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Machiavellian on 30 May 2013
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SvennoJ said:
Machiavellian said:
 

To be honest, who cares if the whole thread believes one way.  It would be different if the whole thread was compose of developers and they were giving their feedback on what they have experience but its not.  Also people seem to be getting confused about the two concepts between Gaikia and Cloud compute.  

When I think about cloud compute, I think about an Application Server or Database.  The game code just sends API calls to the App Server or if its a database you just execute a stored procedure.  The amount of information sent along the wire is very small and can be compressed if need be because the Xi have dedicated hardware for encoding and decoding.  The information can be sent back compressed, and cache in local memory to be fetch by the CPU or GPU.  One of the things that was leaked about the X1 APU is that it can process compressed data directly.  An enterprising developer probably could host a lot of jobs on the cloud platform and just call those jobs just like calling a stored procedure.  The data could be sent way before the player get to those parts letting the local APU concentrate on immediate situations.

Processing compressed data is nothing new though. I was doing it in '96 out of pure necessity, gpu's have been doing it for a decade with compressed textures. It's nice that is has dedicated compression and decompression but the usefulness of a standard compression method for game data is very limited. Within the company I worked for: if zip can make a significant dent on your database, then you're doing it wrong, start optimizing. We rendered and computed directly from compressed data that zip could not get more then 1% of 'air' out of. And compressed at a minimum of 5x better then using a standard compression method on the original data.

It's a trade off. Everything you download and store ahead takes away from available memory for immediate tasks. I've also run into plenty of situations where it was better to do just in time calculations instead of sacrificing memory and bandwidth by pre-storing data.

Plus the server needs to be ready with an instanced copy of your game in memory with where you are. Pretty much running in parallel with what you are doing. To make that efficient (and not run a second game for everyone playing) it will require a lot of resources to make the server side part efficient. Unfortunately it's not so simple as making a few api calls and getting a bit of data back.

it's interesting but a lot more complicated then folding@home and seti search type distributed computing.
Next gen's mmorpg are going to be amazing though :) (I hope)

Having everything compressed keeps it effecient.  No wasted time encoding and decoding thus improving performace.  As everything has a cost, depending on how many jobs are being processed and sent over the wire, the nano seconds in encoding decoding can mean a lot if you have 100s of jobs being processed.

I do not see how memory will be an issue with 8GB.  Even if the OS takes 2 to 3 still gives a lot of memory for use.  If the data is compressed it also helps to keep memory available.  Non immediate stuff can be temporarly stored on the HDD.  When I write web applications, I am always prefetching information from databases and caching them before users actually select and object which will be used.  SImple things like Google Autocomplete is one such thing that I use when creating dynamic Eforms for line of business scenerios.  For some queries hitting databases, it could take some time to filter through information so its always best to work with a local cache to improve performance.

As to your point about having an instance copy ready, you should take a look at MS Orleans Platform.  Here is a link from MS Research.  http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/orleans/

MS stated that for each X1 sold, developers will have the capability to leaverage 3 X1 compute power in the cloud.  Basically this means that Developers will have a persistance instance of their code available to leaverage for cloud compute.  The Orleans is one project that is created to provide that type of distributed, persistance resource which was in development since 2008.  Read the part from the Programming model and the grains concept to see how MS has built a platform to solve that solution.  Current the Halo team is using the platform so we might actually see real world product using the cloud compute from them.

You are right that this type of setup is extreamly complex and not something that was thought up in a few months because of Sony reveal.  On a geek from I am very interested to see how this technology will play out and if it actually will be the next coming as MS is prone to hype.