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Why don't MS offer dedicated servers to 3rd party MP games?

Pimpbaa

Member
Ehm. They do :) We are building our new game strongly with Azure in mind for physic calculations (currently for vegetation, grass, water being manipulated by wind and objects, which would not be easy [impossible] to do with local power only).

Vegetation and grass being affected by wind has already been done (locally) in games this generation (next gen) by games like Watchdogs and Tomb Raider Definitive Edition (ps4 version at least). Haven't seen an example of water being affected by wind however.
 

Dabanton

Member
Well this thread certainly took a turn for the interesting. If that guy is a dev and I see no reason why he'd bullshit and put his account on the line.

But it does make me excited for the second wave of games we'll see on PS4 and X1 next year once the need for PS360 versions of games is no longer needed.
 
They theoretically do, and for free, but no one has used them yet.

Which, of course, makes one wonder -- no sane company avoids a cost-cutting opportunity unless there's a catch.

No need to be a catch, EA for instance, wants to hold their own servers so they can shut down at will to incentive players to get new iterations of the games.
 
Well this thread certainly took a turn for the interesting. If that guy is a dev and I see no reason why he'd bullshit and put his account on the line.

But it does make me excited for the second wave of games we'll see on PS4 and X1 next year once the need for PS360 versions of games is no longer needed.

Took a quick glance at his post history and he says he creates assets for big (and small) games and mentioned something about a "small game" with mates.

Also, lives in Germany. So... yeah.
 
They theoretically do, and for free, but no one has used them yet.

Which, of course, makes one wonder -- no sane company avoids a cost-cutting opportunity unless there's a catch.

The catch is companies want control over their own servers and want to shut them down when they please.
 
Vegetation and grass being affected by wind has already been done (locally) in games this generation (next gen) by games like Watchdogs and Tomb Raider Definitive Edition (ps4 version at least). Haven't seen an example of water being affected by wind however.

I think you are missing the point... anything that you can offload to Cloud is power saved locally.
 

Leyasu

Banned
Hmm so after reading those comments, would I be right in thinking that it would be better to have the game world in the cloud and then connect to it??

Thanks for the comments kampfheld
 

ethomaz

Banned
Devs are renting azure servers, that means devs can shut servers down whenever they want.
Better... they won't have to deal with the machines itself... the add/remove servers (renting) is a lot faster too... need more? here... I don't need anymory? give me back.

It really have a lot of advantages..
 

AgentP

Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
Love the confirmation bias at work. Guy says it works great and is free. Everyone falls all over him because he said what they wanted to hear.

Two points. The OP said "free" and then this so called dev says it is free until the game is live. That is not free.

Second, the OP said "dedicated servers" which is a term usually reserved for multiplayer servers. What is then described is a more generic cloud computing, which is a bit different.

But making water run and grass wave in the wind sounds like a dumb use of cloud power, especially doing the work twice, once for online and once for offline. Maybe the whole thing is a marketing co-op with MS, otherwise it sounds like a waste of resources.
 

Leyasu

Banned
Love the confirmation bias at work. Guy says it works great and is free. Everyone falls all over him because he said what they wanted to hear.

Two points. The OP said "free" and then this so called dev says it is free until the game is live. That is not free.

Second, the OP said "dedicated servers" which is a term usually reserved for multiplayer servers. What is then described is a more generic cloud computing, which is a bit different.

But making water run and grass wave in the wind sounds like a dumb use of cloud power, especially doing the work twice, once for online and once for offline. Maybe the whole thing is a marketing co-op with MS, otherwise it sounds like a waste of resources.

Would it have been more believable if he had said it was complete shit then??
 
Love the confirmation bias at work. Guy says it works great and is free. Everyone falls all over him because he said what they wanted to hear.

Two points. The OP said "free" and then this so called dev says it is free until the game is live. That is not free.

Second, the OP said "dedicated servers" which is a term usually reserved for multiplayer servers. What is then described is a more generic cloud computing, which is a bit different.

But making water run and grass wave in the wind sounds like a dumb use of cloud power, especially doing the work twice, once for online and once for offline. Maybe the whole thing is a marketing co-op with MS, otherwise it sounds like a waste of resources.

I understand what you're getting at with the dedicated server part, but the word "free" is no where in the OP or title. Perhaps that's what he meant but, if so, he/she still hasn't clarified or corrected the thread on that and "offer" (especially in this context) would normally imply "give the option".
 
This generation has only just begun. I'd say give it 2 years at least and it will probably become a lot more common in titles. It's not a case where people snap their fingers and this stuff is in their games. They need to look into this stuff, do some reading up on it, and then plan how they're going to use it.
 
Would it have been more believable if he had said it was complete shit then??

Would be better if he was an insidered approved by the moderation team because I believe this isn't the first time I've read stuff from him that went unverified.
 
He said such things were not easy (impossible). I'm just saying they have been done (except for wind affected water).

It all depends how far this simulating goes. If he said it, he probably means rather advances wind effects on water. Without seeing it in action, it is hard to tell. Fact is that Cloud servers are really good at some types of calculations that would swamp a local machine (especially with the rather weak CPUs of the X1 and PS4).
 
What I kind of take away from this is I believe Microsoft did say Dedicated Servers are free to developers, but Cloud Compute would probably need to be paid for.

I think we would need a bit more clarification from Microsoft or developers.
 

Caayn

Member
I know GAF "in general" is very pessimistic about the cloud. And yes, somehow I can understand that - because so far, there weren't that much games that really took advantage of server calculations. To be honest, no new-gen so far really did (Titanfall touched 5% of the possibilities ...). And this is also why I try to be very careful about the words I choose.

No. You can not boost your games resolution with Azure. And no. You can not create better lighting effects with Azure. But, if you focus on it, you can still boost the overall graphical look of your game by a mile. We are currently creating a game. But in fact, we are kind of creating two-in-one. One with Azure available, and one for offline only. Everything you code, you need to code for two scenerarios. This is a ton of work. if online = dynamic grass; if offline=static grass ... To say it very simple. And so on.That's why we are currently thinking about going "online-only". But to be very open to you, we have some fear about that. Obviously. The gaming community is very careful when they hear "online-only" ... Games like Sim City simply ... Well, did it wrong.

If I could show you a screen comparison of our latest build right now - Azure on/off (no, sorry, I can't ...), you would understand what I am talking about. Wind, dynamically moving vegetations, footprints that stay for hours and even wildlife nearly without losing any local CPU power. This is just awesome in the right situations.

I know MS has some own projects in the works, too, that will go all-in with the Azure servers. Crackdown is the already known example.

That's all I can say for now. Really. I'm out here! :)
As much as I want to see those screens/know more about the game I understand that you can't tell, wouldn't want to get you into trouble for that. Once again thank you for the info drop.

I understand the situation you're currently in with the on/of scenario, needing to write code for one scenario with all the possibilities within that is though let alone two. I'd feel sorry for the people who need to write tests for that.

If you were to go online-only I guess that Destiny, being one of the first major online-only games on consoles, would help take some of the negative attitude regarding online-only away.

I don't have a problem with online-only games, but then again I was also one of the few people who was content with the original plans MS had for the Xbox One regarding physical games. You could say I'm one of the odd ones here :p
 
As much as I want to see those screens/know more about the game I understand that you can't tell, wouldn't want to get you into trouble for that. Once again thank you for the info drop.

I understand the situation you're currently in with the on/of scenario, needing to write code for one scenario with all the possibilities within that is though let alone two. I'd feel sorry for the people who need to write tests for that.

If you were to go online-only I guess that Destiny, being one of the first major online-only games on consoles, would help take some of the negative attitude regarding online-only away.

I don't have a problem with online-only games, but then again I was also one of the few people who was content with the original plans MS had for the Xbox One regarding physical games. You could say I'm one of the odd ones here :p

I didn't have a problem with the original Xbox One vision either....
 

Killer

Banned
I know GAF "in general" is very pessimistic about the cloud. And yes, somehow I can understand that - because so far, there weren't that much games that really took advantage of server calculations. To be honest, no new-gen so far really did (Titanfall touched 5% of the possibilities ...). And this is also why I try to be very careful about the words I choose.

No. You can not boost your games resolution with Azure. And no. You can not create better lighting effects with Azure. But, if you focus on it, you can still boost the overall graphical look of your game by a mile. We are currently creating a game. But in fact, we are kind of creating two-in-one. One with Azure available, and one for offline only. Everything you code, you need to code for two scenerarios. This is a ton of work. if online = dynamic grass; if offline=static grass ... To say it very simple. And so on.That's why we are currently thinking about going "online-only". But to be very open to you, we have some fear about that. Obviously. The gaming community is very careful when they hear "online-only" ... Games like Sim City simply ... Well, did it wrong.

If I could show you a screen comparison of our latest build right now - Azure on/off (no, sorry, I can't ...), you would understand what I am talking about. Wind, dynamically moving vegetations, footprints that stay for hours and even wildlife nearly without losing any local CPU power. This is just awesome in the right situations.

I know MS has some own projects in the works, too, that will go all-in with the Azure servers. Crackdown is the already known example.

That's all I can say for now. Really. I'm out here! :)

Thanks for the info. I'm interested in seeing what cloud servers could do in SP as well. hope to see your game soon!
 

TK Turk

Banned
Very interesting. I figured Msoft would try and utilize the cloud, I never thought a third party would be doing it to help their SP game. Seemed like maybe too much work.
 
Remember what the DayZ dev said about the stuff that Microsoft showed him behind the scenes.

His response was why aren't you showing people this stuff. Maybe this was part of what they showed him. I guess we'll find out at some point in the future.
 

allan-bh

Member
All 360 games (except EA and some others) doesn't use Microsoft servers?

Now on Xbox One third party servers is the rule?
 

bishoptl

Banstick Emeritus
Ehm. They do :) We are building our new game strongly with Azure in mind for physic calculations (currently for vegetation, grass, water being manipulated by wind and objects, which would not be easy [impossible] to do with local power only). We are so happy with it that we are currently thinking about going all-in and make the game kind of addicted to Azure. The benefits are huge. Especially for singleplayer there are some risks tho, so we really need to think about it first.
Cool. Then you won't mind PMing me with details to confirm who you are. Thanks!
 

TK Turk

Banned
Remember what the DayZ dev said about the stuff that Microsoft showed him behind the scenes.

His response was why aren't you showing people this stuff. Maybe this was part of what they showed him. I guess we'll find out at some point in the future.

Yeah, I've also heard that one of Day Z's major flaws are its servers. This is according to my brother who is obsessed with the game, I don't have any first hand experience.
 

Nafai1123

Banned
My guess is MS provides a certain amount of compute for free. This can handle matchmaking/player stats/cloud saving/asynchronous play/etc; however, I have yet to see evidence that they are providing full, dedicated server support for MP games for free and until they actually come out and say that, or a dev comes out and says that it's free and they're using it, I will remain skeptical.
 
As much as I want to see those screens/know more about the game I understand that you can't tell, wouldn't want to get you into trouble for that. Once again thank you for the info drop.

I understand the situation you're currently in with the on/of scenario, needing to write code for one scenario with all the possibilities within that is though let alone two. I'd feel sorry for the people who need to write tests for that.

If you were to go online-only I guess that Destiny, being one of the first major online-only games on consoles, would help take some of the negative attitude regarding online-only away.

I don't have a problem with online-only games, but then again I was also one of the few people who was content with the original plans MS had for the Xbox One regarding physical games. You could say I'm one of the odd ones here :p

Not too odd at all. I agreed with their vision as a steam lover. I've bought all my games digitally thus far and don't see any reason I won't continue that trend.
 

kmg90

Member
Well this thread certainly took a turn for the interesting. If that guy is a dev and I see no reason why he'd bullshit and put his account on the line.

You mean their valuable Junior Member status'd account?

Post history has a lot of Xbox related stuff... Some of it looks like it was spit out like PR

Won't tell us a studio or game but promises a game in development on Microsoft's already explained costly cloud service that's obviously not free to use in production environment.


Nope

Edit: Looks like bishoptl is on the case
 
I know GAF "in general" is very pessimistic about the cloud. And yes, somehow I can understand that - because so far, there weren't that much games that really took advantage of server calculations. To be honest, no new-gen so far really did (Titanfall touched 5% of the possibilities ...). And this is also why I try to be very careful about the words I choose.

No. You can not boost your games resolution with Azure. And no. You can not create better lighting effects with Azure. But, if you focus on it, you can still boost the overall graphical look of your game by a mile. We are currently creating a game. But in fact, we are kind of creating two-in-one. One with Azure available, and one for offline only. Everything you code, you need to code for two scenerarios. This is a ton of work. if online = dynamic grass; if offline=static grass ... To say it very simple. And so on.That's why we are currently thinking about going "online-only". But to be very open to you, we have some fear about that. Obviously. The gaming community is very careful when they hear "online-only" ... Games like Sim City simply ... Well, did it wrong.

If I could show you a screen comparison of our latest build right now - Azure on/off (no, sorry, I can't ...), you would understand what I am talking about. Wind, dynamically moving vegetations, footprints that stay for hours and even wildlife nearly without losing any local CPU power. This is just awesome in the right situations.

I know MS has some own projects in the works, too, that will go all-in with the Azure servers. Crackdown is the already known example.

That's all I can say for now. Really. I'm out here! :)
Interesting. Could be really cool! Thanks for the drop.
 

Kampfheld

Banned
This is what I am allowed to share.

sequenz010wuvh.gif


Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here.

And no, this won't be a golf/grass/whatever simulator - I just thought maybe it is interesting to see;)
 
Why would a multiplatform game use MS's servers? They aren't going to used different servers for the same game if there's a PS4 version.
 

ethomaz

Banned
This is what I am allowed to share.

sequenz010wuvh.gif


Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here.

And no, this won't be a golf/grass/whatever simulator - I just thought maybe it is interesting to see;)
It is possible to use GPU compute to these calculations? There are some GPU power not being used due waiting others tasks... so you can use parallel compute while that too.

Why would a multiplatform game use MS's servers? They aren't going to used different servers for the same game if there's a PS4 version.
They can use Azure for PS4 too... they have the choice to rent Azure or create it own servers.

MS wants they use Azure for all platform... it is one if MS core business but for now 3rd are using their own servers... I don't know why... maybe because they are re-using servers from old games that makes cheaper than use Azure.
 

TK Turk

Banned
This is what I am allowed to share.

sequenz010wuvh.gif


Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here.

And no, this won't be a golf/grass/whatever simulator - I just thought maybe it is interesting to see;)

Can you explain what that gif would look like in "offline" mode? Also, has this account been verified by Bish?
 

Eoin

Member
This is what I am allowed to share.

sequenz010wuvh.gif


Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here.

And no, this won't be a golf/grass/whatever simulator - I just thought maybe it is interesting to see;)
How bandwidth intensive is it trying to do that amount of updates when scaled up to a full scene? That's got to be a lot of data.
 

Chobel

Member
This is what I am allowed to share.

sequenz010wuvh.gif


Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here.

And no, this won't be a golf/grass/whatever simulator - I just thought maybe it is interesting to see;)

How about the Azure costs?
A person pay X for your game, but it'll cost you Y for using azure servers when that person play the game, and Y will increase as long the person play your game. Eventually you'll have this situation "Y>X".
Are you going to continue to support your game when that happen? Do you have measures to make that not happen?
 

Ade

Member
That's all I can say for now. Really. I'm out here! :)

I want to believe what you say, but you seem incredibly obtuse in so many threads, popping in with random "news" and "facts" but never elaborating on anything, perhaps its just me but I kind of feel you should either come out with who/what you are and what you know, or keep quiet, there's enough "insiders" out there to last a life time.
 

linkeds

Banned
When i first bought watchdogs and had the terrible MP decryption lag, I found out shortly after that Ubi didn't implement any dedi servers and used a host for the game. what i ultimately decided was that neither consoles got Dedis because not all platforms offered the function???

Sold the game so i dont care so much now
 
I want to believe what you say, but you seem incredibly obtuse in so many threads, popping in with random "news" and "facts" but never elaborating on anything, perhaps its just me but I kind of feel you should either come out with who/what you are and what you know, or keep quiet, there's enough "insiders" out there to last a life time.

All he needs to do is be verified by Bish. We can't ask devs questions and then demand them to publicly out their identities and the games they're working on.
 

Krilekk

Banned
How bandwidth intensive is it trying to do that amount of updates when scaled up to a full scene? That's got to be a lot of data.

Probably a lot less than say streaming a video of a game at 30 or 60 fps in 1080p. But I think it's only good for visual stuff, something like PhysX enhancements. The lag would otherwise be very visible.
 

Killer

Banned
This is what I am allowed to share.

sequenz010wuvh.gif


Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here.

And no, this won't be a golf/grass/whatever simulator - I just thought maybe it is interesting to see;)

This would be cool on a bigger scale for sure. Thanks for sharing!
 

Ade

Member
All he needs to do is be verified by Bish. We can't ask devs questions and then demand them to publicly out their identities and the games they're working on.

Fair enough, be nice if he does get verified, because, as I said, he has a habit of been a little insider in threads...

I'll remove my wall of past posts, as I see Bish posted above!

Cool. Then you won't mind PMing me with details to confirm who you are. Thanks!
 

ps3ud0

Member
Interesting tangent - Id like to understand how 'interactive' cloud compute could be as I just dont see how you can really do anything thats user-interacted without having the massive issue of lag.

Cloud compute is a nice idea but always seems to be something that makes the skybox/far distance look 'prettier' (well more accurate/intelligent), while thats good, to me, I want more things to react to the users existence in the game world...

I always seem to end up thinking about how good streaming could be once the internet backbone is up to scratch - then I wonder how old Ill be when that happens :p

ps3ud0 8)
 
Interesting tangent - Id like to understand how 'interactive' cloud compute could be as I just dont see how you can really do anything thats user-interacted without having the massive issue of lag.

Cloud compute is a nice idea but always seems to be something that makes the skybox/far distance look 'prettier' (well more accurate/intelligent), while thats good, to me, I want more things to react to the users existence in the game world...

I always seem to end up thinking about how good streaming could be once the internet backbone is up to scratch - then I wonder how old Ill be when that happens :p

ps3ud0 8)

Assuming Kampfheld is for real, he was talking about stuff like grass that remains depressed after something lands on it or footprints that can stick around forever. Stuff like that isn't exactly data intensive, but it does eat up processor power.
 
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