| Machiavellian said: To set the fact straight, I called you out on stating you were a developer. it was you who first mentioned about being a licensed developer and calling me an armchair poster. So no, I stated we both can send each other our creds then start again instead of trying to call people names or make assumptions about their knowledge. Even still, just because you develop does not mean you develop in this area. The type of software I develop does not mean I can state I know how a game developer does his job. The whole point is that you put that you are a licensed developer part as if that qualify you as knowledgeable about the subject which it does not. Even I who have developed on cloud based platforms can only reference the type of work I do which is totally non game related and in most areas probably not going to be relevant but then again I was not going to come off as that way in the first place. Alright this is my final post on that stuff as I am not interested in waving creds but instead the topic. |
I've got ample experience with the latest SDKs for the current consoles and how currently-in-development, as well as already released titles utilize cloud, thats my point, outside of gaming the usefulness of cloud based computation increases dramatically because load based scheduling that would locally take a long time anyway loses nothing if that load is pushed elsewhere to be computed remotely and the results of which passed back.
Cloud computation on rendering, or cloud like swarming for deformation, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics and so on are just as viable, but gaming, the viability of cloud based compute drops considerably, the best we will get in this generation is sub processed light math, that being lighting computed externally and the result streamed back as low quality monocromatic video which is essentially used as a the dynamic lightmap, but even then the local processing saved in doing this is minimal and would not be able to react fast enough to user input to be permissible on high dynamic objects, if youre muxing in the stream for a specific area cast from a building in a set piece with realtime lighting then depending on the speed and predictability of motion in the objects you want to calculate, then the viability for such processing is there, and could cause minimal issue should connection drop in quality or all togehter.
beyond that though, we lack the connectivity to the average home and the hardware in these clustered servers to handle the demand of hundreds of thousands of clients connecting to process entirely different chunks of resource for various applications and games, hence why lab environments are all we've seen such computational demonstrations thus far.
Sure microsoft would love to use it as a springboard for azure adoption but its not like they'll get much from additional XBL subscribers, Azure is doing fine as it is, without the gaming side of things chipping in, the gaming side has little impact other than being a bullet point for presentations and something to whet the lips of those attending such conferences who want to see how flexible the technologies can be.
I maintain that we are years, perhaps a decade or more away from cloud computation making a descernable difference in games that could not be achieved with simple server side communication on existing infrastructures, or by simply having additional hardware resources locally (such as additional power on ps4).
