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On June 14 2013 20:17 paralleluniverse wrote:
You cannot have game and marketing budgets this high while also having used and rental games existing. The numbers do NOT work people.
Newsflash. This is why you're seeing free to play and microtransactions everywhere. The disc based day one $60 model is crumbling.
does not compute
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Xbox One developers team up with NASA to simulate 35 thousand light years of space
In a small room tucked away at the back of Microsoft's E3 booth, developers behind the company's upcoming and now controversial Xbox One shared a tech demo created with the aid of NASA in an attempt to push the technical limits of what Microsoft's Geoff Henshaw calls the system's "pure horsepower." The demo itself is largely the work of programmer Frank Savage who with a team began the experiment with the system by searching for a "giant set of data," says Henshaw. The goal: To see what is possible using the pure computational horsepower of the new console. "So we went to NASA, because NASA has this really cool database. It has every single celestial body in the inner solar system, including planets, moons, asteroids, comets." says Henshaw. The result is a tech demo simulation of space based on out to 35 thousand light years of data which tracks the position, velocity and orbital trajectory of every single subset of asteroids between Mars and Pluto. Each of the 40,000 asteroids are calculated and rendered, presenting its time and place to a high degree of accuracy." It's an example of the possibilities of the system, which according to Henshaw includes the ability to feature "10,000 or 100,000 enemies in-game" while maintaining a high level of realism and fluidity in the near-field view by offloading it to the cloud. Comparatively, to get the same result from last-generation consoles it would require "10 and a half Xbox 360 consoles all working in parallel" in terms of computational horsepower, he adds. "This is how the cloud will change the gaming experience," he says. "If a developer wants to do really crazy stuff we can see how he can map and compute 330,000 asteroids in real-time via global cloud computing. There are 500,000 updates per second from the cloud to Xbox One. Developers tell us this is a miracle for them. Even the highest of highest PCs could not do all of this at once, it really takes global cloud computing resources." Xbox One makes roughly 100,000 servers available and dozens of data centres for developers to use — a number that Henshaw says is likely to grow over time. "We're just scratching the surface of what can be done," he says. Henshaw previously detailed how Xbox One's built-in Kinect can augment gameplay, in an overview you can read up right here. Source: http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/13/4427394/xbox-one-developers-team-up-nasa
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Titanfall making use of the cloud services available on Xbox One. It's basically running like a MMO.
Respawn has conducted numerous blind player tests of Titanfall, and the results of its efforts to blend multiplayer and single-player tentpoles are encouraging. "They’re playing a multplayer game and they don’t even realize it for the first 45 minutes," said McCoy. "They see all this crazy stuff happening around them, but it doesn’t click that these are people in our office playing against them." And according to every Respawn employee interviewed for this article, this is due in large part to Titanfall’s cloud-implementation. "One of the new things … is taking advantage of the cloud to put our dedicated servers there, to eliminate things like host advantage and things like that, and introduce more stable experiences for our players," Zampella says. But Titanfall’s server-based backbone goes beyond the traditional benefits of dedicated servers for multiplayer games. "It allows us to offload all AI processing, all that single-player stuff, onto the cloud." The "single-player stuff" Zampella alludes to includes the basic scripting and control of the world itself. All non-player activity is determined server-side, whether it’s AI "popcorn" or the massive ships that often hover over the battlefield. There are multiple practical benefits to this arrangement. Instead of having world events determined in one player’s session and uploading that information to the multiplayer server, which would then be distributed to each player, locational and movement data for the various parts of Titanfall are distributed to each player simultaneously. "Being able to know we have those servers available allows us to focus on other things," Baker says. It also frees up system resources for the game running on a console or PC. "Before we decided to do that, our plan was to have (two of six available) threads dedicated to that, to running the 'server' on one of the (player) clients. It gives us more CPU available on the console than we’d have." "I don’t know that we would have tried this game, had we not had access to the cloud and the servers that it gives us," Emslie said. Source: http://www.polygon.com/e3-2013/2013/6/12/4419110/titanfall-respawn
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United States22883 Posts
Cliffy B makes Jeff K look intelligent.
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Cloud computing is a myth. It cannot exist the way they claim they do. The reason it works for that NASA thing is because it is ONE client with a big task. But Xbone players aren't ONE client, they are millions of clients, all requiring DIFFERENT tasks. That means the tasks have to be faaaar smaller. Imagine it this way:
You have a desktop PC and an xbox. Your xbox can use your desktop pc's clockcycles to compute stuff. If your desktop is idle, your xbox can use all your desktop's processing power to compute stuff. That is awesome. However, if your desktop is busy with something (for instance, your brother is playing a videogame of his own on it), then there are very few free clockcycles for it to use.
Now the same happens with the Xbone. Lets say an average of 200,000 gamers use their Xbone at primetime per serverpark. That means they either have a HELL of a lot of servers (far more than Blizzard does for WoW), or the extra processing power per user will be negligible. Now add latency to it: if there are 1000s of NPCs walking around doing stuff in the game, these have to have been computed BEFOREHAND, because you cannot simply outsource something over the internet without far larger delays than local computing will take. Now that means that the game is either extremely linear (so the game knows where you're going and how long it should take you to get there), or lots of extra stuff will be computed, just in case your next decision is to go left (whereas you actually go right). The former obviously works for some games, the latter just means that all those overloaded servers will have to work even harder to give you even a marginal increase in performance.
Now I'm not saying its useless. A good developer could probably optimise this backend computing, for instance by finding users requiring similar computations and only performing that computation once (for instance, the same crowd of people only needs to be computed once, and sent to 100s of users simultaneously). The Drivatar idea is also a pretty awesome idea for using crowdsourcing/cloud computing (although the name is retarded). But simply saying "it will happen in the cloud!" is about the same as saying "the toothfairy will give you money". There are serious bandwidth and processing limits on what can actually be done with cloud computing.
As a final example of the difference between cloud and local, I suggest you look at the responsiveness and featureset of googledocs as compared to a locally (or even a company license run on a dedicated server) installed office suite (MS Office or something else): it can do less, and does so slower. However, it offers serious advantages: your documents are automatically available when you move between systems, other people can see your changes and make their own, etc.
If developers manage to take advantage of THAT aspect (reuse of processing, or using people's choices in a crowdsourced AI, or something else that can use the socially centralized aspect of cloud computing), then the cloud computing really will offer massive advantages (although it's still not something Xbone exclusive... PSN is moving in a similar direction WITHOUT requiring it: it's opt-in, not forced). However, simply waving your hands and saying the cloud will offer massive computing power? Look at Simcity.
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Yea the idea that you can outsource computing power to some data center and then have all that CPU power transferred over the internet to the end user is ridiculous given current technology. They are probably just making some nonsense up so they can report to the "smart money" on Wall St that the Xbox One has cloud computing. Its more about buzzwords and stock prices than about actually creating good games.
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So if it's too expensive to make as technically proficient games as possible, then don't? Look at Metro Last Light or Demon's/Dark Souls. They both look outstanding, and they're both 2 of the best games to come out in a loooong time yet I bet the development costs for those games are nothing at all compared to most "triple A" games. It doesn't have to look ohhhmmyguuurd good you know.
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dedicated server cluster = cloud computing powered by Zeus Father of Gods and Men and Lord of Skies
We next gen now
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Funniest part about cloud computing was, when they asked MS what happens, when the internet connection goes down in the middle of a game. They had no freaking idea what to say 
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On June 15 2013 01:03 Vardant wrote:Funniest part about cloud computing was, when they asked MS what happens, when the internet connection goes down in the middle of a game. They had no freaking idea what to say
Well, the cloud starts raining...
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I thought people would have learned their cloud-computing lesson after Sim CIty.
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On June 15 2013 01:12 a176 wrote:
I thought people would have learned their cloud-computing lesson after Sim CIty.
Yeah. Thats just one game and EA is a pretty fuking big company. Simcity 5 is by no mean a popular game nowadays and they still can't handle its release.
Cloud computing up until now are just servers to perform basic task, not complicated task like real computing or rendering and transfer its back to the client. We are not there yet, its as simple as that.
MS is just trying to have control over its customer so it can make sure that people cant buy used game or have to remain connected at all time so they can sell other products to customers.
Even if that could happen, I don't see how Sony won't react to this and make a similar service once its really possible to do so. Its not like XboxOne hardware wise have something that PS4 doesn't, they are basically the same structure. I think MS just in way over their head and rely too much on the success of Xbox360 to push customers into their uncomfort zone.
They failed to realize that PS3 sold just as much as the Xbox360(both at around 77 millions worldwide) and gamers will jump ships as soon as they got their chance. This has been proven again again and again, the most recent example was Sony themselves. PS2 sold 150 millions unit worldwide(53 millions in the US) , the absolute king of 2000~2006 gen, but look what happen when Sony become arrogant and bring the PS3 to customer with a $599 pricetage. They let Xbox360 took over the US, the most important gaming market in the world.
I really hope MS can undo some of the damages they did to themselves so we can at least have a competitive next gen scene. I doubt that though, Sony is so much in the driving seat right now.
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On June 15 2013 00:19 TheFish7 wrote:
Yea the idea that you can outsource computing power to some data center and then have all that CPU power transferred over the internet to the end user is ridiculous given current technology. They are probably just making some nonsense up so they can report to the "smart money" on Wall St that the Xbox One has cloud computing. Its more about buzzwords and stock prices than about actually creating good games.
And what's going to happen to the stock price when these Wall Street traders realize that they've been duped. Real smart strategy.
All of you bashing cloud computing don't seem to realize that this isn't some pie in the sky idea which will be viable only in the next decade. It's real, and it's really happening in games right now. MMOs use servers to track characters, NPCs, items, and basically everything. According to the interview Titanfall uses servers to implement their AI and they use a MMO-like server infrastructure.
It's real.
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Cloud computing can be used to supplement games. Not sure where people are getting that its a complete myth. Can it do everything? No but their are very real applications that could improve games to a degree. People who act like Azure is useless are wrong.
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United States22883 Posts
On June 15 2013 02:05 takingbackoj wrote:
Cloud computing can be used to supplement games. Not sure where people are getting that its a complete myth. Can it do everything? No but their are very real applications that could improve games to a degree. People who act like Azure is useless are wrong.
Well that and I wonder what they think the PS4's Gaikai streaming is.
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I'm not sure anybody is saying that cloud is useless, but you can't build a single player game around that and it will not in the near future double or triple the power your console has.
We've seen how fragile streaming games is, that it all depends on server penetration and your luck with an ISP that can offer you a good routing to the servers.
Anybody touting it as a killer or life saving feature is just lying, plain and simple.
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On June 15 2013 02:42 Vardant wrote:
I'm not sure anybody is saying that cloud is useless, but you can't build a single player game around that and it will not in the near future double or triple the power your console has.
We've seen how fragile streaming games is, that it all depends on server penetration and your luck with an ISP that can offer you a good routing to the servers.
Anybody touting it as a killer or life saving feature is just lying, plain and simple.
Who said anything about tripling power or saving lives though? A post was made about how Titanfall would utilize Azure and everything in the article is very real and possible. Will it give every Xbox the power of 5? No, but there are a lot of other things it could do to improve games.
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On June 15 2013 01:38 paralleluniverse wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2013 00:19 TheFish7 wrote:
Yea the idea that you can outsource computing power to some data center and then have all that CPU power transferred over the internet to the end user is ridiculous given current technology. They are probably just making some nonsense up so they can report to the "smart money" on Wall St that the Xbox One has cloud computing. Its more about buzzwords and stock prices than about actually creating good games. And what's going to happen to the stock price when these Wall Street traders realize that they've been duped. Real smart strategy. All of you bashing cloud computing don't seem to realize that this isn't some pie in the sky idea which will be viable only in the next decade. It's real, and it's really happening in games right now. MMOs use servers to track characters, NPCs, items, and basically everything. According to the interview Titanfall uses servers to implement their AI and they use a MMO-like server infrastructure. It's real.
I work in the general area. It is (still) a pie in the sky. It is future tech. What MMOs do, what Dota does, what basically ALL online server-based games do is child's play compared to what Microsoft is promising. Many (astounding) things are possible today. The drivatar idea, for instance, is completely doable and will undoubtedly enhance gameplay. I think that that is a great idea and stuff like that has serious promise.
What MMOs do is simply track players' movements and actions. And even that screws up with the minimum amount of latency: try playing a WoW arena (or battleground) with > 200 latency. You'll see fireballs hit you out of nowhere and your own abilities can hit already dead people. Loot lag, or trade lag, is (or was, because it has been a while since I played) a fairly common problem. It is not a big deal in an MMO, because both players and game are explicitly prepared to deal with this. Not to mention that Laggrimmar became a term for a reason, and I know people who couldn't visit Dalaran because their game simply lagged out.
And, once again, these are incredibly simple operations (basically database operations, albeit massively parallel database operations), and small messages. All complex operations (such as generating what the world looks like), and scripting the giant dragon you're fighting's behaviour, are done client-side.
Furthermore, look at the development time and cost of your average MMO. It is far longer and far more expensive than that of a "standard" game, because the code is extremely complex, because ensuring the client has consistent behaviour (and things don't go wrong serverside, like items being inadvertently cloned, or a dragon being alive for one party member, but dead for another), is HARD. And the servers? WoW has approximately 10million subscribers. I googled peak concurrent users and found around 800,000, so lets round up to 1,000,000 (and peak is not average by any means... it's like the release day of TBC: servers were crashing all the time). These are distributed over 10 datacenters, which total(ed, during cataclysm) 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. So that means that to BARELY be able to perform these simple operations, you need 1 blade server per ~80 users.
Xbone is promising to not only give far more complex operations, but to far more people, at a far lower cost (WoW subscription is more than XBL subscription). The costs of being able to both develop this, and run this, are unrealistic at today's level of technology.
EDIT: I don't really see anything wrong with Microsoft planning for this in the future. There are things that will be able to be moved to the cloud in the foreseeable future. However, it will not work NOW, and imho, is a bad design principle for a singleplayer game. Sony (and PC) are far more sensible. DESIGN for the moment, but plan for the future. Xbone offers nothing the PS4 cannot do as well, but are trying to market it as if they do... and all of that to hide the fact that they are shoving unwanted and unneeded restrictions down your throat (forced online, kinect always on, etc.)
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On June 15 2013 02:52 takingbackoj wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2013 02:42 Vardant wrote:
I'm not sure anybody is saying that cloud is useless, but you can't build a single player game around that and it will not in the near future double or triple the power your console has.
We've seen how fragile streaming games is, that it all depends on server penetration and your luck with an ISP that can offer you a good routing to the servers.
Anybody touting it as a killer or life saving feature is just lying, plain and simple. Who said anything about tripling power or saving lives though?
Microsoft did. On more than one occasion actually.
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On June 14 2013 23:21 paralleluniverse wrote:
Xbox One developers team up with NASA to simulate 35 thousand light years of space
Must say when I frist say this I thought it said "Xbox One teams up with NSA."
I was like "yep, it begins." Though that sort of thing wouldn't be made public 
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EPT
