Crackdown 3 [XO, XPA]

Wonder if they can enable it for vehicles?

 

That would be cool. Vehicles tend to explode and break apart in really disappointing ways in games. Seeing some good vehicle damage, especially on large vehicles would be cool. Having a transport truck that you could shoot holes through while it's driving would be neat. Shooting a rocket and blasting the trailer in half would also be cool.

 

I wish they would have shown more about the "transforming" aspects of the vehicles. That sounds like it has wonderful possibilities.

Also, at the very end of the bit, where they showed what the city would look like during a multi-player full on destruction fest was the best part. When it zoomed out and you could see all the buildings burning and crashing down across the city as all four agents cause chaos.

 

I was watching the video of the guy playing the game last night and currently the rockets have very strange behaviour; as soon as they make an impact the smoke trail just disappears from the scene. There also seems to be lag between impact and the destruction happening, which I guess makes sense if the calculations are performed on the server side.

 

Not everything will be there yet due to pre-alpha status of the game, so no doubt things like smoke trails will be fixed. Some lag will probably be evident due to network latency plus the time penalty (however small) of spinning up more dervers, as you can't client-side predict these things like many actions in current online games.

Overall I though the demo was as cool as hell, and after the "no support" Kinect it's great to actually see some - literally - "game changing" technology being demonstrated for the first time this generation.

If the economies of this type of game work out, then this bodes very well for scale in big budget video games.

 

Server side or worse (lag wise) another xbox one, as we must assume if your client is firstly maxing itself out for physics so must each other player.

If the world is shared and all objects are interactive then these calculations must also be shared?

 

I'll be a douche and quote myself. Some new info about this. It seems that there's only limited destruction in singleplayer (or co-op) mode and reason is said to be both technical and storyline. In storyline perspective you "try" to save the city, not destroy it and from technical side... well, if you play offline, you only have xbox power.

So online multiplayer is where you can level everything and servers seem to be like traditional MMO stuff where if something happens to you, everyone else can see it. As kill a mob in MMO or destroy a building in spectacular way in this game.

 

Yeah, the multiplayer bit is where this game is really going to shine, but hasn't it always been that way with Crackdown?

Any way, this article has some more details about the destruction and if half of it is true, this game is going to be bananas. Considering it's also a first party game, if MS starts sharing how to implement this into other franchises, it really could be quite revolutionary.

http://www.gamesradar.com/crackdown...t-powerful-console-ever-made/?tag=grsocial-20

 

I love bananas.

 

2-4mbps for the multiplayer. That's a pretty significant number, like streaming SD to low-quality HD video.

 

2 mbps is only 8.5kb a frame at 30 fps. Games that use the full range of modern broadband, so 10+ mbps, could do a heck of a lot more with their data. One almost wonders if the limiting factor to online games hasn't been computational power and the invention of cloud computing rather than just the bottleneck of the download.

 

The answer is both. It's not like there have been massive data centers with huge amounts of extra computation power just sitting around waiting to be used. If you look at what Azure is, it's insane. Amazon's data centers are insane. The requirements to store, process and transport the data are massive.

Also, am I missing something on the math side? 2 mbps is 2000 kbps. 2000kbps/30fps is 66.66 kb/f. Regardless I think Battlefield 4 sends about 200kbps per client. They can fit all of the world udpates for 64 players into 200kpbs. Crackdown 3 requires 2-4 mpbs, so 10 to 20 times the data. 10 to 20 times the data means they're transforming 10 to 20 times as much data in the game world, which means the computational power required is probably some factor along the same lines, or even more because of the complexity of physics vs simple game updates.

Not even touching on how much memory is required server side to keep the crackdown 3 world persistent for every broken object.

 

I think that 3-4 mbps is just data downloaded from the servers (related to the destruction physics calculations).

Like watching a livestream.

Most proper livestreamers stream at 2500kbps-3500kbps at 1080p/30 or 1080p/60 on Twitch.tv.

Upload data will most likely be at a minimum, under 1 mbps upload I recon.

This is not too bad imho, since most countries with decent internet infrastructures have an average of 5-10 mbps download speed.

 

What I'm hopeful is the API and SDK's created from this can be leveraged by other developers.

It's hard to think of a gametype that I enjoy playing that wouldn't immensely benefit from this tech.

 

Upload shouldn't be different than any other game. You'd just be sending basic information about your characters position and actions.

 

Yah, it's interesting. It sounds like these virtual servers are dynamically allocated as a game session needs them. It's not a traditional dedicated server. In the talk the dev talks about it scaling up as they cause more destruction. If it's written in such a way that you feed it a chunk of world geometry and associated physics data, then it could potentially be leveraged by other games, or at least maybe they could modify it so that it could be leveraged by other games. The dev would have to keep a copy of the world in the cloud, and the virtual server would grab the piece it needs to keep an instance of the modified data for persistence. When the session ends, that server would be available for another game session by resetting and grabbing a new slice of the world to work on. There is probably a typical dedicated server that tracks the usual global state of the players which requests these physics servers as it needs them.

For instance, they show the game world split up into zones by colour. So if you have a yellow zone that ecompasses 4 buildings, and someone does some damage in there, it grabs a VM server to process the damage that's being done and saves the data into shared memory. As players leave that zone, the VM server is freed up for another zone, or another game session. That way, the dedicated server and shared memory can sync all of the clients, but the actual processing for physics is being dynamically allocated to minimize the amount of hardware required. That's just me hypothesizing, but it sounds like that's how it would work from the talk.

 

Viva Pinata Gets Loco

 

I meant kilobytes.

 

Oh yah, I should have clued in.

 

xbox one's cpu (and ps4) was responsible for the bad framerate in AC Unity because of the number of NPCs, this cloud technique could really improve the FPS in such a game too i believe ?