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

A pair of tweets from Videogamer.com journalist David Scammel on Crackdown 3. It seems that they've gone for the remote hosted session approach with a client much as in non P2P FPS games or MMOs but with responsive physics as opposed to canned animations (as in BF4's 'level-ution'). I've not seen any firm articles as to whether there is any cloud compute involved in single player at all. The mention of a wholly separate map for online co-op suggests it is a very different thing to the main campaign map, whether this means it's different in size and scope or just layout is something I hope we get some more detail on but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't address that at this stage of dev.

So itt's not cloud in the way I imagined it when I first heard of the concept (essentially a remote co-processing resource) rather it's a whole game instance you connect to, still I look forward to them revealing how they're handling the transmission of all that data.

EDIT: Further tweets

David Scammel also clarified his earlier tweets referred to 'co-op' when he meant to say 'multiplayer'.

Further EDIT:

http://www.videogamer.com/xboxone/c..._bandwidth_of_a_regular_multiplayer_game.html

So 2-4 Mbits of b/w for multi, given that the simulation is all happening server side I'm going to guess this is d/l bandwidth rather than upload given that the normal amounts of data are all that need to be passed (ie player velocity/location, weapon projectiles, etc) rather than the more complex data sets if it were some kind of cloud hybrid compute. Still it will be interesting to see if they can combat lag/warp in debris physics although it would be kind of cool to see a collapsing building do a Zack Snyder-esque fast-slow-fast motion effect

Edit 3 this time it's personal:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/...-the-cloud-to-make-whole-cities-destructible/

So Ars Technica got an interview too and they saw an interesting overlay that showed which servers are simulating which bits of debris and spoke to the dynamic scaling they have that allows them to spin up extra servers to support a game instance if the load gets too great.

 

Does this game uses any GPGPU at all?
Ubisoft once made some cloth physics testing and the GPGPU results on PS4 were 16 times superior to the CPU.
This leaves me wondering if, with the proper coding, the GPGPU could replace the cloud (maybe not for 20x CPU, but with less players average seems to be 9x the Xbox CPU) .

 

I guess with this statement, you should first ask why they went with CPU clusters, pros and cons, and then look at GPGPU (or async compute) and see what those pros and cons are. And then think about the game playing in real time, with multiple players.

 

Actually i was thinking about the offline mode with limited physics destruction, and if he could replace the Cloud calculations with the GPGPU!

 

This is all shown in the video linked previously. The buildings are colour coded.

 

There's been no mention whether the local and cloud resources they're comparing are CPU or GPU. They've just said, "processing power."

 

It's certainly a possibility, but there's very little information on the topic of what happens in offline mode, or at least, I haven't been made aware of more developments in that area. And as Scott Arm says, 'processing power'. It's not quite specific as to what it is, my assumption is that it's CPU based (on Azure) as I don't believe they run GPU clusters for processing. For local processing, we could look at Scream Ride as a possible example of what type of power is available.

Though from what I've heard, it suffers horribly in the frame rate department.

 

It is CPU. They are comparing a multiple of whatever percentage of CPU time they are dedicating to physics when using the Xbox alone. So the 20 times multiple is based on some unknown percentage of the Xbox cpu. Watching the videos you can get a pretty significant amount of destruction before the first server spins up. I just have no idea what percentage that would be.

 

I think is relevant to post this video again for reference on how this technology helps to maintain the framerate during high destruction.

 

He also mentions memory usage a lot. The local gpu will not add more memory.

 

I haven't observe all the video closely, but is there an example where someone shoot point blank at a destructible object?
Edit: I mean for Crackdown 3

 

This is how I see it too.

 

Interestingly during the tech demo with them showing the different cloud servers ramping up he states the max they have seen is 13....

 

If you see the video at minute 4:46 is it explained that there is an icon on the top left that represents the compute power that usually is used on the Xbox One for Physics. All other references are based on that power, so yes. X is not the Xbox full power, but the percentage allocated to physics.
23x the power of the Xbox is 13x the compute power usually alocated to Physics os the Xbox, not 13 times the full power of the Xbox.

 

Great to see something happening. Crackdown 3 is next in line.

"just about everyone remarks on the graphics and physics of the titular Sea, but very few people even question where the physics calculations are run. Hint: The waves are shared with other players, and your Xbox isn’t responsible for any of them."

http://www.gameondaily.com/avast-ye-microsoft-finally-showing-power-cloud/

 

the comments in that article.. i lolled
wow.

 

So is the water indeed calculated "on the Cloud"?
I am pretty sure aging can be implemented numerous ways. Even without the cloud, locally.

 

Was it posted here that Epic bought cloudengine back in january??