But it is not sending the computed data back down piecemeal to be used in local software. It is rendering the completed frame and sending it. What will a game do when the required data gets delayed on its trip? What if it is lost completely?
It doesn't matter if it is lost if it isn't something that directly affects gameplay.
They sound new to me, MMOs don't do physics calculations and send results to local computers, they send meta-data like mob position. They don't do it to offload the local computer, they do it because they are serving hundreds of other players which need the same shared data. How can a dev who needs more FLOPS in a single player game use something unreliable with random latency?
Maybe I'm missing the point of MS's cloud features.
Yes.
While I and others can see the potential for gameplay affecting features. I think it's more likely that developers might play it safe and use it for game enhancing features.
So think of it another way. Tesselation does absolutely nothing for gameplay. Its primary virtue is that it allows for a better looking game world. The same could be said for HDR. The same could be said for textured polygons. As far as gameplay is concerned gourard shaded polygons would be just fine. You don't NEED all that fancy stuff like shadows or accurate lighting or even character models with more than 100 polygons.
And yet a significant amount of render/game time is spent on all these things that only serve to enhance the visual appeal of a game.
There are lots of things that don't require low latency that can enhance the visual appeal of a game. That can make games more immersive and believable.
I mentioned previous a case where you had more NPCs with better AI respresenting random people you would see while walking around the busy streets of New York City, Paris, London, Rome, Tokyo, etc. There isn't enough computing power in even the most powerful PC to make that a reality. But maybe the cloud can slowly make it less empty and less repetitive than the open world games currently are by hosting that AI. AI That is re-useable across multiple people playing that game potentially allowing for hundreds of NPCs featuring more robust and random AI than currently exists in any game in existence. Hell, the cloud could allow the developer to uniquely texture many of those NPCs as well as change the clothing they use based on the time of year and the season in real life. You just stream the appropriate textures from the cloud based on time of year. So rather than shipping a game with all possible clothing combinations, etc. you have the cloud store most of them and just ship what you usually have in games currently with the game disk. Hell, the developer can also then add new textures/clothing without requiring the user to download anything before playing the game as it's all done while they are playing.
Or a somewhat less demanding example that Bkilian used, where instead of a 2D crowd in the stands of a sports title or racing game, you have a more fleshed out and believable 3D crowd with AI that can actually react properly to what is going on in the stadium or race track. In such a case, it doesn't even matter if there's 2 seconds of lag.
Or going even farther. You could offload global world illumination to the cloud while keeping local illumination local. Global illumination not affecting the character and what is immediately around doesn't require low latency. Throw in offloading things like birds flying around, or cars driving on a distant street and that would fit right along with the offloaded illumination. Something like this probably requires more computing power than is realistically available for games, but 2 years from now? 4 years from now?
You can even extend that out to extensive weather affects with accurate physics, globally (as in affecting the world the game is in) it doesn't require low latency. Anything that actually affects the player would require it being done locally. So, being able to relieve the console from doing ALL of the game worlds physics in such a situation would allow for a much larger physics calculation budget for the character and anything affecting the character.
Hell, you can theoretically render the entire world outside of a few feet around the character and enemies on the cloud without it affecting gameplay in any way. Basically the only things that HAVE to be done locally for the most responsive play possible is anything the character can potentially interact with in the next, say, 2 seconds or less. Otherwise does it matter if NPC #21347 in the scene walking down the street with random AI that has decided they are on a window shopping excursion who stops to talk to NPC #12234 who is heading to the dry cleaners is delayed by 4 or 5 seconds? Since it doesn't rely on player interaction, no, it doesn't.
I could go on an on about ways in which cloud computing
could enhance gameplay.
Basically just like a developer spends the majority of their frame rate budget on non-character interactive things such as rendering the scene, so too you could use cloud computing to enable scene enhancing effects or additions that aren't possible without more resources.
Now, as to what's possible? That's far more difficult to say. How much cloud capacity will be allocated for this? How much of a safety margin will be built in to prevent a breakdown of the system due to overwhelming load if everyone started playing a game with cloud compute enhanced features?
Regards,
SB
