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

I would assume 'yes'. There's no advantage in showing a different engine but it'll discredit MS if it leaked that it wasn't the same. So why take the risk? The demo was how many objects could be communicated over the cloud.
 
I admit to being intrigued by the possibilities of offloading computational tasks to the cloud and what it could mean for interactive entertainment, but ultimately I agree with the skeptics. We really need to see a game utilize this tech in a novel way.
 
Sure. B3D is the right place for censorship^^

In any case... would it be really likely to add a compression scheme in a chip for a method that is very high latency and very low bandwidth and probably doesn't take a whole lot of compute to run on any other chip inside the console?
 
ProjectNatalFan said:
Lz compression looks like it might be used in conjunction with the cloud. interesting read, probably will be taken down by nervous mods

http://www.maxconsole.com/news/XBOX...Xbox-One-sauce-RKSID00000000000000001723.html
Click to expand...
Dude - censoring that would be unfair as it'd be protecting your reputation.

It's a content-less fanboy fluff-piece, the sort that last gen used to be the Sony Defence Force spewing mindless, unqualified 'powerz of teh Cell!' drivel. The most important content of that piece, Cloudgine, has absolutely no detail. The website is a place holder. Is it MS exclusive, or open platform? What few details there are suggest multiplatform to me (integrates with existing engines which are cross-plat). While the details about 3GBs of textures in 16 MBs RAM, so 6 GBs fits in 32 MBs ESRAM, are laughably naive.

Ignoring that rather embarrassing article, it does bring to light a new player in cloud compute in Cloudgine, which'll be one to watch.
 
in reality how useful would LZ be for games over a network? would enough of the content be compressible in a large enough factor to make that much of a difference? remember not everything is compressible with lossless compression like LZ some things might not be that much smaller if smaller at all.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
While the details about 3GBs of textures in 16 MBs RAM, so 6 GBs fits in 32 MBs ESRAM, are laughably naive.
Click to expand...

...classic Lempel-Ziv algorithm has some limitation in the classic open implementation, due to the number of max repetition pattern etc - so essentially I dont believe it can store 3Gb in 16Mb, even with all zeroes. If my memory hold true (time passes...), you have a maximum of 127 repeats, to which you have to add extra overhead.
 
Betanumerical said:
in reality how useful would LZ be for games over a network?
Click to expand...
If you're transferring enough data across a network in a realtime game situation to require LZ compression, then you're transferring too much data... Latency will screw up your game.

This is why cloud-enhanced gaming will ultimately come to absolutely nothing. If you have ~30ms ping to some web server somewhere - pretty decent overall - that's roughly two frames of latency already even before factoring in processing overhead by the cloud server. You're going to end up with even more latency before the player sees the final result, both from additional local processing/graphics rendering, and in your display device.
 
Cloud based services are up and coming; it's just an advance on Remote Access, which is just a revisiting of the early days of computers with servers and thin client terminals. The downstream is likely a video stream, so the application in games is akin to Gaikai/OnLive. You can also access you project development anywhere on any device, which is cool. Mobile development on your mobile has appeal.

Doesn't help with this thread though. ;)
 
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I think Halo 5 (or 6) is running on the cloud as well. the debris from the spaceship in the footage could in no way have been done on an single xbox 1 in realtime.
But how will that scene play when your xbox is not connected? Will it use less debris particles? Or will it show a recorded cutscene?
 
SlimJim said:
I think Halo 5 (or 6) is running on the cloud as well. the debris from the spaceship in the footage could in no way have been done on an single xbox 1 in realtime.
But how will that scene play when your xbox is not connected? Will it use less debris particles? Or will it show a recorded cutscene?
Click to expand...

You mean teaser trailer for Halo 5 beta?! That trailer was pre-rendered (in-engine) but with game assets (according to Stinkles on Neogaf).
 
How would something like this be even feasible for a commercially released game. Especially for a multi million seller such as Halo. MS would have to make sure that every Xbox owner was always online while playing the game. He'd also need to be backed by 10 times the hardware muscle at all times. Heck, when even major publishers like Blizzard and Ubisoft can barely guarantee you stable login servers, what are the chances of offering everyone the hardware grunt to manage complex physics simulations?.
 
SlimJim said:
I think Halo 5 (or 6) is running on the cloud as well. the debris from the spaceship in the footage could in no way have been done on an single xbox 1 in realtime.
But how will that scene play when your xbox is not connected? Will it use less debris particles? Or will it show a recorded cutscene?
Click to expand...

That's pre-rendered. Even if it was realtime, you don't need to calculate the physics in realtime, if the scene is not interactive: you can bake the physics calculations and play it out. Uncharted's, Ryse, upcoming Quantum Break are the games I know that are using pre-baked complex physics impressively, with quantum break taking things a bit further and letting you locally change parts of the scene, as far as I know. Heck, even in battlefield 4, you can see that the rather convincing storm affected trees bending and swaying have the same baked animation.
 
I think we have enough info to quantify the valbility of that demo

Here is a battery of real world physics and floating point benchmarks for the 4171HE based Azure Cloud in comparison to its competitors.

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-performance.html
Click the link and you see the pdfs for floating point tests half of which are physics tests

Then you can click the indivisdual tests in the pdfs and check out detailed descriptions of the tests and how they might quantify

Here for example are the benhcmarks for 8core (2chip) instances on the Azure cloud.
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/assets...d-CPU-Performance/238314-CINT2006.002.ref.pdf

The benchmarks are from summer 2013, but performance for these A1-A7 instances which represent the worldwide capability of Azurewill not have changed. They are starting to roll out limited Xeon (A8-A9) based services but those are only in selected places in america.
 
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