The Xbone

I said potential. Right now, it's not practical to offload heavy, time-sensitive stuff. That will change in the future as broadband gets better. What you can stream at this very moment, however, would be the level geometry itself. Textures can get processed on the box since that's what you really see, while the mesh can be calculated remotely. Perhaps skyboxes, or NPC interactions. How about storing all of the markers that are necessary to maintain a large, persistent world? Heck, Microsoft may not even know everything that they can do with the servers and Azure yet, it's there partly so developers can explore this new resource.

And the PS4 does not have that much of a hardware advantage. It just doesn't. Yes, it has more stream processors, but the GDDR5 advantage is made up for by software tomfoolery on the Xbone. I really don't think multi-platform games are going to look any better on the PS4 than they do on the Xbone.

Hey, you guys remember playing H2X/H2V on Live?

The cloud. Yet another out-of-band service that will break forced functionality when the next gen is phased out. I wonder if developers have to pay monthly fees for the Azure bullshit as well (meaning if the studio or support goes under, so does the cloud).

You know what else runs on Azure? H4. Hopefully the shit service with H4 was just a learning phase.

The Cloud: because developers don't get any sunlight, why should their software? :mech2:

Okay, that's enough cloud turbulence for one morning.

I lied. You know what other over hyped, mystical idea exists "in the cloud"? "Heaven". :mech2:

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Originally Posted by Warsaw

I said potential. Right now, it's not practical to offload heavy, time-sensitive stuff. That will change in the future as broadband gets better. What you can stream at this very moment, however, would be the level geometry itself. Textures can get processed on the box since that's what you really see, while the mesh can be calculated remotely. Perhaps skyboxes, or NPC interactions. How about storing all of the markers that are necessary to maintain a large, persistent world? Heck, Microsoft may not even know everything that they can do with the servers and Azure yet, it's there partly so developers can explore this new resource.

And the PS4 does not have that much of a hardware advantage. It just doesn't. Yes, it has more stream processors, but the GDDR5 advantage is made up for by software tomfoolery on the Xbone. I really don't think multi-platform games are going to look any better on the PS4 than they do on the Xbone.

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Nonononono. You would never want to run anything that directly affects a local simulations each frame.

The cloud is such a bullshit term.

This is a server and nothing more. You want to use it for player versus player interaction and that's about it. Single-threaded capability on these servers are going to be the most power-efficient thing microsoft can afford to maintain. I'm actually surprised they're considering using some of them for on-demand dedicated servers for various games.

The games that use it for more than multi-player server hosting will be akin to MMOs. They'll have a disclaimer on the box making it clear to the player exactly what it is. As long as you know what you're getting into, I don't see a problem with this. I am a pretty anti-cloud person, but you'd have to be blind to ignore the benefits; it's rather disingenuous to only preach about its pitfalls.



I also fail to see how static level geometry affects a local simulation each frame if it doesn't even move. All you need to know is that there 's terrain there so your collisions interact properly. NPC interactions, i.e. Mass Effect conversations, don't really have a time demand, and a skybox does nothing but look pretty...

They might not have a 'time demand' but they don't have a computational demand either, therefore making them pointless to process remotely.

That is not a true statement. If it were, then polygon counts wouldn't matter.

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Originally Posted by Warsaw

That is not a true statement. If it were, then polygon counts wouldn't matter.

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It wasn't supposed to be taken literally, like with your time demand statement. The point is that there's no benefit to streaming geometry over the Internet that I can see. I didn't understand the comment about skyboxes and calculating meshes remotely.

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If it were, then polygon counts wouldn't matter.

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They only matter for the actual rendering, which happens 60+ times a second and is done locally on the GPU so I still fail to see how the cloud would be of benefit.

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Originally Posted by Warsaw

The games that use it for more than multi-player server hosting will be akin to MMOs. They'll have a disclaimer on the box making it clear to the player exactly what it is. As long as you know what you're getting into, I don't see a problem with this. I am a pretty anti-cloud person, but you'd have to be blind to ignore the benefits; it's rather disingenuous to only preach about its pitfalls.



I also fail to see how static level geometry affects a local simulation each frame if it doesn't even move. All you need to know is that there 's terrain there so your collisions interact properly. NPC interactions, i.e. Mass Effect conversations, don't really have a time demand, and a skybox does nothing but look pretty...

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Simulation-level stuff (ie your physics colliders, render geometry (arguable, but depends on specific engine architecture and game's design), game code that directly interacts with those two prior things such as weapons fire checking what material was hit for particles/sounds/hit info/etc) would be hung up on the latency to obtain a serialized version. Even if you had amazing ping (less than one millisecond), that ping would take up a significant fraction of a frame. If you get to more accurate pings (especially in the united states) where a good low ping is 33ms or lower (lets be reasonable here it's usually somewhere under 200ms) then you've waited the equivalence of two 60Hz frames for your serialization.

Networked game code that doesn't affect the simulation frame by frame would be fine since you can predictably handle latency. So your 'ME conversations' query to the server to see "what's hot and what should be talked about like cool hip dudes" would be fine since you can check frame by frame if a pointer to the data is valid yet without breaking anything on the simulation side. If you 'start the conversation', you ask the server for the conversation. While you're waiting to see if you even get a response, you can have the simulation carry on without any worry.

Titanfall managed to get away with AI-bots(autopilot Titans) in their game because their gameplay completely relies on a server authoritative method to serialize everything. Want to walk forward? Server says that's fine. Want to walk more forward? Well, server says that you're running into a wall at this position, but you can keep trying. DayZ would work fine, considering it completely relies on the server for persistence. WoW or EVE would be fine as well.

Titanfall's server-authoritative method is the only way this hybrid cloud is going to work.

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Originally Posted by Skyline

They only matter for the actual rendering, which happens 60+ times a second and is done locally on the GPU so I still fail to see how the cloud would be of benefit.

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A better way to look at it would be that your avatar is remotely controlled by you via the internet in the remotely calculated environment, and the console renders the textures or other bits that would be really hard to transmit over an internet connection without issues such as excessive popping. All the console is doing now is effectively drawing a matte painting over top of what would otherwise be a grey clay render (if even that) using the information contained in the packet to set the boundaries. It's not doing 3D. It doesn't have to figure out what the player's position is, where the lights are; it simply gets told all of that and executes the texture, which will be stored locally as a base and modified according to the lighting information received. Voxels might actually be a good fit for this, using the cloud information as a sort of skeleton to be magnetically attached to by the local hardware. Glorified pixel art, but damn pretty pixel art.

This may not work for fast-paced games at first, but that doesn't matter because not all games are fast-paced. They are not even all shooters.

This is, really, all uncharted territory. Even Microsoft themselves said they are excited to see what uses developers come up with for their new cloud services. I don't expect any current engine technologies to really be flexible with the cloud system. What I described above is most definitely not a conventional raster engine.