| sth88 said: If there was one thing in particular that peaked my interest it was the idea that cloud servers could be used by game developers for latency-insensitive parts of the game. Obviously any game that uses these servers would need a persistent internet connection, but for MMOs and other games that naturally require a connection (and for multiplayer matches in games like Halo) this could be an incredible tool. |
"But perhaps the most curious thing about the Xbox One reveal was the manner in which Microsoft's engineers - and Turn 10's Dan Greenawalt - referred to both "transistors in the box", and "transistors in the cloud", the inference being that Xbox One could evolve by offloading mathematical computations from the local hardware to the ginormous servers Microsoft is prepping for the new system's launch. There was talk of new worlds being generated in the cloud, and less latency-specific systems like physics and AI being processed outside of the console. It's true that this is an exciting prospect in terms of creating massively multiplayer open worlds where "next-gen" dedicated servers will be required to keep track of everything that's going on and feed that out to the gamers.
However, even the 20-30ms latency we tend to see on the raw exchange of data over the internet is an absolute lifetime in terms of rendering games locally, plus of course there's the fact that any game embracing this won't work unless your internet connection is always on. We're certainly curious about how this particular facet of Xbox One gaming will evolve in the long term, but we weren't particularly convinced by the ideas set out by the panel - many which came across somewhat as wishful thinking thrown out there with no real exploration or real-life applications."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-spec-analysis-xbox-one
