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

EvB said:
  • I think it will come gradually to more and more titles, both because it may offer some relief AND unique possibilities to aging, fixed spec hardware but also because of other factors.
  • Digital purchasing is becoming more and more common, there is an increasingly larger pool of players that has access to an internet connection.
  • Beta's and paid Early access are now starting to show up for Single Player games and games themselves are being created with this in mind (See Hitman)
  • Episodic gaming has had a few hits, see Killer Instinct and Life is Strange.

Throw in Freemium titles and Free to play games and you it feels very much like the gaming landscape is changing. Whilst "Online only" games are never going to occupy all genres and games, I think that we will end up at the point where we are all effectively connected all the time (I'm pretty much there already)
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Exactly! Totally agree. And yes, we are pretty much always online already. MS tried force it 2 yrs ago instead of letting it happen naturally and organically like they should of done. Agree 100%..it's going to happen and I'm excited for that. I think a lot of us will be once we get a better understanding of it and really get to experience the benefits. 20 times the computing power in its infancy is huge.
 
bj00rn_ said:
As usual there's no point in overestimating nor underestimating this.."feature". It actually works in limited scenarios. Yes it's a limited thing, but it's not a bad thing at all. And it can work on all types of platforms, although basically only MS is doing it right now.
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I popped by the XboxOne subreddit and your comment was posted as "flip flopping" from "Cloud gaming is not possible" to "it's possible on all platforms"

It's weird how they seem to really dislike GAF.
 
xblarcade said:
Anyone been able to find any documentation on Xbox Live Compute from a developers standpoint?

Specifically I'm looking for information around whether it is simply VM support or more of a Services based architecture
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It's detailed thoroughly in the documentation accompanying the leaked xdk
 
JaggedSac said:
You are describing what Crackdown is doing. Not typical MP servers. A typical MP server(full box or single VM) is a "multi-threaded application on a multi-core CPU" that happens to be running remotely.
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Look, this argument started because you claimed that scaling is part of things that the infrastructure provider does, and that if a third-party would try do develop a scaling solution, that infrastructure provider would have failed. I said that this is incorrect, since you can achieve a much better efficiency by scaling on the level of software architecture, using, for instance, frameworks like Orleans to develop a distributed application, and that a third party could provide such development knowledge and tools. Why do you mention that "typical" multiplayers do not do that? That they are not doing that, and that a third party could improve that by providing services or software components that help in building a multiplayer server that does that, was my entire point!
 
That tech video was one of the most impressive displays I've seen in a while.

That said, I really hope some of that awesome destruction will be in the single player campaign, because I'm just not a multiplayer person.
 
Pathfinder said:
Look out everyone. Nostradamus in the house.

Forget about discussing how revolutionary the tech is. Let's start worrying about a hypothetical situation that has no evidence to support it.
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Yeah because no one can have a sense of humour or tell a joke on the internet.

Try checking the post I made after that post, where I did actually talk about the tech.
 
Not this PR cloud crap again... You don't need servers for physics calculation in games, our modern CPUs are fast enough to do it themselves.
 
stat84 said:
Why console only?Why not more powerful than most logically priced PCs too?
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MS azure. This isn't limited by platform but who owns and is willing this pay for servers.

OT -

*In CPU performance.

Good to see the recommended connection speed is quite low so it seems this is quite viable there. I guess the thing that holds wide scale adaptation or it been used outside a couple first party games is the cost of the servers.
 
I think the release of the game will ultimately show how successful it's cloud implementation is, and how likely we might be to see it's use in future releases. I'd definitely be interested to see how a non cloud based game tackles similar destruction, using GPU accelerated physics instead. I feel we may still get one before the end of the console cycle.
 
ElTorro said:
Look, this argument started because you claimed that scaling is part of things that the infrastructure provider does, and that if a third-party would try do develop a scaling solution, that infrastructure provider would have failed. I said that this is incorrect, since you can achieve a much better efficiency by scaling on the level of software architecture, using, for instance, frameworks like Orleans to develop a distributed application, and that a third party could provide such development knowledge and tools. Why do you mention that "typical" multiplayers do not do that? That they are not doing that, and that a third party could improve that by providing services or software components that help in building a multiplayer server that does that, was my entire point!
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That there is no reason to do it, unless you are doing something along the lines of Crackdown(which I wasn't talking about). Which you find financially unfeasible(which is what kicked off the discussion). You are thinking that today's multiplayer servers are inefficient in their usage of their VMs? You seem to be trying to solve a problem that does not exist for traditional MP.

You are in fact discussing a solution for making local/hybrid computation more financially feasible. lol Which I do agree a 3rd party solution would be useful for. In comes Cloudgine.
 
Yautja_Warrior said:
Try checking the post I made after that post, where I did actually talk about the tech.
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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.
 
"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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

Sony doesn't have the infrastructure to offer this kind of experience on this kind of level.
 
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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They are incapable of doing so. They are years behind in this.
 
I'm a big fan of the tech but I'm curious what the overhead is and, in turn, what the cost to consumers will be. Is it included in your gold subscription? Will they charge an additional fee on top of that?

Glancing through the preset Azure prices, rentals for a machine capable of such computations can get pretty expensive. Keep in mind that this is for a ridiculous amount of hours (700+, about a month) though.

Azure price calculator for anyone interested.
 
If this is a success I hope they continue pushing it. Since this kinda tech is infancy you'd expect even better gains in the future. I just hope the game is as fun as the first.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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!"
 
Lady Siara said:
I'm a big fan of the tech but I'm curious what the overhead is and, in turn, what the cost to consumers will be. Is it included in your gold subscription? Will they charge an additional fee on top of that?

Glancing through the preset Azure prices, rentals for a machine capable of such computations can get pretty expensive. Keep in mind that this is for a ridiculous amount of hours (700+, about a month) though.

Azure price calculator for anyone interested.
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Expect DLC out the ass.
 
JaggedSac said:
That there is no reason to do it, unless you are doing something along the lines of Crackdown(which I wasn't talking about). Which you find financially unfeasible(which is what kicked off the discussion). You are thinking that today's multiplayer servers are inefficient in their usage of their VMs? You seem to be trying to solve a problem that does not exist.
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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.
 
Lady Siara said:
I'm a big fan of the tech but I'm curious what the overhead is and, in turn, what the cost to consumers will be. Is it included in your gold subscription? Will they charge an additional fee on top of that?

Glancing through the preset Azure prices, rentals for a machine capable of such computations can get pretty expensive. Keep in mind that this is for a ridiculous amount of hours (700+, about a month) though.

Azure price calculator for anyone interested.
Click to expand...

Well I suppose Sony can just charge for playing online and significantly improve their online experience with the money.
 
Wont the price of Azure go down in time?

It seems like a really strong front for MS moving forward. I very much like how MS has an entire ecosystem that Xbox is benefiting off of with Azure and Windows.

I'm so excited to see what else they do. It sounds like they can push this heavily with more exclusives, if at least to make game physics more immersive. I seriously am super impressed with just the debris staying in the game world instead of disappearing like in most games.
 
FordGTGuy said:
Sony doesn't have the infrastructure to offer this kind of experience on this kind of level.
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They don't need to own the infrastructure to utilize it.

EvB said:
Well I suppose Sony can just charge for playing online and significantly improve their online experience with the money.
Click to expand...

Hopefully this doesn't give MS and Sony justification for raising the price of XBL/PS+ in the future.
 
Krisprolls said:
Not this PR cloud crap again... You don't need servers for physics calculation in games, our modern CPUs are fast enough to do it themselves.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

Yeah... not sure Sony could pull it off in 18 months, they haven't even git their online services nailed down in 6 years.
 
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