This at least has some of the things I recall reading
Thanks for that URL. I hadn't seen that yet.
However, I still seem to be missing an important document, because I don't see how some of you (not you Coreldan) get from this description of techniques that are obviously still in their experimental stages, to the dead certainty that Forza 5 will be using such techniques.
OP?
Is Forza 5 the first "cloud based" game?
Many games run on cloud based infrastructures. Rendering in the cloud and streaming the rendered video to the client also isn't new (although it working well would be). So, at least in general terms, there is nothing new about "cloud based" games.
More specifically, in terms of the techniques mentioned in the document Coreladan linked to, I don't know. Does anyone else? If Forza 5 were to, say, calculate a very large and detailed ambient occlusion map in the cloud which the game uses to improve fidelity of the real-time graphics rendered on the console, that likely would be a first. Maybe I'm wrong, but so far, I'm unaware of Forza 5 attempting any such thing.
recall they mentioned a few things like fe. rendering smoke, explosions or for example some hair/clothing interacting with gravity and movement etc, lighting was also one of the things mentioned... but in short the point is not to render everything in the game.
Actually, that isn't what the article suggests. At least some of you are confused.
What the interviewee was referring to was scene setup, not rendering! I'll use Coreldan's smoke example to illustrate. According to the interviewee, you could offload the calculations of how fast smoke should rise, how it may interact with other physical objects, and how it is blown about by the wind. But it would go no further. At that point, the results would be returned to the console and "fed" to the rendering engine, which does all of the actual smoke rendering. More generally, his point was that latency-sensitive things aren't suited to being offloaded to the cloud. Anything you are doing repeatedly, 60 times per second, obviously
is latency sensitive, hence cloud based rendering isn't what they have in mind. Not sure if I've made that distinction clear, but I hope so.