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walsufnir on 22 January 2014
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lucidium said:
walsufnir said:

We heard a lot about Cloud-stuff from MS and working as a networking specialist I have to say that of course you can't offload realtime stuff into cloud to help the local hardware in a reasonable way, offloading AI is of course possible.

My main question is: What happens if you disconnect your Xbone and want to play a game? Is the AI constantly upgraded and provided via "online updates"? Or is it realtime? I am very curious how they have implemented Drivatar and how it differs when it's "not available".

 

Thanks!

It's essentially just a part-shared cloud save.

your uploaded profile data is randomly downloaded by other players when they start a race, the results of that race are then uploaded to reflect the changes, and of course any wins/achievements, the next time you connect to the net and play it downloads your current latest data and notifies you of the changes, such as how many races it played (used your data), how many it won, etc, then whenever you progress further and improve your uploaded profile data reflects these statistical improvements and adjusts the style and agression of your "avatar", to be used online again.

There is no cloud-based AI involved here, it is simply a cloud shared portion of save data that is used by other gamers, using statistics and portions of your race-ghosts in certain areas, this downloaded data is used locally by other consoles and re-uploaded.

while its "cloud based ai", what it actaully means is cloud stored profiles, theres neither the functionality or the need to have an external machine actively race in a game.

Thus disconnecting from the net does not change the overall experience greatly, its still local ai controlling the cars for the most part, they just wont be using other players statistical data such as cutting certain corners and taking certain racing lines.

If you want to confirm this for yourself, route your xbox one through your pc ethernet and grab network traffic with wireshark like i did, in a race with driveatars used there was no additional network traffic in-game beyond incrimental packets every 20 or so seconds, if they were indeed using realtime external AI, there would have been a constant flow of packets not seen under normal play.

 

Thanks for clearing the things up, still sounds interesting!

If I had an Xbone I would of course had it routed through a Wireshark, especially also to "listen" to what Kinect might talk back to the mothership ;)