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Forums - Gaming Discussion - I fail to see the hyping of cloud computing beyond people drinking buzzword kool-aid

richardhutnik on 01 September 2013
TimCliveroller said:
Had Onlive, and well it works; it really works. And if that works, this other somehow deferred stuff should also work. What I hate about the cloud is this somehow forced dependency on the service. Once you take that single step/ invest it will be pretty had to cancel your allegiance to the service. I'm not a fan of the idea since I like collecting, but I really see this working on the technical level. On another level, the consumer should decide if this is ok or not. Even then, the mass could be educated in the wrong direction.

What Sony is looking to offer is like OnLive with Gakai.  What Microsoft is doing is far more like virtualized client-server, with computing split between the servers and the ONE.



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richardhutnik on 01 September 2013
J_Allard said:
OP, idk if you really want an answer or are just looking for a soapbox to preach about cloud Kool-Aid and all that other shit. The Forza 5 video you're downplaying should be more than enough to answer your question. It's not just about "easing administration of dedicated servers". You can play the game and literally never be playing AI if you are connected to the Internet. Every time you race, you are not only making changes to your own Drivatar, but you are improving everyone elses by racing against them. And then when you're not away, your Drivatar races for you via the cloud and even earns you credits.

Compare this to something like GT5 where there is a whole entire mode based on AI racing, only you have to sit and watch. And then when you wanna race offline, you're racing against shitty, shitty AI. So right here at launch we are already seeing the potential for a huge genre changing element via the cloud. And that has nothing to do with "dedicated servers" or "easing administration". It is entirely gameplay related. How any gamer cannot be excited about the potential here is beyond me. They could bring this tech into virtually every other genre, assuming the outcome with Forza 5 is anything decent.

But even the strictly server related changes you are harping on are enough to get excited about. We already see CoD on Xbone moving to MS cloud servers, and now we read about Sony partnering with Rackspace for their own cloud stuff, to match what MS is doing for 3rd parties. Is this not a great thing? Dedicated servers for all? We shouldn't be excited for this? Also look at Dead Rising 3 with AI cloud integration and supposedly a complete lack of load times while playing the game thanks to the cloud.

And these are just at launch. Maybe some of us are excited because we understand the tech and understand the massive potential.

Outside of modeling specs of how you drive, exactly how is ther Drivatar any different than the Pawns from Dragon's Dogma, but run on the server side?

The thing is people are hyping it like blast processing, without understanding what is going on.  It is stuff going on to day in various forms, and people were hyping it like it would make up for the graphics difference between the PS4 and ONE, and everything and the kitchen sink.  The hyping has been drinking buzzword kool-aid, with individuals hyping it, not knowing what the heck they are talking about.

What you have pretty much the bulk, is the ONE will have dedicated servers, which were made to not be such a big deal for the 360 back in the day when the 360 didn't get dedicated servers.  No one really thought much of it on the Microsoft partisan side, even as the Sony camp yelled at the Microsoft camp.  This came up in defense of people defending XBOX Live, which was pretty much entirely peer to peer and arguing dedicated servers don't matter.

 



Cleary397 on 01 September 2013

What is cloud computing?
Its basically having some form of storage/processing being done away from you, and then having it streamed across the internet for you to view.
Basically, for cloud computing to perform the way in which M$ has been talking you need a hell of alot of bandwidth and a very stable connection, otherwise you will run into some form of problem now and again.



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Pemalite on 01 September 2013
Cleary397 said:
Basically, for cloud computing to perform the way in which M$ has been talking you need a hell of alot of bandwidth and a very stable connection, otherwise you will run into some form of problem now and again.

Bandwidth? Not so much. There are lots of tasks which can be performed which isn't bandwidth sensitive, for example lighting passes, even then you can do some pretty crazy compression ratios these days.
The real limiter of course to cloud computing is latency. - I for one wouldn't enjoy having data streamed to me 300-1,000ms late.

Cloud computing literally has *massive* theoretical potential, however, to be realistic, it's not suited to every aspect of assisting a game render a scene.

The other point to take away from it is, the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, heck any internet connected device capable of running computers games can use the cloud to assist in computing tasks, just strange how we haven't seen any yet that's made a real big push, even on the PC or mobile/tablet ecosystems.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

J_Allard on 01 September 2013
richardhutnik said:

Outside of modeling specs of how you drive, exactly how is ther Drivatar any different than the Pawns from Dragon's Dogma, but run on the server side?

The thing is people are hyping it like blast processing, without understanding what is going on.  It is stuff going on to day in various forms, and people were hyping it like it would make up for the graphics difference between the PS4 and ONE, and everything and the kitchen sink.  The hyping has been drinking buzzword kool-aid, with individuals hyping it, not knowing what the heck they are talking about.

What you have pretty much the bulk, is the ONE will have dedicated servers, which were made to not be such a big deal for the 360 back in the day when the 360 didn't get dedicated servers.  No one really thought much of it on the Microsoft partisan side, even as the Sony camp yelled at the Microsoft camp.  This came up in defense of people defending XBOX Live, which was pretty much entirely peer to peer and arguing dedicated servers don't matter.

Never played Dragon's Dogma. But this concept is not new. Even on PS2/XBox, NFL2k5 had an AI profile type thing you could download of another player and play against. It was supposedly like playing that actual player, but the results were terrible.

Who really cares what kids on some forums say. I haven't seen anyone here going crazy with hyping it up.

What you have right now are dedicated servers and loads of potential for the future. Again, the tech is awesome and some of us understand the potential. There is no reason to not be excited about the cloud. As for the partisan part, cool? Fanboys gonna fanboy I guess. Who cares?



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Stinky on 01 September 2013

I like the thought of just making centralized game servers the norm, overcoming many of the foibles of p2p. Utilizing cloud elastic scaling, games can commit to having servers without the length of a piece of string issue of how many to commission for launch, common problems being not enough servers making for sad gamers, and too many making for wasted money. Being able to spin up servers on demand means that it also makes it easy for games to have dedicated servers even once popularity goes away or not gaining critical mass, no more servers going away for old games.

That in itself makes MS' cloud infrastructure worthwhile, ignoring scope for cloud AI calculation, game world management and possible unrealised applications which may become apparent later in the generation.