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

By events you are referring to the levolution that occurs?

Imo Using battlefield as a reference to why
cloud processing doesn't work just isn't a strong reference. Each BF4 server is isolated to begin with and not all of them have processing juice to handle everything. Game code has been poor for nearly 9 months before they finally resolved everything.

 

A developer has said that the performance of the PS4 and Xbox One is similar, but the cloud could help the X1 in certain ways.

http://gamingbolt.com/ps4-and-xbox-...l-cloud-can-help-xbox-one-in-certain-ways-dev

 

Yeah, in the marketing department

 

Outatime: Using Speculation to Enable Low-Latency Continuous Interaction for Mobile Cloud Gaming

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=246834

EDIT: Found a 15-page paper on tech here...

http://www.bawakayi.com/davidchu/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2015/04/mobi085f-leeA.pdf

and a 1-page demo paper here...

http://www.bawakayi.com/davidchu/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/06/sysd32-lee.pdf

Tommy McClain

 

So you throw multiple times the GPU power at it, significantly increased bandwidth relative to even dumb console streaming (even with deltas you're still sending way more data) and the developer STILL has to restrict the way he designs a game (a 180 degree snap turn is going to screw things up regardless).

Cloud rendering for gaming, as practical as always.

 

They showed this for vr recently, this probably makes things much easier, the head cannot for example perform 180 snap turns and any game which does this jar the user sufficiently that the lag is probably acceptable for this view transition.

 

Crackdown 3 footage at Gamescom showed buildings toppling as players ran through them. Claimed 100% destructible environment running server-side on Xbox Live (Azure cloud). Hopefully they'll give some details on how they're handling latency and bandwidth. It looked pretty cool, if that's how the game actually turns out.

 

I remember way back they showed the tech in action, I have no doubt that what we are seeing from Crackdown 3 is 100% real.

However the question remains whether this is Single player or Multiplayer limited and what is the bandwidth needed to run such simulations on people's consoles.

 

I hope the Crackdown footage is real and believe it is. The thing that makes technology great are the leaps people didn't see coming. People thought Netflix streaming was a joke not too long ago.

On a previous subject, I think EA might have already found a solution for the server being shutdown issue. At least on Xbox. Microsoft supposedly isn't charging developers for severs. I'm sure their fast growing corporate cloud revenue more then covers the cost of gamers cloud use. If you add that with a EA Access like service from publishers or developers the servers would always be available to those users and Microsoft charges EA a small fee. $5.99 a month and you'll be able to play your favorite games forever. Win-win-win.

 

Sounds like it's MP-only.

Would love to see a new Mechwarrior or MechAssault game with this.

 

100% agreement. Also a Godzilla or Ultraman type game would be great.

 

It's about time there was a new rampage. They could make it like Assassin's Creed meets Crackdown with giant creatures.

 

bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. Its multiplayer only since its an open game you'd be able to destroy partso f th eworld important to the story otherwise. A linear game would be able to feature this in single player however.

 

"Game augmentation" would always be a client-server model. The only difference between a multi-player and single-player model is that you're syncing more clients. Regardless, it's computation on the server side. Dedicated servers are obviously not new, and they've always done some computation to track and synchronize game state. Bots have run on servers for ages as well. Doing a game world with a 100% destructible environment that's synchronized between players would be new to me. This looks far more sophisticated than Battlefield, but I guess we'll have to wait and see what the details are. I guess technically you might not call it an "augmentation", but I don't know if that's even a useful distinction. Ultimately we just want to know what types of computation are workable on the server/cloud side. THere was a lot of debate about physics because of latency and bandwidth. It'll be interesting to see how this really works, how they addressed those problems and how detailed it really is.

 

This is definitely interesting though:

http://news.xbox.com/2015/08/gamescom-crackdown-3

So it sounds like there is a single-player/co-op mode that won't have the same level of destruction. Most likely they do not want to dedicate those resources to a player on a 1:1 ratio, and for game design reasons.

 

Designing a game with a fully destructible city with any kind of remotely sensible story is probably impossible to achieve.

Of course, the economics of doing those calculations per client, which I had brought up here and elsewhere still stands.

 

The 1:1 ratio is a key point. Many users simultaneously taking advantage of the same set of physics calculations and memory. I also don't think they are making up the 20 times performance number. The peak CPU performance is required for what instance in time? There will be long stretches where full sky scrapers are not crashing down so the resources can be scaled as needed.

The fact that crackdown will allow you to utilize up to 20 times the CPU performance for peak instances is incredible if it works as shown. How else would any console or even high end CPU manage the order of magnitude differences moment to moment? I'm glad they have finally demonstrated that real time physics can be significantly augmented by the cloud.

 

If it's anything like Azure enterprise there is a dial on how many processing cores you'd like to leverage for your jobs, I do not know if it's something you can do on the fly, though I imagine likely you can. That being said 20 times the performance amount, may work out to be only a handful of server cores when compared to the computing power of jaguar.