BlazingDarkness
Member
I can totally see this happening. And people will lap it up.
MS: Xbox One 40x More Powerful Than 360 with the Cloud, Only 10x Without the Cloud
- Thread starter Horse Armour
- Start date
I can totally see this happening. And people will lap it up.
I hate to break it to you, but your wheel is on a rickshaw.
your posts are hilarious. I like to picture you on a streetcorner, hair akimbo preaching to the masses.
Gully State
Member
Coding to the cloud>>>>>coding to metal. I wonder what kind of day 1 shenanigans we'll get with future games utilizing the this for AI routines.
Penguins&PolarBears
Member
You: Would you mind explaining the true power of the cloud and how it can benefit graphics/physics in games? Thanks.
It allows them to offload game computations on the local machine so that the local machine can be 100% focused on just graphics. And for some games that have large persistent worlds they can stream computations for parts of the game that are far away or out of sight of the player. Again allowing the local machine to focus 100% of local power solely on what the player is immediately looking at up close.
In an OnLive/Gaikai scenario it is unlimited power. In the current mixed implementation they are promising right now it is 40x power. The limitations right now are the local machine. Eventually the local machine becomes irrelevant and you have unlimited power; console generations become an antiquated concept.
I'd bet my life that Onlive/Gaikai technology are the future of this industry. My phone/tablet LTE is already faster than my Verizon FiOS home internet connection. Imagine the world 10 years from now.
Brought to you, along with Netflix, by XBL GOLD + CLOUD EDITION. All this for the low monthly price that we now require for even basic components of single player games
To be fair, you may be overplaying the latency a bit, particularly where AI is concerned. Online multiplayer certainly already exists today that can achieve what appears to be near-synchrony (good enough so to speak, thanks to various clever tricks) between players in genres that require a fair amount of precision.
Now, those remote players could all easily be replaced by AI computed elsewhere, and you'd not be able to immediately discern the difference; that's a first glimpse of one simple use case, ie. cloud-processed AI opponents in your games that are handled like human online opponents. The next step is just to think of those "other AI players" less as players and more as encapsulated objects in the game's ecosystem, because that's effectively what they are. Now you can start to offload the behaviors of other elements in the environment in the same fashion, though certainly with some limitations.
It's not complete nonsense, we just need to see how it plays out.
the point being that whatever was done server side could now free up local to do it's job better, expanding the power of the local box
BlazingDarkness
Member
No, because then Microsoft have no bullshit cover for their online-DRM scheme.
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
The cloud can do two things.
1.) Store shit.
2.) Compute something, then provide a result, typically in the form of a web page. This typically involves looking at a database to produce a result.
The current big use is #1 in the form of "cloud drives" such as dropbox. #2 is used primarily in web based applications like Google docs, or ERP solutions like SAP.
The fact that people are considering this as a feasible option... just wow.
Some people will defend anything to save face.
1.) Store shit.
2.) Compute something, then provide a result, typically in the form of a web page. This typically involves looking at a database to produce a result.
The current big use is #1 in the form of "cloud drives" such as dropbox. #2 is used primarily in web based applications like Google docs, or ERP solutions like SAP.
The fact that people are considering this as a feasible option... just wow.
Some people will defend anything to save face.
Probably going to be exactly this, only the PS4 games will still look better and have everything and more than Microsoft claims the XO is doing via the "cloud".
godhandiscen
There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
I probably didn't explain myself well enough in my post, but the type of computations that will be offloaded to the cloud will be those that aren't latency bound. Graphics processing is latency bound, it will be hard for cloud computations to free up resources for graphics.
ah thats where i remember the name.
BlazingDarkness
Member
I can picture you laughing manically while reading the OP.
la flama blanca
Banned
and how is that information then brought back in-game?
IdreamofHIME
Member
Vegeta's gonna need another power scouter.
OldAsUrSock
Banned
Nonsense. It's more like comparing a reliable, time-proven automobile design, to the promises of someone who says they can make you wings that will enable you to fly. As at least the PS4 is delivering with actual hardware. Whereas, Microsoft is making promises of giving you a rocket science, wizard-jizz performance boost that is entirely dependent on your internet connection. I'll take the hardware, thanks.
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
Not that I really care to compare since we know nothing on Sony's server structure but when they talked about the network at the PS4 unveil they described it as the largest ever. Not sure what that means as I'm not as informed on those bits about the platform by my contacts as I am about the SW and indie side of things.
yep, I wonder how many of those 300.000 servers will be dedicsted to fantasy football stats, skype, tv guide recommendations and user behaviour analysis..
Rebel Leader
THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
EDIT: NVM
I wonder what it is like to be in that head of yours.
The funny thing is, the only examples that could probably be relevant to this are in genres that don't even come normally to consoles anyway. Like say, Civilization running on a pretty low-power device and processing each turn's AI on "the cloud". I can't really think of any other examples that wouldn't turn this into a nightmare for programmers.
Even then I doubt the latency this would involve would really be worth the effort.
Warm Machine
Member
The cloud, so far, has been great at sending data to it, having it crunch a ton of numbers, and then sending the solution back to the device.
Realtime application of cloud computing doesn't sound reasonable. It could however be crunching away at procedurally generating a world and then sending that world to the device in chunks.
It could also do lightmapping offline and sending those light textures back. So you would get the benefit of GI lighting as a texture updating in a time of day lighting scenario. Visually that would be pretty incredible.
Realtime application of cloud computing doesn't sound reasonable. It could however be crunching away at procedurally generating a world and then sending that world to the device in chunks.
It could also do lightmapping offline and sending those light textures back. So you would get the benefit of GI lighting as a texture updating in a time of day lighting scenario. Visually that would be pretty incredible.
NullPointer
Member
But it would also add instability to every one of those game elements, as nobody's internet is perfect. So an offline box could render a crowd in a racing game, for example, no problem - but what would the cloud-powered crowd look like once you have a nice spike of lag?
You'd have to be able to fallback to local processing for anything you offload to the cloud, otherwise you'd have to force any game modes that use these features to be 100% connected at all times.
Nope, even as a cool idea, I see more drawbacks than benefits.
Dark-Cloudz
Member
Them cloud powered game will have an amazing shelf life... not.
"Oh but they can just patch it so the game won't require the cloud anymore"
Yes, because the One would somehow be able to make up for the loss of 75% power from the magic cloud? When the One will get retired, you won't be able to play any games because the cloud is gone.
This is just getting grand. Then again, I guess they can just turn off Cheetah speed when the cloud is strained.
"Oh but they can just patch it so the game won't require the cloud anymore"
Yes, because the One would somehow be able to make up for the loss of 75% power from the magic cloud? When the One will get retired, you won't be able to play any games because the cloud is gone.
This is just getting grand. Then again, I guess they can just turn off Cheetah speed when the cloud is strained.
dark_prinny
Banned
crazygambit
Member
Thank you.
I really don't understand where they are going with this. It's not an edge in any conceivable way. Querying data from the internet and integrating it in software is not something that their hardware is any better at than any other device?
Are they specifically offering remote computation to devs on their 300k servers?
Are they specifically offering remote computation to devs on their 300k servers?
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Yep, not all packets make it to the destination.
No, no, no guys. You've got it all wrong.
The Xbone is definitely going to off-load tons of information to the cloud that your console will never have to process!
What games you've recently played, what you recently surfed/viewed, what the Kinect is hearing and sending back to the servers...
Procedural ads generated in mere seconds! Tailored to your needs! Amazing.
The Xbone is definitely going to off-load tons of information to the cloud that your console will never have to process!
What games you've recently played, what you recently surfed/viewed, what the Kinect is hearing and sending back to the servers...
Procedural ads generated in mere seconds! Tailored to your needs! Amazing.
la flama blanca
Banned
dopeyfish, still working on your explanation?
One thing I will say, is Microsoft will use these servers to get a leg up in online gaming. The benefits of the servers lie in low latency advantage, less computational. What will happen is they'll just push bigger versions of online modes, more players in maps, bigger maps, less lag etc etc that are problematic on P2P systems.
lol, I like this one.
A tower built of a million bricks. That somebody launches a missile into. It's online. Once that missle is launched, the game knows where it's going to impact.
If you were to calculate where all 1 million bricks smashed to, it'd bring a GPU to its knees. If the world instead calculated those figures, you could send the results to all the client players and they could just render the results.
That's a real world application. But it's also kind of meaningless. Because who really cares if those 1 million bricks crumpled according to the laws of physics, or fake physics. It looks very similar either way.
So I get the usefulness, but come on, it's not this massive thing that the headline implies.
tactilecleaner
Banned
Boohoo, probably the best effect for this cloud help will be when you are playing multiplayer and GAF people don't play campaign. So what's the problem. Secret sauce in the cloud!
Rebel Leader
THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
crazygambit
Member
I'd love to see an AI vs AI chess game using the cloud. That could be really impressive.
LukasTaves
Member
I can think of lighting... That's one thing that can be calculated in the cloud, even dynamically and it's very latency tolerant.