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[justsomeguy]

If I have any concern over the cloud implementation beside whether it fundamentally works, it's how much does it cost to rent the servers over 5 years and what kind of assurances will be given over the lifespan of a title.

Spoiler

My guess in none!

Well, the public rates are on the Microsoft website. I rather suspect there are major discounts available to volume users such as games publishers... As for lifespan - you have to assume that'll be down to the publisher. Microsoft aren't likely to shut down Azure, so it's down to how long the publisher wants to pay the compute instance costs...

 

[Caayn]

At this stage, my personal assumption is that all games using this feature will inevtiably be online only so no internet, no game at all.

Or if you'd have read the OP you'd know that having an online and an offline version built-in to one game is perfectly possible. The person who posted the gif demonstrating azure is working on such a game right now.

 

[LukasTaves]

Well flower is basically a dedicated grass simulator It's not like these things couldn't be done isolated without the cloud, but the prospect is, you can do the grass while also doing people walking through the grass

Not only that you can have hundreds or thousands of people walking through the grass, even when you are not looking at them. It might not be the most amazing feature to have, but stuff like that adds up to having a more compelling experience.

Or a chance to actually deliver on Molyneux promises on Fable, like ever growing trees and whatnot. You entire world can be dynamic... Some stuff can get old, rusty, destroyed... You could definitely had a game where your actions has dynamic repercussions in the entire world. And since lots of stuff like this doesn't even need to be ready after a couple of minutes or hours of gameplay even people with crappy connections could benefit.

 

[gofreak]

Do you have a source for more info? I mean, other than occasional outages which hit all cloud providers (unfortunately!) I'm not aware of any specifically related to Azure reaching capacity - I'd be staggered if that were the case.

I have a vague memory of a third party publisher talking about 'adding servers' for a XB1 game after problems but maybe that was on their own end rather than Azure. You're right, it's more likely to be other issues than capacity that trip up a service like this, although capacity planning will need to be good again if they start adding more specialised machines (GPU servers etc). My point is this isn't a challenge that goes away but it gets pushed up the chain, and it becomes an important challenge for the provider to have 'enough' capacity but not too much to inflate costs badly.

Is there api documentation?

Someone might have to go into the code to get something approximating documentation. The 'official' UE4 docs can lag the code a fair bit in my experience, and I'm not sure they'll even be publicly documenting some of the more proprietary/console-y things.

Not only that you can have hundreds or thousands of people walking through the grass, even when you are not looking at them. It might not be the most amazing feature to have, but stuff like that adds up to having a more compelling experience.

Unless each of those people are human players with their own compute quota, you might have problems, at least for the moment. It's one thing to have a single ball rolling through grass (from a compute cost pov), another to have thousands of meshes (or even capsules) doing the same. The latter might exceed what can be reasonably provided to a given player, cost-wise. Even if they were all human players calculating their own grass interaction, sending that data to all the other players might get costly in terms of bandwidth.

There's a lot of mights in there, I haven't run the numbers obviously for a given simulation and what one could fit in a given compute quota, but it's just a caution not to think things are infinitely or arbitrarily scalable from the player's POV just because it's 'the cloud'. It's tempting to think of cloud/server processing as letting you scale things ad infinitum - because of the promise of the cloud to server admins of easy scalability - but economic considerations per player don't go out the window, unfortunately.

 

[justsomeguy]

My point is this isn't a challenge that goes away but it gets pushed up the chain, and it becomes an important challenge for the provider to have 'enough' capacity but not too much to inflate costs badly.

This is the thing though - Azure serves wayyyyyyyyyy more than just Xbox games. It's huge, and Microsoft aren't building it just to support XBox. So the way I see it - Azure is there, it's a done deal, it has reams of capacity. So it's a solved problem... as a game dev, I can simply assume that if I need another game server instance, I can spin it up and it'll be there for a known cost - I won't get an "Azure Full" error

 

[jay]

This is cool and will be a really good feature when the XBO comes out.

 

[Birgitte2004]

Not only that you can have hundreds or thousands of people walking through the grass, even when you are not looking at them. It might not be the most amazing feature to have, but stuff like that adds up to having a more compelling experience.

Or a chance to actually deliver on Molyneux promises on Fable, like ever growing trees and whatnot. You entire world can be dynamic... Some stuff can get old, rusty, destroyed... You could definitely had a game where your actions has dynamic repercussions in the entire world. And since lots of stuff like this doesn't even need to be ready after a couple of minutes or hours of gameplay even people with crappy connections could benefit.

Let's say that this game is a hit, and has over 1 million people playing it simultaneously. Just how much processing power(and bandwidth) does Azure have to do all this stuff for every single person playing it?

And that's just one game. Imagine if every game world-wide being played all at the same time was trying to do it?

Tech demos are fine and dandy, but no tech demo can possibly replicate the real-world usage implications of something like this.

And people saying "well, you probably use Cloud computing already" I sure do. But it's all localized, or not trying to happen in real-time. And even the localized stuff drives me nuts with the amount of time it adds to every single thing you try to do.

 

[justsomeguy]

Let's say that this game is a hit, and has over 1 million people playing it simultaneously. Just how much processing power(and bandwidth) does Azure have to do all this stuff for every single person playing it?

And that's just one game. Imagine if every game world-wide being played all at the same time was trying to do it?

Tech demos are fine and dandy, but no tech demo can possibly replicate the real-world usage implications of something like this.

And people saying "well, you probably use Cloud computing already" I sure do. But it's all localized, or not trying to happen in real-time. And even the localized stuff drives me nuts with the amount of time it adds to every single thing you try to do.

Have you ever played an MMO? Same principle. (And yeah, I know server queues are a painful thing).

 

[gamechanger87]

Let's say that this game is a hit, and has over 1 million people playing it simultaneously. Just how much processing power(and bandwidth) does Azure have to do all this stuff for every single person playing it?

And that's just one game. Imagine if every game world-wide being played all at the same time was trying to do it?

Tech demos are fine and dandy, but no tech demo can possibly replicate the real-world usage implications of something like this.

And people saying "well, you probably use Cloud computing already" I sure do. But it's all localized, or not trying to happen in real-time. And even the localized stuff drives me nuts with the amount of time it adds to every single thing you try to do.

More than is currently running in traditional MMOs? Is Bungie going to be able to support Destiny? Are we one day going to have video games where there are a million people playing together in an online world? Maybe one based on Warcraft or Star Wars, that would be cool.

Bandwidth would be limited as this won't be streaming video. The calculations are done on the server and it sends the GPU the location to place the particle.

 

[Tom Penny]

Cloud will probably shift the balance of the console wars.

 

[LukasTaves]

Okay, but at the end of it, it is just sending TCP or UDP packets to/from server. I guess I just don't understand what value an API would provide. It seems to me that each game would be highly specialized on what it would need and would have to create their own client/server API.

Ms has apis for delegating compute on the cloud. Never used it, but I guess it's better than having to deal with the intrinsic details of networking, or asynchronous by yourself.

Plus other than the API, it's also offering better deals to make cloud usage more financially viable on their platform.

 

[LukasTaves]

Is drivatar really that different than competing against your "ghost" like many driving games have been doing for years on end?

Judging by the messages I got from people complaining about my drivatar in Forza, yes.

I'm lousy at racing games, and people said my drivatar is always getting in the way, or forcing too much during curves and end up being a moving obstacle. I never saw a ghost behave like that, specially because since it's not dynamic they are usually intangible when you are racing against them.

 

[Clockwork5]

Well said.

This was posted so many times. Loud and clear. No one wants to read ...

1) Cloud based rendering wont be free. MS is not going to host 1000s of servers to render via cloud for 3rd party games
2) When cloud infrastructure and GPU with virtualization extensions drops in price, all games will have it.

Your first point is pure speculation.

Your second point is a bit more valid; however, as a Wii U / PS4 owner I am grateful to MS for doing a lot of the R&D for this technology.

In time this will change the way games are processed on the hardware.

 

[JaggedSac]

Let's say that this game is a hit, and has over 1 million people playing it simultaneously. Just how much processing power(and bandwidth) does Azure have to do all this stuff for every single person playing it?

And that's just one game. Imagine if every game world-wide being played all at the same time was trying to do it?

Tech demos are fine and dandy, but no tech demo can possibly replicate the real-world usage implications of something like this.

And people saying "well, you probably use Cloud computing already" I sure do. But it's all localized, or not trying to happen in real-time. And even the localized stuff drives me nuts with the amount of time it adds to every single thing you try to do.

That sort of stuff doesn't need to be handled in real time. Queues, queues, queues....and maybe a service broker or two.

 

[EmptySpace]

while this is certainly cool,

ms oversold and overhyped it to death. power of the cloud isn't even offering any new experiences in meaningful ways. those physics can be easily done via local if xbone were more powerful, yet you're paying par for something that needs the cloud to do these?

 

[gofreak]

This is the thing though - Azure serves wayyyyyyyyyy more than just Xbox games. It's huge, and Microsoft aren't building it just to support XBox. So the way I see it - Azure is there, it's a done deal, it has reams of capacity. So it's a solved problem... as a game dev, I can simply assume that if I need another game server instance, I can spin it up and it'll be there for a known cost - I won't get an "Azure Full" error

True, the current general server inventory should be reliably there excepting other non-capacity related issues, but I referred to more specialised machines as one case where capacity scaling could have teething problems (e.g. if they start adding gpu orientated machines, and say some huge big game used them early on in that process).

It's a bit of an academic point anyway. From the game applications point of view they should be prepared for lossiness on the connection for all manner of reasons that are more likely than capacity problems.

 

[Genio88]

Looking forward to see this cloud implementation in a game, it could really help freeing gpu/cpu work

 

[Beerman462]

What happens 5-10 years from now when those games are no longer supported by teh cloud?

 

[AlucardGV]

i don't know if it's really a good thing if this means more work for the dev.
and i don't really like the whole idea

 

[Clockwork5]

i don't know if it's really a good thing if this means more work for the dev.
and i don't really like the whole idea

Devs tend to like more available tools.

 

[LukasTaves]

Let's say that this game is a hit, and has over 1 million people playing it simultaneously. Just how much processing power(and bandwidth) does Azure have to do all this stuff for every single person playing it?

And that's just one game. Imagine if every game world-wide being played all at the same time was trying to do it?

Tech demos are fine and dandy, but no tech demo can possibly replicate the real-world usage implications of something like this.

And people saying "well, you probably use Cloud computing already" I sure do. But it's all localized, or not trying to happen in real-time. And even the localized stuff drives me nuts with the amount of time it adds to every single thing you try to do.

That's on Ms to deliver, but they are promising over 3 teraflops worth of cloud compute for every online gamer on Xbox Live. That's where their claim of 3 times the power came from.

It sounds possible. You can't play two or more games at the same time, and assuming Ms has the structure in place to deliver that computing for every one online, they just need to scale their servers across each game. And 1 million players paying $5 a month plus whatever Ms charges the devs, does make this financially plausible too.

 

[Kazuma Kiryu]

I'm really glad we're now reaching the point where we have reports that are confirming what most sensible people thought about this and people are starting to accept it for what it is because god damn, the silliness around this cloud thing last year was off the charts.

 

[ps3ud0]

My own point from that same thread:

Interesting tangent - Id like to understand how 'interactive' cloud compute could be as I just dont see how you can really do anything thats user-interacted without having the massive issue of lag.

Cloud compute is a nice idea but always seems to be something that makes the skybox/far distance look 'prettier' (well more accurate/intelligent), while thats good, to me, I want more things to react to the users existence in the game world...

I always seem to end up thinking about how good streaming could be once the internet backbone is up to scratch - then I wonder how old Ill be when that happens

ps3ud0 8)

Well they could just go to a provider like amazon. No need for Nintendo (or Sony for that matter) to built its own server infrastructure.

And given things like iCloud partially run on azure, I wonder if they could just use azure themselves. Would be an interesting test of MS neutrality.

When you are trying to show off a facet of your cloud services everyones money is the same. The end game for MS is really selling Azure as a service and they cant afford not to be impartial to be taken seriously.

ps3ud0 8)

 

[In Service]

Is quantum break going to use Azure servers?

Lol.

I read that as "Is quantum break going to break Azure servers" and I thought "possibly".

 

[In Service]

Or if you'd have read the OP you'd know that having an online and an offline version built-in to one game is perfectly possible. The person who posted the gif demonstrating azure is working on such a game right now.

Thanks. I read the OP and the OT.

If you had read the OT you would have seen that no decision has been made as to whether a dual offline/online is feasable.

My personal view

Spoiler

can I be any clearer?

is that no dev will bother brining a commercial game to market with an offline version that is signifcantly inferior to an online version. I don't see the business sense in that decision. Bookmark this post and we can argue about it again in 3 years.

I have no doubt it is technically feasible. It's just a collosal waste of time.

 

[LukasTaves]

What happens 5-10 years from now when those games are no longer supported by teh cloud?

That's actually one of the benefits of the cloud. You don't need to have a server physically allocated to your game, it can be fired up at will. So in 5 years from now, when no one is playing the game they can use the servers for other game, and when someone tries to use it it will be possible to have the server set up automatically.

Of course, that's a possibility, it doesn't mean everyone will. Many devs have their reasons to have servers disabled after a while.

 

[methane47]

That's actually one of the benefits of the cloud. You don't need to have a server physically allocated to your game, it can be fired up at will. So in 5 years from now, when no one is playing the game they can use the servers for other game, and when someone tries to use it it will be possible to have the server set up automatically.

Of course, that's a possibility, it doesn't mean everyone will. Many devs have their reasons to have servers disabled after a while.

This is not how the cloud works lol
There still has to be a server and storage and coding defined for use.

Turning on a game does not by Magic Create a Cloud instance to run all the calculations talked about in here.
What CAN occur is that the instance just stays online and usuage is Zero. but in general Devs will still have to pay for space used.

 

[Birgitte2004]

That's on Ms to deliver, but they are promising over 3 teraflops worth of cloud compute for every online gamer on Xbox Live. That's where their claim of 3 times the power came from.

Saying they can promise "3 teraflops of cloud compute" is PR buzz-speak, and says precisely nothing about how much this equates to real-time usage.

And 5$/month/user is nothing to how much it would cost to support if the Xbox One (and Azure) ever really took off.

 

[Caayn]

Thanks. I read the OP and the OT.

If you had read the OT you would have seen that no decision has been made as to whether a dual offline/online is feasable.

I've read the thread where the dev first popped-up talking about this game. Which is why I said "currently".

I'm not going to argue semantics, especially in a language that isn't my native language, that's the biggest waste of time I can imagine. I probably read your post wrong, my apologies for that.

My personal view

Spoiler

can I be any clearer?

is that no dev will bother brining a commercial game to market with an offline version that is signifcantly inferior to an online version. I don't see the business sense in that decision. Bookmark this post and we can argue about it again in 3 years.

I have no doubt it is technically feasible. It's just a collosal waste of time.

I don't really agree that it's a waste of time. The game would receive massive amounts of negative attention if it is online-only compared to when a game is capable of running offline, you'd have threads filled with drive-by posts such as "LOL that's what you get for weak hardware" and that's putting it mildly.

Don't get me wrong, I too would rather see devs using their resources for extra content or improving the cloud capabilities of a game. But I fully understand why a dev would choose for a hybrid option.

 

[HammerOfThor]

I know we always like to joke around about the cloud and XBO; but the potential is there for some really cool stuff.

 

[Gestault]

This is not how the cloud works lol
There still has to be a server and storage and coding defined for use.

Turning on a game does not by Magic Create a Cloud instance to run all the calculations talked about in here.

It sounds like you may not understand how cloud computing works. There's a resource pool of processing power among an array of machines (which can shift as needed), and the tasks are completed per call, as though it were one large CPU. So yes, it is "magically" completing the tasks for a given user when they turn on their game (or any other application). The Azure infrastructure exists and is currently a product.

The person you were responding to was saying this isn't a one machine (or one group of machines) per-task arrangement. It's part of why a traditional server setup is different from a cloud setup. Yes, software needs its instructions written to work in this context, and yes there's a "budget" to how much computing can be done at once, but it's not as you describe it otherwise.

The short version of this is that cloud computing can be general-purpose processing, while a traditional server structure is locked into task-based roles, each of which need to be configured on the server-side.

 

[In Service]

Don't get me wrong, I too would rather see devs using their resources for extra content or improving the cloud capabilities of a game. But I fully understand why a dev would choose for a hybrid option.

I can see your points but I guess we need to wait a while to see how this pans out.

I know we get stats from time to time of the percentage of consoles connected to the internet but I don't see that the market for the offline/online hybrid is substantially larger than online only.

I'm only taking things like COD and BF4 as an example which, whilst they have single player I don't think many people buy them for that reasons.

If the quality of the game is sufficient (and I hesitate to hold Titanfall out as an example!) then sales should hold up nicely for an online only game.

Isn't the analysis: IF Increase in Sales if we have an offline version > Cost of Dev for Offline THEN go go go go?

 

[methane47]

I don't really agree that it's a waste of time. The game would receive massive amounts of negative attention if it is online-only compared to when a game is capable of running offline, you'd have threads filled with drive-by posts such as "LOL that's what you get for weak hardware" and that's putting it mildly.

Last Generation I remember Devs complaining about "Entitled Gamers" because PS3 users were begging them to add an option to have R1 as the fire button instead of the lazily ported R2 from the Xbox version.

I believe a Call of Duty Dev in particular..

So if a dev is To lazy to change a single BUTTON, and insults gamers calling them "entitled" you really believe they will build two render paths to appease gamers who dont have a proper internet connection?

 

[gofreak]

That's on Ms to deliver, but they are promising over 3 teraflops worth of cloud compute for every online gamer on Xbox Live. That's where their claim of 3 times the power came from.

It sounds possible. You can't play two or more games at the same time, and assuming Ms has the structure in place to deliver that computing for every one online, they just need to scale their servers across each game. And 1 million players paying $5 a month plus whatever Ms charges the devs, does make this financially plausible too.

I think they said 3 xb1s worth of CPU power only, not 3 xb1s overall.

 

[Computer]

So much MS hater salt. MS is trying to develop new gaming technology that no one else has the capability to do and get nothing but hate. Gamers should be happy about news like this. Why would MS invest tons of money into new company's such as cloudgine and build AAA games around the tech if it dose not work?

 

[Pug]

The interesting thing, is many on GAF have gone from, it's not feasible or possible for MS the leverage Azure to any great effect, to the next point where many are now saying I will believe it when I see it, to the point where we've seen a few demo's. True I think a big game utilizing Azure greatly is a way off, but those who mocked this concept I suspect will be back tracking sooner or later.

 

[overdrivex]

The wall of shame that is put out when the first full cloud computed game releases will be quite delicious, high in sodium .

 

[Tetranet]

The whole concept around Azure is confusing to me. Excluding workarounds such as creating essentially two versions of the software, the game in question would have to be online always. On a broad level, I think it has potential for use in online games (assuming such games get made for the XBOne), where online is a given.

At any rate, it's interesting technology but with limited real-world usefulness, imo. As far as gaming is concerned, of course.

 

[methane47]

It sounds like you may not understand how cloud computing works. There's a resource pool of processing power among an array of machines (which can shift as needed), and the tasks are completed per call, as though it were one large CPU. So yes, it is "magically" completing the tasks for a given user when they turn on their game (or any other application). The Azure infrastructure exists and is currently a product.

Yes but even a server/instruction set/operator that isn't in use, still has to exist. Cloud computing is not a magic box where you throw in X and Gandalf behind the scenes can guess your intentions and spit out an animation frame.

The instruction set still needs to exist. And for that instruction set to exist in Azure, the Dev has to pay for the resourcse it takes up. Usage may be zero but you still have to pay to keep it available.

Take a look at Azure pricing page so that you can get a better grasp, for cloud services, you pay for Resources AND Uptime. Many people forget the latter.

 

[Caayn]

Last Generation I remember Devs complaining about "Entitled Gamers" because PS3 users were begging them to add an option to have R1 as the fire button instead of the lazily ported R2 from the Xbox version.

I believe a Call of Duty Dev in particular..

So if a dev is To lazy to change a single BUTTON, and insults gamers calling them "entitled" you really believe they will build two render paths to appease gamers who dont have a proper internet connection?

I wouldn't use a CoD dev as an example here. Same for the comparison, one button has a lot less impact on the public perception of the game and is lesser PR nightmare than an online-only game can be.

Is every dev that's going to use Thunderhead going to implement a hybrid system? No, I believe that there will be games that will support the hybrid set-up. As "In Service" said time will tell.

 

[JaggedSac]

Is Fable Legends doing anything with Azure?

 

[Kinthalis]

Man, people are so gullible.

A tiny patch of grass udpated 12 times per second... what happens when that patch turns into a field? How are you going to pass that kind of data over the internet fast enough? What happens when a million people are playing the game? Who's going to pay for all that CPU time? Micrsoft? They'd need to have dedicated processors ready to handle the workloads, the infrastructure required would be huge and costly.

What happens when the user is not online? The grass disappears?

 

[fin]

Looks pretty cool.

For everyone wondering what would happen if you were offline. It would probably be something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_UNRp7Wrog

I'd imagine MS would be able to gather more support than NVIDIA does for all their stuff. I'm super surprised it's still so early. We should be having games using this by now. MS needs to fast track it, send their programmers out on secondment and get this into some big-name games.

 

[Ol No Bones]

Man, people are so gullible.

A tiny patch of grass udpated 12 times per second... what happens when that patch turns into a field? How are you going to pass that kind of data over the internet fast enough? What happens when a million people are playing the game? Who's going to pay for all that CPU time? Micrsoft? They'd need to have dedicated processors ready to handle the workloads, the infrastructure required would be huge and costly.

What happens when the user is not online? The grass disappears?

So the guy verified to be a dev explaining the tech they are working on and implementing in their game is a liar and it won't work at all.

 

[gamechanger87]

Man, people are so gullible.

A tiny patch of grass udpated 12 times per second... what happens when that patch turns into a field? How are you going to pass that kind of data over the internet fast enough? What happens when a million people are playing the game? Who's going to pay for all that CPU time? Micrsoft? They'd need to have dedicated processors ready to handle the workloads, the infrastructure required would be huge and costly.

What happens when the user is not online? The grass disappears?

What? All that is done is calculations of where the item should be and then the server sends the GPU a single data point in the following form.

Grass is at X --> Game input --> Input sent to Server --> Server calculates new position --> Grass should be at Y --> Sends bit of data to say render at Y --> GPU renders at Y.

The bandwidth required is nothing like streaming an entire game.

 

[jem0208]

Man, people are so gullible.

A tiny patch of grass udpated 12 times per second... what happens when that patch turns into a field? How are you going to pass that kind of data over the internet fast enough? What happens when a million people are playing the game? Who's going to pay for all that CPU time? Micrsoft? They'd need to have dedicated processors ready to handle the workloads, the infrastructure required would be huge and costly.

What happens when the user is not online? The grass disappears?

I'm not an expert but I'm assuming the actual amount of data required is not going to be very much at all, probably similar amounts to your standard multiplayer match. As for the infrastructure, you are correct, MS already has all that. They've been touting Azure constantly. They already have the infrastructure and the processors.


Also, chances are something that relies very heavily on the cloud will be online only.


Also, do you really think people would be developing this if it's not going to work at all?

 

[DarthWalden]

So much MS hater salt. MS is trying to develop new gaming technology that no one else has the capability to do and get nothing but hate. Gamers should be happy about news like this. Why would MS invest tons of money into new company's such as cloudgine and build AAA games around the tech if it dose not work?

I couldn't agree more... And maybe it completely fails but I'm happy to see MS trying something like this to improve the quality of the games we play...

 

[gamechanger87]

Man, people are so gullible.

A tiny patch of grass udpated 12 times per second... what happens when that patch turns into a field? How are you going to pass that kind of data over the internet fast enough? What happens when a million people are playing the game? Who's going to pay for all that CPU time? Micrsoft? They'd need to have dedicated processors ready to handle the workloads, the infrastructure required would be huge and costly.

What happens when the user is not online? The grass disappears?

Further breakdown from reddit

I just calculated an estimate of the data rate for the Crackdown demo shown at Build. Obviously there's a couple more variables involved, for example, how the building breaks and the shape of the chunks. Would they derive from the local box which then gets sent up to Azure? Presumably a server application which would have the collision meshes of the map so it can sync up with the local box, it'd first receives the variables around the explosion like size, direction, radius etc.
Data Rate
UPDATED: Rather than real-time calculating of every chunk, 32 times a second, /u/caffeinatedrob recommended drawing paths which I've just substituted into the calculations
32 bits * 6 - Float
9 bits * 2 - 9 Bit Integer
Compression Ratio: 85%
Chunks: 10,000
Total Bits per Chunk: 210 bits
Total Bits for Chunks: 2,100,000
Total Bits Compressed: 315,000
Typical Ethernet MTU = 1500 bytes = 12000 bits
Data Frames per Initial Explosion of 10,000 Chunks: 27
Typical UDP Overhead = 224 bits
Total Overhead per Explosion = 6048 bits
Total Bits Needing to Be Sent Per Explosion: 321,048
Throughput Needed Per Initial Explosion: 313Kbps
All of Chunks Collide in 4 seconds: 2500 Chunks re-drawn every second
2500*210 = 525000
Compressed: 78750 bits
Data Frames per second needed for re-draw: 7
UDP Overhead = 1568 bits
Total Bits Needed per re-draw: 80318 bits
Throughput Needed per re-draw: 78kbps
Overall throughput needed in the first second: 391kbps
Every second after initial explosion would be: 78kbps
For the data, I've used float values for the X,Y,Z starting co-ordinates and the same for the finishing co-ordinates of the path on the map. I've assigned 9 bit integers for the rotation values on the path and the radius of the arc of the path.
The compression used is a given in this scenario. With the data being compressed featuring purely floats/ints the compression is very high, in around the 80's which I've substituted in.
To compare this to services which are used daily, for example Netflix, which uses 7Mbps for a Super HD stream which is pretty much standard these days. Next-gen consoles, previous gen support Super HD.
Latency
Average RTT (Round Trip Time) to Azure: 40ms
Calculation Time at Server: 32ms (For 32FPS)
Total RTT = 72ms
In Seconds = 0.072 Seconds
That means it takes 0.072 seconds from the beginning of the explosion for it to come back and start happening on your screen. Once the first load has occurred, you only have to receive data if the chunks collide with anything which would result in the re-draw of paths. The latency on that would be the calculation time, call it 16ms which is a lot considering that only a few may have to be-drawn. Then, add the half trip time of 20ms which would result in waiting 36ms or 0.036 seconds before the re-drawn path gets updated on-screen.
Packet Loss
In regards to packet loss, in 2014, you simply don't have any. ISPs these days tend to be both Tier 3 and 2 with peering often directly to large services which make up a lot of the bandwidth. This includes services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix etc. Honestly, unless you have a poor wireless signal inside your house which often causes some slight packet loss, you're not going to get any. Even if you drop a couple of packets, you'd loose a handful of chunks for that one frame and in-terms of gameplay it's not going to be noticeable really.
Conclusion
After taking suggestions on-board and drawing paths rather than real-time chunk calculation, the data rates which are needed there a significantly lower and the requirements for the internet connection are perfectly acceptable with only needing to transmit at 391kbps.
If anyones got any suggestions how to increase accuracy, or anything, let me know.
The OLD solution which requires 5.8Mbps is documented here:
http://pastebin.com/vQQs5ffZ
TL;DR: Cloud computing is definitely feasible on normal ISP connections. Would require 391kbps when the explosion starts.

http://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/27yczf/i_just_calculated_an_estimate_of_the_internet/

Did you do similar math?

 

[shandy706]

It's not using it, or they would be crowing about it, but I swear Forza Horizon 2 looks like it could be, LOL.

The amount of grass/foliage in some places is beyond believable for an open world game. As cars go through it they flatten everything in their wake. I think there's a video of 10-12 cars meeting online, and as they tear towards a meetup every bush and blade of grass in their wake is flattened/destroyed.

If you pay attention you can see it in a number of the videos. At a slow romp with one or two characters in some action game it wouldn't surprise me. Online, in an open world, with that level of density, on this hardware, it does surprise me.

 

[gamechanger87]

So the guy verified to be a dev explaining the tech they are working on and implementing in their game is a liar and it won't work at all.

Shhhh.... the dev is lying because it is a M$ plant trying to pimp the cloud. Don't you know?