Build 2014 Xbox One Discussion


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I didn't see any existing thread that this could go into, but I wasn't sure if it was quite worthy enough for its own thread, but I'll try it out here.

 

The Xbox One has been mentioned many times during the keynotes for yesterday and today as being part of their vision for Microsoft going forward.  When they have talked about things like Azure for the cloud, various changes to how developers create apps, and how Windows is changing, it has included a mention of the Xbox One among the devices that will take advantage of the new features/changes.  So its clear that MS is going to be investing heavily in the platform on the backend to encourage developers of all types to make use of it.

 

So the big parts of BUILD that have been tied to the X1 so far are things like DirectX 12, Azure, and Universal Apps.  The DirectX part of it has been discussed in other threads, so the part I wanted to mention was regarding Universal Apps. Azure is also of course a big deal too and they did take time to demo some examples of how games can leverage Azure to bring various experiences (for both the pc and X1).

 

Yesterday, MS laid out that developers will have the option to offer an app that a user buys once and can then access across devices like the X1, WP, and pc.  The developer can still sell apps that target one device, but at least they have the option to offer the cross buy scenarios that are becoming more and more popular.

 

They did a demo running an educational app on the pc and then pushing it to the X1, similar to a demo done last year as a tease, and they showed how easy it is to adjust code on the fly and see it reflected in the X1 app (which auto closes and relaunches when you rebuild).  Today, they demoed a game that was built, its an in progress indie game, to run on the X1, WP, and PC platforms.  This is the first game demo I have seen as part of the universal idea, so that's positive progress on that front.

 

What we lack right now are the details on when developers can start doing submitting such apps to the X1 store.  The tools to do it are being released this week, so developers will already be ready to do this.  Hopefully, MS gives more info on this before BUILD ends tomorrow.

 

 

For anyone that wants to follow info form BUILD or want to watch the keynotes (they are posted online for viewing shortly after the live event), go here:

 

http://www.buildwindows.com/

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Yeah, its clear that MS is pursuing the idea of streaming games.  The only question is how long does it take them to reach a point where they can actually offer a service around that idea.

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I just saw this on Kotaku and its cool to see how big of a difference it can make depending upon how it is used. Its too bad they did not have this to show off last year.

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I somehow think that demo was rigged but it is nice to see that they are going to be moving that content from xbone only to full pc support.

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Its good for MS to demo the possibilities and talk about what some app/game developers are doing to leverage the server resources.

 

No over the top claims, just a straight forward demo and laying out what the tools allow developers to dig into.

 

The fact that they are pushing this for the X1 and the PC shows at least some evidence that they are going to try and do more for the pc gaming market as they claimed recently.

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I somehow think that demo was rigged but it is nice to see that they are going to be moving that content from xbone only to full pc support.

 

I do as well. Even if you put the physics on the cloud, it's not going magically make the increased rendering load the physics bring to it disappear and keep the framerate from falling.

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I hope someone from MS confirms that the demo was not rigged so that the conversation does not descend into speculation that it is.

 

Keep in mind that they did not say how far away the server was that was pushing the demo and they did not make any claim about latency.  So that means this could have been a collection of servers that were very close by, making the demo possible.

 

Honestly, I think the point was that a collection of pcs can do more than a single pc and server this remotely in some form, which is an obvious claim, but something visual that you can demo.

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I do as well. Even if you put the physics on the cloud, it's not going magically make the increased rendering load the physics bring to it disappear and keep the framerate from falling.

 

It's no different than PhysX. The bottleneck is not in rendering the geometry, it's in calculating how each of the pieces should behave. For example if I run a hardware accelerated PhysX game with the CPU calculating physics on a high-end AMD card it will run at <5fps. With the same setup if I add in a low-end NVidia card solely for PhysX it will play at 60fps.

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It's no different than PhysX. The bottleneck is not in rendering the geometry, it's in calculating how each of the pieces should behave. For example if I run a hardware accelerated PhysX game with the CPU calculating physics on a high-end AMD card it will run at <5fps. With the same setup if I add in a low-end NVidia card solely for PhysX it will play at 60fps.

 

I don't know if i'd use nvidia's physx as a good point when i recall something from a while back on how nvidia deliberately set up physx to run worse than it should in software mode(due to a lack of proper optimization). Regardless, it's not solely about geometry either. With better physics would come more particle effects. More pieces of an object would also mean more individual shadows and more calculations of how the lighting interacts with those bits. and so on. Basically, it's not going to come for free.

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I truly believe the only way any of you skeptics would believe this was not rigged was if Microsoft released the source code and a runable project that anyone could see, and even then, there would be people saying it's bs.

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I do as well. Even if you put the physics on the cloud, it's not going magically make the increased rendering load the physics bring to it disappear and keep the framerate from falling.

 

Because you know more than engineers at MS do :rolleyes:

 

It's funny that they can show these things off and you still can't handle it.

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I do as well. Even if you put the physics on the cloud, it's not going magically make the increased rendering load the physics bring to it disappear and keep the framerate from falling.

 

Really ?

 

so when MS says that physics removes a significant chunk of the rendering load it's bogus. When Sony says so in their Morpheus presentation (phyiscs are only calculated once the scene is rendered twice) then no one bats an eye ;)

 

Never mind that 3D rendering in games on both PS3 and XO has already shown that physics rendering , which uses the GPU takes a significant portion of the rendering performance. 

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Did you guys notice the "cloud" assisted game demo on the day 2 keynote?   The one with the offloading of all the physics data.  It was interesting, though we don't have many details since it was a quick demo they did.

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I predict a thread where half the people still don't believe it and half say "I told you so".

 

What this video shows it what most of us non-xbox haters have said since day one, why? Because it was OBVIOUS.

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Did you guys notice the "cloud" assisted game demo on the day 2 keynote?   The one with the offloading of all the physics data.  It was interesting, though we don't have many details since it was a quick demo they did.

That was a very very promising tech demo. But Microsoft has to really improve getting this stuff out on the market faster.

Sure it was awesome, but when do the benefits of this get reaped? 4-6yrs into the XB1 life cycle?

I know Microsoft tries to go the "Slow & Perfect" route. But the world moves so fast compared days of old, other companies are moving at a rapid rate, and producing products that be used now along the way.

I do love the idea of letting the cloud handle all the calculations for the destruction, and the actual destruction being handled locally by the One. Doesn't seem like it needs a lot of data for this to happen either.

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I'm not going to get into a circular debate about it being real or fixed or w/e.  I'm only going to think about where it can go from here.  It wouldn't be hard for a developer to write their game to check for a connection to the cloud (in this case Azure/XBL), if the connection is there and fast enough then they can do these types of offloading of physics and probably other things that add to the game.   If there isn't one then they fall back to local and do less heavy processing.   The game still looks good because the graphics assets are the same just less "lively" for lack of a better word.

 

Only time will tell how it's used but more and more people are playing while connected to the internet and some service be it XBL or Steam and so on, and their speeds are getting better and better. 

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To be honest, if they can achieve half of what they demonstrated when you take into affect latency etc it will still make quite a big difference. Whilst "cloud computing" is nothing new, I think what MS are trying to do is quite unique in the world of "cloud" so this is probably still quite young in its development but looks like there may be room for plenty potential.

 

Maybe the XB1 might start making those 1080/60fps numbers once developers truly get a hold on things a lot more frequently then the one or two games they have managed so far. 

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The universal apps is the kicker for me as I already have a few nice programs ready. If MS allows a way for users to sideload those (say a $99 a year dev sub, like XNA was but also includes Gold's features), then it could be big.

All kinds of stuff could be loaded without mandatory programmed Kinect features, which could be anything (imagine where you could load emulators, could be a giant win). But I'm sure MS will keep the boxed environment they have now for a while.

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The universal apps is the kicker for me as I already have a few nice programs ready. If MS allows a way for users to sideload those (say a $99 a year dev sub, like XNA was but also includes Gold's features), then it could be big.

All kinds of stuff could be loaded without mandatory programmed Kinect features, which could be anything (imagine where you could load emulators, could be a giant win). But I'm sure MS will keep the boxed environment they have now for a while.

I believe Engadget ran a story about how Microsoft still has to approve your app for Xbox one separate from getting it onto the Windows/WP store.

Here it is: http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/02/universal-apps-xbox-one-microsoft-approval/

Xbox team has final say if your app makes it to the Xbox marketplace and final say as to whether or not its behind gold.

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I somehow think that demo was rigged but it is nice to see that they are going to be moving that content from xbone only to full pc support.

I do as well. Even if you put the physics on the cloud, it's not going magically make the increased rendering load the physics bring to it disappear and keep the framerate from falling.

Seriously? A conference which is aimed specifically for developers, where they announced an SDK for Azure for this sort of offloading in PC-terms is rigged? Why can't you accept that offloading calculations like this to server farms has been around for years, and years and years. Just not in this context. It's not that far-right and beyond like you guys are making out.

 

Are you an software engineer who has knowledge in network infastructure, so you can back up these claims? I could spew out a report on how this technology could advance in games. Heck, this would of been an excellent final year project for someone studying games design. When you off-load physics from the CPU or even the GPU (PhysX, GPGPU etc), no matter how you dance around it, you're saving vital ms in processing which can be used elsewhere in the engine or in this case, keep a stable FPS. 

 

I hope someone from MS confirms that the demo was not rigged so that the conversation does not descend into speculation that it is.

 

Keep in mind that they did not say how far away the server was that was pushing the demo and they did not make any claim about latency.  So that means this could have been a collection of servers that were very close by, making the demo possible.

 

Honestly, I think the point was that a collection of pcs can do more than a single pc and server this remotely in some form, which is an obvious claim, but something visual that you can demo.

It doesn't need a confirmation, the evidence is in your face, you watched the demonstration.

 

Around latency, the only place latency would be effecting is the start of the physics calculation. For example, when the ball hits the building. I'll work this out from personal example. I get around 20ms-30ms to the European servers while on Titanfall. Add a ball-park figure of the calculations being 10ms and the round trip of that would be on average 60ms. Thats 0.06 of a second until the ball hits the building till the results of the cloud computation are on-screen. As the video shows, it's not noticeable. Yet, you would only want to off-load the calculations of processes which aren't latency sensitive. Leaves on a tree blowing in the wind for example.

 

This is a solid proof-of-concept that the cloud can offload calculations to result in better games. No ifs, no buts. It's an obvious application to games when thought is put into it, something that a lot of people on here said ever since it was announced.

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I believe Engadget ran a story about how Microsoft still has to approve your app for Xbox one separate from getting it onto the Windows/WP store.

Here it is: http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/02/universal-apps-xbox-one-microsoft-approval/

Xbox team has final say if your app makes it to the Xbox marketplace and final say as to whether or not its behind gold.

 

This is understandable, people always say how the app stores, on every platform, are full of junk.  Last thing we need is all that junk on the Xbox One as well.    Make a good app for WP and Windows and odds are they'll let it through on the XB1 as well.

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There will be a talk today at 1:30pm EST that focuses on developing for the X1 and how that knowledge can work across the console and pcs.

 

 

This is understandable, people always say how the app stores, on every platform, are full of junk.  Last thing we need is all that junk on the Xbox One as well.    Make a good app for WP and Windows and odds are they'll let it through on the XB1 as well.

 

I just hope they are open about what they allow into the X1 store.  They need to make the process for developers as easy as possible.

 

I know there are media app developers that would love to get something on the X1, so they are just waiting for MS to give the green light.

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