So if GTA5 had this cloud computing feature, you'd be able to have more pedestrians in the city around you all of whom have individualized AIs?
How about some of those sexy, gratuitous physics (physx) particle swirls or destruction orgies you see on high end NVIDIA cards? Could any of those details be calculated remotely?
It is just not possible(at this time) or at the very least practical. What the fuck are some of you smoking?
Lets just pretend they are being honest and can get this to work-
Would only online only games work with this? Or could they perhaps scale the visuals (better visuals when online and speaking to the cloud)?
Dynamic lighting does need fast and immediate responses. This doesn't make sense.
They haven't demonstrated a game yet period...
Let MSFT prove it at E3 and beyond. If they don't then you call them out and gloat. If they do, you eat crow (with about half the other GAF members). The over reaction on the forum with the current (non) information is honestly crazy.
Sure, as long the "impact" can be predicted before, so the calculation comes in time.
Theoretically works, but you won't see player directly generating those physx particles animations if are timed sensitive and can't lag a bit.
I think its a really interesting idea with potential down the road, but I also see it effectively killing offline gaming. Not cool.
The first quote in the OP speaks to having some way to intelligently handle situations where you lose your connection, but doesn't offer any details. The second quote is the kicker though, since he speaks directly towards moving more and more processing to the cloud over time to actually in-place upgrade the graphical capabilities of the console. That to me means they want and expect offline gaming to deteriorate in quality and effects over the lifetime of the console.
An always online console is fine, provided you can guarantee uptime and quality to the extent that say, electricity is dependable, but you can't. Always online is also a measure of control, an ad delivery mechanism, a possible invasion of privacy via kinect, DRM, and one way to justify requiring a subscription account.
So for right now I see it far more about control than about possibility.
So this really is just turning into Microsoft's "power of the Cell" then. Everything is left unexplained and vague and executives just keep saying "power of the cloud" or "cloud enhancements".
I think the difference is that Sony just about managed to get away with it because their team of first party developers are perhaps the most gifted in the whole industry so they managed to extract every last drop of power from the Cell and PS3 first party games were appreciably better looking than other games on either console. I'm not sure I can picture first party Xbone games looking better than first party PS4 games because of some undefined Cloud power.
Personally, I think the "looking better" aspect of this isn't the interesting part. It's more about enhancing AI, turn based games, massive scale MP games, stuff that can be done in the background and used later, not stuff that needs to be sent down immediately (and certainly not every frame... that's just silly).
Maybe we won't see too many games use this in the beginning. But I think it could catch on once the devs have had time to figure out how it helps them.
Not all lighting is created equal.
Head lights and torchlights and explosions != day/night/weather cycles.
This might be a possibility.
But your console doesn't crunch the AI - it gets sent the pathing information, kinda like animation data.
So on your console, the AIs are following predetermined paths and behaviours, and only when you bump into and interact with them would the local console break them out of those behaviourial loops and interject its own in there.
Of course, the scene would have to be carefully constructed - you couldn't have too many people too close together at once (which kinda misses the point of cloud compute AI?) - in case the player does something that affects all of them at once (i.e. pulls out a gun in the middle of night club and shoots - you'd expect everyone in the scene to start panicking and taking cover).
Maybe you can have more complex nodes of behaviour for cloud computed AI, but when they're locally controlled for such a large group, they become 'dumb' - i.e. panicking and all running away from the player, before cloud AI kicks in and individuals start to seek for cover and pull out their cell phones, or etc.
so did this work back when the cell did it? .... right ..
no one is going to waste the programming resources to code for this, hell lowest common denominator porting as it is is rife in the industry ..and that's coding to hardware platforms where specs are set and don't move.
rule of thumb, if yr console is launching in a few mths ..and nothing specific is detailed about things like this ...it's FUD.
great counter material to when ever any one asks why ps3 hw is more powerful though .... but something tells me MS sound have dedicated more of this time brainstorming effective responces to press questions about the DRM situation ... amiright
Personally, I think the "looking better" aspect of this isn't the interesting part. It's more about enhancing AI, turn based games, massive scale MP games, stuff that can be done in the background and used later, not stuff that needs to be sent down immediately (and certainly not every frame... that's just silly).
Maybe we won't see too many games use this in the beginning. But I think it could catch on once the devs have had time to figure out how it helps them.
And how unique or practical would it be to offload these calculations to a cloud based server? What about if someone's connection is spotty? When would Microsoft stop supporting an older XBOX ONE game with this supposed "cloud processing"? Why wouldn't anyone of us most likely have known of this kind of advanced technology up until MS' CONSOLE RELEASE? I'll bet my fucking account that this turns into another gimmick.
If you can't connect to the cloud processor, obviously your Xbone will explode like a petulant child, killing any players seating in front of it, and setting the house ablaze.
Obviously, if the connection drops off, it'll stop looking as fancy/behaving as well. I don't know if this means it shouldn't have access to cloud computing resources - I think it just means it'll stop looking as fancy. Which is ok, if at bare minimum it looks better than console games from this gen by some degree.
As someone who has been working with Azure for years, I had a pretty strong reaction to the PR statements. Just to clarify, I do not work for MS nor in gaming; my work is business app related - a field where MS has been pushing it's cloud offering for a while now.
First of all: These servers have been around for a while, I doubt these 300k claims are based on something Xbox specific. If someone knows better please correct me, but I believe 300k is just the total number of all MS cloud servers currently. So for example the server running our company email is already listed.
Calculating power: The current servers are no graphical beasts, they have 8 core processors and a lot of memory, but quite basic GPU:s that are shared with up to 8 other customers ( Everything is virtualized ). Currently the servers mostly host databases, websites, sharepoint deployments etc. While they certanly might be 4x Xb one in CPU calculations, I doubt they will be doing any heavy graphics calculations anytime soon.
Price: A singe 8 core machine runs at about 500 dollars a month at the current pricing model. I just don't see how it can be feasable in the long run in games that have no monthly fees. If they actually want to calculate anything worthwhile graphics related, we are looking at a several cores per user. It simply makes zero sense to build complicated cloud support for just one extra core.
What the Cloud is good at: The cloud is good for handling large amount of data ( Disk and memory is cheap ) and doing userbase wide calculations. It might calculate statistics or auto balance the game based on a lot of user data, or it might store persistent world states for large worlds ( Online destructible environments ). But actually improving graphics, that will most likely not happen; they would lose their game profit way to fast. Again, 8 cores cost 72 dollars for 100 hours of usage at current Azure prices. How much are those shadow calculations worth?
What we will see: EA will propably make websites for all their sport games based on in game statistics and data. Lineups will be handled trough the cloud and you can compete with your dream teams or whatever. I believe most of the "exclusive" EA sport features are related to this. The big advantage in hte cloud is accessibilty and data. I see more companion iPad apps like Destiny has in the future. You can most likely see Cod statistics live from any device.
Why I am sceptical: The cloud is nothing new and Azure has been around for years. How many games use cloud calculations currently? I only see this as a way for MS to bring current web based features under one roof / API. Thus giving MS a steady revenue, and simplifying development of these kind of "off-console" experiences.
None of the stuff you have mentioned is particularly intensive for a modern GPU and it would just introduce latency for enemies and break the game. My connection to the local MS server will have to be less than 3-4ms so that it can calculate everything and send it back in time for the next frame in 33ms time. I don't see it personally.
As someone who has been working with Azure for years, I had a pretty strong reaction to the PR statements. Just to clarify, I do not work for MS nor in gaming; my work is business app related - a field where MS has been pushing it's cloud offering for a while now.
First of all: These servers have been around for a while, I doubt these 300k claims are based on something Xbox specific. If someone knows better please correct me, but I believe 300k is just the total number of all MS cloud servers currently. So for example the server running our company email is already listed.
Calculating power: The current servers are no graphical beasts, they have 8 core processors and a lot of memory, but quite basic GPU:s that are shared with up to 8 other customers ( Everything is virtualized ). Currently the servers mostly host databases, websites, sharepoint deployments etc. While they certanly might be 4x Xb one in CPU calculations, I doubt they will be doing any heavy graphics calculations anytime soon.
Price: A singe 8 core machine runs at about 500 dollars a month at the current pricing model. I just don't see how it can be feasable in the long run in games that have no monthly fees. If they actually want to calculate anything worthwhile graphics related, we are looking at a several cores per user. It simply makes zero sense to build complicated cloud support for just one extra core.
What the Cloud is good at: The cloud is good for handling large amount of data ( Disk and memory is cheap ) and doing userbase wide calculations. It might calculate statistics or auto balance the game based on a lot of user data, or it might store persistent world states for large worlds ( Online destructible environments ). But actually improving graphics, that will most likely not happen; they would lose their game profit way to fast. Again, 8 cores cost 72 dollars for 100 hours of usage at current Azure prices. How much are those shadow calculations worth?
What we will see: EA will propably make websites for all their sport games based on in game statistics and data. Lineups will be handled trough the cloud and you can compete with your dream teams or whatever. I believe most of the "exclusive" EA sport features are related to this. The big advantage in hte cloud is accessibilty and data. I see more companion iPad apps like Destiny has in the future. You can most likely see Cod statistics live from any device.
Why I am sceptical: The cloud is nothing new and Azure has been around for years. How many games use cloud calculations currently? I only see this as a way for MS to bring current web based features under one roof / API. Thus giving MS a steady revenue, and simplifying development of these kind of "off-console" experiences.
Three servers for each console? Am I reading this right?
If you can't connect to the cloud processor, obviously your Xbone will explode like a petulant child, killing any players seating in front of it, and setting the house ablaze.
Obviously, if the connection drops off, it'll stop looking as fancy/behaving as well. I don't know if this means it shouldn't have access to cloud computing resources - I think it just means it'll stop looking as fancy. Which is ok, if at bare minimum it looks better than console games from this gen by some degree.
So the cloud is handicapped to a small number of effects on the periphery. Not that 4x performance boost MS is going on about.
This post should be added to the OP. Real world experience with Azure.
text
Xbox Live already runs on Azure. As does Outlook. Everybody has real world experiences with Azure.
Looking forward to it being like UE3 on the fly texture streaming, but with...lighting and physics. Lol.
In all seriousness, there are very few aspects of a game that I can think of that are latency insensitive. Even lighting and physics need to be dynamically calculated if they're going to react to the player's actions.
Yeah that's more or less what I assumed - the raw performance icnrease might be 4x or whatever, but in real terms, I don't think the games will look a lot nicer, purely due to what they can and can't cloud compute.
Xbox Live already runs on Azure. As does Outlook. Everybody has real world experiences with Azure.
I don't know why everyone is so hung up on this somehow making games look nicer. Maybe someone will figure out some way to leverage the cloud for that, but in the short term, I'm not sure you're going to see it used that way.
We're talking about general purpose computing power which can be used for lots of non-graphical things.
As someone who has been working with Azure for years, I had a pretty strong reaction to the PR statements. Just to clarify, I do not work for MS nor in gaming; my work is business app related - a field where MS has been pushing it's cloud offering for a while now.
First of all: These servers have been around for a while, I doubt these 300k claims are based on something Xbox specific. If someone knows better please correct me, but I believe 300k is just the total number of all MS cloud servers currently. So for example the server running our company email is already listed.
Calculating power: The current servers are no graphical beasts, they have 8 core processors and a lot of memory, but quite basic GPU:s that are shared with up to 8 other customers ( Everything is virtualized ). Currently the servers mostly host databases, websites, sharepoint deployments etc. While they certanly might be 4x Xb one in CPU calculations, I doubt they will be doing any heavy graphics calculations anytime soon.
Price: A singe 8 core machine runs at about 500 dollars a month at the current pricing model. I just don't see how it can be feasable in the long run in games that have no monthly fees. If they actually want to calculate anything worthwhile graphics related, we are looking at a several cores per user. It simply makes zero sense to build complicated cloud support for just one extra core.
What the Cloud is good at: The cloud is good for handling large amount of data ( Disk and memory is cheap ) and doing userbase wide calculations. It might calculate statistics or auto balance the game based on a lot of user data, or it might store persistent world states for large worlds ( Online destructible environments ). But actually improving graphics, that will most likely not happen; they would lose their game profit way to fast. Again, 8 cores cost 72 dollars for 100 hours of usage at current Azure prices. How much are those shadow calculations worth?
What we will see: EA will propably make websites for all their sport games based on in game statistics and data. Lineups will be handled trough the cloud and you can compete with your dream teams or whatever. I believe most of the "exclusive" EA sport features are related to this. The big advantage in hte cloud is accessibilty and data. I see more companion iPad apps like Destiny has in the future. You can most likely see Cod statistics live from any device.
Why I am sceptical: The cloud is nothing new and Azure has been around for years. How many games use cloud calculations currently? I only see this as a way for MS to bring current web based features under one roof / API. Thus giving MS a steady revenue, and simplifying development of these kind of "off-console" experiences.
Forgive my ignorance; why is it not worth putting pre-computed light maps on the player's hard drive or the game disc?