Unannounced Xbox One game to use The Cloud for physics simulation

[Madword]

Machiavellian said:

Madword said:

vivster said:

bananaking21 said:
until its implemented properly in actual games i wont be impressed by it. and the question is, is it worth it? if they need to double the work on some cases for an offline and online mode, is it really worth it?

i don't think it's really double the work. They will just create the game and during development will look at what they can improve with the cloud. In the end the offline and online mode is just like flipping a switch. Pretty much like turning AA on or off in a game.

Nah dont see it that way.

Making games and testing games is very hard work. To actually have to create two states, one online and one offline is too much for most if not all developers to contemplate. Can you imagine the work/decisions you would have to do to decide to use the cloud and then have a fallback situation if the player cannot get online... would the game then look/play worse in offline mode... how do you communicate such a thing to the player.

This is useful for online games no doubt, but i expect no 3rd parties to use it for anything unless it's a online/multiplayer component. It's too much effort and too time consuming. In a time when games are getting more expensive, it's just not going to be a benefit.

Here is the thing about such a system, its only expensive once.  Once the engine is created to switch between the 2, you probably never have to really code for it again.  The reason why is that you have your pipline structure to either retrieve data from the cloud or locally.  Its one of those type of process that engine developers work on between projects.  

So I agree outside of developers that are producing 1st party or 2nd party games, we probably not see many games using the cloud but later in the lifecycle of the X1 you probably will see a lot of games go down this route as engine developers will have time to incorporate the benefits within their engines.

Well that's not entirely true :) yes the bulk of the code work would be done for whatever you are writing (communicating with servers, authentication), but this still has to fit into the game, not take up too many ms, and work with other systems. Each game will have their own strengths and weaknesses. Actually it's not that difficult to get something working with an online server, its making it work with all other systems within your game and making it improve your game - thats where the cost/time and issues really create problems.

If you were making a game say it was Forza, and you wrote the game to do weather simulation online, if you made Forza 2, it is true that would be slightly easier as its probably using a similar structure and engine as before. If you decided to make a totally different game, all bets are off. It's like starting again.. and theres no guarentee that you would still have a benefit from it once you had got into development of that other game.

It's really difficult juggling all these things... developers dont want the hassle. They have many other priorities and I dont think this will be one of them. I dont see many 1st party using it in the way it's being sold. For example Sunset Overdrive is using it for Matchmaking, which is sensible, but that's not making the actual single player element any better. So as i said, you will see it for MP/MMO benefits and not really in SP games. That's not to say its not a benefit, but not in the way that it's currently being sold.