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

[Lalaland]

Crackdown 3's single-player campaign can be played entirely offline w/ limited destruction. 100% destruction only available in online co-op

It's also being co-developed by Sumo Digital. Multiplayer map is completely different to single-player map

A pair of tweets from Videogamer.com journalist David Scammel on Crackdown 3. It seems that they've gone for the remote hosted session approach with a client much as in non P2P FPS games or MMOs but with responsive physics as opposed to canned animations (as in BF4's 'level-ution'). I've not seen any firm articles as to whether there is any cloud compute involved in single player at all. The mention of a wholly separate map for online co-op suggests it is a very different thing to the main campaign map, whether this means it's different in size and scope or just layout is something I hope we get some more detail on but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't address that at this stage of dev.

So itt's not cloud in the way I imagined it when I first heard of the concept (essentially a remote co-processing resource) rather it's a whole game instance you connect to, still I look forward to them revealing how they're handling the transmission of all that data.

EDIT: Further tweets

“We do not use that [cloud processing] in the campaign game. We wanted to create a very different experience for multiplayer.” - Dave Jones

"We wanted players to have the campaign game they always loved, and if they want to play it offline then they absolutely should be able to."

"Obviously they have to go online for co-op but that's still the same campaign game.” “The 100% destructible environments is limited to MP"

David Scammel also clarified his earlier tweets referred to 'co-op' when he meant to say 'multiplayer'.

Further EDIT:

http://www.videogamer.com/xboxone/c..._bandwidth_of_a_regular_multiplayer_game.html

"We are optimising for between 2 and 4 megabits," Reagent Games producer David Jones told VideoGamer at Gamescom today. "That is our goal."

Jones added: "It's not significantly more [bandwidth than a regular multiplayer game], it's maybe two to four times as much. A standard is maybe around 1mbit, so it's a little bit more, yes."

So 2-4 Mbits of b/w for multi, given that the simulation is all happening server side I'm going to guess this is d/l bandwidth rather than upload given that the normal amounts of data are all that need to be passed (ie player velocity/location, weapon projectiles, etc) rather than the more complex data sets if it were some kind of cloud hybrid compute. Still it will be interesting to see if they can combat lag/warp in debris physics although it would be kind of cool to see a collapsing building do a Zack Snyder-esque fast-slow-fast motion effect

Edit 3 this time it's personal:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/...-the-cloud-to-make-whole-cities-destructible/

So Ars Technica got an interview too and they saw an interesting overlay that showed which servers are simulating which bits of debris and spoke to the dynamic scaling they have that allows them to spin up extra servers to support a game instance if the load gets too great.

Another overlay shows precisely which bits of debris are being powered by which server, some chunks of concrete pasted green and others blue. These objects are located on different servers that are all powering the same game, allowing for greater detail when necessary. Should you enact so much destruction that you need even more power, a new server will automatically come into play and distribute the processing workload further.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Does this game uses any GPGPU at all?
Ubisoft once made some cloth physics testing and the GPGPU results on PS4 were 16 times superior to the CPU.
This leaves me wondering if, with the proper coding, the GPGPU could replace the cloud (maybe not for 20x CPU, but with less players average seems to be 9x the Xbox CPU) .

 

[iroboto]

Does this game uses any GPGPU at all?
Ubisoft once made some cloth physics testing and the GPGPU results on PS4 were 16 times superior to the CPU.
This leaves me wondering if, with the proper coding, the GPGPU could replace the cloud (maybe not for 20x CPU, but with less players average seems to be 9x the Xbox CPU) .

I guess with this statement, you should first ask why they went with CPU clusters, pros and cons, and then look at GPGPU (or async compute) and see what those pros and cons are. And then think about the game playing in real time, with multiple players.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Actually i was thinking about the offline mode with limited physics destruction, and if he could replace the Cloud calculations with the GPGPU!

 

[Scott_Arm]

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/...-the-cloud-to-make-whole-cities-destructible/

So Ars Technica got an interview too and they saw an interesting overlay that showed which servers are simulating which bits of debris and spoke to the dynamic scaling they have that allows them to spin up extra servers to support a game instance if the load gets too great.

This is all shown in the video linked previously. The buildings are colour coded.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Actually i was thinking about the offline mode with limited physics destruction, and if he could replace the Cloud calculations with the GPGPU!

There's been no mention whether the local and cloud resources they're comparing are CPU or GPU. They've just said, "processing power."

 

[iroboto]

Actually i was thinking about the offline mode with limited physics destruction, and if he could replace the Cloud calculations with the GPGPU!

It's certainly a possibility, but there's very little information on the topic of what happens in offline mode, or at least, I haven't been made aware of more developments in that area. And as Scott Arm says, 'processing power'. It's not quite specific as to what it is, my assumption is that it's CPU based (on Azure) as I don't believe they run GPU clusters for processing. For local processing, we could look at Scream Ride as a possible example of what type of power is available.

Though from what I've heard, it suffers horribly in the frame rate department.

 

[Renegade_43]

There's been no mention whether the local and cloud resources they're comparing are CPU or GPU. They've just said, "processing power."

It is CPU. They are comparing a multiple of whatever percentage of CPU time they are dedicating to physics when using the Xbox alone. So the 20 times multiple is based on some unknown percentage of the Xbox cpu. Watching the videos you can get a pretty significant amount of destruction before the first server spins up. I just have no idea what percentage that would be.

 

[Alucardx23]

I think is relevant to post this video again for reference on how this technology helps to maintain the framerate during high destruction.

 

[turkey]

Actually i was thinking about the offline mode with limited physics destruction, and if he could replace the Cloud calculations with the GPGPU!

He also mentions memory usage a lot. The local gpu will not add more memory.

 

[Rurouni]

I haven't observe all the video closely, but is there an example where someone shoot point blank at a destructible object?
Edit: I mean for Crackdown 3

 

[Metal_Spirit]

It is CPU. They are comparing a multiple of whatever percentage of CPU time they are dedicating to physics when using the Xbox alone. So the 20 times multiple is based on some unknown percentage of the Xbox cpu. Watching the videos you can get a pretty significant amount of destruction before the first server spins up. I just have no idea what percentage that would be.

This is how I see it too.

 

[turkey]

This is how I see it too.

Interestingly during the tech demo with them showing the different cloud servers ramping up he states the max they have seen is 13....

 

[Metal_Spirit]

If you see the video at minute 4:46 is it explained that there is an icon on the top left that represents the compute power that usually is used on the Xbox One for Physics. All other references are based on that power, so yes. X is not the Xbox full power, but the percentage allocated to physics.
23x the power of the Xbox is 13x the compute power usually alocated to Physics os the Xbox, not 13 times the full power of the Xbox.

 

[Alucardx23]

Great to see something happening. Crackdown 3 is next in line.

"just about everyone remarks on the graphics and physics of the titular Sea, but very few people even question where the physics calculations are run. Hint: The waves are shared with other players, and your Xbox isn’t responsible for any of them."

http://www.gameondaily.com/avast-ye-microsoft-finally-showing-power-cloud/

 

[iroboto]

Great to see something happening. Crackdown 3 is next in line.

"just about everyone remarks on the graphics and physics of the titular Sea, but very few people even question where the physics calculations are run. Hint: The waves are shared with other players, and your Xbox isn’t responsible for any of them."

http://www.gameondaily.com/avast-ye-microsoft-finally-showing-power-cloud/

the comments in that article.. i lolled
wow.

 

[Nesh]

So is the water indeed calculated "on the Cloud"?
I am pretty sure aging can be implemented numerous ways. Even without the cloud, locally.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Great to see something happening.

Is it any more than was already happening? This is using the game server aspect to do local computations, which is what online game servers do anyway. It's no different to having an online shooter with destructible physics and having the server pass the results on, for example. So is something finally happening, or has it been happening in online games for that past 5 years to various degrees?

It's probably time to forget the XBox Cloud story and just look at online gaming and server augmentations independently of that.

The one game I know doing obvious server-side game stuff beyond the basics of gameplay are Battlefront. Found this vid which seems to show a good recap of the tech in these games, though haven't watched it properly.

Appreciating that server-side game computation isn't unique, we can look at what is unique, so in the case of Crackdown, what methods are they using to pack the physics data, and for SoT, what data is passed for the waves and how is that resolved? For that one, you'd really want to see two player's streams at the same location to compare waves. That's also important to understand what aspects of the rendering at local and what are cloud based - I presume they're just getting height-field/water-state updates and the tessellation and shading is local.

 

[Michellstar]

Was it posted here that Epic bought cloudengine back in january??

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Nope.
https://gameplaying.info/epic-games-acquired-the-cloud-engine-of-destruction-used-in-crackdown-3/

Epic Games acquired the cloud-based physical engine for the destruction of Cloudgine, which was developed by Microsoft Research and demonstrated at Build 2014. It is also used to create Crackdown 3, one of Microsoft’s top exclusives this year.

So MS sold their R&D engine to Epic. I guess the logic there is that they'd prefer everyone to be using their cloud and paying those fees, which is better facilitated by the engine being multiplat, independent rather than an MS exclusive feature.