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[Hooflung128]

Did you even watch the video?

It doesn't matter. There is absolutely nothing you can do with azure that someone else can't Easily do with red hat, Debian, free bsd in a data center or renting a paas from a paas vendor like amazon or rack space.

Nothing.


Zilch.

The cloud is nothing but spinning up nodes through automated tools. It has existed in some fashion now we just have so much cheap hardware it's chic.

 

[RayMaker]

They did not even ask if the cloud could benefit graphics or not.

So I dont know why people are all ''that settles it, its only dedicated servers, nothing to see here''

 

[TheD]

Once again, I ask you, do you believe that there is no CPU cost associated with rendering in a video game?

EDIT:



There are plenty of calculations that you can make that have an impact on the visual fidelity of your game that do not have to be running on your render thread.

The only costs are the the generation of commands for the GPU.

Unless the CPU is not able to give enough commands in a timely manor to the GPU to have the GPU fully loaded, it will not help!

 

[Grief.exe]

I don't understand why this was thread worthy, they are just explaining dedicated servers.

Albeit, they are dynamic dedicated servers and there are a massive amount of them, but dedicated servers none the less.

 

[Formless]

Think about it this way:

To run at 30fps, you cannot exceed 33ms of calculations per frame.

Let's say your AI calculations take up 3-5ms of that frame. Offloading that to the "cloud" allows you to utilize the gained milliseconds in whichever way you please, which could include some graphical processing.

This is a brutally simple example of course. There will be some overhead dealing with batching off these AI calculations and applying the results.

There's also overhead and reliability problems when you're offloading work to somewhere out there (the cloud). You have to send data out there and wait for a response. There's a reason why we have CPUs in locality instead of on huge server farms -- there's a latency in networking and obviously distance.

The cloud application to AI seems to be more "big data" stuff (again more fancy words for basically just an advance in technology leading to better scaling) where a system can gather a bunch of information from players and sort that out to create behavior protocols. Like ghost data but smarter.

 

[op_ivy]

I don't understand why this was thread worthy, they are just explaining dedicated servers.

Albeit, they are dynamic dedicated servers and there are a massive amount of them, but dedicated servers none the less.

what i took away from this is that while this functions as a standard dedicated server, the result is quite a bit superior and cheaper to boot.

 

[xJavonta]

I wish they would tell us what it's being used for so neogaf can shut the fuck up already. People will either be right or eat their words.

 

[Jagerbizzle]

The only costs are the the generation of commands for the GPU.

Yes, it's not free. As you're apparently well aware, there are a limited number of milliseconds you have to work with per fame if you'd like to run at 60fps.

 

[Grief.exe]

what i took away from this is that while this functions as a standard dedicated server, the result is quite a bit superior and cheaper to boot.

That is what I took away from it as well.

But then I read the op...

The cloud is not a magical, imaginary thing that Microsoft made up for PR purposes. It's a truly exciting new technology with high-potential future applications.

Its not an exciting new technology, its just dynamic dedicated servers.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Once again, this is not an advantage limited to Microsoft. AND it's not a new advantage. Renting Virtual Server time still costs money.

Edit: There was nothing stopping devs from renting virtual servers from Amazon this generation. In fact, some of them may have.

Naughty Dog used Amazon's cloud servers for both Uncharted 2 and 3.

Where's your link that proves MS is charging? That doesn't make any sense, the infrastructure is set up for Xbox One development, not to publicly rent... :/

When the Giant Bomb guys asked Erik from MS on their E3 stream point blank if publishers had to pay for access to the cloud processing he refused to comment.

.
.
.
Bottom line, the benefits of calculating AI and physics described by the Respawn guys are the benefits dedicated servers have always offered. What is new is the transition to an elastic compute platform for hosting those servers. This is a great way forward, but it was an inevitable move and is by no means proprietary.

 

[Klocker]

they have said clearly that the new Xbox live servers would be made available to devs to utilize for their games.. somewhere in the past few weeks a dev or a talking head said free, I can not find it amid the sea of articles and posts but they said it..

it does not make sense to say "we will have dedicated servers for ALL games" unless they are referring to the Live/Azure cloud.

also please note that the new matchmaking system is built into the Xbox so ALL games use the Live servers and One to join and find matches. So by that statement as well as the statement by Phil spencer that those servers are available to devs implies hat they are there to use as part of the services that One brings.

Find the perfect match.

Introducing Smart Match, Xbox One’s revolutionary
multiplayer matchmaking system. Completely
reengineered for a new generation of gaming,
Smart Match uses advanced algorithms to pair
players based on skill, language, and now reputation.
That means you play people that are most like you.
And best of all, you no longer have to wait in lobbies
while a match is found. Feel free to play a game,
watch TV, or listen to music while we find your
perfect match. Then you can jump in instantly.
And thanks to the power of the cloud, your favorite
matches are always running behind the scenes,
so you can quickly find the people you like to
play with most.

and Yes Sony is planning on the Cloud too

 

[Jagerbizzle]

There's also overhead and reliability problems when you're offloading work to somewhere out there (the cloud). You have to send data out there and wait for a response. There's a reason why we have CPUs in locality instead of on huge server farms -- there's a latency in networking and obviously distance.

The cloud application to AI seems to be more "big data" stuff (again more fancy words for basically just an advance in technology leading to better scaling) where a system can gather a bunch of information from players and sort that out to create behavior protocols. Like ghost data but smarter.

Absolutely, there are programming challenges associated with doing this. I'm not suggesting that you simply get milliseconds for free as a result of being able to access this stuff.

What I am suggesting is that it enables you to add a lot of features to your game that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to add. This will be up to the developer to implement of course, and in multi-plats where similar horsepower and APIs aren't being offered, many developers will likely opt out. It will be very interesting to see how first party games utilize this tech.

 

[tafer]

False

For developers there are some advantages, for end users... can't think of any.

There's also overhead and reliability problems when you're offloading work to somewhere out there (the cloud). You have to send data out there and wait for a response. There's a reason why we have CPUs in locality instead of on huge server farms -- there's a latency in networking and obviously distance.

The cloud application to AI seems to be more "big data" stuff (again more fancy words for basically just an advance in technology leading to better scaling) where a system can gather a bunch of information from players and sort that out to create behavior protocols. Like ghost data but smarter.

Imagine the beauties that a simply lag spike, a short disconnection or a busy resource could produce on your games. Unless, of course, the developers implemented some sort "back-up" plan for these common scenarios losing all those hard earned ms in the process.

 

[kinoki]

Not to frown on Azure but as someone who hosts a service on it I was quite taken back when the entire service crashed on feb 29th last year. The thing was offline for 24 hours because these engineers couldn't plan for a leap year.

 

[Suikoguy]

Naughty Dog used Amazon's cloud servers for both Uncharted 2 and 3.



When the Giant Bomb guys asked Erik from MS on their E3 stream point blank if publishers had to pay for access to the cloud processing he refused to comment.

.
.
.
Bottom line, the benefits of calculating AI and physics described by the Respawn guys are the benefits dedicated servers have always offered. What is new is the transition to an elastic compute platform for hosting those servers. This is a great way forward, but it was an inevitable move and is by no means proprietary.

Exactly, thanks for the Uncharted link.

 

[Touch]

Their comments on the PC version made me giggle.

 

[Klocker]

I wish they would tell us what it's being used for so neogaf can shut the fuck up already. People will either be right or eat their words.

it will be a year or two until this is fleshed out.... arguing about the benefits today is like arguing whether or not online multiplayer games will work well in 1997.

we don't know yet since someone is finally giving the devs the tools and a playground

 

[El-Suave]

The cloud is not exclusive. That's the point of criticism I have when MS or developers tout it as if it was. Even if Microsoft might have an advantage because of its current infrastructure, it's nothing that can't be replicated.

 

[SummitAve]

The cloud is not exclusive. That's the point of criticism I have when MS or developers tout it as if it was. Even if Microsoft might have an advantage because of its current infrastructure, it's nothing that can't be replicated.

Is there anything that cannot be reversed engineered and recreated eventually? I don't really understand your point? Having the infrastructure is the largest hurdle.

 

[Liabe Brave]

The day that Xbox One servers shutdown is when Azure gets shutdown.

No, the day that Xbox One servers shutdown is when running them on Azure costs more than it earns.

Think about it this way:

To run at 30fps, you cannot exceed 33ms of calculations per frame.

Let's say your AI calculations take up 3-5ms of that frame. Offloading that to the "cloud" allows you to utilize the gained milliseconds in whichever way you please, which could include some graphical processing.

But this only works if you can send the AI problem to the cloud, cloud-process it, and send it back to the client in under 33ms. Even if the cloud does the AI calculation in nanoseconds, that means your ping can never go above 16.5ms. Or, for a 60fps game, never go above 8.25ms. If it does, the AI actors suddenly don't have any AI. Good luck with that.

 

[Jagerbizzle]

The cloud is not exclusive. That's the point of criticism I have when MS or developers tout it as if it was. Even if Microsoft might have an advantage because of its current infrastructure, it's nothing that can't be replicated.

I think the interesting question is how cheap and accessible they make it to developers. Hopefully they shed some light on this.

 

[Proelite]

No, the day that Xbox One servers shutdown is when running them on Azure costs more than it earns.


But this only works if you can send the AI problem to the cloud, cloud-process it, and send it back to the client in under 33ms. Even if the cloud does the AI calculation in nanoseconds, that means your ping can never go above 16.5ms. Or, for a 60fps game, never go above 8.25ms. If it does, the AI actors suddenly don't have any AI. Good luck with that.

Not true. They'll just appear to be several hundred ms too slow in reaction time. Diablo 3 currently runs all of their AI server side, as does all your MMORPGS.

 

[Klocker]

Is there anything that cannot be reversed engineered and recreated eventually? I don't really understand your point? Having the infrastructure is the largest hurdle.

exactly, these "but Sony can..."


they do not have the infrastructure in place... MS does and has made this a backbone of their new Console and I suspect costs were actually shifted to this from other things on purpose as a long term strategy...

Even if Sony jumps on this they are not planning on giving EVERY Ps4 game access to dedicated servers like Xbox One is NOW and they will be a couple years behind at least as well as still doing P2P games.


there will be no more P2P games on Xbox.

 

[Jagerbizzle]

But this only works if you can send the AI problem to the cloud, cloud-process it, and send it back to the client in under 33ms. Even if the cloud does the AI calculation in nanoseconds, that means your ping can never go above 16.5ms. Or, for a 60fps game, never go above 8.25ms. If it does, the AI actors suddenly don't have any AI. Good luck with that.

Let me be clear: no one will be using cloud processing for help with the current frame.

That said, there are a ton of calculations that can be offloaded that benefit your gameplay that have little to do with what you'll be looking at or need to react to within the next few seconds.

Edit: Here's an example off the top of my head.

You have some zombie game. There are 80 zombies in your area that are potentially a threat. You can run the full AI calculations on the console for say, the 10 nearest zombies because those are directly relevant to what you're doing at that exact moment, and then have the luxury of offloading the calculations for the other 70 and getting the results back in a timely enough manner that it feels seamless. Meanwhile the client can simply run a proxy version of that AI without any of the heavyweight calculations (like say, path-finding) bogging down your framerate.

 

[SenjutsuSage]

It doesn't seem to be the fact that there are dedicated servers that's what's meant to impress people, but how those dedicated servers become available and are incorporated into Xbox One games for different users. That seems to be what's impressive about this. Devs save a lot of the headache associated with making their games support dedicated servers.

Sounds pretty useful and cool to have.

 

[Suikoguy]

exactly, these "but Sony can..."


they do not have the infrastructure in place... MS does and has made this a backbone of their new Console and I suspect costs were actually shifted to this from other things on purpose as a long term strategy...

Even if Sony jumps on this they are not planning on giving EVERY Ps4 game access to dedicated servers like Xbox One is NOW and they will be a couple years behind at least as well as still doing P2P games.


there will be no more P2P games on Xbox.

Sony, as pointed out earlier, has already used Amazon "cloud" servers for their Uncharted series. They are not "a couple of years" behind. Additionally, Peer to Peer works better for certain types of games.

 

[ElTorro]

Sony does not necessarily need to recreate anything. One of the big things about cloud-based business models is that you can outsource infrastructure management. Instead of building your own infrastructure, you can "just" get it from providers like Amazon.

Apart from that, they seem to be eager to run their own data centers [1]. But that would be driven by business considerations, not technological necessity. There is no game changing "secret sauce" in Azure. The general concepts behind the cloud are part of the body of computer science knowledge, and many of them have been around for decades. The current cloud hype is a result of a convergence of many factors, like widespread broadband internet, the increasing number of internet-connected clients and devices, hardware support for virtualization, etc. Cloud-based infrastructure, of course, differs in its quality, like every other comercial product, but the general technologies and concepts are no secret.

[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/04/09/sony-launches-media-cloud-services/

 

[SummitAve]

It doesn't seem to be the fact that there are dedicated servers that's what's meant to impress people, but how those dedicated servers become available and are incorporated into Xbox One games for different users. That seems to be what's impressive about this. Devs save a lot of the headache associated with making their games support dedicated servers.

Sounds pretty useful and cool to have.

I don't know.... using the cloud for dedicated servers is the obvious solution and use of this resource. I'm more curious about how other developers will take advantage of it. Forza 5 takes a baby step with the Drivatar stuff, but it probably will be a while until we start seeing the real fun stuff.

 

[NIGHT-]

exactly, these "but Sony can..."


they do not have the infrastructure in place... MS does and has made this a backbone of their new Console and I suspect costs were actually shifted to this from other things on purpose as a long term strategy...

Even if Sony jumps on this they are not planning on giving EVERY Ps4 game access to dedicated servers like Xbox One is NOW and they will be a couple years behind at least as well as still doing P2P games.


there will be no more P2P games on Xbox.

And this reason alone will make gold a better value than ps plus for me

 

[Suikoguy]

It doesn't seem to be the fact that there are dedicated servers that's what's meant to impress people, but how those dedicated servers become available and are incorporated into Xbox One games for different users. That seems to be what's impressive about this. Devs save a lot of the headache associated with making their games support dedicated servers.

Sounds pretty useful and cool to have.

Care to elaborate on this a bit? Unless MS is providing assistance with the actual coding of their games, there is nothing Azure provides that other services don't.

 

[bobbytkc]

exactly, these "but Sony can..."


they do not have the infrastructure in place... MS does and has made this a backbone of their new Console and I suspect costs were actually shifted to this from other things on purpose as a long term strategy...

Even if Sony jumps on this they are not planning on giving EVERY Ps4 game access to dedicated servers like Xbox One is NOW and they will be a couple years behind at least as well as still doing P2P games.


there will be no more P2P games on Xbox.

Have you even read ANY of what was discussed in the last few pages. Sony doesn't need the infrastructure. Azure and other services like it (like Amazon's) are platform agnostic and they already exist. You can sign up for it right now and use it for whatever you want. There is even a link just above you demonstrating that Naughty Dog is already using Amazon's cloud services for uncharted. That is on the PS3.

 

[SummitAve]

Sony, as pointed out earlier, has already used Amazon "cloud" servers for their Uncharted series. They are not "a couple of years" behind. Additionally, Peer to Peer works better for certain types of games.

You don't believe there is a difference between renting Amazon's cloud computing service, and having your own dedicated service?

 

[CLEEK]

Not to frown on Azure but as someone who hosts a service on it I was quite taken back when the entire service crashed on feb 29th last year. The thing was offline for 24 hours because these engineers couldn't plan for a leap year.

Azure and Office 365 had another worldwide outage in Feb when someone forgot to renew their SSL certificate.

No cloud service is 100% reliable. No matter how big the company, how technically excellent they are, and how much money they invest, there will always be issues and outages.

 

[bobbytkc]

You don't believe there is a difference between renting Amazon's cloud computing service, and having your own dedicated service?

Publishers don't own the servers that MS has either. They still need to rent it from them.

 

[Gokurakumaru]

You don't believe there is a difference between renting Amazon's cloud computing service, and having your own dedicated service?

I don't. Both are elastic infrastructure services billed by compute time. Whether the provider is Amazon, MS, or a private data centre is academic.

 

[SummitAve]

Publishers don't own the servers that MS has either. They still need to rent it from them.

Amazon also isn't spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, on a gaming console that fundamentally relies on the cloud servers. There are different levels of responsibility and liability when it comes to renting something out and owning it yourself.

I don't. Both are elastic infrastructure services billed by compute time. Whether the provider is Amazon, MS, or a private data centre is academic.

Obviously they function the same, that is not the point.

 

[Klocker]

Sony, as pointed out earlier, has already used Amazon "cloud" servers for their Uncharted series. They are not "a couple of years" behind. Additionally, Peer to Peer works better for certain types of games.

a couple years behind in owning the infrastructure and software that is designed for this purpose. yes.

 

[godhandiscen]

Publishers don't own the servers that MS has either. They still need to rent it from them.

I thought Microsoft was offering them the cloud compute API for free.

 

[Suikoguy]

I thought Microsoft was offering them the cloud compute API for free.

Do you know what an API is? Additionally, in this video, they did not want to comment on this very issue.

 

[LyleLanley]

I thought Microsoft was offering them the cloud compute API for free.

That's the impression I got, especially after hearing This portion of the Giant Bomb live shoe on day 3 of E3 but to be fair the Microsoft guy doesn't explicitly say it's free.

 

[bobbytkc]

Amazon also isn't spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, on a gaming console that fundamentally relies on the cloud servers. There are different levels of responsibility and liability when it comes to renting something out and owning it yourself.

They don't need to spend money for specifically a console. Servers work regardless of what platforms are connecting to it. That is the whole point. Amazon's responsibility and liability is everyone that uses the service. That is a whole lot more than just gaming consoles.

 

[SummitAve]

Do you know what an API is? Additionally, in this video, they did not want to comment on this very issue.

I watched this entire Bombcast show. The developers specifically talk about how the cloud is just another available resource provided to developers to use in whatever way they want, be it dedicated servers or some other purpose. It has never been mentioned that it would cost developers extra or anything like that.

 

[UntoldDreams]

Wow... We're having a cloud BS discussion again? I thought we had thoroughly beaten this into the ground as stupidity on wheels?

Don't fall for it. In the end cloud capacity is now nothign more than a middleware business. Everyone has access to cloud capacity for reasonable cost or can quite easily build out their own data centers.

 

[Jagerbizzle]

Do you know what an API is? Additionally, in this video, they did not want to comment on this very issue.

No need to be surly, you know exactly what he means.

The question of cost is the interesting one here.

 

[Suikoguy]

I watched this entire Bombcast show. The developers specifically talk about how the cloud is just another available resource provided to developers to use in whatever way they want, be it dedicated servers or some other purpose. It has never been mentioned that it would cost developers extra or anything like that.

If something is not called free, the assumption is, it costs money.

 

[Klocker]

Have you even read ANY of what was discussed in the last few pages. Sony doesn't need the infrastructure. Azure and other services like it (like Amazon's) are platform agnostic and they already exist. You can sign up for it right now and use it for whatever you want. There is even a link just above you demonstrating that Naughty Dog is already using Amazon's cloud services for uncharted. That is on the PS3.

read some articles around the net and not just this thread (did you watch the vid?) and you will find that there are many other benefits that the MS Server cloud brings,

one being the APIs and the near instant scalability of the system as needed and the fact that devs don't need to do a bunch of shit to get them to work for them... these are promised for ALL One games and devs to use and part of Ms cost of doing business with Live Gold and he One sales,

 

[Suikoguy]

No need to be surly, you know exactly what he means.

The question of cost is the interesting one here.

I try not to assume, providing a free API would actually make sense assuming that is actually what he meant.

read some articles around the net and not just this thread (did you watch the vid?) and you will find that there are many other benefits that the MS Server cloud brings,

one being the APIs and the near instant scalability of the system as needed and the fact that devs don't need to do a bunch of shit to get them to work for them... these are promised for ALL One games and devs to use and part of Ms cost of doing business with Live Gold and he One sales,

Those features are not exclusive to Azure... *sigh

Secondly, I need a link for the bolded part.

 

[ElTorro]

a couple years behind in owning the infrastructure and software that is designed for this purpose. yes.

This is an abstract statement. To make it valid, you would have to substantiate it with a concrete benefit of Azure for game-related online services, if there is any at all. Azure is not "designed for this purpose" (gaming), its a PaaS that incorporates general concepts for distributed software.

 

[Outrage247]

Not to frown on Azure but as someone who hosts a service on it I was quite taken back when the entire service crashed on feb 29th last year. The thing was offline for 24 hours because these engineers couldn't plan for a leap year.

The playstation next work itself crashed for a whole month plus and got a ton of credit cards hacked. You still use it?

 

[Gokurakumaru]

Obviously they function the same, that is not the point.

It absolutely is the point if you're arguing the value of a dedicated service versus something like Amazon. So please, enlighten me.

What makes it dedicated? What makes you think it's free? Does it have some dedicated APIs that reduce developer time? What makes you think Sony can't offer the same abstraction for devs -- if they haven't rolled their own already -- to use on a generic Linux installation on EC2 or over S3?