| EpicRandy said: The cloud in C3 is not use to bring something new but to scale it up multiple time and add more realism to it. You could argue that this is possible with dedicated server and you'll be right thechnically but not finnancialy. Cost to have enough server to do that would be insane and seriously affect the game rentability and will automatically lead to server being close prematurely. On a cloud platform like azure ressource are affected dynamically based on needs. It can scale up when more player are online and scale down when not, unlike dedicated server, this remove the needs to ever close the server. but even with this it would be hard for dev to add feature like this to a game because cloud computing is costitive and on that scale at his peak it would cost many M$/year. With the cloud on Xbox platform fees are not assume by publisher but by gamers Xbox live subscription so the cost to add a feature like this to a game is the cost they have to assume when creating it that's where the true power of the cloud is. |
Azure isn't for free either. Phil Spencer sure must pay for each Azure's TFLOP and TB of bandwidth used. Having it in house is cheaper, and XBL may have few free coupons to use Azure in order to push the XB1, but any developer can rent computing resources from other Cloud providers (like Amazon). And that is less of an issue for the big guys (EA, Ubisoft... Sony). If they don't have their Cloud computing technology already.
In any case any deferred computation can be (with some restrictions) implemented as pre-baked. To each building could be associated a DB with one or more explosion simulations. It would require quite a large amount of disc data but the final effect would be similar. Maybe a tad repetitive in few cases if there is a space constraint. Still it would have the benefit to be offline and immediate (no noticeable delay).
So there isn't really anything "miraculous" about this remote computing technology. Which btw is 30 years old. The Uncharted 2 cutscenes have been developed using the same identical technology, but on farms of PS3 connected via Ethernet. Indeed the weak link (literally) on Cloud computing for video games is the Internet. Too bleeding slow. Especially the latency.
