• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Crackdown 3: 10 minute pre-alpha gameplay demo

azertydu91

Hard to Kill
It has literally nothing to do with the visuals. This is all CPU, not gpu

I started by telling I was not impressed by the game then we slipped quite a bit.

When I talked about the visuals and the fact that i didn't liked the look of this game was to tell that maybe I'm biased because I'm almost allergic to the way the world looks, so it may diminished the impact of the physics happening in game on me(on my perception of it not the physics happening on me)
 

Dynasty

Member
Yeah, I don't see a reason why this wouldn't be possible on PC or Ps4 aswell.
I guess the biggest issue is building an engine that can handle the outsourcing of certain calculations. Providing actual servers to run these calculations on is more of a financial hurdle instead of a technical.
I can see it on PC and X1. Not PS4 simply due to Sony not having the cloud infrastructure on the level of MS. Guess they could go to a company and rent those servers (Amazon) but don't see it happening.
 
Putting up another few gifs from the tech demo because some of this is pretty cool:

y26i6mZ.gif
 

ElRenoRaven

Member
I'm impressed as hell with that. For the first time someone is actually showing the power of the cloud without having to resort to fluff and hype. I really can't wait to play around with this game when it comes out.
 
Yeah, I don't see a reason why this wouldn't be possible on PC or Ps4 aswell.
I guess the biggest issue is building an engine that can handle the outsourcing of certain calculations. Providing actual servers to run these calculations on is more of a financial hurdle instead of a technical.

Sony doesn't have anything close to the server infrastructure Microsoft has
 

Trup1aya

Member
Does make me wonder how much of these physics calculations could potentially have been managed by GPU compute instead. The only other game this gen that really shows off particle heavy destruction is Resogun, which has up to 500,000 voxels on screen at any one time (at 60fps no less), but that has GPU accelerated physics calculations instead of CPU (due to it being vastly more capable at the task). Obviously in Crackdown you have other far more taxing things the GPU will have to work on, but it is a game from a bigger studio, and releasing further on in the console's life cycle comparatively. Either way, it seems Crackdown is still very much focused on using CPU calculated physics instead of GPU.

That's one way to look at it... But the question you should ask is what can I do with the GPU now that it isn't burdened with a bunch of physics calculations ...
 

azertydu91

Hard to Kill
I can see it on PC and X1. Not PS4 simply due to Sony not having the cloud infrastructure on the level of MS. Guess they could go to a company and rent those servers (Amazon) but don't see it happening.

When sony bought gaikai weren't there servers? Or was it just the streaming technology I don't remember because playing ps3 games in streaming must require quites the server doesn't it?
 
Sony doesn't have anything close to the servers infrastructure Microsoft has

I had posted on the last page that a developer or producer could still rent space from, say, Amazon, Google App Engine, and others, to achieve similar results... But the cost would likely be prohibitive. Microsoft's Azure service being available to developers who partner with them is what makes this possible today, but with a massive budget, it would be possible for others as well.
 
I can see it on PC and X1. Not PS4 simply due to Sony not having the cloud infrastructure on the level of MS. Guess they could go to a company and rent those servers (Amazon) but don't see it happening.

Sony actually has to have quite the cloud infrastructure to offer a service like PsNow.
PsNow is essentially calculating whole games in the cloud while Crackdown only outsources physics calculations.
So I don't think that would be an issue.
Maybe if Crackdown shows that this opens up great new opportunities big publishers approach Sony and MS and ask to use their server infratructure for more games that use cloud computing, or they just build their own "cloud", I could see EA and Ubi doing that.
 

Torment

Banned
Guys guys I'm not saying it lmooks bad, nor cloud computin is a shame or anything I'm just trying to understand what you find impressive in those videos that's it.

And of course I agree with all of you it's on another level of red faction it's OBVIOUS.
I'm just saying that for consoles allegedly 8 times more powerful this doesn't look 8 times better.

And I'm questionning not the viability of cloud computing but the necessity in what seem achievable on our console without it.

The physics and calculations that compose that many draws is unreal, when you extrapolate that to the whole city, you are talking millions of off-loaded pieces to determine the destruction and collision of each piece of debris.
 
That is crazy - being able to demolish and level and entire in-game city. Impressive use of cloud computing right now.

Red Faction comparisons need to stop. Not sure why it so hard to focus on the game we are being presented here, it's not on the same level. Take it to another thread.
 

Trup1aya

Member
Yeah, I don't see a reason why this wouldn't be possible on PC or Ps4 aswell.
I guess the biggest issue is building an engine that can handle the outsourcing of certain calculations. Providing actual servers to run these calculations on is more of a financial hurdle instead of a technical.

Sure, this is technically feasible on other platforms... But not neccisarily logistically feasible... MS can do it be they own the servers and are simply utilizing their existing infrastructure.. Sony doesn't have that luxury...
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
You haven't really said much DE, which is odd. You had a whole lot to say yesterday.

I said what I said yesterday, that it was a premature/immature bump. I was not arguing tech, just the hilarious lameness of the bump that was fanaticaly motivated only, as well as a juvenile wanna-be "call out" right here.

But keep fighting your warz. Go team go!
 
I wonder how long the rubble on the ground will stay around for in a match. Destruction is only half the battle, I also want to feel like I'm fighting in a constantly evolving battleground. I hope the wreckage from the buildings doesn't just disappear as it hits the ground.
 

Robaperas

Junior Member
Real curious how this works in practice. What are the limitaitons? Once the servers get pounded or lag whats going to happen? Wont bandwidth usage going to be off the charts?


Exciting stuff.

Yep, it looks really nice, it brings all the destruction gameplay and mechanics to another level. I just hope people with limited connections or poor latency like me, can enjoy all this destruction too.
 
Does make me wonder how much of these physics calculations could potentially have been managed by GPU compute instead. The only other game this gen that really shows off particle heavy destruction is Resogun, which has up to 500,000 voxels on screen at any one time (at 60fps no less), but that has GPU accelerated physics calculations instead of CPU (due to it being vastly more capable at the task). Obviously in Crackdown you have other far more taxing things the GPU will have to work on, but it is a game from a bigger studio, and releasing further on in the console's life cycle comparatively. Either way, it seems Crackdown is still very much focused on using CPU calculated physics instead of GPU.

Resogun voxels have collision detection and physics like this but they are nice regular cubes too so I'd imagine far easier to do.

I don't know if I completely trust that there's no smoke & mirrors here too - as I asked before, do we know this was actually running on an XB1? Or that the azure servers were used? Or what their connection speed and latency was?
 

Torment

Banned
I had posted on the last page that a developer or producer could still rent space from, say, Amazon, Google App Engine, and others, to achieve similar results... But the cost would likely be prohibitive. Microsoft's Azure service being available to developers who partner with them is what makes this possible today, but with a massive budget, it would be possible for others as well.

The amount of server space you would need without owning it, would be counterproductive to how much the game would actually make you. They would lose a lot of money keeping the servers active each month to do these type of calculations.
 
The amount of server space you would need without owning it, would be counterproductive to how much the game would actually make you. They would lose a lot of money keeping the servers active each month to do these type of calculations.

Agreed.

I wonder how long the rubble on the ground will stay around for in a match. Destruction is only half the battle, I also want to feel like I'm fighting in a constantly evolving battleground. I hope the wreckage from the buildings doesn't just disappear as it hits the ground.

The presenter says that, in Crackdown fashion, you can still go over and pick up the pieces, etc. He also says that it's interactive so once that struture hits the ground you can go and climb on it and through the architecture.

Although there's a couple instance in the video when something is reduced to fine rubble, that it looks like the player clips through it... so I'd imagine once it gets to a small enough level, it stops being a physical element and that probabyl times out. No proof of this, but just theorizing.
 

Torment

Banned
I said what I said yesterday, that it was a premature/immature bump. I was not arguing tech, just the hilarious lameness of the bump that was fanaticaly motivated only, as well as a juvenile wanna-be "call out" right here.

But keep fighting your warz. Go team go!

No it was warranted in my opinion for amount of people and the absolute deniability that this wouldn't be possible with cloud compute tech.
 
So basically in that video the guy said you can either climb this huge heavy fortified building to reach the top to assassinate the gang owner or you can stand at the street and shoot mindlessly at a stationary object for a few minutes until it falls...

I get that destruction is fun but not at expense of interesting gameplay.
 
Sony actually has to have quite the cloud infrastructure to offer a service like PsNow.
PsNow is essentially calculating whole games in the cloud while Crackdown only outsources physics calculations.
So I don't think that would be an issue.
Maybe if Crackdown shows that this opens up great new opportunities big publishers approach Sony and MS and ask to use their server infratructure for more games that use cloud computing, or they just build their own "cloud", I could see EA and Ubi doing that.

Sony does not have cloud infrastructure so just stop. They rent space from other providers because they don't have their own nor will they spend the money to develop it. MS did it because Azure is the cornerstone of the business going forward and this just leverages it. Sony can't afford to get into this unless they plan on building an AWS competitor which they can't afford to nor is it in the plan.

MS would love it if Sony would rent space from them because they have a business to run. Unused capacity is useless
 

Alienous

Member
So the trailer set-piece was 6x an Xbox One's power, and they've hit 13x as their record, so 20x seems like tales from their ass. 'Hypothetically it can reach this, but in reality? Probably not'.

That's more believable. But it doesn't seem like that much of an advancement from RFG tech. Nothings bending or twisting. It's just bigger things falling.
 

nib95

Banned
That's one way to look at it... But the question you should ask is what can I do with the GPU now that it isn't burdened with a bunch of physics calculations ...

True, but aren't these the kinds of tasks the GPU's were given additional compute specs/processors etc to handle in the first place?
 

azertydu91

Hard to Kill
Sorry guys I have a medical exam so if some of you want to help me understanding it a bit better please send me a private message because I won't see your posts. I'd be back in 2 days if you want to discuss more about this game please send me a message bye guys.
 

Trup1aya

Member
I said what I said yesterday, that it was a premature/immature bump. I was not arguing tech, just the hilarious lameness of the bump that was fanaticaly motivated only, as well as a juvenile wanna-be "call out" right here.

But keep fighting your warz. Go team go!

I guess instead of admitting when they were wrong, folks will just pretend that there's never any justification for calling people out...

The thread was bumbed because there was new info regarding MS' cloud compute plans... Plans which folks were convinced were either PR lies or unfeasible, or some combination of the two...
 

hipbabboom

Huh? What did I say? Did I screw up again? :(
Microsoft is currently the second largest player in the cloud computing/storage space. If there are no more VMs that can be spooled up, MS has bigger issues.

http://marketrealist.com/2015/01/microsoft-azure-key-determinant-microsofts-growth/

Slightly Off-Topic:
I've never seen information about MS adding GPU Compute into their cloud infrastructure but I wonder if this something they'd use to increase their compute density if not already doing so. I think it would be nice to see high end GPUs on the PC pick up some of the slack if games using this tech ever made it to the PC which may allow players to enjoy some of the benefits of online destruction in offline scenarios.
 

Krakn3Dfx

Member
So it sounds like the environmental destruction stuff will only be for MP because of the cloud utilization? Seems like you can allow it for SP as well as long as my XB1 is online while I'm playing. Hopefully they don't lock it out completely, because I love that kind of shit. EDF, EDF, EDF!
 

Alienous

Member
He said that they have peaked at 15x internally as of now.

Right. I want to see what that looks like.

Also, why do the CPU bars never decrease?

If 20x was talking about total use rather than use of CPU power at any one moment then I don't even really know what "20x the computing power of an Xbox One means". Doesn't an Xbox One use the extent of its CPU power in many different situations in a single play session?


Edit:

Looking back they seem to, but it doesn't seem like a proportional decrease to what's happening on screen. It seems like after a building's fall had been calculated there should be a sharp decrease in computing power necessary.

I'm not so sure about the "Xbox One computing power" claims, but it's impressive tech nonetheless.
 

big_z

Member
So it sounds like the environmental destruction stuff will only be for MP because of the cloud utilization? Seems like you can allow it for SP as well as long as my XB1 is online while I'm playing. Hopefully they don't lock it out completely, because I love that kind of shit. EDF, EDF, EDF!

he mentions blowing out the base of the building to bring a king pin boss to you instead of climbing a building the old crackdown way. to me that sounds like the destruction applies to the single player. my guess is that they will gate your ability to destroy buildings as the game progresses.




I wonder how long the rubble on the ground will stay around for in a match. Destruction is only half the battle, I also want to feel like I'm fighting in a constantly evolving battleground. I hope the wreckage from the buildings doesn't just disappear as it hits the ground.

watching the video provides a lot of information on how the destruction works. all the destruction remains in world.
 

Torment

Banned
Right. I want to see what that looks like.

Also, why do the CPU bars never decrease?

If 20x was talking about total use rather than use of CPU power at any one moment then I don't even really know what "20x the computing power of an Xbox One means". Doesn't an Xbox One use the extent of its CPU power in many different situations in a single play session?

Because of multi-threading where it sharing the work evenly so no latency is ever perceptible.
 

xblarcade

Member
Slightly Off-Topic:
I've never seen information about MS adding GPU Compute into their cloud infrastructure but I wonder if this something they'd use to increase their compute density if not already doing so. I think it would be nice to see high end GPUs on the PC pick up some of the slack if games using this tech ever made it to the PC which may allow players to enjoy some of the benefits of online destruction in offline scenarios.

Considering the back and forth of features between Azure and AWS, and the fact that AWS does have GPU clustering in the cloud, I wouldn't be surprised if this is hosted on a pre-release Azure offering.
 
I said what I said yesterday, that it was a premature/immature bump. I was not arguing tech, just the hilarious lameness of the bump that was fanaticaly motivated only, as well as a juvenile wanna-be "call out" right here.

But keep fighting your warz. Go team go!
It was warranted. That thread was an insane and immense pile of crap and still continues to be. You even see it trying to hold on in here. Crow doesn't taste that bad, don't fight it.
 
I think destruction will be wholly toned down in the single player, but that there will be big set-piece destruction moments that will still occur.
 

Dynasty

Member
So basically in that video the guy said you can either climb this huge heavy fortified building to reach the top to assassinate the gang owner or you can stand at the street and shoot mindlessly at a stationary object for a few minutes until it falls...

I get that destruction is fun but not at expense of interesting gameplay.

I think this demo was just to show us the destructibility of the game, I'm sure they'll make it challenging. Maybe the building will shoot back while enemies distract you.
 
I said what I said yesterday, that it was a premature/immature bump. I was not arguing tech, just the hilarious lameness of the bump that was fanaticaly motivated only, as well as a juvenile wanna-be "call out" right here.

But keep fighting your warz. Go team go!

Can't you just for once admit that you may have been proven wrong?
 
Top Bottom