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

[iroboto]

The cloud still doesnt improve visuals in any way as originally promised.

Yup, a complete failure of PR on MS behalf.

Their statement is no different than say: "Make America Great Again".
Well I'm willing to bet everyone thought America was great between 8-16 years of age for everyone. Because after that point, real life starts to get real and life sucks.

But that's just it. Everyone has a different opinion of what Cloud Powered was supposed to be. And it's entirely up to the interpretation of the reader. Unlike MAGA, people called shit out on MS.
I'm soured they didn't do the same for MAGA.

 

[Alucardx23]

Well one thing seems certain The cloud still doesnt improve visuals in any way as originally promised. It is more of something that keeps everyone in sync with whats happening on screen.
And I suspect that whatever cloud features/implementations are in store for XBOX it will become a defacto feature for all platforms.

For now I think we will mostly see the cloud helping with AI and physics. Eventually when the entire game is running in the cloud and we only get the video signal, that is when I believe we will start to see some major improvements in visuals. I always say that if Nvidia wants to really promote Geforce Now, they have to create a game that takes full advantage of that environment and not just have games that were created within the limitations of local PC/console hardware.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'm curious to know how the cloud simulation is done and what is exchanged between client and server.

The reality is pure single player games are dwindling. Most games have some connected element, co-op or variety of multiplayer.

There will be more and more opportunities for physics and parts of ai to be done online. I would not be surprised to see bandwidth requirements increase significantly.

 

[iroboto]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/973638081214476288

Hey @Shifty Geezer
hur hur hur at first part of comment

 

[JPT]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/973638081214476288

Hey @Shifty Geezer
hur hur hur at first part of comment

But as discussed up and down, what is latency tolerant and how latency tolerant must it be. We are not talking about going longer than 60 or 30 fps frame. Most network connections to what ever cloud is probably longer than a 30 fps frame.

And if you say something about edge or fog computing I will sneeze at you

 

[iroboto]

But as discussed up and down, what is latency tolerant and how latency tolerant must it be. We are not talking about going longer than 60 or 30 fps frame. Most network connections to what ever cloud is probably longer than a 30 fps frame.

And if you say something about edge or fog computing I will sneeze at you

You can probably go up to 120ms I’m willing to bet, they bring your standard MP gaming experience.

If waves in SoT is done server side, pretty sure the results aren’t coming back every 33ms. There is probably a way to keep everything in sync without having to need constant updates.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The waves in SoT are probably very latency tolerant. Between updates, assuming it's a heightfield, you can interpolate from existing frames. You can probably put a good half second look-ahead onto the calculations too and update consoles with what the waves will be. Definitely not something that requires per-frame updates and fidelity the same way bullets/cannonballs benefit from.

 

[iroboto]

Microsoft’s new gaming cloud division readies for a future beyond Xbox
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/15/17123452/microsoft-gaming-cloud-xbox-future

Despite the challenge, Choudhry hints that Microsoft could achieve this by streaming games to devices. “We’re looking at ways to make that content available to anyone no matter what device they’re on,” says Choudhry.

Microsoft has teased Xbox game streaming within three years, and it’s clearly going to be big part of the new cloud gaming division. “We’re spending a lot of time thinking about that space,” explains Choudhry. He says a “bunch of things” need to come together, including making a business model that’s attractive to third parties. “What we’re doing with game pass and creating a subscription-based product, where over half the content is third-party content. I would say we’re getting started from a subscription product perspective.”

 

[Alucardx23]

But as discussed up and down, what is latency tolerant and how latency tolerant must it be. We are not talking about going longer than 60 or 30 fps frame. Most network connections to what ever cloud is probably longer than a 30 fps frame.

And if you say something about edge or fog computing I will sneeze at you

This looks like science fiction right now, but it is real and happening already. The idea is that using EEG (electroencephalogram) you can predict the movement you will do, so you can start sending the signal before the physical movement actually happens. Going forward this technology will get more refined so you can get down to predicting individual finger movements. This is a must for VR games that run in the cloud.

Neurable X Siggraph

-How capable is non-invasive EEG data of predicting the next movement? A mini review

"In conclusion, the EEG data gathered before the forthcomingmovement which corresponds to motor preparation and plan-ning period of the brain show significant prediction potentials.The evidence from both Neuroscience and Engineering researchsupport this hypothesis, even though this field has not beenvastly explored. Further studies in both fields in this short pre-movement time can extend exploration of the frontiers of motorpreparation and decrease the response time of BCIs.

https://www.researchgate.net/public...of_predicting_the_next_movement_A_mini_review

-Virtual reality games you can control with your MIND: Startup unveils the world's first brain-controlled VR interface
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4773220/VR-games-control-MIND.html

-Predicting Intended Movement Direction Using EEG
from Human Posterior Parietal Cortex

"In this EEG study, we designed a movement delay paradigm to investigate brain
activities in the human PPC during planning of intended movements. The results
indicated that EEG signals generated in the PPC are altered during movement
planning, and their hemispheric asymmetries carry information about intended
movement direction. By analyzing multi-channel ERPs at the single-trial level, we
obtained stable classification of “go left” and “go right” planning trials for all
subjects. The resulting classification accuracy of 80.25% makes this paradigm
promising for BCI design."

https://sccn.ucsd.edu/~scott/pdf/Wang_MovementPrediction_HCI09.pdf

"Another group of researchers was able to predict their participants movement seven hundred milliseconds before it occurred with up to 80 percent accuracy by tracking the activity in the brain."

https://books.google.com.do/books?id=qvjXDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT26&lpg=PT26&dq=another+group+of+researchers+was+able+to+predict+their+participants'+movements+seven+hundred+milliseconds+before+it+occurred+with+up+to+80+percent+accuracy+by+tracking+the+activity+in+the+brain&source=bl&ots=QSrftBQlFw&sig=--bSu98stSS5hvB96GGvVe-eIJU&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwifrpq0xe7ZAhVEzGMKHaMOAPsQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=nother group of researchers was able to predict their participants' movements seven hundred milliseconds before it occurred with up to 80 percent accuracy by tracking the activity in the brain&f=false

 

[MfA]

The reality is pure single player games are dwindling.

The reality is that multiplayer genres are winner take all, with relatively few successful releases within a genre compared to single player.

The tripple AAA industry doesn't like they can't all be Blizzard, but they'll have to manage. Because nothing is going to change about the fact that gamers make the time to play more single player games in a year than they play multiplayer games in a decade. Multiplayer will never be able to shift the total number of units single player can, the lucky few can earn billions with it ... but only the lucky few. The rest will just have to ship single player games, or have no market at all. Regardless, someone will make my single player games to get my money.

 

[iroboto]

caveat, I'm now going to start using this thread for server side computational assistance. As opposed to just the discussion of real time server side computational assistance.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/gaming-with-windows-ml/

But what does WinML mean for gamers? Gaming has always utilized and pushed adoption of bleeding edge technologies to create more beautiful and magical worlds. With innovations like WinML, which extensively use the GPU, it only makes sense to leverage that technology for gaming. We are ready to use this new technology to empower game developers to use machine learning to build the next generation of games.

Improved Visual Quality
We couldn’t write a graphics blog without calling out how DNNs can help improve the visual quality and performance of games. Take a close look at what happens when NVIDIA uses ML to up-sample this photo of a car by 4x. At first the images will look quite similar, but when you zoom in close, you’ll notice that the car on the right has some jagged edges, or aliasing, and the one using ML on the left is crisper. Models can learn to determine the best color for each pixel to benefit small images that are upscaled, or images that are zoomed in on. You may have had the experience when playing a game where objects look great from afar, but when you move close to a wall or hide behind a crate, things start to look a bit blocky or fuzzy – with ML we may see the end of those types of experiences. If you want to learn more about how up-sampling works, attend NVIDIA’s GDC talk.

Pictures in the blog!

 

[MfA]

Better/cheaper pathfinding is always nice, but other than that good "AI" in game is still just a question of throwing more scripting at it. Machine learning is good at making killer cars, but not all that useful for AI.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

To be fair, ML hasn't been explored for AI yet because it wasn't an option. Maybe it'll lead to some incredible algorithms?? Training AI bots in how humans play seems quite a nice fit (though possibly goes against the requirements of game AI - see 'better AI makes games worse' discussions).

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

Could machine learning be employed to make existing algorithms more efficient i.e. same scope of AI but with lower processing cost?

 

[JPT]

Could machine learning be employed to make existing algorithms more efficient i.e. same scope of AI but with lower processing cost?

Existing algorithms is usually "if then" stuff, from my understanding, so I doubt ml can make that much more efficient

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

True, it's only "if then," but I've had the mightily satisfying experience of making equations more efficient - also a tenet of good writing: saying the same thing in fewer words - and I expect that a machine might be able to do so quicker or across a larger set of interlinking instructions.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Could machine learning be employed to make existing algorithms more efficient i.e. same scope of AI but with lower processing cost?

Maybe. ML is itself is implements through algorithms but it's not impossible for those algorithms to result in additional data to hone existing algorithms. It's also not a sure thing. The whole concept of 'machine learning' has been way oversold as a magic bullet in my view.

 

[Alucardx23]

Jade Raymond Talks About Cloud Gaming as The Future of Triple-A

"There’s a lot of things I think will continue to change the industry, I think in a drastic way, in the next few years. And one of those is cloud gaming and streaming. From the creative perspective, there are just so many new possibilities in terms of how we reach people, what it means to the types of experiences we can create, I mean…

If you think back to Assassin’s Creed, at that point we were during the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation and that enabled game creators to think what they could do differently from a gameplay perspective with all that processing power. That’s what enabled us to say ‘Okay, we’ll do this huge open world and you can climb anywhere and anything you can see you can get to’.

Now if you think of the cloud, obviously you have constraints in terms of costs and numbers of servers and stuff, but in terms of what you could do, you could decide to simulate the real world and render everything with real physics, you could. You could forget about a hundred AI characters and have thousands, or forget about a hundred players in a map and have thousands or even millions. I think the first people to really take a bet and do something different there are going to have a huge hit and I think we’re going to start to see things that we just never thought would be possible."

https://wccftech.com/jade-raymond-comments-swbfii-lootboxes/

 

[MfA]

Then you're just making a MMO. Just more wishful thinking by the games as a service crowd, looking for some magical business plan which will turn them into Blizzard and be able to print money for minimal investments. The entire industry can't be Blizzard, they'll just have to make normal money the old fashioned way.

 

[Alucardx23]

Then you're just making a MMO. Just more wishful thinking by the games as a service crowd, looking for some magical business plan which will turn them into Blizzard and be able to print money for minimal investments. The entire industry can't be Blizzard, they'll just have to make normal money the old fashioned way.

Don't know why you would limit her comments to just MMO games. You should be able to think on how the additional processing power on the cloud can help enhance single player game experiences and why this is something good for all of us. This is just the way I think things will evolve in the not too distant future.