gamechanger87
Member
Ripped from another thread below is a basic example of some of the stuff being done on the XBO cloud side. It looks like people are starting to actually use the cloud for real processing at least on a basic level.
Has anyone heard anymore about the Cloud demo from Spencer? Anyone seen anything similar other than the Build presentation?
For posterity
Has anyone heard anymore about the Cloud demo from Spencer? Anyone seen anything similar other than the Build presentation?
This is what I am allowed to share.
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
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!
Arg. Actually, it was not the plan that this will become a big deal. What you see there is really just a super small-scaled, super simple, super basic test. In reality, we are far more ahead with the tech than what you see there. However, at least some of the comments here motivate us even more to really show what is possible with server calculation
I hope we will be able to share more with you guys next year.
For posterity
Yep, he's okay. Carry on.