... How would better accuracy be worth the problems of inherent in splitting it up this way?
The comparison is that they both limited by latency. You are wrong in your assumption that time isn't an issue with graphics, AI or physics. In most scenarios time is a huge issue, all of it is tied to rendering.
Otherwise why not just wait for the CPU to take more time to make that calc?
Do you just hate buzzwords in general, or do you simply demand that they only be used to describe things that are actually magical?
Buzzwords are typically used so that end users without a proper understanding or familiarity of a concept, can still differentiate it from other similar concepts. Uploading something to a cloud such as Azure, isn't the same as uploading something to a privately rented dedicated server. The "where" is largely unimportant for cloud implementations, but very important for standard dedicated server solutions. Would you prefer that we just say "servers" to describe all different types, and then explain the differences between with a detailed paragraph each time, rather than simply use the term "cloud" which immediately makes some sense (although not necessarily a lot, based on many of the responses in threads like this) to most people?
bananafactory
Banned
I'm sure it has uses for multiplayer titles but it's never going to meaningfully improve a single player experience because at the end those games still need to function offline and on 5 mbps connections or worse.
As others said, it does offer benefits but the context in which it has been advertised previously is mostly just marketing fluff.
As others said, it does offer benefits but the context in which it has been advertised previously is mostly just marketing fluff.
This will never be a viable business model.
Companies are not going to build a multi-billion dollar server farm that can handle insane graphics and physics server side processing for every game released on a platform, with adequate CPUs and GPUs dedicated to each and and every person who logs in, along with the responsibility of constantly maintaining and upgrading those servers. Why would they do that? Why would they carry the entire weight of financial burden on their side?
It's like a stockbroker calls you up and says "hey, we have an entire team dedicated just to your portfolio." BS.
The only world in which this makes sense is one in which you relinquish your rights as a consumer by accepting an expensive monthly subscription, to the point that the money you "saved" by not paying for hardware is more than lost from the money you paid into the subscription (think cell phone contracts, wherein you pay upwards of $3000 over 5 years).
This is an unviable dream that someone is trying to sell people on, and not for the benefit of the consumer.
Right.
It's managers vs implementer. When my supervisor says cloud. It's a magical thing somewhere doing stuff for us for free. When I say cloud it's a time slicse of a set of machines we rent which is worse than a dedicated machine but with less maintenance required by me.
I think that's where I fall on this topic. I'm seeing it for it's implantation warts and draw backs; and you're seeing it from the point of view of what it could do in ideal condition physics and logistics be damned.
Hockeymac18
Member
the new 'have you seen titanfall'?
Fine to be skeptical, and all (as we all should be), but it's funny how many minds are already made up on this stuff.
To me, at least, it seems a sensible person would first see what they have to show off after a few years of work with their "could" stuff before just assuming it's all complete and utter BS. I'm not saying you have to buy in to any PR/marketing speak, but you also don't have to assume everything is a lie. Maybe that's just me, though.
RE: Crackdown being mentioned...Seems to make plenty of sense why. Crackdown is probably going to be a the best example for MS of the type of stuff they think their cloud infrastructure will be able to help with. And based on their demo they showed off last year to the public that was early-crackdown footage, I'm intrigued to see what they'll come up with. I'm sure E3 will be interesting.
What?
Yes it would have gameplay consequences.. but not for the reason you seem to think. It would have gameplay consequences before you would "perceive" the jab 12 frames later, which would then sit on top of your own reaction time, not because your reaction time is sub-12 frames. The AI doesn't need to give a shit about this, because it perceives your jab on frame 1. What typically happens in games like Street Fighter is that the AI just sits twiddling its thumbs until enough time has past that its response doesn't come across as cheating. It could be using all that time to think of horrible things to do to you instead.
As I said in my previous post, the calculation wouldn't have to start when the rocket impacts. It could start almost instantly after you pull the trigger, whilst the rocket is in transit, because the game know ahead of time what it's destination will be, when it'll get there, and anything that could possibly intersect with it. So you wouldn't have the rocket collide, and then start requesting a result. The result would have been sent to you whilst the rocket was in transit.
Depends. I can't really say that I've seen much in the way of dynamic world interaction in any of the listed games. It's not only the accuracy that can be changed, the scope and complexity can be dramatically changed to. Even for simple stuff like persistence, you could have the state of various areas in the game world stored in the cloud temporarily, preventing common situations like when you destroy some object in an open world game, return 3 minutes later, and it's all good as new, because the console needed that memory back for wherever else you where off visiting in that time. Things like this may actually make certain gameplay concepts viable, where they weren't before.
I didn't say time isn't an issue with graphics, AI or physics... especially graphics. What I am saying though is that some implementations of physics, and many many implementations of AI aren't very time sensitive. There's obviously still an operating window you need to adhere to (getting an AI response back after 45 seconds would be useless for most games), but these aren't typically single frame dependencies. There's a lot more time to work with before you get to the point where it'd be reasonable to expect a response from a human.
Stuff doesn't occur in a vaccum. Lots of people know loads a stuff about servers, cloud, and the math of videogames.
You can make guesses at how things will go. Like when Sony came around and said 'hey, you know this Cell. It will fucking change the world.' Well we know what CPU can do. they describe to us what the Cell can do. We shrug and think well based on what we know the Cell probably won't change the world. Optimistically it might do some things alright enough to compete with the ever growing compute power of PC GPU's for a while. But we doubt it will change the fucking world.
For cloud. We can say it has some application but nothing like what they sold it as. Based on what we know.
it's obviously cloudgine.
Nothing, "the cloud" never was this amazing thing as it was touted to be. And a lot of people said so from day one, but they were often shouted down by console warriors and fanboys and accused of being Luddites.
Exactly.
In SF4 the AI reads your controller input because it had trouble keeping up otherwise. It's why it feels like it cheats compared to other players. To keep up with the better players it actually has to cheat and start it's decision making process earlier than another player would. It's why offloading the AI would make it terrible in a twitch game like that not better. You might have more compute power but you have lag between reading the game state which is significant.
Which boxes the potential in to scenarios of low player interaction. So why not just divide the building in 6 and where ever the rockets lands in plays the corresponding animation. 80% of the benifit, 2% of the work.
you're capped by bandwidth. How much of the game state can you send back and forth? You get texture/object pop right now due to the lag time between disk and memory. Imagine the problem of maintaining the game state online instead. Games like WoW that do this have lots of pop in. It's a acceptable trade off for a online game but is it for single player? Do you mask it with bloodborne style 45s loads?
That's what I am pointing out; all of the problems which this could apply to don't benefit that much from this solution but they make massive trades off for it. It's it more plausible that they'll just keep using 'server' power for traditionally 'server' things? Like syncronization, as you said persistence, and storage. All of which are seen everywhere on PC and isn't remarkable.
I don't think we'll see anything impressive in the way they initially sold it. I think they'll just use it for useful but unimpressive traditional stuff. Like good average download speeds, more per user online storage, game servers for low pop games, etc... not physics calcs.
My snide insinuations eh
I could be wrong, but my line hasn't changed from XB1 pre-launch. My estimation of GPGPU has diminished while my estimation of cloud compute is right where it was pre-launch. I'm just saying I disagree that there is anything there. Based on what I know, as a part time server guy. The problems MS asserts they could solve with it don't line up with my understanding.
Hockeymac18
Member
And I'm not saying you have to buy in to what it was sold as (which like most of MS messaging at the time was all over the place on what it'd do and who was saying what...and then how it was being interpreted). Really isn't what I'm talking about.
I'm just saying it seems reasonable to at least see what kind of things they have actually implemented with their technology before dismissing it as BS/nonsense. You're not necessarily doing that (as you mention that it has applications), but it sure does seem like a lot of people have already made up their minds on this topic.
I guess in the end it doesn't matter, though. If it's impressive, it'll change people's minds. I'm more just making a general comment on this (and it happens with many things, not just MS's cloud stuff). Being skeptical is one thing (and is necessary in life, I believe), but it's not bad to have an open mind about new technologies/techniques too.
The AI in Street Fighter is simplistic. It doesn't appear to cheat because it has to read ahead. It appears to cheat because its implementation doesn't allow for a believable range of responses that are reasonably approximate to a human. There's a big difference between complex AI and difficult AI. Difficult AI is typically easier to create than easy AI, as simply selecting the best possible response is something the computer can do very easily in a game like Street Fighter. If Capcom wanted, there would simply be no discussion about keeping up, and the computer would beat you perfect every round. It's the complexity that it lacks... developments of a metagame, recognising player tendencies, displaying realistic reactions to being pressured etc. It simply doesn't bother to consider these sorts of things in general, and just reads from a script. Every time you hit the AI, it's essentially just reached the "let's get hit" part of its flowchart. It's not because "omfg I only have 12 frames, what do?".
It really sounds like you have a specific scenario in your head, and this scenario happens to work with the approximations you're suggesting. The answer to all such questions is simply "because they want something more complex than that". Without such a game in front of us, it pretty difficult to determine why it's required. But at the end of the day, it's something that can be implemented... and pretty much anything that can be implemented has the potential to be fundamentally required in a game's design. That's really all there is to it.
You wouldn't need a game's entire state. Only whatever is required for the area you're about to return to. It's similar to streaming in an open world game. You don't go loading the entire world into memory at once. The server would just hold what you've changed in a given area, and hand that information back to you when required. This would be a very small amount of data basically containing shit like "that lamppost isn't over there anymore, it was knocked over here" for a few hundred local objects (yet possibly tens of thousands stored for elsewhere).
The tradeoffs may not actually be massive though. AI is a pretty modular thing which can be largely decoupled from the rest of the game. Always online requirements wouldn't be an issue if the game was going to be online anyway (think Destiny). There's always easier less ambitious ways of doing things, that doesn't mean its the only way they should be done though.
Journey
Banned
That's really the core of it. The trade offs are well known and the possible upsides less known; but so far tiny. This is the reason for all the cynicism.
I think they would make a much better case of azure leading to a more solid online experience than trying to shoe horn cloud compute in as a feature.
Just as kinect did something very well; but MS kept trying to mandate things it didn't do well.
Reality happened.
Pretty sure I was seeing posts like this a couple years ago too, but here we are, still seeing nothing of substance from the initial horse shit.
Pretty sure I was seeing posts like this a couple years ago too, but here we are, still seeing nothing of substance from the initial horse shit.
Pathfinder
Member
I'm continually amazed at how some people think technology and video games just appear out of thin air.
Oh well.
Shhhhhhh... it's magic and we can't be convinced otherwise.
I too would say the same thing. If this game doesn't deliver then it's going to be seen as hype and nothing more for a while.
Seriously, why would I put more faith in him than an entire corporation when they have a game in development? I know he knows a lot of technical stuff, but at this point, it's his word against a game in development. it would be dumb as fuck to take his word as faith right now. all we're saying is wait until Crackdown since it's confirmed to use it (as of right now of course), if it fails, then yeah, ya'll are right.
Hmm, I'd say the online experience stuff has actually been what they've been focused on. They haven't really been talking about cloud compute stuff much outside of its potential use in Crackdown. This line od discussions is really being continued by us rather than them at this point. Even still, when discussing ways it enhances the online experience, there's a tendency for people to write that of too, because servers at their core aren't a brand new concept, or more often because they assume that because something works offline, it's trivial to have it work online two (typically AI units).
As for Kinect, I'm not too sure I agree with you here. I think the things MS focused on with Kinect did typically play to its strengths... unless you mean that they shouldn't have aimed it at gaming in general? If so, I kinda agree with that, but in the context of using it for entertainment I think it was positioned pretty well. I do think it mostly died out just prior to when it was potentially most useful though (ports of universal apps). Stuff like Fruit Ninja and Infinity Blade are the sorts of games Kinect needed an abundance of, but had little access to at the time. I feel like the first version of the Kinect was important for working out the major kinks, but at the same time, feel like the idea as a whole would have benefitted from coinciding with the Xbox One launch, rather than merely being a v2, after frustrating many people with the v1.
Anyhow. I doubt we really have anywhere more to go from here. I think our middle ground is pretty much "technically possible, questionably feasible" in regards to the cloud's use for enhancing games outside of typical online experiences.
He is describing general principles familiar to me from work. They are hand having at something they are trying selling.
Like a stranger describing salfate based detergents vs a corporation extolling the virtues of pro vitimins. Just cuz they have money doesn't mean they aren't lying to you.
Pathfinder
Member
Do we know that Crackdown is the only game in development that will make use of the Cloud like this?
But to this extent? There's exaggerating and blatant lying.
2-3 years is significant? are we forgetting how many changes/additions the old consoles went through?
Won't it be really easy to tell? Just play the game offline.
Why would a game like this have an offline mode?
Did we both experience the same preceeding 2 years? Always online is absolutely necessary? Kinect is an integral component and can't be turned off? Windows 8/vista/ME is a huge step forward? Windows server is more stable than linux? We are Comitted to pc gaming? MCC is now fixed? Etc....
Maintenance
Member
Still waiting.
Because why not? Most games have an offline/single player mode save for MMOs. Games that aren't MMOs that have eschewed a way to play offline tend not to do too well.
At least with Crackdown it'll be really easy to tell exactly what benefit the Cloud is giving it. They'll undoubtedly make that playable offline.
They backtracked on the always online thing before launch. They always said you could just unplug Kinect, but you can't turn it off and to me, it's an integral component considering I use it constantly. Before all the dash updates, if you went into a XB1 thread, you'll see people saying that they felt kinect was necessary to navigate it. (wasn't true, but people felt that way.) Was Windows 8 not a huge step forward from 7 with the whole metro redesign people hated? Don't know about the windows server stuff. You can stream XB1 games to PC and they've said they're focusing on it more. I haven't played MCC, but recent threads indicate the game is working a lot better than launch. Don't know about entirely, but people have said matchmaking is a whole lot better.
Destiny? Titanfall?
Similar threads
- Poll