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

[expletive]

Is it too early? Only time will tell. The average speed of internet connections has been improving a lot every year. We have to assume that these consoles will be around for many many years, and lots of things will happen during that time.

In your view, what constitutes "too early" and "ready"? Is it the number of graphics-heavy gamers who also have an adequate internet connection reaching a tipping point for developers to target them? (and spend money)

Also, what are you imagining is the acceptable/reasonable requirements for latency to an XBL datacenter and sustained bandwidth for this to be feasible?

 

[tuna]

I just want to say that there is nothing stopping devs from doing server side computations on the current gen (or PC or tablets). Has it ever been done?

 

[Billy Idol]

That might work. You'd need to upload the game state for objects in the water, but 100 ms wouldn't be bad for water response while wading through it, and interpolating on laggy data wouldn't be too distracting either. the 2D data could be heavily compressed and still work.

Another simulation could be wave simulation perhaps. Maybe batches of states could be rendered and cached, and the console tween them, applying local distortions?

Still, there's going to be some issue with immediate response. The moment you shoot at the water, you need an instant splash. That'll have to be rendered locally, and that'll need some alternative solution to the awesome cloud-based simulation. Or maybe the same physics could be applied just to a very small area?

The problem: is it even worth it? Is it worth bothering for a dev?

Joker said it right in his post: people don't see the difference in PS360 versions, don't see the upgrade BF3 ultra PC settings offer, most likely won't see the difference of PS4/X1 games...so will they ever see an impact by the cloud?

It seems to me that the cloud is just there for MS fanboys to have something to scream about after the low spec reveals...no one will see and appreciate the impact on the graphics of the cloud anyway...so I ask again, why bother with all those unresolved issues?

Cloud only makes sense if it offers new gameplay. Everything else like rendering, physics etc will not be recognized by 99.9% of the users...

 

[KKRT]

I think the main concern is not what You can do with cloud processing, but how do You design game around times without cloud processing?
How this will even work in multiplatform game situation? Game will run two lighting/physics solutions in parallel? Will developers have to write special features just for X1 versions and yet still consider situation how to not brake game and IQ when game is out of sync with cloud?

I think its more pain in the ass than real solution and hardly future proof. What will happen with games rarely played or old? Does cloud server will need to have some game data for calculations stored or whole code will be sent from game to cloud at game launch?

 

[astrograd]

It would seem to me that a lot of that non-interactive stuff isn't very computationally intensive anyway, for the very reason that it's not interactive. I wonder if the cycles required to determine what should and shouldn't be offloaded, then sending that info out to the cloud, receiving it back, then incorporating it into the world is about the same as what it would take to simply compute it locally. Cloud for the sake of cloud.

Other non-interactive stuff, like the bridge destruction on the last page, could be simply pre-computed and stored locally. If that scene, or scenes like it, are just cutscenes, even if done in-engine in realtime, then all of that could be computed ahead of time, and the physics and deformation could just be "played back" off of the disc or HDD. In a scene like that, CPU overhead would be surprisingly small.

Maybe I didn't explain that example very well. I meant to suggest that the boat/bridge scene was dynamic in the sense that the boat could have hit anywhere, there could have been any number or type of cars on it, etc. Hell, the player could even be on the bridge while that is happening and just react to the playback of the cloud computed anim sequence being rendered locally.

 

[astrograd]

The problem: is it even worth it? Is it worth bothering for a dev?

Joker said it right in his post: people don't see the difference in PS360 versions, don't see the upgrade BF3 ultra PC settings offer, most likely won't see the difference of PS4/X1 games...so will they ever see an impact by the cloud?

The comparisons there are reliant on rendering differences between the platforms. The more relevant aspect is the fidelity of the dynamic animations in the game world and the load relief you can get from using dynamic (but slightly latent) lighting for static scenes computed in the cloud vs between frames locally. From a purely visuals perspective I mean. I'm concentrating on that atm. A lot of games feature static lighting that is computationally intensive only because the devs find it easier to let it be computed dynamically as they author the scene, etc. That still takes up a good bit of the GPU computing though iirc.

It seems to me that the cloud is just there for MS fanboys to have something to scream about after the low spec reveals...no one will see and appreciate the impact on the graphics of the cloud anyway...so I ask again, why bother with all those unresolved issues?

So your theory is MS just made some gratuitously large investment in their cloud computing infrastructure...so they could give fanboys something to brag about on videogame forums? Does that really seem rational to you? REALLY?

I find it interesting that you assert there are all these 'unresolved issues'. How would know if they are 'unresolved'? Have you honestly convinced yourself that somehow you are in a better position to speak to the challenges and solutions of something like global cloud computing than Microsoft is?! You act like MS has no clue what's going on with this 'cloud stuff' and they are willing to just throw billions of dollars around on a whim without researching it at all. How realistic do you honestly think that scenario is? Come on now...

 

[expletive]

It seems to me that the cloud is just there for MS fanboys to have something to scream about after the low spec reveals...no one will see and appreciate the impact on the graphics of the cloud anyway...so I ask again, why bother with all those unresolved issues?

Cloud only makes sense if it offers new gameplay. Everything else like rendering, physics etc will not be recognized by 99.9% of the users...

Just because the hardest of hardcore MS fans have adopted it as their rally cry doesn't mean it has no basis in reality. Cloud based computing and rendering is a real thing and has been for awhile and after reading sebbbi's comments i think its more a matter of "when" than "if". THe challenge for MS is that they aren't in complete control of all the factors required for this to work (i.e. quality broadband penetration), the same way they weren't with HDTV penetration for the 360.

 

[Scott_Arm]

It would be nice if a topic like this could be discussed in a tech thread without it degrading into, "This is fanboy BS!" Microsoft hasn't given any details or concrete examples yet. We haven't heard anything from devs on the idea, either first or third party. If you look at the thread title, this thread isn't even about MS, but the idea of offloading computation and "augmentations" to the cloud. Can we please get back to discussing the concept? If you want to talk about the ways Apple, Sony and Google could do this, go right ahead. This idea is actually interesting.

 

[MfA]

It's interesting in the way discussing D&D magic can be interesting ... what if the world and physics operated on fundamentally different principles, oh think of all the wonders we could perform within those rules. Interesting, not practical.

 

[Scott_Arm]

It's interesting in the way discussing D&D magic can be interesting ... what if the world and physics operated on fundamentally different principles, oh think of all the wonders we could perform within those rules. Interesting, not practical.

Is that an informed opinion or is that just a gut reaction to something you don't think sounds right?

You know, there could be talk about doing this ignoring whatever PR numbers MS has released.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

True scientific investigation has no motive other than to discover the truth, with no emotional attachment to what that truth is. No-one should care whether it can or can't work - we should only be discussing how it may or may not work.

 

[MfA]

Is that an informed opinion or is that just a gut reaction to something you don't think sounds right?

It's the opinion of someone with a generally high quality high bandwidth cable connection which is still going offline two nights from twelve midnight to 4 am next week.

 

[mrcorbo]

In a way it feels like a reverse idea of distributed computing, and somehow I can't put my finger on it, but it seems ... counterintuitive? And why only CPU? Is that really the most important resource?

Well, first, distributed computing as a paradigm has few optimal use cases IMO, and will continue to be sub-optimal for most computing tasks unless technological development allows increases in the performance of the data connections between nodes to significantly outpace the increases in the performance of individual computing devices.

And as for why only CPU, I expect that again it has to do with data flow. GPUs perform optimally when doing simple calculations on a large volume of source data resulting in a large volume of result data. I'd expect that network bandwidth would become a crippling bottleneck to being able to feed and consume data from a GPU remotely. A CPU OTOH, can do complex calculations on smaller data sets and this is a much better fit for that setup.

 

[Scott_Arm]

It's the opinion of someone with a generally high quality high bandwidth cable connection which is still going offline two nights from twelve midnight to 4 am next week.

So, your opinion is that cloud computing is a dead end because people will face Internet downtime at some point in their lives. Ok.

 

[MfA]

No, I did not say that ... okay.

 

[Nesh]

So, your opinion is that cloud computing is a dead end because people will face Internet downtime at some point in their lives. Ok.

Its not dead infinitely but at this stage and God knows for how long, its problematic because internet downtime is not something that happens once or twice at some point of our lives.
And perhaps this ISNT the time to rely on cloud computing especially on games but later when internet connections are improved.

 

[Scott_Arm]

True scientific investigation has no motive other than to discover the truth, with no emotional attachment to what that truth is. No-one should care whether it can or can't work - we should only be discussing how it may or may not work.

I tried to pick a simple example (animating a flag in the wind) as a starting point. There is little to no interaction with the player, so there is not much need for synchronization. The data can stay in the cloud, the processing can stay in the cloud. They should be capable of keeping all of the game assets cached in the cloud so clients don't have to upload data about the flag. You have a constant stream of data sent back to the client. The client could periodically send changes to wind direction, force of wind. Obviously you'd want to extend that to the bigger scenario where you're player is outside a castle surrounded by tents, banners. I don't have the experience to know how much data would have to be sent down to the player. It would of course depend on the frequency the cloud model updates at and the accuracy they are aiming for in terms of the points on the surface of the material that can deform. I just thought it was a small example that can be used to extend into animating fluid surfaces in general.

No takers so far. Maybe a better example would spur more discussion.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Its not dead infinitely but at this stage and God knows for how long, its problematic because internet downtime is not something that happens once or twice at some point of our lives.
And perhaps this ISNT the time to rely on cloud computing especially on games but later when internet connections are improved.

So, MMOs and online free-to-play games are a failed business model because there aren't enough people with stable Internet connections? Remember when Counter-Strike bombed because people were playing on dialup and broadband was new?

Again, the stability of people's Internet connections is besides the point. The thread is asking whether it's possible to augment a game with cloud computing. Not whether it's a feasible business model.

 

[Arwin]

I just have to think about how we were expecting server-hosted multi-player games being good and all the rage this time last gen, and while from my experiences server-hosted matches do indeed seem better, we got fewer of those from Microsoft's side, where we actually expected them to happen, and more on Sony's side. And all of them eventually made way to almost exclusively player hosted matches, leaving match-making and related features to the server side only. And then we have various games that use those, that eventually get switched off.

Here's certainly something that I could get into - if you as an Xbox One owner could host multiplayer matches completely independent of other servers from the reserved space, and you would never have to retire a game because the publisher can no longer support the centralised server infrastructure, then there is certainly one interesting usage scenario right there.

 

[Cjail]

Just because the hardest of hardcore MS fans have adopted it as their rally cry doesn't mean it has no basis in reality. Cloud based computing and rendering is a real thing and has been for awhile and after reading sebbbi's comments i think its more a matter of "when" than "if". THe challenge for MS is that they aren't in complete control of all the factors required for this to work (i.e. quality broadband penetration), the same way they weren't with HDTV penetration for the 360.

For me cloud gaming has always been matter of "when" but as you say there are things that are not under MS control, the necessary conditions are not in place ATM.
Also I dare to say when the conditions will be in place "server augmentations" will be "obsolete" because there's wont'be consoles to augment anymore.