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[p3tran]

Microsoft has been spewing BS non stop for damage control. Infinite power of the cloud, 200Gbps bandwidth etc etc.

yeap, and its a bit sad to see lots of people eating up the bull, and furthermore hitting on people like this one. He did make one of the best indie games this generation, right? so that alone talks enough for the person.
Better pay attention to what guys like this one say, because chances are you are maybe not going to get many true opinions and assessments about microsoft and this situation.

the smartest thing microsoft can do right now, is completely cut all the bullshit about the cloud an its power.
ok, you want the servers so you can do other things, we get it, but shut up with the bullshit!

 

[eot]

Common sense and the minimal knowledge about networking/computing.

There are things it could be used for, like pathfinding in games like Dwarf Fortress. It doesn't matter if it's delayed 100ms because it's not something you're interacting with directly. That said I don't think you'll ever see anything like that in practice.

 

[Godslay]

As someone with common sense and minimal knowledge about networking/computing I can confirm this.


What specific (and go in as much detail as you'd like) do you want to be educated on?

I've heard all I need to hear.

 

[twobear]

I like how Joe Blow is the go-to expert for MS info when by his own admission he hasn't worked with Xbone at all.

He did make one of the best indie games this generation, right? so that alone talks enough for the person.

Oh come on, hardly. He's made a single good game.

 

[Metalmurphy]

Sony said that backwards compatibility will be available on the PS4 via the cloud.
http://www.destructoid.com/ps4-has-cloud-based-backwards-compatibility-246152.phtml

Also, you will be able to stream all of your PS4 games to your Vita for off-tv play via the cloud.
http://www.psvitahub.com/2013/05/official-ps4-site-confirms-ps-vita.html


Both companies have made bold claims about the cloud and we'll see if it hold's true.

Not only is that completely different, you should also check what my comments on GAF about that were.

Spoiler

It's not happening any time soon, but keep on thinking I'm completely one sided.

 

[Hero_of_the_Day]

Why is The Witness being called an exclusive, when it is also coming out on PC and IOS, which will both have far larger install bases than either XBO or PS4 when it comes out?

 

[KHarvey16]

This isn't really a point for contention. We don't know what was faked from the demo yet, but no matter what it NEEDED to be faked. A live demo of voice control tech would be completely and utterly idiotic.

Why? The guy was wearing a microphone. Do you hear all of the ambient noise amplified through the speakers? Of course not. Not to say it definitely wasn't controlled through other means but the idea that it must have been is silly.

 

[milsorgen]

Well, are they virtualized or not?

It's the Azure platform, of course. That's how most servers are these says without paying an arm an a leg for dedicated.

 

[Angelus Errare]

I must be missing something. Did anyone actually not think these servers were virtual?

Of course they are, it's friggin Azure. Doesn't mean the performance is bad at all.

This. I thought it was common sense.

 

[Tamanon]

Why is The Witness being called an exclusive, when it is also coming out on PC and IOS, which will both have far larger install bases than either XBO or PS4 when it comes out?

PCs are never counted towards exclusivity.

 

[Kinyou]

I still don't get how this cloud bullshit is even remotely supposed to work. It was already dubious (and proven to be false) in Sim City. And even if it's real It would mean that everyone with a bad internet connection would have a consequently worse experience. How would anyone think that's a good idea?

"oh, game is buffering again, guess my roomate is downloading something"

 

[KHarvey16]

I still don't get how this cloud bullshit is even remotely supposed to work. It was already dubious (and proven to be false) in Sim City. It would also mean that everyone with a bad internet connection would have a consequently worse experience. How would anyone think that's a good idea?

It could be anything from reduced graphics and effects to longer load times if the connection goes away or slows down in single player. Or, in other words, the benefits realized by offloading some tasks won't be available.

 

[Jezbollah]

Microsoft using dat Hyper-V!!!

Honestly, it's all bollocks. I pay my gold fee, have a fibre connection that can download 8 megabytes a second, and it still takes 10 minutes to download a 300mb file.

MS will get away with what they can with XBL, because delivering an excellent service would not be profitable. It's all smoke and mirrors.


Edit: Just to add a little here, I did a google search for "Microsoft server farms" to see exactly what major infrastructure centres they had in the world. This is an article that, DISCLAMER, is two years old - but goes to show they at the time had two farms in one facility, in the western USA.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8850861/Global-server-farms-around-the-world.html

Quote how that will perform for gamers not in the USA is beyond me.

 

[Hero_of_the_Day]

PCs are never counted towards exclusivity.

Yeah. I get the whole "console exclusive" thing. It just seems extra dumb in the case of something like this that is releasing so early in the new console life that the system it is "exclusively" coming to will easily be the smallest of the three systems it's actually coming to.

 

[Deleted member 1235]

Fucking of course the servers are virtual wtf Jonathan blow, it's 2013' I'd be fucking surprised if they weren't virtual and scaling as needed. And I'd like to see his 10000 servers on one host.
If the servers were NOT virtual that would be worth a chuckle

 

[Soi-Fong]

Man.. Soo many MS apologists here. Sad really... What Blow is saying isn't wrong. What MS has been spouting is complete bullshit regarding the cloud.

 

[Iacobellis]

Man.. Soo many MS apologists here. Sad really... What Blow is saying isn't wrong. What MS has been spouting is complete bullshit regarding the cloud.

It is funny as hell to see Microsoft doing everything wrong that Sony did in 2005-2006. Remember when NVIDIA claimed the RSX in the PS3 was capable of 2TFLOPS? Remember all of the CG trailers?

 

[Dunlop]

Man.. Soo many MS apologists here. Sad really... What Blow is saying isn't wrong. What MS has been spouting is complete bullshit regarding the cloud.

When he starts calling out Sony's WORLD'S FASTEST GAMING NETWORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(coming soon)

Then I might remove him from the Sony shill section of my roladex

 

[SPDIF]

I'm not going to get into the whole "the cloud allows x40 processing power" thing, but I don't know why people find it so hard to believe MS has 300,000 servers.

They've been in the cloud business for a while now, they have datacentres all over the world, likely totalling over 1 million servers.

300,000 (virtual) servers is nothing to them.

 

[Protome]

I'm not saying it didn't need to be faked. I completely understand the difficulties in showing something like that in a presentation. But their presentation made it seem as if it were live.

Now that they have faked the presentation while claiming it was live, I'm going to be suspicious of any other claims they make.

So I am suspicious of their claim of 300,000 servers.

Well the whole point of the presentation was to show users what they can expect from the console. So, imitating the controls in a manner that should be very similar to the final product is good enough. It's common practice when creating interfaces and demonstrating them.

I mean, when devs show off trailers at conferences the game very rarely looks like what they're showing when they show it. It's an unfinished product and there's still changes to be made, it's why nobody shows trailers for their game where's it's just wireframes running around.

Spoiler

Except EA apparently.

Why? The guy was wearing a microphone. Do you hear all of the ambient noise amplified through the speakers? Of course not. Not to say it definitely wasn't controlled through other means but the idea that it must have been is silly.

Then it wouldn't be running using the Kinect sensor, so it's still faking it to some degree. Not majorly, but that was my point.

 

[Maxrunner]

Really doesn't like Microsoft does he

And do you?

 

[Deleted member 1235]

Man.. Soo many MS apologists here. Sad really... What Blow is saying isn't wrong. What MS has been spouting is complete bullshit regarding the cloud.

Bullshit he's completely wrong on the servers point. Ms didn't say hosts, they said servers. A virtual server is a server and 3 virtual servers running at capacity on 1 host that is maxed is a better use of hardware than 1 server per host. Dude needs to go back to programming and shut up about infrastructure shit.

 

[moargoolus]

This is what I'm afraid of happening...

 

[Kinyou]

It could be anything from reduced graphics and effects to longer load times if the connection goes away or slows down in single player. Or, in other words, the benefits realized by offloading some tasks won't be available.

And that sounds pretty terrible to me. They would lose even more people than they do already through always online. People with no internet at all is rather uncommon, but people with bad internet? That's widely spread.

 

[Soi-Fong]

This is what I'm afraid of happening...

Lol It might get even worst than that. Haha

 

[Bulzeeb]

those that buy ms phones and aren't employes or shareholders?

what if they just like Nokia, I admit thats the only reason I have for trying out a windows phone but still not enough to warrant my puchase

 

[mutsu]

To be honest, my biggest concern is that we are wasting so much of Earth's resources on gaming alone... Better spent elsewhere.

 

[JDSN]

Why is The Witness being called an exclusive, when it is also coming out on PC and IOS, which will both have far larger install bases than either XBO or PS4 when it comes out?

Its helps with the "He is teh shill" narrative.

 

[Hana-Bi]

Microsoft using dat Hyper-V!!!

Honestly, it's all bollocks. I pay my gold fee, have a fibre connection that can download 8 megabytes a second, and it still takes 10 minutes to download a 300mb file.

MS will get away with what they can with XBL, because delivering an excellent service would not be profitable. It's all smoke and mirrors.


Edit: Just to add a little here, I did a google search for "Microsoft server farms" to see exactly what major infrastructure centres they had in the world. This is an article that, DISCLAMER, is two years old - but goes to show they at the time had two farms in one facility, in the western USA.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8850861/Global-server-farms-around-the-world.html

Quote how that will perform for gamers not in the USA is beyond me.

Most Xbox Live content is routed through Microsoft's Xbox Live servers. For the Xbox Live launch in 2002, Microsoft installed massive arrays of servers in four locations in the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom. At that time, analysts estimated that the network costs alone would be $500 million, a quarter of the investment Microsoft reportedly spent to institute its first Xbox console

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/xbox-live3.htm

And that was for the start of the original Xbox...

 

[KHarvey16]

Then it wouldn't be running using the Kinect sensor, so it's still faking it to some degree. Not majorly, but that was my point.

What? The presentation wasn't demonstrating the Kinect microphone's ability to work in a crowded auditorium so I don't see how feeding in the output from his mic directly would be misleading or cheating in any way. It may even ship with a direct mic input for all we know.

 

[DontHateTheBacon]

This Jonathan Blow character is really making himself look like an angry Xbox CoD player lately.

 

[Jezbollah]

OK - I found a Microsoft Cloud Datacenter Video Tour artcle (and video)

I'm quite impressed...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Cloud-Datacenter-Video-Tour-213631.shtml

(I used to work in an IT Infrastructure team that looked after a server room so I have a little appreciation of such issues of power consumption and cooling etc)

 

[JCizzle]

I'm not going to get into the whole "the cloud allows x40 processing power" thing, but I don't know why people find it so hard to believe MS has 300,000 servers.

They've been in the cloud business for a while now, they have datacentres all over the world, likely totalling over 1 million servers.

300,000 (virtual) servers is nothing to them.

I don't find it hard to believe that Microsoft as a corporation has well over 300k servers. Most people are just accusing them of purposely misleading the public into believing there will be 300k actual physical servers dedicated to XBL. Just like a lot of things about the launch - 8gb of unspecified RAM for example - it's smoke and mirrors.

 

[jacobs34]

This Jonathan Blow character is really making himself look like an angry Xbox CoD player lately.

He is an outspoken gentleman who does not seem to be pleased with Microsoft at the moment.

 

[Gaspode_T]

Massive scaling server stuff is happening, it is no lie. Whether you can use it for traditional game computation is totally far fetched until we see it happen in reality, but it can definitely be used to do things like game state management for MMOs or some sort of state data caching

I mean, just look at some of the job descriptions, it says Xbox right here:
http://www.microsoft-careers.com/jo...ent-Engineer,-Principal-Job-WA-98004/2520480/

Do you really think this whole job description + team is there to have a bit of fun with gamers?

The only other interesting thing about massively scalable data centers is that it is something only a few companies in the world can afford to do, because it only starts making sense when you build up infrastructure and knowledge around it which costs billions to do.

 

[maabus1999]

The guy is emotionally unstable. Hell he went into depression for four months from people calling him pretentious about Braid.

I can't believe the credibility people are giving this guy. Wait for someone more credible before rallying behind someone as he is the perfect candidate to eat crow in his current state.

 

[harrypmgaga]

Why is The Witness being called an exclusive, when it is also coming out on PC and IOS, which will both have far larger install bases than either XBO or PS4 when it comes out?

It's a 'timed exclusive'.

That means for a certain amount of time the only platform you can get it on will be PS4, with it coming to other platforms later.

 

[JaggedSac]

lol, this guy is salty as fuck at MS. 300,000 servers for Live is not out of the question.

 

[jacobs34]

The guy is emotionally unstable. Hell he went into depression for four months from people calling him pretentious about Braid.

I can't believe the credibility people are giving this guy. Wait for someone more credible before rallying behind someone as he is the perfect candidate to eat crow in his current state.

I don't think people on this board takes what he says very seriously, I think people are using this thread as a venue to express their doubts about Xbox One relying on 300K servers to improve our gaming experience. I don't really have feelings about it one way or the other, but I think this is anything but a Jonathon Blow thread at heart.

 

[tranciful]

Sony said that backwards compatibility will be available on the PS4 via the cloud.
http://www.destructoid.com/ps4-has-cloud-based-backwards-compatibility-246152.phtml

Also, you will be able to stream all of your PS4 games to your Vita for off-tv play via the cloud.
http://www.psvitahub.com/2013/05/official-ps4-site-confirms-ps-vita.html


Both companies have made bold claims about the cloud and we'll see if it hold's true.

Streaming input/video streams is a lot easier. That's all Gakai/OnLive does.

 

[Dipswitch]

Did MS clarify what those 300,000 servers actually represented after the reveal? At the time, it looked like they were claiming those 300,000 "servers" were solely linked to XBL services. In my mind, that means they're separate and distinct from the Azure "cloud" resources.

Mind you, they've also associated "Cloud" resources with multiplayer game hosting, so maybe they all are in the mix.

 

[i-Lo]

Another thing to think about is developing for target hardware. If variable cloud stuff (ya know, dat 40x shpill) is needed to be taken into consideration, where does that leave the devs? Extra work? Essentially at that point it becomes a PC, albeit with standardized local hardware.

I can understand benefits to MP (world state persistence) but integrating in SP is something I'd rather see working in real world conditions.

 

[KHarvey16]

And that sounds pretty terrible to me. They would lose even more people than they do already through always online. People with no internet at all is rather uncommon, but people with bad internet? That's widely spread.

The idea, conceptually at least, is that offloading to the cloud offers benefits above and beyond what would be possible on the console alone. I suppose a game could make core features dependent upon an internet connection but that would be up to whoever makes the game, not MS. If the standard implementation just leads to longer load times between stages if your connection goes down I don't see any issue there. You're still left with the performance you would have had anyway.

From a high level perspective there's a lot that could potentially be done but it comes down to people actually doing it. Will the benefits be enough to justify the extra development? That's an important question, but it's still that at least: a question.

 

[SPDIF]

Did MS clarify what those 300,000 servers actually represented after the reveal? At the time, it looked like they were claiming those 300,000 "servers" were solely linked to XBL services. In my mind, that means they're separate and distinct from the Azure "cloud" resources.

Mind you, they've also associated "Cloud" resources with multiplayer game hosting, so maybe they all are in the mix.

It's a mixture by the sounds of it.

Mary Jo Foley tends to know what she's talking about when it comes to MS. Especially on the enterprise/business side of things:

Microsoft officials also mentioned Windows Azure during today's Xbox One reveal. Xbox Live does not run on Windows Azure; it runs on its own servers in Microsoft's datacenters. When Xbox Live launched in 2002, Xbox Live required 500 servers. It now requires 15,000. By the time Xbox One launches this holiday season, Micorsoft officials said it will be running across 300,000 servers.

We do know that the Halo game team at Microsoft has used a new cloud-programming model, codenamed "Orleans," which was developed by Microsoft Research. And during today's Xbox One reveal, the Redmondians noted that users will be able to store their movies, music, games and saves "in the cloud," which I am assuming means on Windows Azure.

Link to full article

 

[Pyccko]

It's a 'timed exclusive'.

That means for a certain amount of time the only platform you can get it on will be PS4, with it coming to other platforms later.

There has been worry and speculation on the internet about the PS4 exclusivity that we announced during the press conference, so here are some details to help answer those questions.

Our deal with Sony is a limited-time exclusivity that applies to competing console platforms. Basically it is that you will see the game on the PlayStation 4 for a while before you will see it on the Wii U or the rumored next Microsoft console. (We haven’t been disclosed on Microsoft’s next console, so I don’t know anything about that platform besides the rumors that are on the internet).

This exclusivity does not prevent us from being on the PC or iOS at launch, for example.

Source: http://the-witness.net/news/2013/02/a-clarification-about-our-ps4-exclusivity/#more-2091

 

[Godslay]

It's a mixture by the sounds of it.

Mary Jo Foley tends to know what she's talking about when it comes to MS. Especially on the enterprise/business side of things:



Link to full article

Good read. Thanks. Also adding Dave Cutler is a huge bonus for the platform.

I'll add that the 'Orleans' model sounds really interesting.

http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-orleans-cloud-programming-model-gets-a-halo-test-drive-7000009300/

 

[jcm]

I'm not going to get into the whole "the cloud allows x40 processing power" thing, but I don't know why people find it so hard to believe MS has 300,000 servers.

They've been in the cloud business for a while now, they have datacentres all over the world, likely totalling over 1 million servers.

300,000 (virtual) servers is nothing to them.

People find it hard to believe because they didn't say "(virtual) servers". They just said "servers". And 300,000 physical servers dedicated to xbox live is hard to believe.

 

[Randolph Freelander]

Could someone edit into the OP who Joe Blow is, thanks.

 

[blurredvision]

Jonathan Blow hates Microsoft. We get it Mr. Blow, you can stop now. You should probably get to work on your game if you ever expect to release it.

 

[SPDIF]

Good read. Thanks. Also adding Dave Cutler is a huge bonus for the platform.

Definitely. He's an engineering genius.