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Forums - Microsoft - So, how have you been enjoying The Power of the Cloud ?

Bajablo on 03 January 2014
FrancisNobleman said:
selnor1983 said:
Bajablo said:
selnor1983 said:

Unlike any other system, the ability to have every single game brought out use Cloud processing for things like Drivatar AI, Physics calculations, AI battles, Fixed lighting etc.


... you realy think they are going to be so stupid to do real-time calculations in the cloud?.. you must have belived in all that marketing right?
Never gonna happen, think what would happen to your game if you had lag etc. even in a singleplayer situation.. no-one would code that stupid. AI, sure.. that works, if you have connection -> calculate. other -> use X behaviour that is hard-coded


Its being done already. 3 games releasing this year are using fixed lighting solutions in the cloud as well as physics calculations that are not directly affecting the player input controls. Titanfall does quite a few realtime calculations on the cloud. As its an online only game anyay it will benefit greatly.


What will happen to those who barely have a steady enough connection to play multiplayer ? Will the game glitch, or just tell the person the internet is not fast enough to calculate AI battles, therefore you can't play the game ? Or maybe the game will just work normally, like it will on PC and X360 ?

 

I think you should lookt at the later, and Cloud will be used for saves and avatar ghosts, etc.

The reason why you can't do advanced stuff. You can alter maps and hope that everyone gets the data that it is changing.
If you don't get the data you won't render the changes = you can run into stuff that don't appear and you will probably rubberband all over the place..
Though the map data would prob. just be rendering points = draw rock X here and house Y there. and the console will do the 'thinking'.
The server could without that much data-transfer just tell your console at what new point to draw something and the map would be dynamic.

Though if you loose packets / have high latency the experience will be shit becouse of it. Since nothing that is moving is on your machine, you are dependent on the data from the server to play at all. But that is typical for a MP game anyway, you are just adding more things that can get messed up.

AI is prob. the only thing that isn't latency-dependent, so that will probably work well, if you pre-load it ofcourse and not stream it in during the match.. that would put it in the same boat as the above..



3DS FC# 4553-9947-9017 NNID: Bajablo

Torn-City - MMO text based RPG, join me! :)

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naruball on 03 January 2014
selnor1983 said:


Forza 5 : Cloud based Drivatar AI. - This completely crushes previous driving AI in games like Forza 4 and GT6. In fact I had the chance to play GT6 the other day on boxing day at a friends house and the AI was absolutely pathetic in comparison to Forza 5. In fact it appeared non existant in comparison.

That was clearly needed. Thanks, Selnor. Never change. 



Madword on 03 January 2014
selnor1983 said:
deskpro2k3 said:

Sony has filed a patent called "Suspending State of Cloud-based Legacy Applications," which allows one to add new content into an emulated game without having to rework the game's code.

The patent's abstract provides a detailed summary as to exactly what this might mean for the future of Sony's cloud-based platform. Warning: it is a bit of a mouthful.

A snapshot of an emulated game may be generated by a snapshot generator. At some point during the emulation of the emulated game, a snapshot generator delivers a suspension request to an emulator. Once the suspension request is received, the emulator will suspend the emulated title. The emulator generates a snapshot of the emulated game by recording the current state of all devices being emulated. The snapshot is then delivered to the snapshot generator. It is emphasized that this abstract is provided to comply with the rules requiring an abstract that will allow a searcher or other reader to quickly ascertain the subject matter of the technical disclosure. It is submitted with the understanding that it will not be used to interpret or limit the scope or meaning of the claims.

So what does this mean? Well for one, this could allow Sony to rework some of its older titles and deliver fresh, slightly tweaked experiences of its legacy library via Gaikai. That said, companies file patents all the time, many of which are never fully realized. As such, we'll just have to wait and see if this materializes into anything at all.

[Via NeoGAF]

So not Cloud Processing then. This is much more like Ouya. Streaming the game to PS4. So PS4 is not processing anything at all. Streaming it as a video file. This is exactly what Gaikai is. A steaming service. Its not a processing server.

Yes Gaikai is different to cloud processing. It's a streaming service, but I think if they work it out right, it probably could be used for local emulation of games. As for the streaming part... I dont see this being used for Ps4 games and maybe not even PS3 games.. It will be fine for PS2/PS1 games due to the low resolution requirements. 

As for MS's cloud, it wont help in the most part for making games any more interesting (real time this and that), unless it's an MMO and guess what, every company that does an MMO uses the cloud and can do what MS can do. MS's benefit is having lots of servers to service massive numbers of users, so in theory they should have less downtime than other online games.

As for open world games such as Fallout4 etc.. there is no way they will spend millions on a single player game that has access to these features on a console that will only sell half the number of games. i.e say fallout sells 10 million copies and 5 million is on PS4, why bother with OTT complex cloud features for the XBOX One only. Trust me when i say that they wont, not unless they are paid to do so by MS.

So in terms of major benefit, the only games that *might* use it are MS exclusives and only if MS decide to pump the money in. Considering they havent even supported Kinect2 with much effort yet, I cannot see them pumping lots (and i mean lots) of cash into this.

Unfortunately most people misunderstand the benefits of the cloud right now, it's been around in many forms for over 10 years, and on the whole the internet is the problem - its too slow. Matchmaking, server stability and automatic bandwidth handling will be the key benefits to their service, you can forget cloud processing right now.



Making an indie game : Dead of Day!

Bajablo on 03 January 2014
Ryuu96 said:
Bajablo said:
ethomaz said:

Ryuu96 said:

Well Dead Rising is only 2 player Co-Op so doesn't really need Dedicated Servers, EA Owns their own and most games out are EA right now, Halo will use Dedicated servers, Peggle doesn't need dedicated, Cod uses it's own, Sunset Overdrive will be using the cloud and I assume dedicated servers along with Fable Legends

Found this also..... As for Killer Instinct, they use something called GGPO, which uses an input delay setup. Input delay (as seen in all the Halo campaigns) keeps things way more in sync, since the host/server will only send the next frame's data after the data for every player had been collected and simulated.

Using Dedicated for DR3 and Killer Instinct would be a waste of resources, there only two player online games and hardly need them, Ryse is also only two player co-op so again it would be a waste, I've played Ryse online aswell and not had lag once so again it doesn't need them Lol

Dedicated servers will only be used mainly on first party Ip games that are more than 2 player co-op, But again it's up to the developers, I'm guessing Crytek, Double Helix, Capcom know that it would be a waste to use dedicated on them, EA & Acitivion don't need free dedicated off Microsoft if they have there own

MS told me "dedicated servers for all multiplayer games"

PS. Everybody know that won't happen at all.

PS. some persons arn't that smart so they realize that it is bullshit...
as the 'i will have 3 cloud servers dedicated to my console' what a joke..

Damn i'm bitter today.. think i need some beer

Wait, What? Are you trying to say I'm not smart? I never once said that they will be Dedicated servers for EVERY single multiplayer game, It's clearly being used right now for some games and if you read what I said you would realise why they don't use them for 2 player Co-op games, It's just a waste of resources

The 3 servers for my console thing was a statement from Mr. Selnor, so no. that was not directed towards you.
And yes, there is NO WAY they would waste those resouces and give each console dedicated servers.. just.. no..
you are sharing a group of servers with all the other users of their service. as it is with everything else everywhere (google, youtube, this site, etc. etc. etc.)



3DS FC# 4553-9947-9017 NNID: Bajablo

Torn-City - MMO text based RPG, join me! :)

selnor1983 on 03 January 2014
FrancisNobleman said:
selnor1983 said:
Bajablo said:
selnor1983 said:

Unlike any other system, the ability to have every single game brought out use Cloud processing for things like Drivatar AI, Physics calculations, AI battles, Fixed lighting etc.


... you realy think they are going to be so stupid to do real-time calculations in the cloud?.. you must have belived in all that marketing right?
Never gonna happen, think what would happen to your game if you had lag etc. even in a singleplayer situation.. no-one would code that stupid. AI, sure.. that works, if you have connection -> calculate. other -> use X behaviour that is hard-coded


Its being done already. 3 games releasing this year are using fixed lighting solutions in the cloud as well as physics calculations that are not directly affecting the player input controls. Titanfall does quite a few realtime calculations on the cloud. As its an online only game anyay it will benefit greatly.


What will happen to those who barely have a steady enough connection to play multiplayer ? Will the game glitch, or just tell the person the internet is not fast enough to calculate AI battles, therefore you can't play the game ? Or maybe the game will just work normally, like it will on PC and X360 ?

 

I think you should lookt at the later, and Cloud will be used for saves and avatar ghosts, etc.

Microsoft has a cloud service called Azure (it’s a real thing – you can go on their website right now and pay for servers and use them to run whatever you want). Microsoft realized that they could use that technology to solve our problem.

So they built this powerful system to let us create all sorts of tasks that they will run for us, and it can scale up and down automatically as players come and go. We can upload new programs for them to run and they handle the deployment for us. And they’ll host our game servers for other platforms, too! Titanfall uses the Xbox Live Cloud to run dedicated servers for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.

But it’s not just for dedicated servers – Microsoft thought about our problem in a bigger way. Developers aren’t going to just want dedicated servers – they’ll have all kinds of features that need a server to do some kind of work to make games better. Look at Forza 5, which studies your driving style in order to create custom AI that behaves like you do. That’s totally different from what Titanfall uses it for, and it’s really cool! So it’s not accurate to say that the Xbox Live Cloud is simply a system for running dedicated servers – it can do a lot more than that

With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don’t have to worry about estimating how many servers we’ll need on launch day. We don’t have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don’t have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server. That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacenters all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter.

Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it’s far more affordable than other hosting options – their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers. So because of this, dedicated servers are much more of a realistic option for developers who don’t want to make compromises on their player experience, and it opens up a lot more things that we can do in an online game.

This is a really big deal, and it can make online games better. This is something that we are really excited about. The Xbox Live Cloud lets us to do things in Titanfall that no player-hosted multiplayer game can do. That has allowed us to push the boundaries in online multiplayer and that’s awesome. We want to try new ideas and let the player do things they’ve never been able to do before! Over time, I expect that we’ll be using these servers to do a lot more than just dedicated servers. This is something that’s going to let us drive all sorts of new ideas in online games for years to come.

I know this got pretty technical and long-winded, so I thank you for reading this far. Hopefully I’ve cleared some things up, and you can see why I’m so excited about what Microsoft has done here and how it is letting us do awesome new things for our game. I’ll see you online in the spring to play some Titanfall on our dedicated servers!

http://www.respawn.com/news/lets-talk-about-the-xbox-live-cloud/#more-1772



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selnor1983 on 03 January 2014
naruball said:
selnor1983 said:


Forza 5 : Cloud based Drivatar AI. - This completely crushes previous driving AI in games like Forza 4 and GT6. In fact I had the chance to play GT6 the other day on boxing day at a friends house and the AI was absolutely pathetic in comparison to Forza 5. In fact it appeared non existant in comparison.

That was clearly needed. Thanks, Selnor. Never change. 


????

Its a direct comparison from last gen no cloud. To this gen Cloud. The difference is phenominal. So yeah it was needed regarding the OP's question. Forza 5 proves at launch day it already makes a difference.



kayoss on 03 January 2014
selnor1983 said:
deskpro2k3 said:
selnor1983 said:
Dark_Feanor said:
It´s not that easy to develop a distributed program, service or app.

It will take time.

People that are proficient with that are in the MMO market. But it´s sure those people will bring their expertise to games with larger scope like: The Elders Scrolls, Fallout, Crackdown, GTA, Dead Rising, Horde Mode...

Expect it when people are enjoying Gaikai on PS4, by the way.

Gaikai isnt remotely the same thing.

Gaikai is for storage. Or for example going to be used for downloading PS3 games for PS4.

Gaikai isnt the same as what Microsoft have built for Cloud Processing. Microsoft dont use the 3 servers allocated for Xbox One for Xbox Live service. They are purely for Cloud Processing.


Sony has filed a patent called "Suspending State of Cloud-based Legacy Applications," which allows one to add new content into an emulated game without having to rework the game's code.

The patent's abstract provides a detailed summary as to exactly what this might mean for the future of Sony's cloud-based platform. Warning: it is a bit of a mouthful.

A snapshot of an emulated game may be generated by a snapshot generator. At some point during the emulation of the emulated game, a snapshot generator delivers a suspension request to an emulator. Once the suspension request is received, the emulator will suspend the emulated title. The emulator generates a snapshot of the emulated game by recording the current state of all devices being emulated. The snapshot is then delivered to the snapshot generator. It is emphasized that this abstract is provided to comply with the rules requiring an abstract that will allow a searcher or other reader to quickly ascertain the subject matter of the technical disclosure. It is submitted with the understanding that it will not be used to interpret or limit the scope or meaning of the claims.

So what does this mean? Well for one, this could allow Sony to rework some of its older titles and deliver fresh, slightly tweaked experiences of its legacy library via Gaikai. That said, companies file patents all the time, many of which are never fully realized. As such, we'll just have to wait and see if this materializes into anything at all.

[Via NeoGAF]

 

 

TLDR:

Basically, this patents tech from Sony will add new content to emulated PlayStation games. The question is, will Gaikai use it? I think yes.

So not Cloud Processing then. This is much more like Ouya. Streaming the game to PS4. So PS4 is not processing anything at all. Streaming it as a video file. This is exactly what Gaikai is. A steaming service. Its not a processing server.

What makes you think Sony cant turn Gaikai into a processing server? Remember Gaikai was the largest game streaming in the world before it was bought by Sony. All the component are there. If Sony  can do pretty much what microsoft is trying to claim with it "Power of the Cloud" but you must be realistic. For the power of the cloud to do on the fly processing you need a massive amount of bandwitdh. Let just look at this in a more realistic view.

Just in the United States, how many americans have High speed internet? 70% percent of americans. but what does "High Speed internet" entail? Right now high speed internet is 8-15mb/s. At this speed you can stream movies with some latency. You will need a broadband speed much higher than this just to do on the fly processing. As a consumers and in the united states alone, we are not ready for "Power of the cloud".



selnor1983 on 03 January 2014
Madword said:
selnor1983 said:
deskpro2k3 said:

Sony has filed a patent called "Suspending State of Cloud-based Legacy Applications," which allows one to add new content into an emulated game without having to rework the game's code.

The patent's abstract provides a detailed summary as to exactly what this might mean for the future of Sony's cloud-based platform. Warning: it is a bit of a mouthful.

A snapshot of an emulated game may be generated by a snapshot generator. At some point during the emulation of the emulated game, a snapshot generator delivers a suspension request to an emulator. Once the suspension request is received, the emulator will suspend the emulated title. The emulator generates a snapshot of the emulated game by recording the current state of all devices being emulated. The snapshot is then delivered to the snapshot generator. It is emphasized that this abstract is provided to comply with the rules requiring an abstract that will allow a searcher or other reader to quickly ascertain the subject matter of the technical disclosure. It is submitted with the understanding that it will not be used to interpret or limit the scope or meaning of the claims.

So what does this mean? Well for one, this could allow Sony to rework some of its older titles and deliver fresh, slightly tweaked experiences of its legacy library via Gaikai. That said, companies file patents all the time, many of which are never fully realized. As such, we'll just have to wait and see if this materializes into anything at all.

[Via NeoGAF]

So not Cloud Processing then. This is much more like Ouya. Streaming the game to PS4. So PS4 is not processing anything at all. Streaming it as a video file. This is exactly what Gaikai is. A steaming service. Its not a processing server.

Yes Gaikai is different to cloud processing. It's a streaming service, but I think if they work it out right, it probably could be used for local emulation of games. As for the streaming part... I dont see this being used for Ps4 games and maybe not even PS3 games.. It will be fine for PS2/PS1 games due to the low resolution requirements. 

As for MS's cloud, it wont help in the most part for making games any more interesting (real time this and that), unless it's an MMO and guess what, every company that does an MMO uses the cloud and can do what MS can do. MS's benefit is having lots of servers to service massive numbers of users, so in theory they should have less downtime than other online games.

As for open world games such as Fallout4 etc.. there is no way they will spend millions on a single player game that has access to these features on a console that will only sell half the number of games. i.e say fallout sells 10 million copies and 5 million is on PS4, why bother with OTT complex cloud features for the XBOX One only. Trust me when i say that they wont, not unless they are paid to do so by MS.

So in terms of major benefit, the only games that *might* use it are MS exclusives and only if MS decide to pump the money in. Considering they havent even supported Kinect2 with much effort yet, I cannot see them pumping lots (and i mean lots) of cash into this.

Unfortunately most people misunderstand the benefits of the cloud right now, it's been around in many forms for over 10 years, and on the whole the internet is the problem - its too slow. Matchmaking, server stability and automatic bandwidth handling will be the key benefits to their service, you can forget cloud processing right now.

Titanfall is the first realtime FPS that uses the Cloud severes like the MMO's. And it looks a ton load better than any other MMO game so far. Visually I mean. And the map size and player count is awesome.

Microsoft have more servers around the world than any other company. The benefit Microsoft also has is all around the world almost everyone will have a local server set to them. For example I know my Cloud servers are in the UK. Not like World Of Warcraft serverd where UK gamers have to connect to Germany.

Azure from Microsoft is the worlds largest collection of servers all around the world. Which will help lag alot. Much better than any other server company out there.



selnor1983 on 03 January 2014
kayoss said:
selnor1983 said:
deskpro2k3 said:
selnor1983 said:
Dark_Feanor said:
It´s not that easy to develop a distributed program, service or app.

It will take time.

People that are proficient with that are in the MMO market. But it´s sure those people will bring their expertise to games with larger scope like: The Elders Scrolls, Fallout, Crackdown, GTA, Dead Rising, Horde Mode...

Expect it when people are enjoying Gaikai on PS4, by the way.

Gaikai isnt remotely the same thing.

Gaikai is for storage. Or for example going to be used for downloading PS3 games for PS4.

Gaikai isnt the same as what Microsoft have built for Cloud Processing. Microsoft dont use the 3 servers allocated for Xbox One for Xbox Live service. They are purely for Cloud Processing.


Sony has filed a patent called "Suspending State of Cloud-based Legacy Applications," which allows one to add new content into an emulated game without having to rework the game's code.

The patent's abstract provides a detailed summary as to exactly what this might mean for the future of Sony's cloud-based platform. Warning: it is a bit of a mouthful.

A snapshot of an emulated game may be generated by a snapshot generator. At some point during the emulation of the emulated game, a snapshot generator delivers a suspension request to an emulator. Once the suspension request is received, the emulator will suspend the emulated title. The emulator generates a snapshot of the emulated game by recording the current state of all devices being emulated. The snapshot is then delivered to the snapshot generator. It is emphasized that this abstract is provided to comply with the rules requiring an abstract that will allow a searcher or other reader to quickly ascertain the subject matter of the technical disclosure. It is submitted with the understanding that it will not be used to interpret or limit the scope or meaning of the claims.

So what does this mean? Well for one, this could allow Sony to rework some of its older titles and deliver fresh, slightly tweaked experiences of its legacy library via Gaikai. That said, companies file patents all the time, many of which are never fully realized. As such, we'll just have to wait and see if this materializes into anything at all.

[Via NeoGAF]

 

 

TLDR:

Basically, this patents tech from Sony will add new content to emulated PlayStation games. The question is, will Gaikai use it? I think yes.

So not Cloud Processing then. This is much more like Ouya. Streaming the game to PS4. So PS4 is not processing anything at all. Streaming it as a video file. This is exactly what Gaikai is. A steaming service. Its not a processing server.

What makes you think Sony cant turn Gaikai into a processing server? Remember Gaikai was the largest game streaming in the world before it was bought by Sony. All the component are there. If Sony  can do pretty much what microsoft is trying to claim with it "Power of the Cloud" but you must be realistic. For the power of the cloud to do on the fly processing you need a massive amount of bandwitdh. Let just look at this in a more realistic view.

Just in the United States, how many americans have High speed internet? 70% percent of americans. but what does "High Speed internet" entail? Right now high speed internet is 8-15mb/s. At this speed you can stream movies with some latency. You will need a broadband speed much higher than this just to do on the fly processing. As a consumers and in the united states alone, we are not ready for "Power of the cloud".

1. For Cloud Processing to work around the world and not just a select few countries without lag it needs to have server farms all over the world. Gaikai isnt even close.

2. Its not as simple as asking Gaikai to spend billions on their servers just so they have an answer to Microsoft Azure ( which dwarfs Gaikai ).

Azure has farms of servers all over the world. Which is why lag will be a far less issue on Xbox Live Cloud.



naruball on 03 January 2014
selnor1983 said:
naruball said:
selnor1983 said:


Forza 5 : Cloud based Drivatar AI. - This completely crushes previous driving AI in games like Forza 4 and GT6. In fact I had the chance to play GT6 the other day on boxing day at a friends house and the AI was absolutely pathetic in comparison to Forza 5. In fact it appeared non existant in comparison.

That was clearly needed. Thanks, Selnor. Never change. 


????

Its a direct comparison from last gen no cloud. To this gen Cloud. The difference is phenominal. So yeah it was needed regarding the OP's question. Forza 5 proves at launch day it already makes a difference.

"Absolutely pathetic" and "non existant"? Dude, no. Just no.