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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - So Crackdown 3's Building Destruction was already shown months ago. The Cloud for Xbox One is real.

Madword on 14 June 2014
Machiavellian said:

Arkaign said:
I never thought that game streaming was impossible, because the data involved is miniscule, and all calculations are done remotely. It's no different in many respects to me using PCAnywhere in the 90s over ISDN to support clients in Israel and Japan with remote desktop.

The key not wheather you think something is possible or not, the key would be if you are developing in this space and know if something is possible or not.  Just because you do not have a reference wheather cloud based Physics works doesn't mean there are not may protoypes out there where the tech has been vexxed.  This happens all the time with new implementation of software.  At the software company I work for, customer have thought many things we have done is impossible because our competitors have not done it.

I also don't think you understand what I mean by async. Once you have a big event happening with a ton of pieces moving, all that has to be synced out between client and server, otherwise you have no real interaction with those objects possible without breaking the physics model.

In software, Async means that the client does not have to wait for the server to send back information.  The client can continue to send info to the server and not have to wait for a response.  The server can queue up those transactions and send they back in order to be process by the client.  You can have async and schronous communication at the same time especially if the backend and front ends are designed for such purpose.  I understand what you are saying its just that you only present a one sided solution which does not take into different client server implementations. Is this setup complex yes it is but thank goodness MS development a platform called Orleans to handle the complex interactions behind the scense.  Orleans has been in development for over 3 years so my guess is that MS understand how complex such calculations can be and spent 3 years making it easy on the developer to code against such multi-threaded actions.


Let's get a decent basic hypothetical : you are playing a game where you control a player who can untie a ribbon and release hundreds of various size balls from the ceiling in a net. These balls vary in size and weight. Half of the floor is rubber, half linoleum. The graphics are all rendered by your console. Okay, pull the string, and everything tumbles down and starts bouncing. This is an event being calculated by the server, server tells the client where things are, client draws them. Now walk up and start bouncing the balls against each other. You are now changing the variables dramatically with every action, and that input needs to get back to the server, and there is no longer a 'set piece' in place, but rather a constant variable series of actions that all have immediate consequences. If there is lag, then the physics model won't appear realistic, or worse, it will fail to render and cause client side issues/glitching.

Thats a good scenerio but the key would be if the design of a game would go for such a dynamic situation for the cloud compute part.  The client only needs to render the point of view of the person moving.  Once you get beyound the person point of view, all other calculations can then be sent server side.  Great thing is that information can always be sent to the server without the client waiting on a response.  Data can be plugged in by the server once those calculations are made.  You can easily dedicate CPU threads for just those purposes or with the X1, it already have dedicated hardware just for that purpose without having to waste CPU resources.  Either way, the game designer has full control of what happens within their world.  Having this control allows then to easily predict when to perform server side cal and when to do client side.  What you are looking for is a scenerio where their is chaos but in reality, a game can be tighly controlled to not introduce those scenerios.

Does that make sense? Because a big set-piece action triggered by the user, but that is not interactive beyond the start/end of it, is useless. We can already do that locally. The bigger stuff, huge synchronous cloud to client and back physics events of a continually changing cycle : THAT is both what would be incredibly cool AND is ridiculously impractical.

We probably could argue this point all day.  You really only show one side of a coin where they are multiple different solutions.  I am more than willing to wait until MS give us the data on how them are implementing their solution.  I have plenty of ideals of how they could go about the work but I hate making speculations when the data is really sparse at this time.

It bears repeating that dedicated hardware physx cards start having problems when they're moved from a bus of 2000MB/sec to one that is 500MB/sec. Moving that same physx engine to one that exists on 1MB/sec (8 megabit) is astonishingly unlikely to be impressive or effective.

So how do you explain the Build Demo



At the end of the day, what MS is doing should be applauded, but it's not without massive risks based on the current technology connecting people to the internet.

It doesnt matter how many servers a massive company throws at a problem, the issues:

  • Getting the processed data back to the client.
  • Single player - offline cannot use it
  • Developers have to figure out how their game will work without internet/interruption
  • How long the processing takes at the database end
  • How benefitical this is to the game, most could be done locally.
As the first cloud game isnt looking like its due till at least 2016... doesnt sound to me like they are ready yet and 3rd parties wont be. Most will use it for saving or MP games and thats it. I think some people are totally underestimating the issues on this. It's ok in a database world, where you are pressing a button to index/search through a load of records in a database, you see the *waiting/searching* text and within a few seconds the data comes back... thats not a problem, in a game where you need response's almost immediately.. it's imperative. We dont really know the scale of what is being done in the game, or if the *Crackdown* game isnt already being made into an online game... which for me changes everything. So definately wait and see, but dont expect to see this tech being used by the majority of game developers.
As one of the other posters said, it could store states of a world in a game, such as areas destroyed, trees chopped down, but its not like this hasnt already been done in other games.


Making an indie game : Dead of Day!

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Arkaign on 14 June 2014

I can explain the Build Demo quite easily : they didn't show us anything at all in terms of how they connected the units. For all we know they ran 10Gbe or a direct-bus connection between the systems to handle the bandwidth involved. It was also quite sluggish with a poor framerate even so.

If they really wanted to impress people, they would have said "here we are logging on to our Microsoft data center in South Africa, and watch how our client can manipulate this physics test!". But they didn't even go so far as running a test across town.

I don't have to tell you that even Gbit lan, good old lowly Gbit, is an order of magnitude quicker than any average home ISP in the 1.5 to 50mbit range. Even 'Mbit' is deceptive, because the hops are mind boggling sometimes, and neither the ISP nor Microsoft can completely control all the various hardware in between the client and server. Run a tracert on a few of your favorite sites and enjoy watching the various layers tell you how 20th century our global network truly is.

In closing, I have no problem with people keeping the faith that this is somehow going to work in a way that's relevant in the near future. I also have complete faith in the facts that this is unfeasible on a variety of levels so overwhelming that it's almost comedic to entertain. I've seen COUNTLESS promises from a huge variety of tech companies over the years that proved to exist either only for R&D/patent progress that will eventually be repurposed/sold elsewhere, and/or was to be a PR puff piece to attempt to boost their image or their stock price, to raise investor confidence. This smells 1000% of that, particularly when you match it up with the fact that Microsoft has been beaten to hell and back for having irrefutably second-rate hardware that launched at a higher price. They DESPERATELY need a win in the 'tech/specs' PR campaign in their minds. Whereas in my minds they're better off keeping their eye on the real aspects that they CAN control that will help : a great message and a great library of titles. If heaven and earth part and they DO get the impossible cloud physics model working in the real world with real people with real crappy internet, then that would be that much more impressive than touting something that they can't even demo in an open and believable manner.

If they had a demo that could work on XB1, they KNOW how much that would impress people and get good word of mouth. All they would have to do is put it on the XB store. But they can't, they won't, and almost certainly this will never work in this gen.



Puppyroach on 14 June 2014

I remember when Onlive started to get some buzz but no one seemed to believe it would ever be possible to stream HD games. Onlive showed that it could be done and now MS I taking it a step further. I have a feeling this is in someway also connected to Window 9 and their grand scheme of interconnecting all devices in homes.



Richard_Feynman on 14 June 2014
Arkaign said:
I never thought that game streaming was impossible, because the data involved is miniscule, and all calculations are done remotely. It's no different in many respects to me using PCAnywhere in the 90s over ISDN to support clients in Israel and Japan with remote desktop.

I also don't think you understand what I mean by async. Once you have a big event happening with a ton of pieces moving, all that has to be synced out between client and server, otherwise you have no real interaction with those objects possible without breaking the physics model.

Let's get a decent basic hypothetical : you are playing a game where you control a player who can untie a ribbon and release hundreds of various size balls from the ceiling in a net. These balls vary in size and weight. Half of the floor is rubber, half linoleum. The graphics are all rendered by your console. Okay, pull the string, and everything tumbles down and starts bouncing. This is an event being calculated by the server, server tells the client where things are, client draws them. Now walk up and start bouncing the balls against each other. You are now changing the variables dramatically with every action, and that input needs to get back to the server, and there is no longer a 'set piece' in place, but rather a constant variable series of actions that all have immediate consequences. If there is lag, then the physics model won't appear realistic, or worse, it will fail to render and cause client side issues/glitching.

Does that make sense? Because a big set-piece action triggered by the user, but that is not interactive beyond the start/end of it, is useless. We can already do that locally. The bigger stuff, huge synchronous cloud to client and back physics events of a continually changing cycle : THAT is both what would be incredibly cool AND is ridiculously impractical.

It bears repeating that dedicated hardware physx cards start having problems when they're moved from a bus of 2000MB/sec to one that is 500MB/sec. Moving that same physx engine to one that exists on 1MB/sec (8 megabit) is astonishingly unlikely to be impressive or effective.

 

That really is the crux of the matter. More serious doubts arise if you combine this with the fact that the implementation of such a rendering engine would have to be scalable.



Richard_Feynman on 14 June 2014
Machiavellian said:

You say you know how the tech work, exactly what have you done in this space to know the challenges.  Hell, its something MS and their partners are working out as we speak so I am a little doubtfull you trully understand exactly how developers will use cloud compute for physics in games and how it will be implemented unless you are woking in this space.  I work in client server tech as I develop software in this space all the time but that does not mean I am an expert on how games will implement a solution since I do not design games.  I do have a lot of ideals how things can work but they are just ideals and not hard implemtations since thats where the nuts and bolts are worked out.

As I stated you just have assumptions but you really do not know.  Its evident that MS has and is researching this tech and its also evident that Crackdown will be implementing it.  They have planly stated this is what they are doing which means they are actively encountering challenges you have made and either solved them or they are null because their implementation does not go down that path.  

Personally anyone who is not actively working in this space has no more knowledge of how it will work then the average person on the street even if they know client server tech.  When it comes to software there are a host of differet ways to skin a cat.  I teach software development at the company I work for and it always amaze me when I give an open end project how many different solutions I get.  Based on the experience of the developers and how they code most solutions never are the same.


You can read any of Arkaign's posts to see my argument.

You are ignoring the arguments and pulling my credentials into this. I'm not agreeable to a discussion based on credentials. The past has showed that such deliberations yield nothing of value.



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Machiavellian on 14 June 2014
Richard_Feynman said:
Machiavellian said:

You say you know how the tech work, exactly what have you done in this space to know the challenges.  Hell, its something MS and their partners are working out as we speak so I am a little doubtfull you trully understand exactly how developers will use cloud compute for physics in games and how it will be implemented unless you are woking in this space.  I work in client server tech as I develop software in this space all the time but that does not mean I am an expert on how games will implement a solution since I do not design games.  I do have a lot of ideals how things can work but they are just ideals and not hard implemtations since thats where the nuts and bolts are worked out.

As I stated you just have assumptions but you really do not know.  Its evident that MS has and is researching this tech and its also evident that Crackdown will be implementing it.  They have planly stated this is what they are doing which means they are actively encountering challenges you have made and either solved them or they are null because their implementation does not go down that path.  

Personally anyone who is not actively working in this space has no more knowledge of how it will work then the average person on the street even if they know client server tech.  When it comes to software there are a host of differet ways to skin a cat.  I teach software development at the company I work for and it always amaze me when I give an open end project how many different solutions I get.  Based on the experience of the developers and how they code most solutions never are the same.


You can read any of Arkaign's posts to see my argument.

You are ignoring the arguments and pulling my credentials into this. I'm not agreeable to a discussion based on credentials. The past has showed that such deliberations yield nothing of value.

I am not pulling any credentials into my discussion I am pulling my experience.  My assumptions are based on my experience in this space just like yours and I am not questioning your experience because I have no clue who you are. 

I am not ignoring any of your arguments, I am saying that your argument is just your point of view and its not absolute.   Its one way to look at a problem with many different implementations.  For some reason you believe only your solution is the only route to success which is what always blind people to new implementations others are working on.  Plain and simple you do not have enough information on how MS and other devs will tackle cloud based compute so in the end you can make as many assumptions as you want until we get the answer from MS and their partners.



EpicRandy on 14 June 2014
Madword said:
EpicRandy said:
That's exactly the kind of feature I want from a game this gen.
I want to see open world games with ever growing forest.
I want to see open world where you could put a whole town to fire.
I want to see open world game where every character / enemy do not spawn from nowhere but came from a defined population that grows an evolves as you play.

This is what cloud computing can bring.
I really hope that Undeads Labs are working on a next zombie apocalypse game that use that kind of feature.

Ironically that could be done without the cloud. Of course it all depends on how complex you want to go. If you wanted every character to have stat's and have a defined role within a world, and was able to go from place to place, then single player non cloud - yes that does start to get more complex.. but I just dont see games going into that level of depth. Oblivion was the last game to have characters walking from home to work etc in their daily lives and that was a single player game.

But I would like to play in a world that my actions have a visible effect on the world, no doubt and I believe that to be the next big thing in open world games.


Yes I agree, but would not be implemented without sacrificing something else. They would have to be a main key element of the game (depending on how complex they are). So you would end up adding a big feature to create a more immersive world but to be able to do it you would have to remove other features that are also important to the level of immersion.



Captain_Tom on 14 June 2014

So running at 32 FPS confirmed?



EpicRandy on 14 June 2014
Captain_Tom said:
So running at 32 FPS confirmed?

Which is fine for an open world. But cloud processing is not limiting the system in any way. the render of the actual scene on the console is what will determine if it is 30 or 60 fps.



Captain_Tom on 14 June 2014
EpicRandy said:
Captain_Tom said:
So running at 32 FPS confirmed?

Which is fine for an open world. But cloud processing is not limiting the system in any way. the render of the actual scene on the console is what will determine if it is 30 or 60 fps.


And what happens when you lose connection to the internet?  The explosions stop appearing?