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Microsoft already has a game that makes use of the cloud.

godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Galactic Reign is a turn based game that uses the cloud to render the battles after each turn has been made. The rendered battle's are FMVs which you can stop at any time to analyze the performance of your ships and change decisions for the next turn accordingly.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/galactic-reign/45859ddf-684e-43bc-a282-0a4494e88864

The general reaction to Galactic Reign is pretty good, it has generated quite the cult following.

http://youtu.be/BGvS09ijYKA

As you can see, the cloud can be applied to games with great effect. Obviously, the cloud will not help Microsoft close the gap of hardware between the Xbox One and PS4, but new gaming experiences specifically engineered around the cloud await us.

Also, if you are concerned about Sony's answer to Microsoft's cloud powered gaming, they could have a partnership to make use of Google Compute Engine or Amazon Services.

Microsoft is obviously choking in it's own PR message since they are using it as a spin to preemptively defend themselves against Sony's hardware advantage, but there is a hint of truth to Microsoft's claims and we will see more cloud powered games in the future.
 
J

jwk94

Member
"Also, if you are concerned about Sony's answer to Microsoft's cloud powered gaming"

Isn't that what Gaikai is?
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
jwk94 said:
"Also, if you are concerned about Sony's answer to Microsoft's cloud powered gaming"

Isn't that what Gaikai is?
Click to expand...

No, Gaikai's strength isn't it's array of servers AFAIK, but their ability to stream HD images with a proprietary compression algorithm that allows them to do it with almost negligible lag, thus making it of use for real time applications.
 
M

marrec

Banned
jwk94 said:
"Also, if you are concerned about Sony's answer to Microsoft's cloud powered gaming"

Isn't that what Gaikai is?
Click to expand...

Theoretically there's nothing stopping Gaikai from being used in this way, though Gaikai's footprint is in all likelyhood much smaller than Azure.
 
D

Delusibeta

Banned
So, 1) turns are stored on a server. Whoop de feckin' do, that was done back in the nineties. 2) A selection of cutscenes depending on the outcome of the battle is selected and streamed to the phone, to keep the game size down. Again, whoop de feckin' do, that's at least a decade old tech (and completely irrelevant to consoles that has 50Gb discs and 500Gb hard drives).

Try again.
 
O

Osiris

I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
I for one can't wait to play a turn-based FPS, should be awesome!

How awesome? So awesome!
 
C

Cheesecakebobby

Banned
In Halo 5 you use your smartglass device to switch to another weapon. 3 minutes later Microsoft tweets you a link to YouTube where you can watch an fmv of Master Chief switching to the needler. You can share this on pinterest or perform an Ask Jeeves search for similar clips.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Delusibeta said:
So, 1) turns are stored on a server. Whoop de feckin' do, that was done back in the nineties. 2) A selection of cutscenes depending on the outcome of the battle is selected and streamed to the phone, to keep the game size down. Again, whoop de feckin' do, that's at least a decade old.

Try again.
Click to expand...

The cut scenes change depending on what exact configuration of ships you use. There is too many permutations to preemptively render all of the FMVs possible.
 
F

fallagin

Member
Wow, that is just so unique to xbone, no one else could ever do that, only the xbone infinite cloud. Infinite. cloud

Edit: oh you adressed this in the op

Anyways though, this really doesn't enhance real time gaming. This is interesting though.
 
D

Delusibeta

Banned
godhandiscen said:
The cut scenes change depending on what exact configuration of ships you use. There is too many permutations to preemptively render all of the FMVs possible.
Click to expand...

It's still nothing a decent phone can't do, it's primarily a space saving measure. Again, irrelevant to consoles.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
equippedwithtowel said:
Hasn't this been a thing since around CIV II?
Click to expand...

Probably but the rendering was done on your desktop. This is a phone game, it would take the hardware hours to render those kind of cut scenes. Also, it's just an example of how a game can be enhanced thanks to the cloud if the experience is specifically tailored towards it.
 
N

nib95

Banned
Nobody is arguing that Cloud can't be used for compute or games. What do you think OnLive and GaiKai are? These are things that run the entire game and merely stream to the end user in interactive fashion. The game you've linked also does exactly that. It renders a scene based on some actions and then streams back to you dependant on them. This is very different from what we are saying is fluff, which is dynamic rendering to compute at a local level, as Microsoft claims, of up to 4.8Tflops of power (40x the 360).

Cloud computing can be used, and already is used for low latency stuff, but with graphics rendering etc in dynamic real time, it's a completely different ball game altogether that is simply not currently feasible on the Cloud.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
nib95 said:
Nobody is arguing that Cloud can't be used for compute or games. What do you think OnLive and GaiKai are? These are things that run the entire game and merely stream to the end user in interactive fashion. The game you've linked also does exactly that. It renders a scene based on some actions and then plays a video back to you dependant on them. This is very different from what we are saying is fluff, which is dynamic rendering to compete at a local level, as Microsoft claims, of up to 4.8Tflops of power (40x the 360).

Cloud computing can be used, and already is used for low latency stuff, but with graphics rendering etc in dynamic real time, it's a completely different ball game altogether that is simply not currently feasible on the Cloud.
Click to expand...
I am unaware of any PR from Microsoft saying the cloud will be used for latency bound computations. During the hardware panel, Microsoft was very clear on the distinction of the kind of computing that the cloud provides.

famousmortimer said:
Just to get this straight... the game uses "the cloud" to downloaded a prerendered movie of action you do not in any way control?
Click to expand...
It uses the cloud to render each turn. There is an incredibly high number of ship configurations and actions that you could have in each turn. They haven't rendered them all. Instead they are rendered on demand after each turn.

Delusibeta said:
It's still nothing a decent phone can't do, it's primarily a space saving measure. Again, irrelevant to consoles.
Click to expand...
The FMVs are not pre-rendered. So many things can be different from turn to turn. If they were to pre-render all turns, they would run out of space in the actual cloud.
 
M

marrec

Banned
nib95 said:
Cloud computing can be used, and already is used for low latency stuff, but with graphics rendering etc in dynamic real time, it's a completely different ball game altogether that is simply not currently feasible on the Cloud.
Click to expand...

Microsoft really needs to stop being so obscure about their cloud based goals and stop telling people it will be "40x more powerful" because that's simply not true. A cloud based future is very intriguing for many reasons, but you aren't going to make a console forty times more powerful via the cloud unless server technology takes massive leaps forward in the next 5 years.
 
K

King Tubby

Member
I have no doubt that cloud computing can certainly offer many benefits when it comes to video game computations that will have real, tangible benefits.

Claiming that it will result in something akin to quadrupling or even doubling the power of your home console however is pie in the sky ludicrousness and, at the very least, subject to a high amount of conditions that will almost certainly not be met and also quite some time away.
 
Ardenyal

Ardenyal

Member
Turn based collar duty.

It's not going to work for real time games.
I could see them use cloud computing for something like simulating games in a sports game career mode but real time, nah.
 
N

nib95

Banned
godhandiscen said:
I am unaware of any PR from Microsoft saying the cloud will be used for latency bound computations. During the hardware panel, Microsoft was very clear on the distinction of the kind of computing that the cloud provides.
Click to expand...

Please link or quote the exact lines then that make the "clear" distinction. I'm interested to see it, because nothing I've heard has been remotely clear or defined.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
nib95 said:
Please link or quote the exact lines then that make the "clear" distinction. I'm interested to see it, because nothing I've heard has been remotely clear or defined.
Click to expand...

I am not going to re-listen to the podcast, it was on Major Nelson's site, but the talk about the cloud there was more specific than the message people are getting from "40x more powerful".
 
B

Baloonatic

Member
If these sorts of things start being used in big single player games, then how do we play them once the servers are shut down? I think that's the thing that worries me most.
 
S

Seanspeed

Banned
Very cool if you have a rock-solid internet connection that never suffers occasional brownouts.

I dont want to be kicked or unable to play games because my internet is being fussy, which happens often enough. So I'm not really enthusiastic about games that are built around using this 'cloud power'.
 
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