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Machiavellian on 31 May 2013
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SvennoJ said:
Machiavellian said:
 

Taken out to reduce length of quoting

I wasn't arguing the usefullness of working with compressed data, but the particular use of standardized compression tools as proposed in the move engines. It makes sense for web applications, http requests and responses, form data, etc are terribly wasteful in memory size. It is a lot less useful for binary game data though, especially with properly optimized (or already compressed) data structures.

It's the same vibe I get from the New Orleans platform. An abstract layer build for easily scaleable business web applications. Applying it to games, especially single player games seems a bit of an extra money grab. As if someone came up with an idea to make more money of the Azure platform by offering it to enhance games. Charge developers to use the web hosting, charge players the live gold fee for enhanced single player.

From a game development standpoint it's great to have to have access to an already established widely distributed server network. But the grains themselves still need to be build from the ground up. Developing a fully fledged server side version of the game (which probably can't rely on specific hardware and needs to be ported to the available apis) is a huge undertaking for a couple of enhancements.

8gb ram seems like a lot now (or 5 or 7 whatever is left after the OS) but so was 512mb in 2004 after the ps2 with only 32+4mb available. Yet it didn't take long before developers ran out of memory again. (Remember Bill Gates' famous quote in '81 640kb should keep everyone happy for the next 10 years...)
In my experience ram is always the bottleneck, together with read/write speed. Working directly with bitstream compressed optimized data and letting the processor do some extra work is preferable to sacrificing memory and bandwidth to pre storing too many things.  I don't see it being very practical for preparing light maps or complex animation sequences. More useful for mmo type settings where you offload memory and caching by letting the server keep track of the world and send you the relevant cell data when needed. Yet that's not applicable to single player games that need to keep working when the connection drops.

The first games won't have any memory problems ofcourse, they won't max out the 8 processor cores either. So I wonder what (if anything) they'll show at E3 for cloud computing enhancements in single player games, and whether that couldn't be done locally with a bit of optimizing.

One point I would like to make is that why would you need to send binary data across the wire when you can basically setup your code to execute methods like Stored procedures.  The data that comes back would be compressed of course and can comprise a host of different formats that work best with compression thus easing the burden of data bandwidth issues.

As to the Orleans being a Money grab, well I guess we will have to see.  From the statements MS has made it does not appear they are charging developers for this capability.  I do agree that this is a means for MS to get Azure out there more and to leaverage their platform but what I want to see if it can actually be used for real world game scenerios that could expand your local singleplayer game and its world to something we all have only dreamed about.  Hell, maybe Moleyneux vision for the frist Fable game can actually be realized.  As I remember, the Fable team is making some type of new RPG singleplayer/MMO game which we might see at E3 that could use some of this technolgy and see how viable it is.

I believe people keep forgetting that the CPUS on the PS4 and X1 are not beefy.  They cannot compare to your 4 to 6 core I7 or even an I5.  Also I believe threading with those multiple cores, halfs their clock like it does with the 360 CPU.  Right now I am not sure but I will stay on that one.  You mention the future but the future holds more benefit for the cloud compute platform then fix hardware.  Internet and infrastructure will not remain the same within the next 3 to 5 years and off loading more to the cloud may be fore practical if you can keep your local resources humming constantly on delivering the upfront stuff needed for a game.

I know people keep bringing up connection drops but I cannot remember the last time I experience such a thing in my home.  I have to agree with the Orth guy that the Internet is becoming like electricty where you expect and the expectation is that is always up and running.  Most providers are putting their resources into insuring that this is the case.  There is no doubt that there are problems to any new solution and their probably will be growing pains but I am interested to see when you put a bunch of creative people on the issue, what they come up with.  I would love for the team at Naught Dog to get their hands on this cloud compute and see how they could make it work.