Microsoft Claims "Cloud" Will Quadruple Power of Xbox One

[Frostbite3789]

It's simple. The "cloud" is going to give the Xbox One the awesome computational power to pull off levels of detailed simulation to rival that of SimCity 2013.

Pretty much what I came here to say. "Isn't this exactly what we heard with SimCity? And sort of what was said with the Cell processor with the PS3?"

 

[Poetic Nova]

In other words: always online DRM? No thx MS. Where is the time consoles never needed social networking or a working internet connection to play a game?

 

[Zeraki]

Jeff Henshaw, the group manager of Xbox Incubation and Prototyping

Does he spend all day sitting on Xbones waiting for them to hatch? Maybe the Xbone is an alien conspiracy and they have facehuggers in them!

The Kinect watches you, learns your mannerisms, voice patterns... then it makes a perfect copy of you. The copy traps you within a dimensional rift inside the Kinect and it takes your place in society.

You are now trapped in... The Twilight Zone.

 

[Callate]

Heh. Heh heh. BWAHAHAHAHA!

Yeah, I'm definitely going to design my game around hypothetical resources that may or may not be available depending on the user's Internet connection and provider, Microsoft carrying through on marketing promises to make massive amounts of expensive computational power available at will on a long-term basis, and the general uncertainty of large computer networks in an era of outages, 404 errors, hacker attacks, and similar manifestations of Murphy's Law.

But first I think I'm going to post all my credit card numbers on 4chan, put my DVDs in a microwave for an hour, and sew my crotch to an angry wolverine.

Microsoft? Two of the biggest companies in games have already proven that they can singularly flub up large elements of games that are dependent on network connections to servers- and no one thinks you're as good at this kind of thing as they are!

Will someone please think of the investors and lock these people away before they can talk to the press any more?

 

[thesilentman]

The "Cloud" can be used like this, but only for real data crunching. If it's for on site programs, forget it. I'd find the chat that I had with DoPo over this in the Linux group, but I can't find it for some reason. I will update if I do.

Main point? MS is a bunch of twats for thinking this. True data crunching is really the only practical reason, and I don't think MS wants games to stream at 2 MB/s from Xbox to Xbox. -.-

Spoiler: EDIT- Here you go, found it. Read it normally, from top to bottom. And I decided to add more to give a context of what we're discussing here.

Welp, sharing a random thought I had - it's about possible future for Linux gaming. How Linux can suddenly be Up There? with other platforms, on equal footing when it comes to playing stuff. And I don't know why I didn't think of it before but - streaming games. Yep, it's that easy - stream the games and it doesn't matter which platform you play them on.

And Linux already has that covered and has had it for...decades. OK, technically UNIX but whatever, Linux can do it too - this entire idea of streaming stuff is how stiff already operates. You don't have to be on your own machine to do stuff, you could just as well just have keyboard and a screen and get your session over SSH from another server. Or have an X session running on another machine but shown on your screen. Or numerous remote desktop variations. It's a complete non-issue to get a game displayed to us and send back control inputs, the only thing is network speed and a good enough game server to give us the performance. Network is being sorted out for us (technology marching on), so we only have to worry about what runs the games.

I've seen talks about streaming games (and there is OnLive, still, I thing, but dunno how good it is) but never actually connected to Linux or mentioned that we have the facilities to do it just lack some tech to support it properly. And it does seem like a viable direction to expand in - never heard much talk about that either. Get a beefy machine to run the games for you and you won't need specific consoles/PCs/whatever in the house since it can direct the output anywhere you want it to, on multiple screens if you wish and the controller just needs to be "whatever fits the game". So can cut out ports in one fell swoop - there needs to be just one version of the game.

I understand that there would also be difficulties but...it's still too little discussed thing, I believe. There is only OnLive but it's just...there - rarely if ever do I hear about it. When some 4G technologies were being discussed there was a brief mention of "Oh, that means you'll be able to stream games on mobile phones" and...that's about it, really. Now with PS4 we have a brief mention of streaming games but no real big hubbub of the possibilities. Just bizarre.

@DoPo: I thought it'd be a pretty viable thing, or at least it will be in the near future, with a device sort of like Ubuntu phone's docking. You load up your OS via device to a screen, keyboard and mouse combo with a dock and from there are able to play any sort of media, high end games as well.

Though, last I heard the major hurdle was internet connections? I attempted to try OnLive and Gaia but my flash package wasn't up to date -_-

@Lucem712: Internet connections are on their way to becoming a non-issue...well, OK not everywhere at all times but there have been places with stable 10Mb/s or so download speeds for a decade. Furthermore, you won't care much for internet connection if you deploy it over LAN at home and my impression is that everybody and their dog has easy access to home LAN solutions. And for, like, at least 5 years home wirelesses have been popular. It's a bit limited, yeah, but it's there, it can be used.

@DoPo: Streaming and web-based games is how I see Linux growing as a viable alternative to Windows or da Mac. Sooner or later, it won't matter what most of us need to do as it will all be in the high and mighty cloud. I already see Google Docs up there, and a nice group word editor called Etherpad doing this. The future is heading more towards streaming and the almighty "cloud", something that pisses me off personally, but I respect in a sense.

@thesilentman: Well...cloud is something else I've been musing about. It's not a bad idea, quite good in fact, and it sort of feels like a golden hammer...which isn't as good. However, it does have a great potential and for anybody working in technology, I'd suggest to go and start getting familiar with it. Myself included. For good or bad, it should become more and more relevant as you observed.

But at any rate I had an...interesting idea the other day - P2P cloud computing. Which has been around for a while in a way (well, all those "loan us CPU to compute a cure for cancer/Einstein's theorems/etc") but you could grow it out into an actual P2P computing. So like torrents but instead of using the network's hard drives, you can also use CPU as well. So more or less, you can loan CPU power to others ("seeding") and claim some back later ("leeching"). It's of limited usefulness but it can work in some situations. There are ways to do it, there are obstructions, to but it is possible. But then I realised it'd just a giant botnet to be operated by mostly anyone. Ugh, not a pleasant thought.

@DoPo: Loaning CPU power? Ah wait a minute, let me visualize that.

....

Dang it. I can't. How would this work in practice?

@thesilentman: Don't you know those projects about solving theorems or cancer research and stuff? How they work is you install their software and then specify how much CPU you want to give them - you could go for 10% or 80%, if you wish. Nowadays you can happily give them a core or two to use, I suppose, the first time I encountered them was around when WoW started out, so 2005-2006 when multicore CPUs were almost unheard of for normal users. But anyways, once you specify how much processing they can use, they'll just feed your computer small chunks of data to be processed and when finished they just get the result back. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's distributed computing really similar to the cloud but...not the cloud. Here is one I remember from back then. You can extend the idea to a P2P network, too - feed others the processing you can't do, they'll do it for you then spit back the results and voila. In the downtime you get fed processing requests.

It's not useful for all things, say, if you're playing a game you really need that data NOW and latency isn't really an option, however if you have to crunch through large volumes of data it can really speed things along, assuming, of course, you can split off the data in discrete chunks. Presumably each of these would need some time to be processed, so each could be a complex mathematical formula, for example or maybe you have a batch of images which need some automated manipulation that just takes time. Of course, you could just distribute the bruteforcing of a password or even a DDoS.

@DoPo: Oh, I've heard of something like that. But I've always thought they'd work for more calculation based data than anything else. :-/

@thesilentman: Yeah, not every type of computation would lend itself well to parallelisation but if it does, then it'd just be useful to have it.

I remember one guy giving a talk on the CUDA technology which allows you to run your software on nVidia cards. Now, even if you have, like 8GHz CPU, some software just doesn't need power, it needs more processes and the video card has that in spades - at the time (three years ago) you could easily pick up a card with 128 cores which would run any CPU to the dust with sheer parallelisation power. He had rewrote some software that simulated...earthquakes or volcano eruptions - one of the two, but some science lab somewhere was studying them and providing warning for a nearby area (I believe it was somewhere in Africa). So basically, they were in a high risk region and when the sensors picked up something that could possibly indicate the disaster, they'd run the software to see where and how it'd most likely hit. Problem is that on a normal CPU (well, probably not off the shelf but a bit more beefy). While the rewritten application, utilising some normal nVidia card, was still not realtime (he showed a demo - it advanced with about a frame or two a second) it would at least finish in just a few minutes as opposed to the 5-8 hours or so, the original needed.

So yeah. I'm pretty passive here and decided to listen more than suggest any ideas, but this can probably shed some light on something as it talks about the method that MS is trying to put into practice. I don't see it working after DoPo explained it, and after some further thought, I had to agree.

Any thing you guys want to discuss on this from the technological side? Just join us in the Escapist Linux group here. We're pretty lenient and all, but we can talk for hours on tech. And we have too. :-D

 

[Reyold]

Being "future-proof" is probably the only good thing about the Xbox One. The faster this thing dies, the better. Seriously, NO ONE, gamers or devs, should be touching this crap with a 10-foot pole. Instead, they should be smashing it to bits with said pole.

Considering you'd have to actually touch the console with the pole to smash it, I think it'd be better to just shoot them damn thing to pieces with an 18th century cannon.

As for the "developers shouldn't touch this crap", look at the facebook-comments to the article, with someone working as a developer stating flat-out that this isn't tempting to work with.

Yeah, I saw that comment. As an aspiring indie dev, it's good to know that the Xbox One is NOT an ideal platform to develop for. Incidentally, I thought I heard something about it being "indie-unfriendly" in other ways. Does anyone know about that?

Also, what I probably should've said was "shouldn't touch this crap with a 10-foot pole unless you're smashing it to bits," but I like your idea much better.

Microsoft seems intent on putting themselves in last place in the console race. Used games fee, hardly any focus on games, always-online (technically, it's not, but...). I wonder what the public reaction will be when it comes out.

 

[Kayevcee]

Does anyone here remember the adverts for Onlive? It was a cloud-based gaming service where they sent you a wee box and you paid a monthly fee to play any game you want (in their library, natch). All the processing was done at Onlive's server farm, and the box really just uploaded the controller info and provided the video feed. There was a strong community element and if you weren't in the mood to play you could watch one of your friends' gameplay stream instead. A friend of mine said it was really impressive and went on about it a lot on his podcast:
http://www.geshcast.com/

It was on that self-same podcast that I learned that Onlive had gone belly-up last year. Not enough people were keen on the "streaming games" idea and there were some latency problems that the service never got over.

The 'bone looks like it'll have plenty of horsepower of its own so that may compensate for the latency issues. I'm still not convinced about it, for the reasons expressed by pretty much every response in this thread, but also because of the ballad of Onlive.

Tread carefully, Microsoft.

-Nick

 

[Kristian Fischer]

I love that they saw the SimCity debacle and went "Gotta get me some o' dat!"

Incidentally, their boast is a little too specific and quite frankly smells very strongly of bullsh*t.
So...

Also known as "marketing". It smells of a Dilbert-esque disconnect between Microsoft marketing and engineering.

Personally, I shall be watching from the side lines (being a PC man), but it's kinda fascinating to behold the start of this console generation.

When the PS4 was "revealed", we wondered why Sony didn't show the console, and whether MS could derive an advantage if they showed theirs. Now Microsoft has done it, and it hasn't helped...

CAPTCHA: Chocolate cookie. Well, if you insist...

 

[Iklol]

Very crafty Microsoft, now you can have your always online DRM without actually having DRM. I'm sure you will be able to play the games offline, it's just that you'll get 10 fps and constant crashing because the Xbone's hardware is a joke.

God knows what it'll do to your internet bill too.

 

[tardcore]

Well Microsoft has proven that the Xbone can certainly harness the power of the Shit Storm anyway.

 

[Talvrae]

Cloud gaming, yeah great idea... does i have to remind that some poeples, me included, don't have access to limitless bandwith

 

[zalithar]

The Cloud is still going to be bottlenecked by your internet connection, which is pretty variable across different regions, so it's not something anyone should be counting on.

Thankfully I was not the only one to pick up on this. There is no way that they can transfer enough data fast enough with out serious repercussions. To quadruple your power they would need to push three times as much data through the internet as through your processor. If you have weak, throttled, or limited internet connection it means nothing to your power and could even raise your internet bill significantly depending on your plan. Not only that but you also have to consider server load; not just for when it might go down but how busy the cloud is.

Microsoft's game division should either get of the stool or kick out from under them. Preferably get off the stool otherwise there will be no more competition.

 

[Something Amyss]

See, that's what I'm saying. I want to own my hardware. The cloud is such BS! If I pay money for this new XBOX, what am I really getting?

From the looks of things, a more expensive (and powerful, but that seems redundant) OnLive settop.

 

[Zanderinfal]

Oh, ha ha! It's laughable that you think this way Microsoft!

Laughable and depressing.

Gah, fuck. Now we've got another possible "SimCity cloud saving" scandal here. If it fails (and I'll be damned if it doesn't) then what would happen to the console connected or connecting to the cloud? Would it crash the console, brick it or what? This is bound to fail like like it has failed before. Nothing new here.

Cappy: point blank
... Shot to the back of the head of the guy who thought this was a good idea after what EA did.

 

[magicmonkeybars]

This is how I think they're doing this.
They're using idle XB1s to off load some of the calculations of users actively playing games.
It'll be extra efficient if that idle XB1 has the same game installed as the one being played.
So in busy hours your XB1 plays like shit but in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else is asleep it'll play like a monster PC because it can off load so much of its workload on idle XB1s.
They might even install bare bones "games" on your harddrive without you knowing.
So while some people are watching Game of Thrones you'll be using their cpu, gpu and ram to play Call of Duty.

 

[weirdee]

Wait, doesn't that mean that the games will be overdesigned and whenever you play the game offline, it'll run really slow?

 

[The Enquirer]

Can anyone list out the plus sides that this console will give over anything else such as a Pc or hell, even a ps2 and gamecube? Like seriously?? It's just one bad piece of news after another. It's actually hard to believe that microsoft can be this stupid.

 

[Strazdas]

So basically his is OnLive type of service. Which means a strong and stable internet connection will be needed to use the device, hence the always online comes back.

Unless you're someone like me who only gets 10 megabits down and 1 up. There's no way their cloud would be able to improve anything on my network

Actually, if we assume that calculation server side graphic generation user side assumption (which woudl require Xbone t be mostly a VGA conencted to internet, which frankly it is seeing as it uses a tablet processor, your internet shoudl be able to handle it fine. it does not take big bnadwitch to send calculatino commands and results, only if you want to stream the actual game. but i the visuals are generated locally then this can work.
Now who is willign to be MS is that smart? yeah, i guess noone.

1) Even if the ability to do this worked, it is completely impractical. "The cloud" isn't just empty space, and that computer work has to happen on someone's machine. If it isn't the end-user's, it's the provider's. This means paying for the machine, upkeep, server and bandwidth costs etc. It is cheaper to have the end-user run the hardware, rather than keep some kind of gigantic cluster of PCs running 24/7.

There is a reason they want your xbox to be on even when your sleeping. it wont be on standby, it will be calcualting gameplay for other palyers that paly at that time. while you dont play you "cloud"for others, whne you play others "cloud" for you. it is actually very practical if everyone used it properly.
Though we already have a system that works like that for years. Its called torrents. (before you jump the gun, no, torrents arent illegal, a lot of games use torrent protocol to download updates due t it being faster than HTTP, its just that what people like to do with it (piracy) is illegal)

2) It's technically impossible. Unless we're talking about running a game on a completely different machine and streaming effectively a video feed, running parts of a game on one machine but parts on another and sharing data between the two is impossible to develop for.

except 90% of the MMOs that do calculating on servers......

3) The end result for the user would be an increase in performance in exchange for never, ever being capable of running their game without the cloud help. Putting to one side the constant-failure of online DRM, even if the tech was there and it was efficient it would basically destroy our concept of ownership, with every game becoming always-online. I hope you can see why that might be an issue.

yes and thats why i am agasint it, but to say that this is impractical from sheer power perspective is silly.

What about when the servers inevitably go down? What about people like me that have slow and unstable internet (125kB/s in case you were wondering)?

peple like you shuld get a better internet. No, really, i pity people who have t struggle with internet like that. been there, 10 years ago, i know how hard it is and i hope you upgrade as fast as possible.

How exactly is that going to work?

I mean the vast majority of any game's calculations are frame-related, wrapped in your typical game-loop.

- Get and process user input.
- Calculate AI reactions and physics.
- Render results.
- Repeat.

And you repeat that if at all possible at least 30 times per second. If you've got 50ms ping, which about as high as can be reasonably expected, then you'll still only manage 20 frames per second even if you have instantaneous results

Not really. Lets say you get instant sending if user input, becuase the console itself is powerful enough to send signals that you pressed a key. its a fair assumption as xbox360 is powerful enough for that. Calculating AI and physics happens up in the clouds, but oes not have to happen every frake. AI can be recalcualted even as slowly as once in 2 seconds. it certainly doesn ot rething its actions every frame in current games and it does not make sense to. physics can work on thier own and unless player imput gets to touch it it has no reason to realculate. we seond thins infor back to the machine and render locally, thus removing the need for high bandwitch of low ping stream, as locally generated will generate with 0 ping (or well the amount of ping it takes for the cables to move intfo to TV and TV process it, but thats usually very small and not counted, we got TVs that proces in nanoseconds now). technically it could work. and it does on MMOs. MMOs do calculations server-side this disabling any possibility to cheat stuff like gold, reload, ect. and the gpraihcs are generated locally from your machine. and it does not take a beast to run either. and yes physics are generated server side too (example being World of Tanks), and the pings there are around 60ms for me. which is acceptable.

Or, to put it in words I'm sure most will understand, you know the rubberbanding and lag that happens in most multiplayer games? Where you think that Spy is actually in front of you but somehow actually behind you and backstabbing you? Where your friend runs against a wall for two seconds before teleporting somewhere else?

i remember those... last time i saw was 2008 i think. (with exception of high ping servers or my internet deciding ti spike lag to 200 ms or so, but its not really games fault now is it).

I thought it would help with loading of levels and faster uptake of graphics when walking through the game world. But then remembered your installing the game onto your hard drive. So have no idea what the point in cloud is. Why dont they just go for digital dl via cloud. Make the games £40 in store and £20 to downloads. That, would enable people no turn away from used games and not even worry about lending games.....because you cant....but hey getting a new game for £20 is worth it.

My captcha said Thats all, folks. lol

But how dare you suggest that they woudl offer it cheaper than retail? remember the last time they tried? retailers threw a tantrum and refused to sel any games till they fixed the price high enough for them to compete. retailers hld
publishers by the balls and it is retailers who dictate prices.

Unless you're someone like me who only gets 10 megabits down and 1 up. There's no way their cloud would be able to improve anything on my network

HAHAHAHAH. Try 1.5 megabits peak. You'd really think the dormitories in a UNIVERSITY would have better internet.

dormatories are known to have one of the worst internet in the world.
i played MMOs with 1mbps way back in the old days of 2003 and it didnt lag. you certainly can do that with 1.5.

 

[Syzygy23]

So even single player titles that use the Cloud are going to be unplayable when the servers eventually die.

Best plan ever ¬_¬

Get with the TIMES, Grandpa! Things like "ownership" went out with the dinosaurs! These days, all the HIP, COOL, SLEEK and MODERN kids know that disposability is where it's at. Who wants a game with replay value? That just keeps you from playing all the OTHER games out there! If we did things your backwards, caveman ooga-booga way where everyone "owns" things "permanently" and "continued to enjoy them" past a 3 month period, then we'd all be stuck playing Call of Duty 4 when Call of Duty 5 was released!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have better things to do than to visit the old folks home and set you all straight, such as riding my skateboard and listening to my iPod. RADICAL!

 

[Hagi]

Not really. Lets say you get instant sending if user input, becuase the console itself is powerful enough to send signals that you pressed a key. its a fair assumption as xbox360 is powerful enough for that. Calculating AI and physics happens up in the clouds, but oes not have to happen every frake. AI can be recalcualted even as slowly as once in 2 seconds. it certainly doesn ot rething its actions every frame in current games and it does not make sense to. physics can work on thier own and unless player imput gets to touch it it has no reason to realculate. we seond thins infor back to the machine and render locally, thus removing the need for high bandwitch of low ping stream, as locally generated will generate with 0 ping (or well the amount of ping it takes for the cables to move intfo to TV and TV process it, but thats usually very small and not counted, we got TVs that proces in nanoseconds now). technically it could work. and it does on MMOs. MMOs do calculations server-side this disabling any possibility to cheat stuff like gold, reload, ect. and the gpraihcs are generated locally from your machine. and it does not take a beast to run either. and yes physics are generated server side too (example being World of Tanks), and the pings there are around 60ms for me. which is acceptable.

Or, to put it in words I'm sure most will understand, you know the rubberbanding and lag that happens in most multiplayer games? Where you think that Spy is actually in front of you but somehow actually behind you and backstabbing you? Where your friend runs against a wall for two seconds before teleporting somewhere else?

i remember those... last time i saw was 2008 i think. (with exception of high ping servers or my internet deciding ti spike lag to 200 ms or so, but its not really games fault now is it).

Let me guess, you live in a highly urbanized area where you've got access to constant high-speed internet? Possible even glass-fiber?

Now in the rest of the world, or even in those highly urbanized areas where you're connecting to servers on another continent, all those ping counts you claim to have existed only in 2008 still happen.

See... not everyone has high-speed internet. I know it's difficult to understand, but just try to imagine. People, through absolutely no fault of their own, have internet connections that are not as fast as yours. They are significantly slower. It's not because they did something wrong, it's because they live in different places.

Now imagine that one of these people, playing a single-player game, with their slower internet connection due to their location, what do you think will happen if that new AI behavior that was supposed to come every two seconds gets delayed?

And you clearly don't know how MMOs work. MMOs aren't calculated purely server-side. They're calculated in tandem. The client does the calculations as well, so it can immediately give you a reaction that you're expecting. You don't have to wait for a server response. Whilst the client is doing that and your game continues as normal the server is also calculating it and sending the results back to you, if it differs from the client then the client's results are overwritten and you get the before mentioned rubberbanding effect. In MMOs this has a use since it prevents cheating and makes sure calculations are always using the latest data available on server whilst at the same time you get an instant response to your key-presses since the calculations also run locally.

Now please tell me, what the freaking point of doing the same calculations twice both on server and locally for a single-player game? Your local information is never out-of-date, in fact it's the server-side information that will be. You don't have to prevent cheating since there's nobody there to cheat.