| thranx said: I would love to see it in action. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/05/24/microsoft-will-back-xbox-one-300000-servers/ "Booty says cloud assets will be used on “latency-insensitive computation” within games. “There are some things in a video game world that don’t necessarily need to be updated every frame or don’t change that much in reaction to what’s going on,” said Booty. “One example of that might be lighting,” he continued. “Let’s say you’re looking at a forest scene and you need to calculate the light coming through the trees, or you’re going through a battlefield and have very dense volumetric fog that’s hugging the terrain. Those things often involve some complicated up-front calculations when you enter that world, but they don’t necessarily have to be updated every frame. Those are perfect candidates for the console to offload that to the cloud—the cloud can do the heavy lifting, because you’ve got the ability to throw multiple devices at the problem in the cloud.” This has implications for how games for the new platform are designed." |
Thanks for that. About god-damn time someone gave a sober pro-cloud-computing response. Even if you are not necessarily pro-c-c.
Queries:
1.1 What type of performance disparity will there be between those that are able to access the cloud (i.e. online) and those that aren't? The game needs to be able to run completely offline, so that implies a hell of a lot of extra work for devs.
1.2 In the same vein, the bandwidth-scalability factor is surely also a massive one. What if the latency/bandwith is not low/big enough to handle the entire set of instructions that the devs would want to upload to the cloud? This would imply a very, very complex, un-console-like software development process which I simply do not see happening. EVER. (I hope whoever reads this gets what I mean?)
1.3 The above two points shout "IT'S NOT WORTH IT" directly to my face.
2. I don't see how this whole development isn't completely open to everyone else as well. Sure, 300 000 servers need a hell of a lot of money (which MS has and Sony perhaps not), but there is no part of this ordeal which is limited to MS. Sony has server farms too.
3. Even experts (and YES, Eurogamer are experts - face it) have severe doubts about this whole thing.
I could go on, but I suspect few will even read these points, so I'm just hoping someone nitpicks me a bit.
SEE EVERYONE, this isn't a flame-bashing-troll-thread!
