The Best Article about the Xbox One Cloud I've seen so far

[Robert Carpenter]

Microsoft makes the case for Xbox One's 300,000 server cloud, but what do developers think? • Articles • Xbox One • Eurogamer.net

For everyone interested in the potential, read this. The entire thing, every word. It explains things in much more detail than others have been.

 

[stmav]

Thanks for the link. Very informative article.

 

[a5cent]

Pretty much what I've been saying this whole time ;-)

 

[Robert Carpenter]

Pretty much what I've been saying this whole time ;-)

I think there may have been a little more doubt from you at first, but the intent was there

 

[Reflexx]

You said every word explains it.

I saw a word or two that didn't.

False advertising!

But overall, great piece.

It's going to blur the line of what we think of as single player and multiplayer. We'll probably see Online Single Player games, where the world you play in huge and expansive. Every NPC in the world exists in the cloud, along with all of its AI. So it's not about getting AI calculations downloaded to your console. The character actually exists outside of the console. The console is only rendering it.

 

[Robert Carpenter]

So it's not about getting AI calculations downloaded to your console. The character actually exists outside of the console. The console is only rendering it.

Exactly. This would be completely identical to any multiplayer experience that uses client-side movement detection. No latency argument is valid. The reaction times are identical lol

 

[Reflexx]

Exactly. This would be completely identical to any multiplayer experience that uses client-side movement detection. No latency argument is valid. The reaction times are identical lol

One of the problems with having a ton of characters on screen at a time is the AI. A console might be able to render all of the characters, but not at the same time that it is calculating the AI for each individual character.

The cloud would take care of that, leaving the console to only worry about the rendering.

 

[a5cent]

I think there may have been a little more doubt from you at first, but the intent was there

Nah. I wasn't partying with everyone else when the xbox cloud was first announced. That much is true. Instead I was raining on peoples parades by pointing out how most weren't interpreting MS' comments correctly and building up false expectations. That stark contrast is the only reason you think I was being overly pessimistic, when in fact I was just being realistic. The fact that it is far easier to define what the xbox cloud can't do, than it is to define what it can do, might also have had an impact. :wink:

This article does a much better job of explaining what to expect, and it's exactly what I've been saying. Uncoincidentally, it's also exactly what you've been saying, but those weren't the same things the community was convincing themselves of.

Just for the sake of tradition, and for arguments sake, let me make another prediction you might find pessimistic:

The xbox cloud doesn't fundamentally change anything about game development. The Battlefield franchise has been running "in the cloud" for a decade. Anything a game developer might want to do with the xbox cloud would have been possible ten years ago without it. In that sense the xbox cloud isn't at all a technical revolution. If it's one at all, then it's a conceptual revolution, as it will bring game developers everywhere to comprehensively rethink which computations are done where and why. Those instances in which that rethinking leads to a direct and meaningful impact on gameplay will be those that reap the most success from using the xbox cloud.

So it's not about getting AI calculations downloaded to your console. The character actually exists outside of the console. The console is only rendering it.

That is an excellent way of putting it. It just may be that all of our games, even single player games, will end up living in the cloud at some point.

A console might be able to render all of the characters, but not at the same time that it is calculating the AI for each individual character. The cloud would take care of that, leaving the console to only worry about the rendering.

In all the excitement over what exactly the xbox cloud does, I think that aspect is being overlooked (what it allows a certain console not to do).

Everything you can offload to the cloud frees the console up to do something else. In a sense, the earliest and most noticeable benefit of xbox cloud gaming may turn out to be exactly what the xbox cloud can't directly help with... better graphics... because the console may be able to put a larger percentage of its local computing power towards that goal.

 

[HeyCori]

Microsoft makes the case for Xbox One's 300,000 server cloud, but what do developers think? • Articles • Xbox One • Eurogamer.net

For everyone interested in the potential, read this. The entire thing, every word. It explains things in much more detail than others have been.

Thanks. I will come back to read when I have time.

 

[Keith Wallace]

Lots of cool stuff and a lot of potential here. My only concern is the Internet speed requirements needed to handle this. With so much information being offloaded and re-sent to the console after computation, will people without high-speed broadband be able to even play games using this, or will there simply bee too much information traveling back and forth for something like my 3Mbps connection? I mean, even the peer-to-peer setup we have now leads to lag. If there is offloaded and streamed information headed from my console to both a Respawn AND a Microsoft server, will that be too much for my connection to handle? Is that even something to worry about?

 

[a5cent]

I mean, even the peer-to-peer setup we have now leads to lag. If there is offloaded and streamed information headed from my console to both a Respawn AND a Microsoft server, will that be too much for my connection to handle? Is that even something to worry about?

Considering that MS' cloud infrastructure is specifically setup to handle these scenarios, you can bet your bottom dollar that their infrastructure will perform much better than some arbitrary gamer's ad-hoc P2P network. The fact that MS has multiple Azure sites spanning the globe (which will provide the infrastructure for the xbox cloud) also makes it far easier for developers to come up with more deterministic latency and bandwidth statistics, than if they must assume joe-shmoe will be the one hosting a game.

Finally, game developers obviously have no interest in producing games that only those with the best internet connections can play. Any cloud based features will either scale based on network performance, or require only that level of network performance which can be expected everywhere in the world where the xbox is sold.

I can't predict the future, but I'm pretty sure you don't have to worry about any of this (unless you develop xbox games).