Yep, so does me watching Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go in HD.
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Crackdown 3 uses cloud-based physics processing to enable environmental destruction
- Thread starter mocoworm
- Start date
Yep, so does me watching Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go in HD.
Cizeta-Moroder
Banned
You know NeoGAF, we really are the most powerful console ever made.
Banjo-Kazooie
Member
Thank the stars for Comcast suspending my internet cap for the past 2 years. Only good thing they've done for me 
Although, I guess 3.5GB per 24 hours of play isn't too terrible(?)
Although, I guess 3.5GB per 24 hours of play isn't too terrible(?)
Slateboard
Neo Member
This sounds very cool.
I imagine it's multiplayer-only so there's no 'Always Online' complaints.
I imagine it's multiplayer-only so there's no 'Always Online' complaints.
LiquidGotti
Banned
NO, not saying they are getting paid.
But yes I am saying it is a tech demo, that more than likely wont be representation of actual gameplay.
Love the title. There has to be some way to get the message across that they are pulling this "cloud" enhanced game thing off.
It's a live pre Alpha GAMEPLAY demo.
Not a live concept tech demo.
I'm sure there's something to be concerned about though.
It's a live pre Alpha GAMEPLAY demo.
Not a live concept tech demo.
I'm sure there's something to be concerned about though.
oho
gamechanger87
Member
So your argument is that the Xbox One is unable to play this game? You seriously are making your stand on that rather than the fact that they made a tech demo from a slice of the game that they enabled debug on to show things like number of servers used and tweaked weapons.
Other than that, what makes you believe the game won't have this in it. They aren't playing clips of a game. People are actually trying it themselves.
ultratruman
Banned
Yeah i thought this too. That freeform destruction wouldn't work well in a singleplayer story mode anyway.
To clarify he said offline they will still have limited destruction, they are centering the game around this feature so even the single player will have mass destruction, just probably not persistent debris, I really want to bust through walls or create new paths to take down targets or drive through the bottom of a building to chase someone down. I still believe these things will be possible in single player.
clearly LOL
Alx
Member
That's quite easy to estimate. The bandwidth requirement is apparently 2-4 Mbps (which seems to be in the same range as a Netflix stream by the way).
So in the (worst) case of a constant data stream at 4 Mbps, you'd have 4 x 3600 / 8 = 1800 MB / hour, = 1.8 GB/hour consumption. Playing two hours a day for the whole month would use 2 x 30 x 1.8 = 108 GB of data, which is less than half of the quotas you mentioned.
viveks86
Member
This is how most competent clouds work these days. Amazon does it too. Everything being demonstrated can be done by anyone on any platform using any elastic cloud. It really is the power of an elastic cloud. Spinning that as "most powerful console ever" is disingenuous, but that's how PR works I guess
RedAssedApe
Banned
Welcome to the new age
All that tells me is that there is indeed something to this. No way are they going to invest that much money into the cloud, only for it to be a bunch of bullshit like so many want to believe. I mean, some pretty smart people work at Microsoft and I don't think that they would be spending billions working on and promoting this just for smoke and mirrors.
IndieJones
Member
Fantastic drive-by post from a Tearaway avatar with the name GnawtyDog
foxdvd
Member
I am excited as hell for Crackdown 3. I honestly think it is going to be a blast coop with friends. I guess my biggest problems with all this cloud stuff is I just don't see the end product displaying a huge leap over other games. The game does not look any more impressive than the many other games coming out. Those big explosions shown in the video don't seem like something that can't be done without the cloud. It almost seems like they pushed some of the computing onto the cloud just to say they are using the cloud.
When gameplay comes out showing something leaps ahead of what current and future xbox/ps4 games have shown, then I will be impressed. If they had shown the destruction and never said anything about it being connected to the cloud I don't think we would have any threads on Gaf/Reddit/ect claiming "My god did you see crackdown 3? That is the most impressive destruction I have ever seen! How did the xbox do it?"
When gameplay comes out showing something leaps ahead of what current and future xbox/ps4 games have shown, then I will be impressed. If they had shown the destruction and never said anything about it being connected to the cloud I don't think we would have any threads on Gaf/Reddit/ect claiming "My god did you see crackdown 3? That is the most impressive destruction I have ever seen! How did the xbox do it?"
Mugatu
Member
I wouldn't say a high percentage of people have caps, a significant percentage have them but most are not enforced. Either way, it's not excessive as others have said and it's not like you're going to be playing this game and utilizing the server side stuff 24 hours a day.
It is a valid concern but I think you over emphasize it.
Gaming needs some new ideas so this is good. It will be interesting to see how BW, latency, data caps and server maintenance work with this in the real world. Right now I just kind of question why its necessary but I have not played the game to see all that it can do over what we have now. Guessing this make console lets expensive so more people buy it but someone has to take the hit for these servers and data usage. How does that get monetized? Is it going to be DLC packs that adds in these features in the future and you pay for it that way?
Well, currently it is only providing it's work to MS, aren't they?
llAuburnll
Banned
Which is what you keep doing. You just post how you're right and move on to blanketing statements of console warrior and such.
You argue that distributed systems are hard to code for and really should only be used when the application is necessary, like multiplayer for instance. The fact that something has not been done yet or that it has been historically or even intrinsically complicated is not a reason to NOT do it. You're not wrong when you talk about how some things can't be run in certain ways or how "good" or "optimized" code can't fix all problems. These are correct assertions. Yet again, the paradigms are changing and the technologies are improving. Sdks are improving.
So what I'm saying is you've routinely argued that because things may be complicated, are probably expensive, have historically not been feasible, etc are reasons why either this won't pan out or we won't see it in other games. But we are saying here it is. Something has obviously been figured out. The rumors are that it isn't even the only game using it in the pipeline.
Again though,you are speculating. It's like you are supplying things you know, almost like writing a text book just to give information, but they aren't really supporting arguments.
If you're arguing that there are hurdles that this tech has had to overcome or solve in order to be viable, ok got it. However, again, we are seeing results. Can this solve every issue? No absolutely not.
For my money, that physics multiplayer stuff looked like the most next-gen shit I've seen to date, and a next-level expression of an ideal I've been wanting to revisit since playing the astonishing Red Faction Guerrilla.
The obvious limitation is that since it must be online, this sort of thing works best for online multiplayer experiences. That's a gameplay limitation. But for the modes it would work well for, I can't see it as anything but a plus. There's another dev on GAF who said the way his team is using the Cloud is going to blow people away, so there finally seems to be some fire where the smoke was.
I don't know why anyone has to even entertain the console war nonsense. Just respond to points people make, not imagined ideas about which console they own as motivation for why they made the points. It's not like cloud streaming is some specific Microsoft advantage only they have. If it works well and makes the game successful, it would only motivate others to also implement such a thing in games. Which is, ya know, good... more expanded possibilities.
Who even cares about the PR nonsense of "20x more powerful" or whatever.
The obvious limitation is that since it must be online, this sort of thing works best for online multiplayer experiences. That's a gameplay limitation. But for the modes it would work well for, I can't see it as anything but a plus. There's another dev on GAF who said the way his team is using the Cloud is going to blow people away, so there finally seems to be some fire where the smoke was.
I don't know why anyone has to even entertain the console war nonsense. Just respond to points people make, not imagined ideas about which console they own as motivation for why they made the points. It's not like cloud streaming is some specific Microsoft advantage only they have. If it works well and makes the game successful, it would only motivate others to also implement such a thing in games. Which is, ya know, good... more expanded possibilities.
Who even cares about the PR nonsense of "20x more powerful" or whatever.
No, no.
No, sorry.
Onlive and Gaikai stream images and sounds directly to your machine. Your machine just becomes a glorified YouTube or Netflix, and the software takes your button-presses and sends them back to the server then actions them in the game and sends the picture back.
With Crackdown 3, when you fire a rocket at a building, the Xbox gathers all the maths behind what the rocket will do, the physics-data of particle 001 flying this way and hitting particle 002/003/004 and spinning that way – just numbers – and it sends this data to the Microsoft server.
The server then does the really heavy computing, turning the maths into directions for where the images will go and all the effects – stuff a current-gen console couldn't do at a huge scale – and sends back this animation data telling the console what to show on-screen.
It's just numbers being sent back and forth. There are no images or sounds being sent anywhere.
(This is still my layman's interpretation, but I think I get the difference.)
Ok, he said it guys, let's all go home
LukasTaves
Member
I agree with you on the performance scaling, but imo, the only way cloud processing will be feasible is precisely if they leverage some of the local processing.
Something has to be done locally to be able to hide latency, or improve image quality on a purely streaming solution. Even if they receive multiple possible in advance streams and chose the right one given a certain input. Otherwise you end up with a completely working solution using the cloud, but that won't appeal to anyone because the experience won't ever match a local running app or game.
Loading balancing between the console and the cloud is also precisely what crackdown is doing to be able to enable full destructibility and still maintain the responsiveness you'd expect from a local game.
I'm fairly certain it will be close, if not fully 1:1 in scope.
thehillissilent
Member
No, this is nothing at all like OnLive or Gaikai, which full run the game on servers and streams the video down to clients. This is basically similar to dedicated servers for multiplayer games. However, the servers are calculating very complex physics. The data is then shared with the clients which display animation and position data. The complexity of the physics is what makes this unique.
EDIT: beaten
Sure, but that's a shitty business plan for a middleware company if they only intend to have MS as a client.
AmaterasuOni
Banned
So when the cloud is offline... is the game paused or everything turns static or what? I mean, when you lose the power of 20 Xbones, I doubt that game would even run. Just wondering. I really don't understand the concept.
so its streaming the physics data. its not a video feed, but it's still streaming.
Well, Azure is more than just for Xbox One. The investment is for many other businesses and ideas. It just so happen MS make and maintain the infrastructure and have a console to test things on.
While other people can hire the Azure hardware, MS are bound to favour their own teams and tech.
gamechanger87
Member
Meh its a clickbait title and article, but since the demo and videos over the past 72 hours there have been a lot of drivebys claims that this is all a like and smoke and mirrors.
BiGBoSSMk23
A company being excited for their new game is a huge slap in the face to all the fans that liked their old games.
If you want to take it there, you're currently streaming NeoGAF from a server somewhere. But really, "streaming" is a term that was created to refer to downloading video in a manner that lets you watch as it's downloading.
Miles Quaritch
Member
And yet none have, I wonder why that is?
You're being too flippant in your point of view. An infrastructure like Azure can't just be bought on a whim, it takes years of heavy investment and no-one apart from MS is capable of doing this. Only MS had the forethought to design their console and have it beta tested in the future. Only MS had the vision to ensure their console would tap 100 per cent of the cloud 100 per cent of the time, gamers everywhere were simply too close minded and stuck in their ways to see the bright future that lay ahead had they just believed in that vision.
But no matter, the future is here and Crackdown 3 is but a small taste of what the cloud will bring to gaming.
Yep.
This is what I envisioned years ago with cloud based physics.
Very exciting times.
LiquidGotti
Banned
and even your link says
"We should say at this point that what we saw and played of Crackdown 3 was more tech demo than actual game. Crackdown 2 is still a long way from release
Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2015/08/05/crack...he-xbox-one-killer-app-5329378/#ixzz3i35aHbt8 "
Them investing in their servers isn't the exact same as them investing in Xbox cloud computing. I'm not saying that this won't work or is bullshit, just that the money deals with all their cloud services
backflip10019
Member
I'm going to laugh my ass off if this turns out to be as bad as Crackdown 2. All that tech, please don't be boring. I loved Crackdown 1
Nothing will ever be that disappointing. Crackdown 2 was a special kind of bland.
SEGAvangelist
Member
And it didn't even have a 1-year dev cycle, right?
LiquidGotti
Banned
Yea i can understand it being close, but by no means does this video show what will actually be played when its released. the tech is insane, but I know not to be fooled by these types of tech demos.
Mushroomer25
Member
If Microsoft's entire cloud infrastructure has gone down, it's likely you have bigger problems to contend with than Crackdown 3 multiplayer.
I'm going to laugh my ass off if this turns out to be as bad as Crackdown 2. All that tech, please don't be boring. I loved Crackdown 1
As long as there is no mutant activity, the game is already much better.
The footage talks about bringing the gang warfare back and expanding on the first game's idea of taking out weapons factories to reduce a gangs effectiveness etc. I just want that with way more details and blowing stuff up.
gamechanger87
Member
Obviously, but its a vertical slice from the game that they converted into a tech demo. I think you are just attempting to troll for the sake of it.
Bish, even responded to you.
Chezzymann
Member
Well, neither of the other two console makers have access to anything close to Azure (Microsoft servers) so the xbox is the only console that can do something like this unless someone else wants to spend a shitload of money renting someone elses server farms
Just like any other game being run on a dedicated server, when the server goes down the game goes down.