Cloud Processing won't mean a thing for the Xbone

[Machiavellian]

Dr.Grass said:

Machiavellian said:

 

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.

For this type of game, cloud computing could have major advantages. I fully concede that. Huge, sprawling, alive worlds - yeah, totally. Much benefit to be had there.

I just don't see how one would cater for those without (good/reliable/any) access to the cloud. It is a logistics nightmare. Therefore, these types of benefits are destined to reside with MMO's (for the foreseaable future).

Can you deny these (simple) points?

If this is good for MMOs with millions of players, why would this not be good for regular Singleplayer games.  Games work today over the net just fine.  You have companies like Gaikai and Online doing game streaming.  Why exactly would cloud compute be any different.  People who play their MMOs expect those games to be up and running all the time and in most cases they do.  One of the key advantages of MS cloud tech is that its highly redundant.  Meaning that if one node goes down you have three to take up the slack with no down time.  The only thing that would make this not viable if your internet service is bad which I admit is the case for a lot of areas.  Even then, developers can get around high bandwidth and latency but prefetching their compute work based on the bandwidth and latency of the individual connection.  This type of work is done all the time with MMOs and multiplayer games.

What the developer would need to do is to think more ahead in design.  Since they know eactly what the player is doing at all times, sending multiple Jobs to the cloud to prepare a scene should not that that much work.

The negatives that people mention is that this would mean that games are tied to MS services and thus if you leave the network you basically leave your game.  This is true and a good concern but then again is it any different from PSN or Steam where each service give you benifits to entice you to stay on the service.