Jonathan Blow: Microsoft's Cloud/Server Claims Are Lies
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Seriously Jonathan? We know you had a rough time with Microsoft, build a bridge and get over it rather than slagging them off at every opportunity you get. Even if he's right he just comes off as a butt-hurt blowhard (pun intended) and judging by the posts I'm not the only one who feels this way. Focus on spruiking your game Jonathon and let Microsoft bury itself.
Same here. He might be "allied" with Sony, but that doesn't make him any less wrong. It doesn't take a technical genius to see that Microsoft is spouting bullshit and that someone (who is a tech genius) should call them out on it.Adam Jensen said:
I have to agree with Blow. I was reading an gushing article on the New Yorker earlier which ultimately just showed how little evidence there is for cloud processing being of any use: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-future-of-video-games-a-box-and-a-cloud.html Here's some of the key quotes:
So... it allows you to render parts of the game the player is not likely to see for a fair while? That's not overcoming a limitation of in-console processing: that's wasting resources.
Aside from the fact that this concept isn't really that new (see Gears of War), you already need to be connected to servers to play CoD online. How is this really showing off what 'cloud' gaming can do, where cloud gaming is defined as letting the server handle the bulk of the processing?
So... you still have to install the game on your HD one way or another, and all you're offering is basically what Steam already does. Congratulations on the amazing technical breakthrough there.
Aside from suggesting that Kinect could be used as always-on achievement police, this quote really says nothing about the potential of the 'cloud'. Plenty of developers have already switched over to the 'we'll fix it later' mentality of design. What does cloud add to that? Absolutely nothing.
All this aside, relying on the cloud as a method of future-proofing strikes me as incredibly daft. You're basically betting that server technology and data transfer rates will evolve exponentially faster than the processing capability of personal devices, and that the cost to the user in terms of subscription fees and internet usage won't go beyond the cost of upgrading hardware.
Whitten offered an even more profound example of what the cloud can offer gaming. Today, he explained, ?most games work on artificial intelligence ? There?s this bounding box that?s close to where you, as a player, are that?s running full A.I. In the rest of it, it is running a very simplified model.? Whitten then let his hand fall to the table with a thump. ?And you wait for someone to come there. Suddenly, a world can be experiencing a shared simulation for long periods of time, in a persistent manner, regardless of where you are.? To explain this another way: imagine that you are the center of the universe, and everything exists solely for your benefit. People only interact when they?re in your presence; the sun shines only when you?re looking outside; dogs only bark and wag their tails when they see you; and so on. This is how most A.I.-governed worlds in games work now. Now imagine ?The Matrix,? in which billions of people participated in an ongoing virtual world that, like real life, was shaped by infinitely complex dynamics, all powered by countless machines. Whitten was quick to offer a caveat for his scenario: ?This is a hypothetical; I?m not talking about a specific game or anything like that.? Regardless, artificial intelligence powered by thousands of machines can be a lot smarter than A.I. powered by a single console, particularly four years into the future.
It used to be that games shipped only once they were finalized and done, their code set forever in silicon or plastic. Now, developers have the ability to send users game updates with new features or bug fixes. The next generation promises something even more dynamic: a game that constantly changes. Eric Hirshberg, the president and C.E.O. of Activision, publisher of the juggernaut Call of Duty series of first-person shooters (which holds the record for ?the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium?) told me, for instance, that ?learning the maps? through rote memorization of the best hiding places and assault points will be a thing of the past, since the new architecture allows maps to vary every time they are played: an earthquake may knock out a favorite hiding place, while inclement weather ruins a sniper perch. Learning a map won?t mean learning locations, it will mean learning the processes that can shape and re-shape it over time.
Given the One?s dependence on the cloud, it?s odd that the console comes with a Blu-Ray optical drive. This is a result of timing. In 2013, it?s not feasible for everyone around the world to download a fifty-gigabyte game over an Internet connection. But the system was designed to move, eventually, to an entirely cloud-based ecosystem. ?We actually play the game off the hard drive,? Multerer explained. ?So it kind of doesn?t matter if the bits are streamed down off the net or if they are streamed off the disc.?
The ability to evolve continuously allows for a certain kind of future-proofing in the design of games themselves. Multerer offered another example, made possible by the Xbox One?s Kinect camera, which can recognize individual players and even detect when the controller is handed off to a different person. ?Someone?s playing a game and they hand [the controller] to you for help. You get them over that hump. Do they get that achievement for getting over that hard thing? Do you get an achievement for helping someone get over a hard thing? Or do both people get achievements? That?s determined in the cloud ? We don?t know at game design, because we don?t know what?s going to be fun; let?s push that off to the cloud.? Game designers can build gaps into their games knowing that they can come up with better ideas later.
All this aside, relying on the cloud as a method of future-proofing strikes me as incredibly daft. You're basically betting that server technology and data transfer rates will evolve exponentially faster than the processing capability of personal devices, and that the cost to the user in terms of subscription fees and internet usage won't go beyond the cost of upgrading hardware.
LOL! Sounds like our developers.Shamanic Rhythm said:
QA: We've found a bug with X.
Devs: O.K, is it going to impact many customers?
QA: It's in one of the primary instructions so yeah.
Devs: Umm, we'll release it anyway and let them know a patch will soon be on the way to fix the problem.
Yeah, lots of people on this forum have pointed that out, but Blow did not, THAT's the issue here. Yes, their claim is very flimsy at face value, but if you are going to call bullshit, show some evidence. It's sad that a dude who is in the games industry isn't able to come up with reasons, yet people on this website are. And while the burden of proof is on Microsoft's shoulders, their claim is a future prediction that we'll have to wait for, whilst Blow's claim is saying right now it's bullshit, but has yet to back up his reason.Vivi22 said:
I don't like the Xbox One, and I'm sure as hell not buying it, but when it comes down to issues like this, if someone's gonna call bullshit they better have facts to back it up.
quadriple power is technically possible with clouding. whether they will actually use that is questionable. you can offload meaningful calcuations as you dont need to send all calcualtion steps to other amchine. you senc the begining, and the calcualtion command (it already knows how to execute this command being a identical product), it executes it and send info back. the info itself is in fact very small and its caoculation process that creates a lot of information that last for nanosenconds. you dont need space level bandwitch for clouding. altrough dialup wont work for obviuos reasons. you dont need your itnernet to match speeds of CPU, RAM or GPU.Vivi22 said:
Now this being a technical nightmare, well, MMOs do it. so its possible.
Of course MS's claim is nonsense. The mere suggestion that any frame-crucial physics or rendering is done anywhere other than on the Xbox is ludicrous. Even with a really good internet connection that is very close to the server farm, the round trip of the data would have a latency of a minimum of 100ms. If you're lucky!
Call of Duty runs at 60fps, which means it has exactly 16.66666ms to do its processing and display the frame. Most games nowadays run at 30fps, which still only gives you 33.33333ms to play with per frame. Shove in a 100 or 150ms of pause into that, and you'll be running at seconds per frame, instead of the other way round!
Utter bullcrap.
However... it is theoretically possible for the more open-world games (such as a Saints Row, or GTA) to have some sort of 'world simulation' constantly running in the background that your local game can pick and choose what data it takes from it, but whatever the simulation was doing in the cloud, it would have to be completely non-game critical, which kind of makes it more of a gimmick than anything of use.
So: will games be able to possibly use MS server farms? Yes. Will it improve physics and graphics in the game? NO. Will it make the games better? Highly doubtful.
(Unless, by 'improving graphics', MS mean the game can fetch lots of advertizement textures to shove down your throat on in-game billboards...)
Call of Duty runs at 60fps, which means it has exactly 16.66666ms to do its processing and display the frame. Most games nowadays run at 30fps, which still only gives you 33.33333ms to play with per frame. Shove in a 100 or 150ms of pause into that, and you'll be running at seconds per frame, instead of the other way round!
Utter bullcrap.
However... it is theoretically possible for the more open-world games (such as a Saints Row, or GTA) to have some sort of 'world simulation' constantly running in the background that your local game can pick and choose what data it takes from it, but whatever the simulation was doing in the cloud, it would have to be completely non-game critical, which kind of makes it more of a gimmick than anything of use.
So: will games be able to possibly use MS server farms? Yes. Will it improve physics and graphics in the game? NO. Will it make the games better? Highly doubtful.
(Unless, by 'improving graphics', MS mean the game can fetch lots of advertizement textures to shove down your throat on in-game billboards...)
Even though he seems to think he doesn't know why, he's absolutely correct. See my post above this one for an explanation.TheKasp said:
You can't offload any work that is frame critical, such as physics or rendering. The round trip latency for the data is just too great, even with a very good internet speed, and a close proximity to the server farm. You're looking at a minimum of 100ms round trip, which would destroy your frame rate.Strazdas said:
Any processing done in the cloud cannot be game or frame critical. Simple as that.
No, actually your frame rate can drop thanks to data transfer, too. Online games do as much prediction as they can while they're waiting for either other player's input data or actual positional information, but it reaches a point where the game (especially one as in the original poster's scenario - a 20 person team in WoW) just doesn't have the information required to predict any more - for whatever reason it has been starved of data, and it has to stall and wait for some solid data before processing can continue. The amount of impact this has depends hugely on the type of game that's being played, of course.Strazdas said:
There's also the scenario where the more players you have in a party, the larger the lump of data that will be sent to each person's machine in the group. Depending on how the online architecture is set up (peer to peer, client/server, etc.) also has a bearing on possible frame rate hits on large groups. The larger the group, the more stuff will be going on (people moving, shooting, blowing stuff up, all generating lots of particles, physics objects, and collision events, and all of this, depending on where the processing for that is done, has an impact too.
(To address your first point as well, you can't do physics or frame-critical AI in the cloud. The latency on the round trip is too high and your game would be running at about 1 frame per second while it waited for object position data to be sent back!)
You cannot offload rendering. I never claimed otherwise. You can offload Physics calculation, remaining the movement factor to be information recieved by the client. World of Tanks recently did server-based physics. They are not working on a hybrid where part of physics wil lbe calculated at user side and part at serverside because its a large strain on their servers as now they take most of the calculating load and thus they cant add all the physical structures they want (like turrets flying off from explosions).DiamanteGeeza said:
Well, WOT seems to handle it with pings as low as up to 17ms. OF course thats server calculation and not cloud, cloud would add extra latency because my game would have to wait for somone to send his calcualtion results via his dialup from congo.
No, render rate cannot drop due to slow data transfer unless you transfer render data, which noone does. It stops and waits for response, which is lag, but this does not affect your actual framerate. dont confuse lag caused by ping and lag caused by slow hardware.DiamanteGeeza said:
The more particle effects generation is a fair point, however this has nothing to do with internet speed but rather with how the game engine is set up and if it can handle many particles at once or not.
Okay, I don't get why so many people are hating on his comments here.
He's just saying 'Yeah, that sounds like BS to me, someone who knows more about this stuff should probably look into it.' over Twitter. Which is what everyone with even some knowledge on this stuff is saying.
It's not like he's putting on a press conference refuting Microsoft's claims or something. MS made claims, he is saying he's not convinced.
He's just saying 'Yeah, that sounds like BS to me, someone who knows more about this stuff should probably look into it.' over Twitter. Which is what everyone with even some knowledge on this stuff is saying.
It's not like he's putting on a press conference refuting Microsoft's claims or something. MS made claims, he is saying he's not convinced.
I can't speak about World of Tanks... never played it, so I can't comment. But, I can tell you categorically, as someone who's been developing video games for decades, you can't process anything that is frame critical - and let me clarify what frame critical means... it means you need the result of the calculation before you can render the next frame - anywhere other than locally if you want to maintain a stable frame rate of 30fps or above in any type of remotely fast paced game. Take a driving game, for example, if you send your inputs off to the cloud, and wait to get the resolution of the rigid body solver back from the cloud before rendering the frame, the game will be running at single digit frame rates if you're lucky, and the frame rate will vary wildly between frames as the latency on the data rate varies. Same with shooters (especially something running at 60fps like CoD)... if you wait for the physics on the player to be computed on a cloud before rendering the frame, you won't be anywhere near 60fps. And, of course, you can't defer calculations like these because you need to update object positions prior to rendering the frame. The same goes for collisions if the result of the collision is required prior to rendering the frame, which of course they typically are.Strazdas said:
We're not talking about the length of time it takes to render a frame. We're talking about frame rate, which is a different thing altogether. Perhaps, not being an engineer, you're not quite understanding what FPS is...? If your game has to wait 100ms for a lump of data to arrive before it can render the frame, it doesn't matter whether you can render the entire frame in 1ms (you can't), because you've just had a delay of 100ms on top of that. Bang, your frame rate drops drastically. Frame rate is the TOTAL amount of time required to update and render a frame. If you're busy sitting waiting for some data from a server, that will affect your frame rate. And lets not forget: 16.66666ms is all you have to run at 60fps, 33.33333ms is what you get to run at 30fps.Strazdas said:
Once again, with the particles, you're not quite understanding how game traffic works when an external cloud is involved. In your scenario of offloading it all to the cloud, if there are 20 people all blasting away with rocket launchers and blowing stuff up, the explosions will probably generate debris and particles. Every single client in the game will need to be told of the creation of these particles by the cloud (which increases the amount of data being sent... delay number 1), then each client has to create their own version of these particles and objects in their local simulation of the world (delay number 2), and then they all need to be rendered in the next frame (extra polys to process and render = delay number 3). And, of course, if all calculations are being done in the cloud for these particles (as in your scenario), the local client can't render the next frame until they've been notified of all the new particle positions. The more data this becomes, the longer it takes to transmit it, so you can see how this all adds up as the number of players increases, and this will, in turn, hit the frame rate. And now bear in mind that if you get a round trip to and from the cloud in less than 50ms you're doing really well, that would put your frame rate around 15fps - in the real world it would be less than this, because even if you have a speed of light connection to the cloud, you're at the mercy of the slowest client that's connected - the cloud can't send you a new update packet until it has all other clients' input data and has done a full processing update. This is why the best way to handle a situation like this is to have the arbiter (whether that be a server or the cloud) inform the clients that something has blown up, and the local client decides what debris it can handle (bearing in mind everything else that is in view on that particular client) and will process all physics and collision locally to avoid a synchronous reliance on the arbiter.
I'm not sure how many client/server or peer-to-peer network engines you've written, but I've written quite a few over the years, and they are complicated beasts. Keeping as much processing as is humanly possible local to the client removes a considerable amount of frame-lock reliance on the cloud/server.
My problem with him is that he made an "artsy" game, and as with other works of art, people started analyzing it and giving their own interpretations about what it meant. He then proceeded to go around and tell people that their interpretations are wrong.TheKasp said:
That said I don't have a problem with what he's saying right now though.
Physics are not frame critical then. you can calculate physics for multiple secons ahead in current games. epecially when one physics effect does not do anything to the other (for example a splash of explosion does not effect physics of a building nearby it being a static model).DiamanteGeeza said:
thats assuming pings above 100 ms, but fair enough many people still have that.
The processing if powerful enough happens way bellow those marks though. for most renders anyway. (lets ignore consoles being stuck on ancient technology for a second). 33 MS is still enough for a render and a signal if the render is, say, happening in 15 MS, which on some machines do for almost all games. granted you need powerful machine to render everything at that speed, but if the machine only has to render 10% and another 10% is rendered by another machine it does the job much faster. well maybe i shoudl say calculate and not render since render is done locally anyway.
and you need to do that once. and your fine for the whole particle effect to last multiple seconds. Yes it will cause a single freze of say 100ms once. But thats because our machines are not powerful enough yet to make it smaller. Or rather, they are but people dont get acess to.
Technically - yes. Practically the bandwitch of our cables in comaprisong to how much data is being transmited by online gameplay in current games would allow us much higher data amounts without extra delays.
and that is why we have dedicated servers that does the calculations for us, so we wouldnt need to rely on the slowest machine. of course clouding would render that away which makes your point valid.
Why would it take a technical genius to prove that? Blow stated that he himself could produce 10,000 servers and they'd suck. There's nothing that indicates Microsoft can't produce 300,000 servers.Lovely Mixture said:
It's not that they're lies, it's that they're misleading to the point of practically being nonsense. I build and blow away virtual machines nearly every day for testing. Servers, client machines, new and old environment types, all of that. 300,000 machines is saying nothing because the amount of RAM, the CPU type, and even disk space are all things I can completely control and may suck or be fine. If you found out that they were making a server farm of 300,000 pre-color gameboys would you think that number matters? Probably not.
It's like me telling you that I have one computer to sell you for $900 but I refuse to tell you anything more than the fact that it is a computer. I'm not lying in this hypothetical scenario, I do have a pc to sell you. But the deception or misleading part is that it could be an old Pentium 3 that barely works or it could be one of the latest and greatest i7 machine with everything cutting edge to go with it. Microsoft is doing that in such a way that is indicating that it's a good thing without giving real details. Total misdirect.
If you really want to complain about cloud computing being used to augment video games, you should do it in another way. This isn't just requiring always online while you're playing solo player games, it's requiring a decent internet connection that can upload and download data in a manner that could potentially make a solo game more internet demanding than first person shooters. The number of people who do not have the infrastructure for this could be extremely significant since it takes a step beyond the people who don't have a reliable connection. It also means that every game created in this fashion will die the day that those servers go down unless special provisions are made. So these games would cease to exist for our children and grandchildren. If the average infrastructure proved capable of handling this load in a timely manner then it'd be feasible. But if anything happens and your internet can't handle it, we're facing a future of lagging single playing games that have no business lagging.
What's more, there's not necessarily a reason to require cloud processing. It will just be used as an excuse to require always online gaming. We already saw EA trying to pull that shit with Sim City and they got caught. But the truth is that this is the crutch publishers were hoping for to force a kind of DRM on consumers that they know we wouldn't go for without a legitimate reason. Shame on them.
As for the processing bit, with the appropriate internet speeds and network set up, it is entirely viable. Sony did a less upload/download intensive version of this with their folding at home project where ps3's all over the world did the processing. But real time processing and responses is a trickier problem. It really all comes down to the amount of latency it would cause as to whether or not it's worth having. I don't know that we could prove or disprove it as feasible until we have an actual example of it: A game that demands a significant amount of remote processing and a reasonable connection.
But again, they are going to use this, mark my words, as a way to justify always online drm. Just like EA did.
Until today reading this news item, I didn't have a clue who he was. I still don't much care. But he is right. Live Cloud computing requires an equally powerful connection to that processor. Microsoft could sink billions into the fastest computers in the world. Unless they upgrade everyone's internet with it, its a complete failure before it starts.Evil Smurf said:
To quadruple the processing power of the XBone would probably require an internet connection of upwards of 20 Mb/s, that being a favorable estimate. A person I know with about 20 years of experience put it closer to 1 Gb/s, which in North America is ludicrously expensive. Another factor to consider would be that the more people using the same cloud server the less power each person gets.shintakie10 said:
I honestly have no idea where they got the fact that it would improve lighting effects and physics. I'm pretty damn sure the game software would set that limit with the cloud only increasing processing speed. It would be very unintuitive to be running the physics and lighting engines on the cloud.
Technically Microsoft's claims are possible, but chances are, their not going to do it. Or you would need a perfect scenario to get what their promising. As in; the server is next door, connected with 1Gb/s speeds, you are the only user.