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Crackdown 3 uses cloud-based physics processing to enable environmental destruction

FordGTGuy said:
Sony doesn't have the infrastructure to offer this kind of experience on this kind of level.
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Just to throw that in, Sony could just buy stuff on Azure like every other business. :-P (Or go to one of the many other operators of cloud infrastructure. Microsoft' business is big, but it ain't even the biggest one. Currently, they are already working with Rackspace to implement things like the Sony Entertainment Network, if I remember correctly.) If they are willing to pay the price that said operator demands.
 
chrislowe said:
I dont see anything that should not be possible without the cloud anyway.

Just some clever programming
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This seems like a well informed opinion. Hey developers, you should hire this guy. He says that all you need to do is program better and you can get CPUs to work better. It's just plain science.
 
ElTorro said:
Every real-world application is inefficient in their usage of VMs compared to what I described. If you can achieve an increase in efficiency of just 20%, that translates to some serious savings for an overall data center. Let alone the fact that VMs allocate, deallocate, and move across physical machines very slowly, impacting all kinds of nice features, like automatic clustering of active computation on fewer physical machines in order to save energy. That is all ongoing research.
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Traditional MP server instances are largely static in the amount of resources they need and actively use at any given time. The game loop is pretty consistent.
 
EvB said:
It reads much like concern trolling....

but in response to that, the tech for Crackdown is not limited to multiplayer games, it is limited to online games.

Those aren't necessarily the same thing. There is nothing to stop them enabling you to go into the city by yourself once moore's law has had it's way with the azure servers.
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Because criticism is always trolling, no one can say anything bad about their beloved console these days without it being trolling.

I loved the 1st Crackdown on 360 (Crackdown 2 was shit though) and I'm interested in this game and the tech looks great but there are still a lot of questions about the tech, things like...

How it's going to work with single player, if it does at all?

If it does work in single player and someone loses connection, will single player stop working?
 
serikson45 said:
People laugh at it now, but when internet connections are fast worldwide there will be a sharp decline in consumers owning physical hardware.
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lol no

The fat vs thin client cycle has been with us as long as computing has existed. There will always be a need for as much local CPU as you can afford / fit into a device, because of the laws of physics.
 
Very very exciting for Xbox One owners, it looked super cool from that clip in that Gamescom vidoc. I fess up to being one of those who thought the cloud stuff was just marketing talking.
It will be interesting to see the effects they can make in the full game, looks sweeeet.
 
ElTorro said:
Just to throw that in, Sony could just buy stuff on Azure like every other business. :-P (Or go to one of the many other operators of cloud infrastructure. Microsoft' business is big, but it ain't even the biggest one. Currently, they are already working with Rackspace to implement things like the Sony Entertainment Network, if I remember correctly.) If they are willing to pay the price that said operator demands.
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I think the bigger question is if Sony could afford to rent all that server space. Microsoft can essentially just write off any strain on Azure as a necessary sacrifice to push the XBox brand, and promotion for their cloud systems. They own the whole hog, so there's virtually no investment required on their part to utilize it.

Sony however, would need to be a very significant fee (and keep paying it for the entire life of the game) to a cloud provider - or build one from the ground up. They don't have the capital for the latter. If they did the former, its' likely they'd have to push some of that cost out to the consumer.
 
Yautja_Warrior said:
Because criticism is always trolling, no one can say anything bad about their beloved console these days without it being trolling.

I loved the 1st Crackdown on 360 (Crackdown 2 was shit though) and I'm interested in this game and the tech looks great but there are still a lot of questions about the tech, things like...

How it's going to work with single player, if it does at all?

If it does work in single player and someone loses connection, will single player stop working?
Click to expand...

You should go and read some stuff and get back to us. Single Player/Online Co-Op will have a campaign with limited destruction and be playable offline. They are going this route because orbs would be unobtainable and you can't have a campaign if the city is destroyed. You are supposed to save the city not destroy it.

Multiplayer will be 100% destructible in a different world and will be justified by the lore.
 
ElTorro said:
Just to throw that in, Sony could just buy stuff on Azure like every other business. :-P (Or go to one of the many other operators of cloud infrastructure. Microsoft' business is big, but it ain't even the biggest one. Currently, they are already working with Rackspace to implement things like the Sony Entertainment Network, if I remember correctly.) If they are willing to pay the price that said operator demands.
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They would still have to buy it on a per game basis unless they went all in for multiple games and that would get expensive. Otherwise they'll just take servers down when a game doesn't sell well or the community dies, and that would suck.
 
gamechanger87 said:
This seems like a well informed opinion. Hey developers, you should hire this guy. He says that all you need to do is program better and you can get CPUs to work better. It's just plain science.
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So he is the one that stole the optimise button!
key.php
 
Yautja_Warrior said:
I loved the 1st Crackdown on 360 (Crackdown 2 was shit though) and I'm interested in this game and the tech looks great but there are still a lot of questions about the tech, things like...

How it's going to work with single player, if it does at all?

If it does work in single player and someone loses connection, will single player stop working?
Click to expand...

With all due respect, these questions have been answered so many times both @ Gamescom and here.
 
Yautja_Warrior said:
Because criticism is always trolling, no one can say anything bad about their beloved console these days without it being trolling.

I loved the 1st Crackdown on 360 (Crackdown 2 was shit though) and I'm interested in this game and the tech looks great but there are still a lot of questions about the tech, things like...

How it's going to work with single player, if it does at all?

If it does work in single player and someone loses connection, will single player stop working?
Click to expand...

The single player campaign does not leverage the server physics. The destruction is minimized and you can't level the entire city. There is 4 player co-op for the campaign, but there's no mention if it uses the servers at all. My guess is that the campaign co-op will just use p2p.

There is a multiplayer mode that is on a completely separate map and that's the one that uses the servers and has all the destruction turned on.

http://www.windowscentral.com/crackdown-3-multiplayer-game-will-blow-you-and-everything-else-away
 
Yautja_Warrior said:
Because criticism is always trolling, no one can say anything bad about their beloved console these days without it being trolling.

I loved the 1st Crackdown on 360 (Crackdown 2 was shit though) and I'm interested in this game and the tech looks great but there are still a lot of questions about the tech, things like...

How it's going to work with single player, if it does at all?

If it does work in single player and someone loses connection, will single player stop working?
Click to expand...

Read the thread, it's been discussed several times.
 
EvB said:
5 years from now games companies will be bragging our their cloud power number.
Digital Foundry will be running network analysis to see how many servers you are connecting to and who has the best implementation.

it'll be the new 1080p

GAF will be all like
"Eww my eyes, I can't physically play a game that only runs on only 48 clouds. Gross"

"48 clouds lol"

"DAT 64 clouds! I can't wait to play this game!"
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Lol, no way will it play out like that in 5 years, not even close. Handling CPU based physics and handling other areas of graphics or the rendering pipeline are two entirely different things. Latency sensitive graphics rendering is the problem area, and the area where hardware, along with internet connection, financial viability and scenario reliability come in to play.

Even the recent Nvidia cloud based lighting demo highlighted this. They needed a GeForce Titan in every server (imagine the costs!), and even then only to aid in indirect lighting. They concluded that it would not be viable for things like Shadow Map Renders, Direct Illumination, Composites, Post-Processing etc. Remember, some of these elements of rendering are things that are latency sensitive for a reason, rendering at speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than what your internet bandwidth could provide. Cloud computation for graphics rendering or video games is definitely going to be a thing of the future, but it's advantages are likely going to remain specific and limited, at least for the next decade or so.

Then there's the financial aspect of it. Microsoft are doing this with Crackdown because they have the servers readily available to leverage. That will not always be the case, not if every other game is using them, especially games that are hugely popular. There's a cost to those servers, and running them, and the fact that using them means they cannot be used elsewhere. When game manufacturers aren't even willing to eat the cost on console hardware itself, you really think they'll be happy to eat the cost of countless servers just so we can enjoy some better AI, physics or whatever else? I can't see it being mass feasible.
 
Bizzquik said:
"Crackdown 3 effectively turns your Xbox One into the most powerful console ever made"

Only if it doesn't work.

If it does work, Sony will bring a cloud-based game to market in 18 months after its release, so any 'advantage' would be short-lived.
These companies just ape each other's stuff, tit for tat.

Still, excited to see how this game actually plays.
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lol

Sony can't even match XBL from 2007.
 
You know what's hilarious. The tech is literally been proven and shown in live demos, and there still people labelling this as PR fluff.

Brilliant.

Either way, I'm really excited by what this brings to gaming as a whole.
 
Mushroomer25 said:
I think the bigger question is if Sony could afford to rent all that server space. Microsoft can essentially just write off any strain on Azure as a necessary sacrifice to push the XBox brand, and promotion for their cloud systems. They own the whole hog, so there's virtually no investment required on their part to utilize it.

Sony however, would need to be a very significant fee (and keep paying it for the entire life of the game) to a cloud provider - or build one from the ground up. They don't have the capital for the latter. If they did the former, its' likely they'd have to push some of that cost out to the consumer.
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Bear Cub in Sky said:
They would still have to buy it on a per game basis unless they went all in for multiple games and that would get expensive. Otherwise they'll just take servers down when a game doesn't sell well or the community dies, and that would suck.
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While I threw that comment in half-jokingly, because the irony of Sony buying infrastructure from Microsoft would be really funny, you are assuming that Microsoft can use its own servers for free, or at least for a non-trivial amount of money. That is not the case. Building and running those data centers costs money, and every unit of server time that is used by Microsoft itself, is server time that cannot be sold to customers for profit anymore.

So, while they get their own server time for cheaper, they don't get it for free, or even for cheap.
 
I'm still not convinced. Not saying it's isnt true, but I'm not going to believe it until I'm playing it in my living room.
 
I thought it looked pretty good and the scale was impressive for sure, more so than in any game I have seen. Otherwise the game itself didn't look visually impressive at all really. It looks decent but this feature is super cool.

The cloud stuff though.
 
Mushroomer25 said:
This is clearly false. The level of destruction in Crackdown has never been done before - why wouldn't another game have topped it already if it was possible with the tech in the box?

These consoles have limits. The cloud can extend them.
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No released next gen games so far topped Red Faction from last gen, so I guess these next gen console are weaker than last gen machines. Great logic.
 
inpHilltr8r said:
They'll just rent it from Amazon.
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Does anybody in this thread have a fair idea on how much that would cost? I'm sure Sony could work out a partnership (just brand every game as 'Powered By Amazon') for a lower rate, but it still seems like a massive recurring cost to take on.
 
JaggedSac said:
They have. But they should procure more storage space for everyone before worrying about any sort of cloud computation project.
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No they haven't.

There's still not even basic features such as name changes or appearing offline. It took them 8 years to make a party chat

The idea that Sony would just roll this out in 18 months to nullify the advantage is hilarious.
 
ElTorro said:
While I threw that comment in half-jokingly, because the irony of Sony buying infrastructure from Microsoft would be really funny, you are assuming that Microsoft can use its own servers for free, or at least for a non-trivial amount of money. That is not the case. Building and running those data centers costs money, and every unit of server time that is used by Microsoft itself, is server time that cannot be sold to customers for profit anymore.

So, while they get their own server time for cheaper, they don't get it for free, or even for cheap.
Click to expand...

Everything being under the same company ensures that Microsoft can use those servers at a lower cost than Sony could ever get from a third party. Microsoft would be willing to sacrifice some profit on Azure services, because they know its' directly translating to increased revenue from XBox Live, game sales, and console sales.
A third party server provider has no benefit gained when Sony uses their systems. Sony can offer a branding deal, or some further assistance - but unless that server's owner has something to gain by Playstation using said server - it will never be priced as low as an Azure server used by Microsoft. They can only reach cost parity by purchasing a major server farm (unlikely, considering Sony's position as a company), or giving the server host some percentage of Playstation revenue.
 
ElTorro said:
Just to throw that in, Sony could just buy stuff on Azure like every other business. :-P (Or go to one of the many other operators of cloud infrastructure. Microsoft' business is big, but it ain't even the biggest one. Currently, they are already working with Rackspace to implement things like the Sony Entertainment Network, if I remember correctly.) If they are willing to pay the price that said operator demands.
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Isn't it like $75 per hour per 100k users?

I thought I saw it mentioned in a thread.
 
Mushroomer25 said:
Does anybody in this thread have a fair idea on how much that would cost? I'm sure Sony could work out a partnership (just brand every game as 'Powered By Amazon') for a lower rate, but it still seems like a massive recurring cost to take on.
Click to expand...

The cost would indeed be significant, but could be offset by the revenue from PS+. And as El Toro said, the fact is that it's not free for MS either, just cheaper.
 
ElTorro said:
While I threw that comment in half-jokingly, because the irony of Sony buying infrastructure from Microsoft would be really funny, you are assuming that Microsoft can use its own servers for free, or at least for a non-trivial amount of money. That is not the case. Building and running those data centers costs money, and every unit of server time that is used by Microsoft itself, is server time that cannot be sold to customers for profit anymore.

So, while they get their own server time for cheaper, they don't get it for free, or even for cheap.
Click to expand...

I never assumed it was free. Where did you read into that? It's certainly cheaper for MS and they have shown actual commitment, though.
 
inpHilltr8r said:
They'll just rent it from Amazon.
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Sony hasn't got that kind of money to throw around just to compete with Microsoft, nor do they have any reason to. Cloud powered games like Crackdown 3 are still untested. Odds are they won't hit the mainstream for years to come outside of first party MS games.

It's a nice thing for MS to have even if only for the positive buzz it creates for Azure and gamers could really benefit from the tech, but Sony can rest easy for as long as the PS4 continues to sell as remarkably well as it has so far.
 
Ridiculous thread title aside, i'm glad this game is also going to have a single player component that only uses the power of the console.

I think it sets a really bad precedent for developers to hold their games online only with an excuse of server side physics calculations. I can only imagine something like holding a game always online through water physics only possible through the cloud or something like that, even though the absolute rest of the game is perfectly playable alone.

Need for Speed really is leaving a bad taste in my mouth
 
So, I ask the question - does this technology make the Xbox One more powerful? Jones nods. Does it, effectively, make it the most powerful console ever made while those servers are running? Jones nods.
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Um, no. It doesn't do anything to the Xbox One. When running this the Xbox One is still exactly as powerful as the Xbox One when it isn't running it.

To be fair to Dave Jones though, it's largely down to the leading questions.
 
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