Yeah maybe you should stop reading and actually DO it.  Reading about something does not give you practical experience.  I work as a developer on business critical code that are hosted on cloud platfoms.  We run entire business within the cloud.  I know how the technology works very well, what I do not know is how well it will work within games.  There are many different scenerios I can think of that may benefit a game but since I do not develop in those areas they are just ideals.  Most developers know the scene and what the player will be doing in any given moment of their game.  A lot of pre calucations can be sent, processed and stored in memory, thus releaving the CPU/GPU from those task and allow them to concentrate on the immediate input from the gamer.  

You can tell me you have friends who are developers but that means absolutly nothing.  There are many different developers that work on different parts of a game.  Even then, if they have not explored cloud compute, they would be no different from a graphics programmer trying to tell a network programmer how to code against the net.  That whole sentence is a very arrogant statement as if being a programmer immediatly gives you insight into everything without the practical experience.

I have to call this statement out because its one of the big problems with people on the net who THINK they know something without any practical knowledge.

You don't need to be a game dev to know EXACTLY how cloud-computing works.

Have you ever programmed to a platform like Azure or Amazon cloud infrastructure.  Do you even know what it takes to host an entire business on the cloud.  Have you ever coded a game or even an MMO.  Do not tell me about what you think unless you actually have practical knowledge on how its done.  I am not going to sit here and tell you how it will be done just because I develop code.  Without the practical experience, I can only make quesses and even then I would not know if I was on target or not without actually doing it.

There were many developers asked about the whole cloud compute thing and their answers was that they needed to test it.

Well, I am a developer but not for games.  Yes, I can only speculate based on my experience working on cloud platforms but not hosted game code which is why I stated I would rather hear from people that DO game code for a living and who would have actual practical experience.  I know, its easy to just grab a part of someone post instead of reading the whole thing which is what people are good at on the net but please read the whole thing.

I make no mention that I know what can and cannot be done.  Instead, I am stating we need to wait for people with that knowledge, who have actually tried to use or are using cloud compute.  I hear the naysayers but I am wondering what they are basing their experience on.  Without experience, its just ramdon noise

Processing compressed data is nothing new though. I was doing it in '96 out of pure necessity, gpu's have been doing it for a decade with compressed textures. It's nice that is has dedicated compression and decompression but the usefulness of a standard compression method for game data is very limited. Within the company I worked for: if zip can make a significant dent on your database, then you're doing it wrong, start optimizing. We rendered and computed directly from compressed data that zip could not get more then 1% of 'air' out of. And compressed at a minimum of 5x better then using a standard compression method on the original data.

It's a trade off. Everything you download and store ahead takes away from available memory for immediate tasks. I've also run into plenty of situations where it was better to do just in time calculations instead of sacrificing memory and bandwidth by pre-storing data.

Plus the server needs to be ready with an instanced copy of your game in memory with where you are. Pretty much running in parallel with what you are doing. To make that efficient (and not run a second game for everyone playing) it will require a lot of resources to make the server side part efficient. Unfortunately it's not so simple as making a few api calls and getting a bit of data back.

it's interesting but a lot more complicated then folding@home and seti search type distributed computing.
Next gen's mmorpg are going to be amazing though :) (I hope)

I wasn't arguing the usefullness of working with compressed data, but the particular use of standardized compression tools as proposed in the move engines. It makes sense for web applications, http requests and responses, form data, etc are terribly wasteful in memory size. It is a lot less useful for binary game data though, especially with properly optimized (or already compressed) data structures.

It's the same vibe I get from the New Orleans platform. An abstract layer build for easily scaleable business web applications. Applying it to games, especially single player games seems a bit of an extra money grab. As if someone came up with an idea to make more money of the Azure platform by offering it to enhance games. Charge developers to use the web hosting, charge players the live gold fee for enhanced single player.

From a game development standpoint it's great to have to have access to an already established widely distributed server network. But the grains themselves still need to be build from the ground up. Developing a fully fledged server side version of the game (which probably can't rely on specific hardware and needs to be ported to the available apis) is a huge undertaking for a couple of enhancements.

8gb ram seems like a lot now (or 5 or 7 whatever is left after the OS) but so was 512mb in 2004 after the ps2 with only 32+4mb available. Yet it didn't take long before developers ran out of memory again. (Remember Bill Gates' famous quote in '81 640kb should keep everyone happy for the next 10 years...)
In my experience ram is always the bottleneck, together with read/write speed. Working directly with bitstream compressed optimized data and letting the processor do some extra work is preferable to sacrificing memory and bandwidth to pre storing too many things.  I don't see it being very practical for preparing light maps or complex animation sequences. More useful for mmo type settings where you offload memory and caching by letting the server keep track of the world and send you the relevant cell data when needed. Yet that's not applicable to single player games that need to keep working when the connection drops.

The first games won't have any memory problems ofcourse, they won't max out the 8 processor cores either. So I wonder what (if anything) they'll show at E3 for cloud computing enhancements in single player games, and whether that couldn't be done locally with a bit of optimizing.

As to the Orleans being a Money grab, well I guess we will have to see.  From the statements MS has made it does not appear they are charging developers for this capability.  I do agree that this is a means for MS to get Azure out there more and to leaverage their platform but what I want to see if it can actually be used for real world game scenerios that could expand your local singleplayer game and its world to something we all have only dreamed about.  Hell, maybe Moleyneux vision for the frist Fable game can actually be realized.  As I remember, the Fable team is making some type of new RPG singleplayer/MMO game which we might see at E3 that could use some of this technolgy and see how viable it is.

Well I'm sorry that you are the type of person who needs to do something himself to figure out how it works. Suppose that's why I'm a researcher and not a mechanic.

Don't care if you think I'm arrogant. Fact is you boil down an operation to the least amount of parameters and see where the breaking point is. Not very hard.

1. OP makes the opinion very clear.

2. It's far from a unique opion.

3. Invites arguments to the opposite.

4. You just come and say I (we) have no right to make these claims since we have no experience.

5. You completely ignore the possibility of argumenting against any of the (many) doubts raised by posters in this forum.

Take the above points and realize that there is no outcome for you to be had in this thread. If you're not willing to argue why it will work (TO WHICH WE ARE OPEN!) then kindly leave.