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[Aeonin]

...I'm only trying to provide some insight into what I believe to be the closest technology to what MS is proposing....

Since that post I've been racking my brain all kinds to try and come up with an answer.

Is there anything MS can do interestingly with the XBONE if the game was cloud based (OnLive-ish)...? With its graphical capabilities (what else would it do)?

I'm actually starting to think that if a game is online, can connect to an OnLive type service - the XBONE wouldn't help at all - and the game would look fantastic. They would have an online only version of the game with better assets, computation, etc. I could see that happening at the end of this generation and going into the next (XBONE2).

EDIT: Yeah, I think this is what they mean. Its very interesting. It won't make your XBONE any more powerful, but the games themselves would be of higher quality if accessed via cloud based service.

2nd EDIT: I wonder - could the XBONE be used to interpolate frames if just the framebuffer came in? Any other possible fancy effects?

 

[Godslay]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination

As for weather, that sounds possible but very contrived. Same thing for the far-away battle scenes, how much benefit is there to have them on the cloud compared to just being pre-rendered or rendered at low detail locally?



Doing latency sensitive stuff with high latency is a contradiction. What do you mean?

There are ways around it. The most recent example and one I've overused in other threads is latency sensitive ai calculations. Research using quake 3 ai locally and distributed shows that up to around 1 second of latency distributed ai outperformed local ai. After that it doesn't work. 1 second of latency is a lifetime. So if it can work for some latency sensitive items it is feasible that it can be implemented for latency insensitive items as well. I'm on my phone otherwise I'd link to it. When I get home I'll link to the white paper.

At heart though, I agree with you, but I also believe that we can engineer such a system and get tangible benefits out of it. It's an engineering challenge, but I think MS can tackle to some degree.

 

[2MF]

Sorry, your sentence was confusing, you said "local resources" before you mentioned OnLive servers. Made it sound like you were saying the client was running the engine.

Yeah, my phrasing was a bit sneaky, sorry about that

Bottom line, my point was that Onlive has very little to do with cloud gaming as proposed by Microsoft.

 

[TheExodu5]

Distributed rendering will never happen, at least not without an input lag inducing buffer.

You could send a frame to the cloud for post-procesing, but that would be grossly inefficient and would introduce compression artifacts. Many people's upload speeds wouldn't cope either.

My guess is that at best, the cloud will be available for time insensitive calculations...perhaps some form of distant AI or world simulation.

 

[KingFire]

I think some calculations can be done by the cloud and sent to the client's console. In case the player is playing offline, nothing is done on the cloud and the game uses some kind of inferior calculation to do the same thing.

Think of it like PhysX. Games don't need it but it does enhance the experience. If your GPU is ATI or simply is not powerful enough, the game uses the standard game physics engine, which is inferior.

I don't understand the outrage at MS for doing this. People wanted their games to look better and this is one way to do it.

 

[TheExodu5]

I think some calculations can be done by the cloud and sent to the client's console. In case the player is playing offline, nothing is done on the cloud and the game uses some kind of inferior calculation to do the same thing.

Think of it like PhysX. Games don't need it but it does enhance the experience. If your GPU is ATI or simply is not powerful enough, the game uses the standard game physics engine, which is inferior.

I don't understand the outrage at MS for doing this. People wanted their games to look better and this is one way to do it.

Many of us are arguing that games are not going to look better as a result. There are no viable ways to do so that I can think of without significant drawbacks (i.e. input lag and/or compression).

 

[ThisWreckage]

300,000 servers sounded like bullshit as soon as they said it. They made it sound like it was 300,000 physical servers.

 

[Metalmurphy]

People in glass houses

What about them?

 

[ParityBit]

Could care less what he says/thinks.

 

[Alx]

If a rendering element is not impacted by player's input, you might as well pre-render it, which is much more convenient than "cloud" calculation...

The thing is, you're not always interacting with everything. From what the MS guys said in different interviews, the smart part of their system is being able to define on the go which part will be handled by the console, and which part will be done by a server.
Big battle in the background ? Have it done "in the cloud". The player sends a rocket in the midst of that battle ? Have the console handle the part in the splash area of the rocket, keep everything else in the cloud.

I won't say it's how it's done or even if that scenario is realistic (I have no experience in such things). And it would obviously require additional and complex design from the programmer (that's where MS has to provide good development tools).
But as a general idea, something between "pre-render everything, and don't interact with it" and "render everything in real time so that the user can interact with it" seems possible.

 

[DesertFox]

Since that post I've been racking my brain all kinds to try and come up with an answer.

Is there anything MS can do interestingly with the XBONE if the game was cloud based (OnLive-ish)...? With its graphical capabilities (what else would it do)?

I'm actually starting to think that if a game is online, can connect to an OnLive type service - the XBONE wouldn't help at all - and the game would look fantastic. They would have an online only version of the game with better assets, computation, etc. I could see that happening at the end of this generation and going into the next (XBONE2).

EDIT: Yeah, I think this is what they mean. Its very interesting. It won't make your XBONE any more powerful, but the games themselves would be of higher quality if accessed via cloud based service.

2nd EDIT: I wonder - could the XBONE be used to interpolate frames if just the framebuffer came in? Any other possible fancy effects?

Yup I completely agree, I don't see how cloud computing can add anything to the local processing, but if it replaces it entirely? Then the graphics, AI, physics, etc. can continue to evolve without being limited by the hardware in your living room. Pretty cool possiblity, but the internet infrastructure needs to drastically improve before that can become a reality.

 

[grumble]

Distributed rendering will never happen, at least not without an input lag inducing buffer.

You could send a frame to the cloud for post-procesing, but that would be grossly inefficient and would introduce compression artifacts. Many people's upload speeds wouldn't cope either.

My guess is that at best, the cloud will be available for time insensitive calculations...perhaps some form of distant AI or world simulation.

But that's being done on the PS4 as well for individual games, see Destiny.

This is all bullshit anyways, it's just a bunch of PR statements to muddy the waters since the PS4 is significantly more powerful than the Xbone. We're falling for it too.

 

[Fried Food]

Jon is on twitter and destroying the games press

 

[Miles Quaritch]

Jon is on twitter and destroying the games press

Link?

 

[Bomber Bob]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

 

[Metalmurphy]

Jon is on twitter and destroying the games press

"Jonathan Blow ‏@Jonathan_Blow 1 h
Rather than investigating the cloud claims, game journalists seem to prefer the story "Jonathan Blow says bad things about Micrrosoft." Sigh"

Sums up my thoughts.

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

Maybe he's only allergic to PR bullshit.

 

[Dunlop]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

lol I totally forgot that Braid was exclusive to XBL when it first came out

 

[HyperCubed4]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

Braid isn't exclusive (anymore). Microsoft is shitting all over indies with their new console. Why wouldn't Jonathan be a little pissed if he thinks Microsoft is spouting nonsense?

 

[Perkel]

Link?

.

 

[Arkam]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

/Thread

/Blow

 

[ReturnOfTheRAT]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

Take your head out of the sand and pay attention to the role reversal that has occurred with indie developers from PS3/360 to PS4/One.

 

[i-Lo]

.

Which one do you think is easier? One that presents itself or one that needs to be investigated? And remember, the game is being played for "clicks".

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

If you really believe that, which you would if you haven't seen his underlying argument then it's sad.

 

[Dunlop]

Braid isn't exclusive. Microsoft is shitting all over indies. Why wouldn't Jonathan be a little pissed if he thinks Microsoft is spouting nonsense?

It's called professionalism.

What he is calling out right now has nothing to do with the "indie" topic. As someone else mentioned, he sounds like a jilted lover.

He is calling out MS on topics that you could be asking Sony about as well, while making an exclusive title for them. Grade school stuff

 

[Zombie James]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

Or MS has bullshit policies. Lots of indie developers agree.

 

[Miles Quaritch]

"Jonathan Blow ‏@Jonathan_Blow 1 h
Rather than investigating the cloud claims, game journalists seem to prefer the story "Jonathan Blow says bad things about Micrrosoft." Sigh"

Sums up my thoughts.

Maybe he's only allergic to bullshit.

Maybe because there's no validity to his claims?

If there is, I'm sure we'll hear it about soon enough though. Someone will eventually ask them about the claims.

 

[Micerider]

The thing is, you're not always interacting with everything. From what the MS guys said in different interviews, the smart part of their system is being able to define on the go which part will be handled by the console, and which part will be done by a server.
Big battle in the background ? Have it done "in the cloud". The player sends a rocket in the midst of that battle ? Have the console handle the part in the splash area of the rocket, keep everything else in the cloud.

I won't say it's how it's done or even if that scenario is realistic (I have no experience in such things). And it would obviously require additional and complex design from the programmer (that's where MS has to provide good development tools).
But as a general idea, something between "pre-render everything, and don't interact with it" and "render everything in real time so that the user can interact with it" seems possible.

I see how it makes sense, but it's an absolute nightmare to determine a fixed budget to render localy or online.

Besides, how will they determine prioritization of access to servers ressources? Will they allow it for big games and deny it for smaller games at peak hours? It all seem pretty cumbersome for something which seems to be limited in practice (no "low latency" calculation with big bandwidth need).

 

[PaulLFC]

Blow is full of shit himself.

Of course Azure is running on virtualized hardware, anything else wouldn't really be feasible. And it's pretty much standard, AWS is all "VMs", as is Google Compute.

As for the 300k number: While no one in the industry gives out this sort of information, it's unlikely that the 300k represent anywhere near the total number of physical machines. So 300k could very well be the number of dedicated servers just for XB1. In 2008 Microsoft mentioned they were adding tens of thousands of servers a month. That was before they even launched Azure. In 2009 they opened up their Chicago data center, which can hold anywhere from 200k - 400k servers. That's one data center, almost 5 years ago. Since then they've opened additional data centers in Iowa, Ireland, Amsterdam and Virgian, to name a few.

So yes, Blow is full of shit.

Sources:




http://www.globalfoundationservices...icrosoft-cloud-scale-data-center-designs.aspx

What exactly is he wrong about? He didn't dispute that they may have 300,000 virtual servers, which is what you seem to be saying. He disputed that they have 300,000 physical servers, and I would do the same. Comparisons to Azure as a whole are weak, as Azure powers a hell of a lot more than just Xbox Live.

As I said before, what exactly is the reason for them to have 10 times the current number of servers sitting there on day one when a proportion of them will remain unused? Xbox Live usage isn't suddenly going to increse tenfold on launch day.

Could care less what he says/thinks.

Yet you still posted in a thread about his opinion...

 

[Metalmurphy]

Maybe because there's no validity to his claims?

If there is, I'm sure we'll hear it about soon enough though. Someone will eventually ask them about the claims.

If there was no validity then it would be easy to invalidate them.

 

[JDSN]

Maybe because there's no validity to his claims?

If there is, I'm sure we'll hear it about soon enough though. Someone will eventually ask them about the claims.

Isnt he asking for journalists to do so in his last tweet? Doesn't that means that he wants people to find out for themselves rather than the "Blow is meany to poor MS" narrative that people are so pointlessly sticking to in this thread?

 

[HyperCubed4]

It's called professionalism.

What he is calling out right now has nothing to do with the "indie" topic. As someone else mentioned, he sounds like a jilted lover.

He is calling out MS on topics that you could be asking Sony about as well, while making an exclusive title for them. Grade school stuff

I'm not up to date on Sony's DRM as it were, but are they trying to justify it with some 300,000 server spiel?

 

[Miles Quaritch]

Isnt he asking for journalists to do so in his last tweet? Doesn't that means that he wants people to find out for themselves rather than the "Blow is meany to poor MS" narrative that people are so pointlessly sticking to in this thread?

Is any site claiming as much? I'm on my phone so can't check.

In any case, I'm sure the truth will surface eventually.

 

[i-Lo]

It's called professionalism.

What he is calling out right now has nothing to do with the "indie" topic. As someone else mentioned, he sounds like a jilted lover.

He is calling out MS on topics that you could be asking Sony about as well, while making an exclusive title for them. Grade school stuff

Yes, because it up the ass is such a remarkable show of professionalism. Same shit happened with CELL back in the day.

And as for not calling out Sony, they aren't the ones producing numbers like "40x" and nor have they made any claims about their games being "enhanced" by their cloud service.

 

[Hana-Bi]

If there was no validity then it would be easy to invalidate them.

Or the other way around?

"Hey MS is totally lying! Do you hear me? They are liars!" "And now investigate this, so I won't look like a fool..."

 

[ThusZarathustra]

Always hilarious to see the posters whose knee-jerk reactions about this sort of are that this is somehow personal for Blow, that he has some sort of horrible revenge scheme he needs to play out. Very, very telling about those posters and how much projection vs free-thinking they engage in.

J.Blow is basically on point here. The 300,000 servers claim and all of its pie-in-the-sky promises will be forgotten, just like the BS VelocityGirl-and-the-like claims of the previous generation. Over-promising is not functionally different than lying.

Blow is looking really, really immature and juvenile during all of this.

You've my thanks for proving my point for me.

 

[ymmv]

As I said before, what exactly is the reason for them to have 10 times the current number of servers sitting there on day one when a proportion of them will remain unused? Xbox Live usage isn't suddenly going to increse tenfold on launch day.

I think they plan to scale up to 300,000 servers in three, four years. That would make a lot more sense than starting the service with hundreds of thousands of servers when there are only a couple of million users and few/no games harnessing the "infinite power of the cloud" in late 2013/early 2014.

 

[Suikoguy]

Always hilarious to see the posters whose knee-jerk reactions about this sort of are that this is somehow personal for Blow, that he has some sort of horrible revenge scheme he needs to play out. Very, very telling about those posters and how much projection vs free-thinking they engage in.

J.Blow is absolutely on point here.

The 300,000 servers claim and all of its pie-in-the-sky promises will be forgotten, just like the BS VelocityGirl-and-the-like claims of the previous generation. Over-promising is not functionally different than lying.

Yep, there are some really sad posters here. One poster even went as far as to say his opinion should be invalid because he went through a bout of depression... holy shit.

 

[Metalmurphy]

Or the other way around?

"Hey MS is totally lying! Do you hear me? They are liars!" "And now investigate this, so I won't look like a fool..."

I guess one has to take into account which of the claims is more ridiculous.

 

[Four_Chamber]

Blow is looking really, really immature and juvenile during all of this.

 

[madmackem]

It's called professionalism.

What he is calling out right now has nothing to do with the "indie" topic. As someone else mentioned, he sounds like a jilted lover.

He is calling out MS on topics that you could be asking Sony about as well, while making an exclusive title for them. Grade school stuff

Hes calling out the 300k claim from ms and this super sauce 40 times thing, if sony had come out with this shit i dont doubt he would take issue with them, he doesnt seem the kind to pull punches.

 

[i-Lo]

Blow is looking really, really immature and juvenile during all of this.

Why?

 

[Hana-Bi]

I guess one has to take into account which of the claims is more ridiculous.

Well it seems a massive feature for MS. If they are gambling on online than these numbers aren't that ridiculous.

MS has the infrastructure to do this. Are they really gonna do this? I don't know, but I don't like calling out MS before e3...

 

[Aeonin]

Blow is looking really, really immature and juvenile during all of this.

It is bad press.

The journalistic community should've been the ones to investigate and clarify the issue.

 

[Kuroyume]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

He got rich by making a game people enjoyed... Which btw I thought was overrated. He didn't get rich because his game was an exclusive.

 

[hey_it's_that_dog]

It's called professionalism.

What he is calling out right now has nothing to do with the "indie" topic. As someone else mentioned, he sounds like a jilted lover.

He is calling out MS on topics that you could be asking Sony about as well, while making an exclusive title for them. Grade school stuff

What is "professionalism" exactly? It's trotted out whenever someone complains or stands up for themselves against an employer or other entity that they believe is in the wrong.

Blow works for himself. Perhaps he feels that his professional responsibility is to tell the truth, or what he believes to be the truth.

I don't know if he's right or wrong, but so many posts in here basically amount to "he should not speak his mind."

The fact that it's easy to construct a narrative where he "broke up" with MS and is now "in bed" with Sony doesn't negate the probability that the choices he's made have been made for good reasons. If he is saying negative things about MS, why not assume his negative opinion of MS is the cause of his move over to Sony rather than the result of it?

 

[Metalmurphy]

Well it seems a massive feature for MS. If they are gambling on online than these numbers aren't that ridiculous.

MS has the infrastructure to do this. Are they really gonna do this? I don't know, but I don't like calling out MS before e3...

Oh I'm not talking about the 300,000 servers. And whether their VMs or not I don't think it matters.

 

[hey_it's_that_dog]

Blow is looking really, really immature and juvenile during all of this.

What is he doing that is immature and juvenile?

Don't say "because he's obviously a Sony shill now!" because that's mindless, speculative horseshit.

 

[Tookay]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

So he owes MS forever now?

 

[Sandfox]

I think he has a point about the press not investigating MS' cloud claims.

 

[Suikoguy]

It is bad press.

The journalistic community should've been the ones to investigate and clarify the issue.

What "Journalistic Community" would you be referring too.

edit:

Also, who the fuck is going to pay for all of these servers? MS out of the kindness of their heart?

 

[StuBurns]

J Blow got rich with an xbox live arcade exclusive with microsoft and now is shitting all over them only because sony's got his next title exclusive

classy dude

You're wrong.

His 'shitting' on Microsoft has been consistent, with, and without a Sony contract.

I don't understand why people even think think him shitting on MS is going to help Sony, how many people are going to buy a PS4, and not buy an XBO because of these tweets? I would imagine not a single one, but just to show how utterly stupid the point is, even if he converted 150,000 people, and we all know that's utterly impossible, that would still only be 0.01% of the install base of the currently announced versions of The Witness.