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[a Master Ninja]

Crackdown is the test. I'm skeptical.

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

Crackdown or bust. I only hope it's online only and doesn't have some shitty fallback mode for the offline whingers. If they plan to do that then they have already failed.

 

[GreatestHits]

they have already failed.

.

 

[Rembrandt]

The funny thing about this is, that Crackdown isn't using MS's cloud service at all. They have partnered with Cloudgine to provide the service.

Doesn't really matter if it's still using cloud processing. threads like these are dumb. we've had several and it's been obvious for a year that Crackdown will be the first big showcase of it. For smaller examples, look at Forza and Titanfall.

also, where's that golf ball gif at?

along with that poster's several posts about it working.

 

[spared]

A lot of console technology is using cloud-based programming so I would say about half and half.

 

[JaggedSac]

The funny thing about this is, that Crackdown isn't using MS's cloud service at all. They have partnered with Cloudgine to provide the service.

Cloudgine is a middleware developer. Probably agnostic to cloud service provider. Otherwise the middleware would be terrible.

 

[Neuromancer]

Ars Technica had a great feature about the cloud a few days after the Xbox One reveal. As far as I can tell these implementations are all totally plausible, and if they haven't happened yet I'm sure they will soon.

"One example of that might be lighting," he continued. "Let’s say you’re looking at a forest scene and you need to calculate the light coming through the trees, or you’re going through a battlefield and have very dense volumetric fog that’s hugging the terrain. Those things often involve some complicated up-front calculations when you enter that world, but they don’t necessarily have to be updated every frame. Those are perfect candidates for the console to offload that to the cloud—the cloud can do the heavy lifting, because you’ve got the ability to throw multiple devices at the problem in the cloud."

Booty added that things like physics modeling, fluid dynamics, and cloth motion were all prime examples of effects that require a lot of up-front computation that could be handled in the cloud without adding any lag to the actual gameplay. And the server resources Microsoft is putting toward these calculations will be much greater than a local Xbox One could handle on its own. "A rule of thumb we like to use is that [for] every Xbox One available in your living room we’ll have three of those devices in the cloud available," he said.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/...s-more-processing-power-from-cloud-computing/ [/QUOTE]

 

[Alx]

The funny thing about this is, that Crackdown isn't using MS's cloud service at all. They have partnered with Cloudgine to provide the service.

The engine and the service are probably two different things. MS will certainly provide the servers and API, while Cloudgine is developing the engine for doing server-side processing in a game. A bit like the Unreal Engine or Unity are using the console graphics API to do their thing.

 

[Ayato Kanzaki]

"The Power of the Cloud" is mostly a PR argument. The very idea was doomed from the start, due to local US conditions.

Try to visualize a game that require you to DL 25GB for installation, then 2GB per hour of use for the "power of the Cloud". Play 50 hours with that, and then think about your next ISP receipt.

 

[Rembrandt]

This is what I am allowed to share.

Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here.

Spoiler

And no, this won't be a golf/grass/whatever simulator - I just thought maybe it is interesting to see

so yeah

 

[TheLostBigBoss]

Lets see what crackdown can do before throwing it all out as BS marketing speak.

Or we can continue to shit on their early attempts to market the cloud and have them prove us wrong with a game that truly depends on it.

 

[Gamezone]

Ask Microsoft Japan.

 

[Shuggananas]

so yeah

30 fps :^)

 

[Dictator93]

"The Power of the Cloud" is mostly a PR argument. The very idea was doomed from the start, due to local US conditions.

Try to visualize a game that require you to DL 25GB for installation, then 2GB per hour of use for the "power of the Cloud". Play 50 hours with that, and then think about your next ISP receipt.

Also imagine them having multiple TF machines dedicated to each and every player of a certain game. That seems kinda absurd.

 

[JinjoUnchained]

If you think about it, clouds are not really solids, so how could they fill a gap?

On point, "the power of the cloud" always sounded to me like marketing buzz meant to sound "techie" to the uninformed consumer. Much like "blast processing" back in the day. Thought I've not played XB1 games online, so I don't know if it actually helps process information faster. But certainly it would do nothing to address the power gap from weaker hardware and that pitch was rightly ridiculed here when they tried to sell it.

 

[SerTapTap]

Poor Crackdown. I wonder if reviews/impressions will try and assess it as "the big one" for the Cloud. Because there's basically no way it will single handedly live up to this bit of spin.

The demo did look cool, and I hope the game is good, but it's best not to fret too much over this. MS was in a really weird place during the One reveal. I think they were just trying to make their servers sound sexier to the public.

 

[PensOwl]

Sounds great, just wish pins didn't have to use the almighty power of the cloud

 

[OdysseusVA]

They should have leaned on the multiplayer aspect of it. I'm a believer after playing Titanfall.

 

[bomblord1]

The cloud is great for offloading workload but not in things that need instant calculations like games.

It's there but not in the way Microsoft made you think it would be. I'm fairly certain a lot of their voice stuff is cloud based.

 

[Tuck]

I think they realized that everyone saw through it as marketing bullshit and nothing more.

 

[gofreak]

Remote processing in general could get very cool as things develop.

As it was, however, Microsoft's talk was a band-aid over short term marketing holes.

But I'm optimistic about where we can apply 'cloud processing' in time.

 

[Gamezone]

 

[Angel_DvA]

They just notice almost everyone aren't stupid enough to get their bullshit, glad they stopped with it though, it was ridiculous.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

so yeah

Where was this post originally from?

And as far as I can remember, really only TitanFall and Crackdown seem to be using to offload resources in a tangible way, but then again we don't know what else MS has in the pipeline.

 

[SomedayTheFire]

Buzzwords. Not fast enough for actual processing. Can do things like Titanfalls bots etc.

 

[Alx]

Try to visualize a game that require you to DL 25GB for installation, then 2GB per hour of use for the "power of the Cloud". Play 50 hours with that, and then think about your next ISP receipt.

In the case of cloud processing, it's not the same thing as cloud gaming. You're not streaming high resolution video but only game data, which can be much smaller in volume (if it's only object types and positions for example).

I think a simple and "easy" scenario of cloud benefit could be open worlds like Skyrim. We know that the game struggled on previous gen consoles because it had to keep in memory a database of all objects in the world, so that you would find a cup or a corpse at the exact place where you left them hours before. Handling such databases are a thing that servers do best, and all the data you would need to exchange would be sending your current position and getting the list and status of objects in the area. Even if there are 10000 objects, that's just a few kilobytes of data (uncompressed).

 

[BadWolf]

Smoke and mirrors.

 

[watership]

They should have leaned on the multiplayer aspect of it. I'm a believer after playing Titanfall.

That, and cloud saving, and demoed the cloud assisted stuff when it was ready, instead of talking it up when they couldn't show a game. MS's can complete far beyond what Nintendo and Sony can, but the Mattrick lead team seemed to squander it's potential with "Telling" instead of "Showing".

 

[rawd]

Smoke and mirrors.

The cloud got....... cloudy

 

[Gamezone]

Buzzwords. Not fast enough for actual processing. Can do things like Titanfalls bots etc.

I don`t get this. Unreal Tournament was released in 1999 with better bots. They also played offline.

 

[Leafhopper]

The cloud got....... cloudy

6/10

 

[N.Domixis]

Nothing but lies, wanted to trick people into thinking the xbox was as if not more powerful than ps4.
But it WILL happen one day in the far future with other consoles.

 

[shandy706]

It very much exists, and I'm sure they're working hard on implementing some more complicated things.

Talking about "The Cloud" is received badly though. Physics based calculations server side are legit. Now if they can implement it like they hope in Crackdown, I'll be impressed.

They probably should have just talked about what their future use of server and "cloud" systems could possibly bring down the road and not used it as a big key speaking point.

There's no doubt Azure (the "cloud") is an excellent asset though.

I don`t get this. Unreal Tournament was released in 1999 with better bots. They also played offline.

I don't remember playing against 40 AI at once in Unreal though (you can do that in Titanfall). The new(ish) hoard mode in Titanfall can be a blast. I remember trying to crank it in Battlefield 2 though...lol, I'd bring my PC to its knees in truckloads of bots (that were dumb as rocks).

 

[Astral Dog]

It just evaporated

 

[Noobcraft]

Buzzwords. Not fast enough for actual processing. Can do things like Titanfalls bots etc.

Have you played against the survival mode bots? They are ridiculously intelligent.

 

[Rembrandt]

Where was this post originally from?

And as far as I can remember, really only TitanFall and Crackdown seem to be using to offload resources in a tangible way, but then again we don't know what else MS has in the pipeline.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=870776&page=2

We assumed he was working on Crackdown or at least somewhere in MS, but who knows.

 

[Dragonborn]

MS learned slowly that people weren't as stupid as they thought and that it was a completely silly bullet point.

 

[AmFreak]

They should have leaned on the multiplayer aspect of it. I'm a believer after playing Titanfall.

That would have been nothing new - dedicated server's and bots on them exist since the dawn of time.

 

[fabricated backlash]

Reality happened.

 

[Rembrandt]

To all the naysayers, what's going to happen when Crackdown comes out? I find it funny to see people completely denying it like MS hasn't spent billions developing their cloud stuff.

I mean, the game is in actual development and is attached to the cloud, so what's going on? I can understand thinking it might not work completely, but to actually say it was nothing but lies is silly.

 

[BobTheFork]

When Titanfall 2 barely runs on PS4, that's when you'll all see.

 

[Geg]

Don't believe something a marketing guy tells you

 

[leeh]

Really looking forward to Crackdown, I feel like that's the make or break moment for them. If cloudgine are developing an engine for these sorts of applications, it'd be great if this was released commercially after and incorporated into other engines.

Also, why do people ignore the practical example which was posted and continue to post 'lies'? We know its possible, just very costly/time consuming to implement. I suppose Crackdown will be essentially a business case for other devs.

 

[Chris1]

We'll see at E3 when we see a trailer for Crackdown how the cloud will change gaming.

 

[kadotsu]

To all the naysayers, what's going to happen when Crackdown comes out? I find it funny to see people completely denying it like MS hasn't spent billions developing their cloud stuff.

I mean, the game is in actual development and is attached to the cloud, so what's going on? I can understand thinking it might not work completely, but to actually say it was nothing but lies is silly.

Announcing stuff is easy, executing is hard. Just ask Peter Molyneux. I'll change my opinion once the game is out and has delivered.

 

[shandy706]

When Titanfall 2 barely runs on PS4, that's when you'll all see.

LOL, that's a pretty good joke actually.


Seriously though, as long as the servers are there it's no big deal. I'm guessing those "Free" servers won't be there though like they were on the MS end.

 

[Alx]

That would have been nothing new - dedicated server's and bots on them exist since the dawn of time.

That's true, but part of the benefit of more recent "cloud" services is that those servers are allocated dynamically depending on the requirements.
As a matter of fact the server status of Titanfall has been really smooth all along, even during launch. Very few games can claim the same on this gen...

 

[JetSetRadio]

It moved to Zynga.

 

[Ayato Kanzaki]

In the case of cloud processing, it's not the same thing as cloud gaming. You're not streaming high resolution video but only game data, which can be much smaller in volume (if it's only object types and positions for example).

Only game data, but if you want it to be a signifiant, noticeable improvement for the game graphics, you'll have to use a lot of bandwidth anyway. Or else we're speaking about the kind of things the console would do well enough on it's own.

 

[Backfoggen]

If Crackdown is shown off and doesn't have impressive physics that we haven't seen before then you can safely assume the cloud has dissolved.