The Cloud is very real. //build/ demo is from Crackdown 3

[vcfan]

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go to 2:00 on the crackdown 3 trailer

 

the destruction that dave jones is building that's all cloud powered to allow us to do some things on a console that i think thats never been seen before

go to 50 seconds

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/yni07m/xbox-one-e3-2014--all-access---phil-spencer-interview

 

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

Oh, and the "Cloud" strikes again.

 

The sooner this gimmic name for a server dies the better.

 

First video:

 

"This is on an high-end machine"

 

Doing 12 FPS? What year was that machine high-end? Even my laptop can do better on RF:G where theres MUCH MORE destruction.

[blerk]

If that trailer is all in-game currently running on a XB1 + cloud then I am very impressed

 

(I can't view the interview for some reason, can anyone confirm?)

[George P Global Moderator]

Oh, and the "Cloud" strikes again.

 

The sooner this gimmic name for a server dies the better.

 

First video:

 

"This is on an high-end machine"

 

Doing 12 FPS? What year was that machine high-end? Even my laptop can do better on RF:G where theres MUCH MORE destruction.

 

I think you might have the wrong idea here, there's regular environment destruction like what BF4 likes to do, and then there's actual physics in everything that's going on.  You're talking apples to oranges here,  a developer can just make something break apart and fall without any sort of real physics going on behind it or they can up it and add in lots of physics.  The more individual pieces flying around the more heavy work has to be done and you will get slowdown.  It's why we have supercomputers to run real world simulations for things.

 

Look, I get that people, some at least, don't want to believe what's being show, or the possibility behind it, but they're showing it's possible.  I always expected it'd be a first party exclusive to take advantage of this first and if Crackdown is the first game to do so then what do people care?  

If that trailer is all in-game currently running on a XB1 + cloud then I am very impressed

 

(I can't view the interview for some reason, can anyone confirm?)

 

It's just an interview with Phil, they don't talk about crackdown much other than the quote he says about the game.  It's cloud powered, name it what you want, cloud/server w/e, it makes little difference.  The key here is that they're going to be using XBL servers more with the game.

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

I think you might have the wrong idea here, there's regular environment destruction like what BF4 likes to do, and then there's actual physics in everything that's going on.  You're talking apples to oranges here,  a developer can just make something break apart and fall without any sort of real physics going on behind it or they can up it and add in lots of physics.  The more individual pieces flying around the more heavy work has to be done and you will get slowdown.  It's why we have supercomputers to run real world simulations for things.

 

Look, I get that people, some at least, don't want to believe what's being show, or the possibility behind it, but they're showing it's possible.  I always expected it'd be a first party exclusive to take advantage of this first and if Crackdown is the first game to do so then what do people care?  

 

It's just an interview with Phil, they don't talk about crackdown much other than the quote he says about the game.  It's cloud powered, name it what you want, cloud/server w/e, it makes little difference.  The key here is that they're going to be using XBL servers more with the game.

 

I think you have the wrong impression what RF:G actually is. RF runs on Geo-mod engine which, as far as I know, none of the other games outside Red Faction use. RF:G and upwards have real physics destruction on a high-scale map such as GTA.

 

Here.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHKPW49BdBI

 

And theres no off loading to anywhere.

 

RF:G and RF:A were sale on steam for a couple of bucks last I saw, you should try it out. Its actually fun to play and well, it gives you an better idea. The "gun" in the video is just a start, you actually use an sledgehammer for the most of the game to actually get a grip how well the physics work in those games.

 

Also off loading your consoles work to external servers can cause pretty big misshaps. Even more if there are no MS servers near you.

 

Im not here to argue but to actually show this is nothing new nor did they test that on some high end machines.

[HawkMan]

No, RF uses light physics, also i believe the demo above has inter particle collision which you never see in a game engine.

[George P Global Moderator]

I've played Red Faction, in the end Geo-Mod, while a good engine uses Havok at it's base, used in other games as well.   I won't get into the details because I'm no expert but it's all about the number of pieces.  Things get destroyed in RF or BF and so on but you can stress any high end system/PC once you up the object counts.  The video you posted and from what I remember playing, when you did take down something it comes down in big chunks and not thousands of small ones.   There's probably other factors at work as well but we'd need someone who's coded to chime in on the details. 

 

As far as the build demo goes, the "local hardware" ran things fine until they jacked up the object count and the framerate started to fall.   We see it in games even now, once you get enough things on screen at once systems start to lose performance.

[Zaic]

Imagine I'm having poor internet connection or lag spikes, do this add or remove immersion? I don't want to see rocket stopping mid air to think how its explosion will effect nearby environment.

 

And that trailer for crackdown is fishy, there is no game-play scenes in there, all I see is scripted sequence. Using servers to simulate physics for scripted sequences is not the brightest decision, when you could do a better job with a high quality prerendered video, that wouldn't waist server time whenever a user is watching the scripted sequences.

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

No, RF uses light physics, also i believe the demo above has inter particle collision which you never see in a game engine.

 

This is true that RF used light physics but that was just so the system req. wouldnt get insane. And I think RF:G was on Geo-Mod 2.5, which in itself is pretty old engine. Also the fact that RF:G has way more destruction than any game out there today (from the ones that I have played), you can, basically, destroy everything in your path. Not even MS servers could handle that kind of stress if youd include this kind of "particles" destruction. Not to mention high-end gaming PCs.

 

Anyway while I applaud MS for the efforts to offload the work to their servers, like I said, this will only work perfect for people who actually live close to the servers.

[HawkMan]

Because I who live far out in the middle of nowhere can't play multiplayer games.... no wait, I can... unless you're on satellite internet you'll generally be fine.

 

Also age of the engine doesn't matter for physics performance.

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

Err of course it matters. You cant expect an Engine from 2005 (lets say) to have the same physics capabilities that an engine from 2014 has. Ex. Geo-mod vs Frostbite 3

[HawkMan]

Physics is physics, newer engines aren't faster than the old ones by any special margin, new features yes, but these make the engine slower.

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

I didnt mean the new engines are faster. I meant that older engines just dont have the new physics features built to support it.

 

The thing is, with enough coding skills you can make a game demo any way you want, you can make it so the particle will be so small you can barely see it but whats the point if your hardware cant handle it? I seriously doubt there is no catch to game devs if they want to use the "Cloud" option to offload some parts of their game. MS isnt an charity after all.

[Skiver Veteran]

I loved the first crackdown games so this is a very welcome game. I do hope they change the city slightly as it always felt a little cheap in the second one with things being near enough identical.

 

The trailer looks amazing but that doesn't scream gameplay to me so I'd rather wait and see some actual gameplay before jumping on the power of the cloud excitement. TBH I don't think we will ever be able to tell if the cloud is truly what MS sometimes seems to suggest it is unless we see a multiplatform game that can do something on XB1 that can't be done on PS4 and it being directly linked by the developers themselves. 

[George P Global Moderator]

I loved the first crackdown games so this is a very welcome game. I do hope they change the city slightly as it always felt a little cheap in the second one with things being near enough identical.

 

The trailer looks amazing but that doesn't scream gameplay to me so I'd rather wait and see some actual gameplay before jumping on the power of the cloud excitement. TBH I don't think we will ever be able to tell if the cloud is truly what MS sometimes seems to suggest it is unless we see a multiplatform game that can do something on XB1 that can't be done on PS4 and it being directly linked by the developers themselves. 

 

Odds of a multiplatform game doing something like that on one system over the other is slim to none, that's just not how they do things.   I think the only place to expect it is with exclusives where they can go deeper into it and not have to worry about another system that doesn't have the backend support needed and how to code around that or take it out etc.

[Showan]

Interesting...

[spenser.d]

That trailer was awesome. Couldn't get into the other Crackdown games, but perhaps I'll give this one a shot at some point once it's been out a while.

[JonnyLH]

Oh, and the "Cloud" strikes again.

 

The sooner this gimmic name for a server dies the better.

 

First video:

 

"This is on an high-end machine"

 

Doing 12 FPS? What year was that machine high-end? Even my laptop can do better on RF:G where theres MUCH MORE destruction.

Your completely missing the point. No-one cares that the high-end PC is chugging at 12FPS.

 

The point is, that these calculations can be offloaded so the local box doesn't have to spend many crucial milliseconds calculating it. Whether that be the GPU or CPU, it's still being removed for processes which could make the game prettier or just simply boost the FPS as the demo shows. With having an entire chunk of instances dedicated to physics, you can provide physics which are way more impressive than you see in other games. BF4 for example.

 

The data requirement would be minimal and the latency in this scenario really wouldn't effect gameplay. It's a perfect match, one I really can't wait to see in action. Also one I referred to myself when posting about this demo when it was shown, saying wouldn't it be cool if Crackdown 3 did this? 

[trooper11]

Honestly, I'm tired of the arguing over theoretical things.

MS showed a tech demo that offered a small glimpse into what server tech could be leveraged to do. Now it turns out that demo was early work on Crackdown. That means we will get to see another actual game that uses the server infrastructure to improve the experience. I look forward to seeing what it adds.

Also a little side note. Did you guys notice that neither MS or Sony mentioned the word 'cloud' even once. When MS or Sony mentioned anything that could use the term 'cloud', they simply said their network instead. So MS kept saying such and such feature was leveraging the XBL network.

So it seems to me that both companies felt that the 'cloud' term was just not helpful anymore.

[Luc2k]

That Geoff guy from Spike talked about Crackdown and the cloud at one point after the conference and he said that what was shown in the trailer wasn't live footage (or something to that effect).

[trooper11]

That Geoff guy from Spike talked about Crackdown and the cloud at one point after the conference and he said that what was shown in the trailer wasn't live footage (or something to that effect).

Yeah, that trailer was not gameplay, it was just a trailer. I don't think anyone was claiming otherwise.

The MS demo way back at BUILD turned out to be a real demo using early Crackdown assets.

[Skin]

Oh, and the "Cloud" strikes again.

 

The sooner this gimmic name for a server dies the better.

 

You do know a cloud is a lot more than 'a server', right? You make take issue with the name 'could', but the idea behind what it is and what is offered is a lot more than simply calling it 'a server'.

 

Also, the term 'cloud' is morphing and even being retired in spots within the industry, and is a tad old for services provided and hosted, but that is neither here nor there.

[Luc2k]

Yeah, that trailer was not gameplay, it was just a trailer. I don't think anyone was claiming otherwise.

The MS demo way back at BUILD turned out to be a real demo using early Crackdown assets.

I'm just saying I wouldn't get my hopes up about what the cloud does for the game until there's actual gameplay footage.

[trooper11]

I'm just saying I wouldn't get my hopes up about what the cloud does for the game until there's actual gameplay footage.

 

 

Its not about hope at all.

 

The point is that MS is working on it. They are working to leverage it.

 

Who knows if it will result in something good, its just good to see MS investing in it as they push other developers to do the same.

[BajiRav]

Oh, and the "Cloud" strikes again.

 

The sooner this gimmic name for a server dies the better.

 

First video:

 

"This is on an high-end machine"

 

Doing 12 FPS? What year was that machine high-end? Even my laptop can do better on RF:G where theres MUCH MORE destruction.

cloud is not "a server" but you already knew that. Cloud computing is real, buzz word or not.