Server based game augmentations. The transition to cloud. Really possible?

Thats just hand waving for nothing other then incremental changes. The fundamental technologies that enables these solutions ( global traffic services/anycast routing/etc) have been around for a very long time and they haven't changed much.

Cloud is just the current flavor of the day.

I agree with you. Posted a few times to remind folks that "we" have been doing this for years.

That said, it's not a bad thing to call out cloud technologies in E3.
 
no they didn't, if they did, they have been doing the internet wrong............

i find the whole this new cloud thing, funny as..... hummm what has akamai been doing for 15 years then............

There is a rather large potential change at least with regards to games. Even MMO's had relatively limited processor offloading compared to what Microsoft is talking about for the cloud.

And MMO's have always been on dedicated server hardware. They could not dynamically scale onto more or less servers depending on load. Hence for less popular games it wasn't uncommon to have server downtime as game worlds were manually shuffled from one set of dedicated servers to another in order to balance the load generated by the respective server populations.

And with MMO's being the most sophisticated use of offline processing, they were still very limited to AI, data structures, combat resolution, thousands of simultaneous players (versus 64 player for the largest multiplayer FPS games on dedicated servers), etc. Very basic stuff compared to what Microsoft envisions and what some developers are hinting at.

Regards,
SB
 
What does today's announcement that being online is no longer a requirement mean in relation to 'the cloud' improving gameplay?
It could just mean that some single player games will have sickers "requires internet connection" on their boxes. PC gamers have been used to games that require internet connection for a long time: Unreal Tournament, Quake Area, WoW, Diablo, etc. It's not been a problem. If your PC doesn't have a internet connection, you just simply do not buy those kinds of games. Consoles haven't had many games that require internet connection to start, but Modern Warfare (and many other shooters) are basically online games as well. Single player campaign is just a practice for the real thing. Same is likely true for Titanfall. You already need internet connection to enjoy many of the biggest console hits to the fullest.

Removal of the internet requirement might also mean that some single player game developers skip the cloud completely in order to sell the game to wider audiences (because the internet connection is no longer guaranteed). This might negatively affect the game quality, but the increased sales (more potential customers) might be worth it financially.
no they didn't, if they did, they have been doing the internet wrong............

i find the whole this new cloud thing, funny as..... hummm what has akamai been doing for 15 years then............
Many current generation console games have been using dedicated server farms build just for a single game. Look at this Warhawk server room (racks filled with PS3s):

http://www.ps3blog.net/2007/08/09/warhawk-multiplayer-ps3-servers/
 
Warhawk (2007) uses PS3 as servers because you can start your own server. It is an interesting solution for consoles since you don't have to rely on Sony to operate the servers.

Traditional/old MMO games are designed to run segregated game server instances, but even in this scenario, virtual servers can be used to consolidate low population servers. World of Warcraft is in the midst of releasing Virtual Realms for such purposes. Over time, we should see old operators move to cloud technologies for efficiency. They have to migrate their users slowly to avoid further service disruption.

Newer MMOs and online games may and do run on Amazon's EC2. e.g., This is from 3+ years ago: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/02/17/rightscale-powering-social-games-on-ec2/

What does cloud computing look like? For tens of millions of millions of Facebook users, it looks like Farmville, MafiaWars and Texas Hold’Em. Those are among the growing number of social games that are running atop the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure.

The popularity of Amazon’s cloud for running gaming apps for social networks has been a huge boost for RightScale, which helps social gaming companies Zynga, Crowdstar and Playfish manage their infrastructure on EC2. Eight of the 12 most popular games on the Web today run on RightScale, including FarmVille, Café World, Mafia Wars, FishVille, Happy Aquarium, Pet Society, PetVille, and Restaurant City. Those games have a total combined audience of more than 77 million daily active users, according to social gaming metrics firm developerAnalytics.

...

After Zynga went IPO, they migrated their bigger games back to their own EC2-like cloud platform, zCloud. New games were deployed on EC2 to ride out the initial bump, then move to the private cloud once things stablize and become sustainable.

There are also articles on game developers like NaughtyDog running MP jobs on EC2.
And here's a tutorial to run minecraft server on EC2:
http://www.blog.gartonhill.com/setting-up-a-free-minecraft-server-in-the-cloud-part-1/

There are many ways to use cloud technologies, depending on the state of your online service.
 
Now that always online requirement is gone, what happens to the promised 'cloud Power' to the devs? I posted it in the wrong thread before.

Bt now that the MS can't guarantee net access from everywhere , what do the devs do now? Make it optional? Back to square one?
 
Now that always online requirement is gone, what happens to the promised 'cloud Power' to the devs? I posted it in the wrong thread before.

Bt now that the MS can't guarantee net access from everywhere , what do the devs do now? Make it optional? Back to square one?

It's exactly the same. The 24 hour heartbeat didn't guarantee stable Internet access either. Nothing has changed.
 
Probably not an issue.

For online games, you'll need connectivity anyway. So they can continue to use the servers.

For SP games, it's either optional or doesn't support cloud at all.

EDIT:
I'm curious about MAG's 256 player server technology. Zipper patented it but I haven't seen it surfaced yet. I think the lead joined MS about 2 years ago.
 
Now that always online requirement is gone, what happens to the promised 'cloud Power' to the devs? I posted it in the wrong thread before.

Bt now that the MS can't guarantee net access from everywhere , what do the devs do now? Make it optional? Back to square one?

The game will just require online requirement and as Publishers have now been pushed into a corner I suggest many games will be required to be online
 
Forza 5 has cloud powered or something like that on the box.

The big deal is that these cloud resources are available to all games as part of the platform?
 
It's exactly the same. The 24 hour heartbeat didn't guarantee stable Internet access either. Nothing has changed.

I know, all i am saying is that earlier MS had put out the word to the end user that u need a 1.5mbps connection for your xbox to function. So developers were sure everyone has a stable net and always online system. That is gone now. Now Xbox owners willr ange from full net to no net at all, so the cloud systems are not guaranteed to function on all devices. An optinal feature becomes a no-feature basically, when it comes to game development. Like we are saying that since ps eye isn't available on all systems so won't be used much.
We can't expect support from all games anymore. Yes, most prbly a 'Internet required' sticker for the ga,es which use it, whihc most prbly be mostly exclusives.
 
I know, all i am saying is that earlier MS had put out the word to the end user that u need a 1.5mbps connection for your xbox to function. So developers were sure everyone has a stable net and always online system.
Microsoft didn't promise a reliable connection. A bunch of their PR revolved around having graceful degradation if the cloud was being used for things like single player. An outage that lasts for multiple minutes starts becoming indistinguishable in terms of fallback measures to being offline entirely.
 
Regards this topic, nothing, as this thread is supposed to be a platform agnostic look at what cloud computing can offer as a technology.
Talking of which, I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in the thread, and there is another good read to be had in an Eurogamer's article which says, among other things, that the NAT might be a thing of the past thanks to the cloud.

The NAT was a nightmarish thing to set up in some situations, and fortunately the most modern routers had an option to apply open NAT settings automatically if you wanted.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...000-server-cloud-but-what-do-developers-think


"Phase one is you have a single-player world that exists in multiplayer, so you have a lot of AI that the cloud is really helping us with," Emslie says. "We're calculating a lot of the AI on that end. And we have dedicated servers. There's a lot of tough stuff with your NAT settings. We don't have to worry about that at all any more, so partying up is a breeze. Your NAT can be restricted if you want."
 
Talking of which, I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in the thread, and there is another good read to be had in an Eurogamer's article which says, among other things, that the NAT might be a thing of the past thanks to the cloud.

The NAT was a nightmarish thing to set up in some situations, and fortunately the most modern routers had an option to apply open NAT settings automatically if you wanted.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...000-server-cloud-but-what-do-developers-think

Just a byproduct of the move away from P2P to server-based multiplayer as the norm?
 
So will cloud be handled as an on off switch or scale as speed/connection permits?

It would probably depend on what it was actually being used to do. In use cases where straight turning off cloud processing would be jarring for the game experience developers would have to work out a way to have the function scale. buffer, etc. to create a smoother transition as the connection degrades or drops out.
 
It would probably depend on what it was actually being used to do. In use cases where straight turning off cloud processing would be jarring for the game experience developers would have to work out a way to have the function scale. buffer, etc. to create a smoother transition as the connection degrades or drops out.

So it sounds like either is possible. Its just another resource thats flexibility depends on the talent of the devs,rather than some hard and fast rule.
 
. You would want to offload the air flow fluid dynamics calculation to the cloud, generate a low resolution vector field in the server, compress that field, and send that field to the client. Now the client can animate the foliage / particles according to the vector field (preferably using a GPU vertex/compute shader).

So further down the road maybe more and more of the game resembles an interactive simulator where the CPU dispatches 'calls' the server with models to solve ( all the models reside server side of course ) and the CLOUD crunches away returning vector fields or other data structures than can continue evolve the "game model" running on the client. Sorta kinda like in inverse of PS3 and the Folding Home project

Somebody mentioned either way up thread or in another thread that you really just need to send state changes across the network and obviously games will need new architectures to take advantage of new ways of sending state to and fro.

inevitable :oops: if this has been discussed before.
 
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