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Rumor: Build 2014 cloud destruction demo = Crackdown 3

geordiemp

Member
Not a rumor. Confirmed by Phil:

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I called it? I called it.

And he said it was EARLY crackdown work.

He did not say the tech would be implemented in the game (yet) /

Interesting though, say a 500,000 games try to play crackdown online, how much CPU power would the data banks need if its 100 x a high end CPU for each game being played.

Cant get my head around that, seems a very expensive proposition...
 

Saganator

Member
I'm no developer, but something tells me physics are still being calculated on every little piece of debris on the ground, instead of making them a static object once it lands on the ground to free up the CPU. This is cool and all, but I'm skeptical of the smoke and mirrors on this.
 
Why would a current "high end PC" crawl down to 2 FPS because there's 30k objects in a scene with graphics from 10 years ago?

Probably because they were using the cpu to handle the physics, instead of the gpu where you normally see simulations of that scale running in real time.
 
Because they are doing it as inefficiently as possible to show you the extremes. The numbers don't add up for cloud gaming.

If crackdown sells 1 million copy at launch and has 500k players on at the same time, will MS have that much power available... and for how long. What happens 6 months later when another "cloud" game comes out. How is long term "cloud gaming" support financially viable without a monthly fee?

They have a monthly fee.

Xbox live revenues at over 1 billion dollars/year in subscription, that looks more than enough to rent cloud servers capable of supplying data crunching for whatever online players are logged into xbox live at the same time.
 

Acheteedo

Member
And he said it was EARLY crackdown work.

He did not say the tech would be implemented in the game (yet) /

Interesting though, say a 500,000 games try to play crackdown online, how much CPU power would the data banks need if its 100 x a high end CPU for each game being played.

Cant get my head around that, seems a very expensive proposition...

Perhaps they can scale the complexity of the destruction based on the available servers or something, lots of possibilities.
 
It's a game changing feature for an open world game, especially for one as explosive as crackdown.

Think about it, buildings wouldn't just be hollow shells anymore. Any building capable of being partially destroyed would need to have something going on inside it.
Not to mention how frickin cool it looks.

Unfortunately this feature would require a constant broadband internet connection, but it seems that it just wouldn't be feasible without the cloud, while maintaining the same fidelity.
And if that level of destruction is working that well this early in development, I say the trade offs are worth it.

And he said it was EARLY crackdown work.

He did not say the tech would be implemented in the game (yet) /

Interesting though, say a 500,000 games try to play crackdown online, how much CPU power would the data banks need if its 100 x a high end CPU for each game being played.

Cant get my head around that, seems a very expensive proposition...
That is the beauty of the dynamic server allocation that a cloud infrastructure provides.
Although, I don't think it requires 100 high end CPUs to function for one game :p
 
They have a monthly fee.

Xbox live revenues at over 1 billion dollars/year in subscription, that looks more than enough to rent cloud servers capable of supplying data crunching for whatever online players are logged into xbox live at the same time.

They won't need to rent anything.... they already own and operate the most robust cloud platform in existence.
 
Because offloading trivial prebaked/non-dynamic/non-interactive/high latency stuff is the only thing you can do with cloud+todays internet speeds.

Well, that's exactly the opposite of what the demo shows. they have something not pre baked, dynamic and interactive, and the latency seems fine.

MS azure servers for Titanfall gets me at around 22-33ms. And I'm in Brazil, why would something like that have a higher latency?

Nvidia also had a demo of lighting being offload to cloud, and it was again interactive, dynamic, and even with some latency completely acceptable.

As long the company has data servers close to where you are (and didn't they say that one of the many reasons to launch in fewer countries was to get the server back structure right?), I don't see why does the latency needs to be so high.
 
And he said it was EARLY crackdown work.

He did not say the tech would be implemented in the game (yet) /

Interesting though, say a 500,000 games try to play crackdown online, how much CPU power would the data banks need if its 100 x a high end CPU for each game being played.

Cant get my head around that, seems a very expensive proposition...

Currently, Azure is comprised of roughly 1.5 million servers in 24 countries. By years end, that number should be around 1.7-2 million servers. That is a massive pool of server resources that MS potentially has for XBL.
 

geordiemp

Member
Currently, Azure is comprised of roughly 1.5 million servers in 24 countries. By years end, that number should be around 1.7-2 million servers. That is a massive pool of server resources that MS potentially has for XBL.

Running business software around the world. Still don't think MS will throw cloud resource at crackdown.....its not how their business minds work in my opinion...

We shall see.
 
Running business software around the world. Still don't think MS will throw cloud resource at crackdown.....its not how their business minds work in my opinion...

We shall see.
Why not? They are throwing cloud resources at every other game on their system.
Any multiplayer game can use their cloud servers for free.
And crackdown is a first party game, so I imagine they'd be even more flexible.

Plus, this demo was literally shown to promote Azure at their build conference.

Don't see any reason to be concerned.
Just tons of reasons to be excited.
 

klaus

Member
Still don't think MS will throw cloud resource at crackdown.....its not how their business minds work in my opinion...

We shall see.

Where have you been when all that cloud talk was going on? First people were complaining that it is all marketing BS and never going to be real, now that MS is demonstrating it & announced a game using the tech people are saying they are not interested in doing cloud computing for games.

I utterly fail to understand that logic.
 

the_champ

Banned
Azure isn't only used for online gaming and server availability scales appropriately according to a product's current demand. I'm pretty sure MS knows what they're doing in this area.

And I don't know if games like Crackdown will require gold to play, but co-op and multiplayer (Crackdown co-op was amazing) will continue to push gold subs. There is your fee.



Again, Azure server availability scales according to the current population of a product. If no one is playing a cloud heavy or multiplayer game those servers will just be used for other game/enterprise products. It costs MS almost nothing to continue supporting games on Azure regardless of how few people are playing.


I undestand elasticity of cloud technologies, i was referring to cs, bug fixing, etc (in gral, product support), since an online product always requires some kind of structure to keep the lights on. But yes, as i said, would be really inexpensive to keep it for a really long time.
 

RdN

Member
This is very interesting.. I really want this concept to work and be employed in as many games as possible.
 
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