mibuokami said:
Quote 1: Quote 3: With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don’t have to worry about estimating how many servers we’ll need on launch day. We don’t have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don’t have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server. That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacenters all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter. Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it’s far more affordable than other hosting options – their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers. So because of this, dedicated servers are much more of a realistic option for developers who don’t want to make compromises on their player experience, and it opens up a lot more things that we can do in an online game. Initially quote 1 looks like a they are implying that the cloud is powering AI and physic etc (which completely contradict quote 2 and 3), but if you look at the sentence more carefully you will note that it says the additional bandwidth allows for better physic, ai etc. This is not the same as saying the cloud is allowing additional processing capability to improve ai and physic, this is simply saying that higher bandwidth allows for more data to be sent and received. The processing power is still done locally by your PC/XB1/360 and not through the cloud. This is actually a step back in some ways as ISP would no longer be able to host dedicated server and us Aussies as well as other people in isolated places will feel the pain. |
Yeah, after reading this latest statement I also have my doubts if it indeed does anything extra in the Cloud.
Look at Forza 5, which studies your driving style in order to create custom AI that behaves like you do. That’s totally different from what Titanfall uses it for, and it’s really cool! So it’s not accurate to say that the Xbox Live Cloud is simply a system for running dedicated servers – it can do a lot more than that!"
The Xbox Live Cloud lets us to do things in Titanfall that no player-hosted multiplayer game can do. That has allowed us to push the boundaries in online multiplayer and that’s awesome. We want to try new ideas and let the player do things they’ve never been able to do before! Over time, I expect that we’ll be using these servers to do a lot more than just dedicated servers.
So it seems the extra bandwidth from dedicated servers is just utilized to distribute more data between 12 clients. As it would indeed be a bit straining on a player hosted server to send data for 12+24+12 characters to 11 other clients over a slow upload connection. You can see it in GT5, when the host has a limited connection not everyone can see eachother in 16 player races. Which reveals that hit detection is done locally, as other people can see the cars that can't see eachother drive through eachother.
