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XBO Cloud Implementation Examples
- Thread starter gamechanger87
- Start date
i dunno. i haven't played a racing game in years (besides playing forza through game sharing) but isn't generally the ghost a transparent copy of your fastest lap? i remember some sob story about how some dude used to play some rally game with his dad and his dad kept beating him. then like 10 years later his dad died and he found his old xbox and booted up the game to remember it. well his dad's ghost was still in there. finally he almost beat his dad's ghost, but then turned off the system so his dad could live forever in his xbox.
i don't know if the drivatar calculations are accurate representation of how the person is drives in his game, but forza 5 was the first racing game since GT3 (the one that killed racing games for me) that i played a bunch of.
edit: beat me.
justsomeguy
Member
Well I know that my mate Jon's drivatar drives like he does - a complete sod, blocking and braking in front of me... Honestly drivatars are pretty awesome IMO to make a more 'human feeling' racing experience. I don't necessarily think they're a great example of the benefits of cloud computing in gaming (which are more with offloading cpu work in realtime), they're more just "offline processing of data" that happen to be running on cloud servers.
Hmm, that sounds like it is worth an experiment....
Marky Mark
Member
Well, yes, because that's exactly the point?
I'd fire my game designer if game allowed for such game-destroying mechanics
horizon2 will have drivatars roaming the open world. I think some interesting observations could be made then.
Shpeshal Nick
aka Collingwood
I thought drivatars were horrible, it turned every offline race in Forza 5 into a recreation of a public race online with the Aim breaking for no reason on straights, everyone just crashing into each other at cornets etc.
It going to be interesting to see how the tech matures. I can live with online focus games coming with always online requirements so they can utilise the cloud, but if random 3rd party RPG's start coming with one so they can have grass physics or some such then I'll take my money elsewhere.
It going to be interesting to see how the tech matures. I can live with online focus games coming with always online requirements so they can utilise the cloud, but if random 3rd party RPG's start coming with one so they can have grass physics or some such then I'll take my money elsewhere.
In Service
Member
This is back to the old point that, for me, a Cloud enabled game is an always online game. That isn't too hard for me to conceptualize.
I know that the OP quote went on to say that they had an online and offline experience scoped out but I can't see that being a pleasant experience.
Use the Cloud on an always online title and be done with it. I'm convinced it wont hurt sales if it's a good game given the wealth of titles you need to be online to play.
Caayn
Member
Jup. But I can't really blame them with the way the internet would respond to hearing about an online-only game.
This does makes me wonder what MS is doing with their own first-party studios/IPs, do they make them "two-in-one" as well or are they going to make it online-only?
Doubt it never saw one do that. Turn10 has most probably put up some safety nets that prevents people from being assholes by doing dumb things like that.
That said. Drivevatars are fundamentally different from ghosts, to say that they're ghosts is simply incorrect.
If its works very cool indeed.
I still remain very skeptical until i play a game.
I think there are alot of unanswered questions about cloud gaming for example "What happens if i lose internet looses connection?".
Its the same as PS now. I dont think the general infrastructure is ready for cloud gaming.
I still remain very skeptical until i play a game.
I think there are alot of unanswered questions about cloud gaming for example "What happens if i lose internet looses connection?".
Its the same as PS now. I dont think the general infrastructure is ready for cloud gaming.
You're experience with Drivatars was true for the first month after release. But then they were actually trained enough to allow for normal races. Nine months after launch I don't see those mass crashes at the start of a race anymore.
In Service
Member
Are you concerned about internet connection when playing COD or Titanfall and will you be worried about it when playing Destiny? Will you not buy those games just because they require you to be online? (COD excepted for single player which no-one plays anyhow)
The unanswered questions are whether it works or not.
Well afaik, you play against either your friends drivatars (if one of them is a dick, just block him) or against drivatars with good times. So if someone would drive the oposite direction, and his drivatar would learn from that, it wouldn't destroy the game in any way. However, I bet your drivatar only takes the data from your race if you finish, and it seems pretty hard to finish a race if you are driving backwards
What i meant is :
What happens if the server is down?
Can i just dont play the game anymore?
Will it be rendered on my XB1 with worse framerate or something?
I dont have any problems with always online but what happens if Microsoft/Sony decide that the additional "power from the cloud" will not work on a 5 year old game anymore?
PC version (Windows) shares the same servers with Xbox versions.
Apparently all the background action happening on Titanfall maps is processed by the cloud servers which are also used for AI soldiers and auto-titans.
Would be cool to see games like Destiny using that functionality in same way as Titanfall did. As great game Destiny is, there is not that much happening in the singleplayer or multiplayer maps.
EventHorizon
Member
For the sake of this argument, I'll assume that using the cloud works as intended. Here are a couple of concerns. The first is cost. Azure is a CPU farm but the demonstrations that use it seems to be better geared towards GPU usage. What this means is that Azure will have to throw a lot more horsepower, and thus money, at solutions than is necessary. Is it really going to be economical to use Azure for any game that wants it?
Second, Azure adds complexity to development. Kampfheld already mentioned that to do it right you have to code everything twice, once when your console has access to Azure, and the second time when it doesn't. This would continue Microsoft's transformation into Sony of 2006, where coding for the console is significantly more difficult than it's competitor. In addition, if a game always has to be able to fall back to offline mode, that means that using "The Cloud" can't affect gameplay in any meaningful way.
The only other option to requiring a split online/offline code base is to require a network connection for every game, even if it is single player. That is worse than the 24 hour check, and we all know how well that went over. It would inevitably cause problems during peak usage periods like during a game's release, because if enough capacity exists to handle that load at that time then it wold be wasted the 90% of the time when it is not needed.
In addition, places with poor internet connections could find this new breed of games unplayable. Imagine buying an XB1 because you love single/couch coop Halo and Gears of War, only to find out that you can't play them because the game requires a good internet connection even for these modes.
Second, Azure adds complexity to development. Kampfheld already mentioned that to do it right you have to code everything twice, once when your console has access to Azure, and the second time when it doesn't. This would continue Microsoft's transformation into Sony of 2006, where coding for the console is significantly more difficult than it's competitor. In addition, if a game always has to be able to fall back to offline mode, that means that using "The Cloud" can't affect gameplay in any meaningful way.
The only other option to requiring a split online/offline code base is to require a network connection for every game, even if it is single player. That is worse than the 24 hour check, and we all know how well that went over. It would inevitably cause problems during peak usage periods like during a game's release, because if enough capacity exists to handle that load at that time then it wold be wasted the 90% of the time when it is not needed.
In addition, places with poor internet connections could find this new breed of games unplayable. Imagine buying an XB1 because you love single/couch coop Halo and Gears of War, only to find out that you can't play them because the game requires a good internet connection even for these modes.
Very cool that we are moving towards implementation examples for this stuff. Can't wait to see this stuff in action.
MS has been messing with GPU in their Azure infrastructure. Either way, CPU is perfectly suitable for physics calculations.
I'm fine with always needing an online connection. The biggest game this year will require one at all times.
Dynamic scalability is what PaaS and IaaS is all about. Instances are spun up when they are needed, and dropped when they are not.
EventHorizon said:
MS has been messing with GPU in their Azure infrastructure. Either way, CPU is perfectly suitable for physics calculations.
EventHorizon said:
I'm fine with always needing an online connection. The biggest game this year will require one at all times.
EventHorizon said:
Dynamic scalability is what PaaS and IaaS is all about. Instances are spun up when they are needed, and dropped when they are not.
gamechanger87
Member
Op updated
Can you link to this documentation.
Site is in maintenence mode, so no I can't right now.
I thought they bought 360's.
EventHorizon
Member
I didn't say a CPU could not do the calculations, only that it is less efficient. The question becomes "Just how many CPUs have to be backing every XB1?" It's like if a developer showed a demo of a fantastic looking game, and later you find out that it needs to run on a PC with the most powerful GPU available to work. Sure it might make a great demo, but it is not practical to expect it to actually run like that.
That's great for you, but as I mentioned there was a huge backlash against the 24 hour checkin. Now imagine that every Microsoft game requires a good constant internet connection. How do you think sales of the XB1 would go if Microsoft said that all future Halo and Gears of War games would require an internet connection at all times? It's one thing for a third party game to require an internet connection. It is quite another when all future exclusive games for the console requires it. The XB1 severely cuts its potential userbase if it becomes an online only console.
I got that, but there is always a maximum required capacity, and that max capability if highly variable. If Azure was in full use right now, how much demand do you think would be placed on its servers? Now how much demand will be placed on their servers after Halo 5 drops? The point is that if you have enough capacity to handle a Halo 5 launch, then you have excess capacity that goes unused in times like now. For business uses it all averages out because different businesses will have different usage patterns, but the demand that comes from games always spikes around individual releases.
poop
Auto-Reply
Member
And I assume you are going to need xbox live gold for getting your cloud grass, even if you are not using any other aspect of xbox live?
No, you can play the master chief collection single player as well
In seriousness though i'm all for MS pushing online tech as hard as they can but it remains to be seen how effective it is in gaming. I hope Crackdown 3 looks amazing because of it - excited to see what Cloudgine can do.
KampferZeon
Neo Member
Well said.
Xbox 1 Cloud computing is more than 'simple' cloud computing.
It is trying to have local resources working in tandem with remote resources for real time applications.
Pure fantasy stuff. At best this research belongs to theoretical computer science.
Thanks, I am surprised that so many console details are in the patch notes.
Current games do most or all of their physics on CPU cores. Be specific. What sorts of physics are you expecting and what kind of CPU power do you think it needs?
You made quite a leap here. Not every game needs this, and certainly not every game wants the costs associated with it. Games likely to benefit are ones where the computations are shared among many people. Online games. But it also appears that MS has no qualms about making single player ones. They will likely be the only dev to do so.
Are you worried that Azure doesn't have the hardware capacity to handle this? Or worried about the cost of having a large server enough farm and having others pay for their use? Because that is the whole concept of a cloud service provider.
Isn't it open source now? Can someone take a look at what is in that module?
Look at the post above yours. It is real. It is coming. Games are being made. It is merely a matter of time to see what it is capable of, what it requires, and whether it is worth it.
justsomeguy
Member
No no no - the whole point (pretty much the key feature) of cloud computing, and why it's far better than a static/dedicated-to-one-title server farm, is elastic scale to cope with that kind of traffic pattern.
Demand goes up? You can just spin up 1000 more Azure Compute instances automatically as your code detects that you're running out of capacity.
Demand drops again? The Azure Compute instances deactivate.
This is also a reason why I hope cloud-based games will have a longer tail than games with the traditional style of publisher-hosted servers... There's not as much of a need to "shut down servers for game X" if you can just have a handful of compute instances running in the cloud at minimal cost. (Obviously the operational support costs are also a factor - but you lose the whole cost of maintaining physical servers in a data centre).
justsomeguy
Member
See my previous post - I reckon you're better off with cloud compute (compared to dedicated servers) as it's trivial to scale it right down to a tiny number of compute instances, without the overhead of maintaining a bunch of old legacy servers in a data centre.
edit: I get it though you're saying "compared to an offline-only game"... yes, obviously the cloud dependency is different there - you have to assume that the cloud is integral to the game experience rather than just there for some minimally important reason so it wouldn't make sense to have the "offline only" version?
Hardly. It's not fantasy, it's quite straightforward, but in the realities of a network you have to work within limitations. Limited bandwidth, latency, lossiness and just economics.
Economics are actually the part I'm most curious to know about - i.e. what MS is providing and at what cost. Knowing that would make it easier to compare to alternatives and to ascertain the potential.
Yeah, that's the idea for the client application, but on a fundamental level he's right. The capacity planning is shifted to the cloud provider, but the problem is still there. The client application doesn't have to worry as long as resources are available, but sometimes resources are not because of problems up the chain at the cloud provider. I mean I believe MS even had these kinds of problems already around launch for example. Resources don't come out of thin air, even if the client/application isn't worrying about them anymore.
The main thing is who are going to make these games? The multiplat guys aren't going to be so keen on an online only Xbox platform specific title, or catering their development to take advantage of different technology profiles (remembering how much they loved to cater to the cell last gen).
It's only Microsoft that are going to be able to support this and they demonstrated at Gamescom where they think they should be putting their money.
So yeah, great idea. Needs support if it isn't to become another nice idea but no games thing like the Move or the WiiU gamepad.
This isn't just MS going in this direction. Cloud computing is a known commodity. If EA wanted to, they could create BF4 VMs that could be dynamically allocated via pretty much any IaaS service.
It's funny how a number of people in gaming don't believe in the cloud. That's exactly how enterprises behaved...and now a bunch of them are moving to the cloud or a mixture of cloud and on-premise. Also funny how many (all) of you use the cloud (non-gaming) and don't even know it. Oh well, carry on.
Caayn
Member
Saying "(all) of you" is a big statement to make, especially when you don't know the people behind each account
justsomeguy
Member
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.
overdrivex
Banned
ignorance and fear of change always blind people
KampferZeon
Neo Member
Its not much really.
Just linking to the api library file.
Is there api documentation?
In Service
Member
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.
I would think that the last question you pose (old servers) is addressed by:-
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.
My guess in none!
Maintenance
Member
Pretty strong words when you don't know how much each member know.
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