| Alby_da_Wolf said: Assuming cloud computing power and internet connection speed are adequate, the decisive factor becomes lag. To "bake" lighting at a rate that makes it almost the same as dynamic, even bad lag, as soon as it's below, say, 80ms, should be enough to make the delay unnoticeable in most cases, to accelerate AI as well, but for other things a much lower lag will be needed: for graphics, to be useful at a 60HZ frame rate, lag+frame coprocessing time must be within 16ms, for physics, it depends on the update frequency of the game's physics engine, lag in the few tens ms range will be enough for many games, but not for racers, where the physics engine can process at a frame rate of 360Hz or more: in this case, though, the cloud could process the physics of AI-controlled competing cars at the proper frequency and communicate their position at a lower frequency, but only as long as competing cars aren't directly interacting with the player's car, like in clashes. In this case, though, the console will have to directly handle the physics of just two or little more (in case of bigger clashes and accidents) cars, unless there is a pile-up. In case of pile-ups, obviously, if the game was using more than the power available locally on the console, there will be a degradation of the game's performances. In flight sims, again, the cloud could process the physics and AI of anything that is too far away to have direct interaction with the player's aircraft, but like with racers, too many objects approaching the player could cause performances degradation. Also, in the case of combat flight sims, unless the lag be very low, objects in the range of the targeting system will have to be processed locally, even if still far away enough to be out of range for the weapons, otherwise the error induced by the lag could make it difficult to lock on them if they are performing fast evasive manoeuvres. |
What you speak of is pretty much what MS showed at E3 behind closed doors with the asteroid demo on cloud processing. The cloud can be used to process things that the player does not directly interact with. This will free up processing cycles so more resources can be put to what the player is doing and experiencing and the background AI, Physics an other calculations can use the cloud. Building such a system would take a totally different makeup in how games are currently developed. We probably would not see something like that for the standard singleplayer game but for MP only games, MMOs and Other types of games that depend on the internet.
I do not know about anybody else but my internet has been more steady then my electricity. As more games and devices start to depend on the net, the net infrastructure will also improve significantly because more money and investment will go into that area. Today's net probably will be totally different in 5 years because more business will spend more money to improve it.
It just seems a lot of gamers seem to only concentrate on the now, which is not bad in itself but most businesses need to concentrate on a solid 5 year plan so some decisions are more future looking then what can be done today.
