Xbox One - General Discussion (NO DISCUSSION REGARDING PS4 - MOD WARNING Post 6903)

bk

I also laugh when people say Sony can't do cloud computing. Of course they can, anyone can and in particular Sony bought Gaikai the largest cloud based game service out there !!

It is just Sony don't go on about it too much as they know it is of only limited usefulness.

Rascasse

FlyingIrishMan wrote: »

Cloud Computing isn't something exclusive to the Xbox One:
http://n4g.com/news/1283531/sony-of-course-ps4-can-do-cloud-computing

Though I still don't see it providing any extreme advantages, definitely not something like improving graphics.

You're forgetting that Gaikai is the largest cloud gaming system in the world.

Sure, any computer can use the cloud. The Sony spokesman's comment suggests that if your game requires it the developer needs to provide the servers. In Microsoft's case they are providing the server and (I'm assuming it's the reason) are limiting their sales to countries where they can get acceptable latency.

Gaikai is interesting but won't be available to many PS4 users. Distance (latency) is an issue, you probably wouldn't want to be more than a few hundred miles of the datacentre. Gaikai is also very different to what MS are advocating, which is taking elements that aren't latency sensitive and sending those up. Improving graphics is very much one of the things cloud computing can improve. It could well be the main thing it's used for.

TNT2k_

Rascasse wrote: »

Sure, any computer can use the cloud. The Sony spokesman's comment suggests that if your game requires it the developer needs to provide the servers. In Microsoft's case they are providing the server and (I'm assuming it's the reason) are limiting their sales to countries where they can get acceptable latency.

Gaikai is interesting but won't be available to many PS4 users. Distance (latency) is an issue, you probably wouldn't want to be more than a few hundred miles of the datacentre. Gaikai is also very different to what MS are advocating, which is taking elements that aren't latency sensitive and sending those up. Improving graphics is very much one of the things cloud computing can improve. It could well be the main thing it's used for.

Someone with a degree in computer science who'd know far more about this than I ever would has explained the true workings of cloud computing and you're seriously still arguing this point? Microsoft has been incredibly vague about how they'll handle cloud computing and Sony didn't say anything about having to be a few hundred miles from a data centre.

Where did you get (or make up most likely) this total BS?

Gaikai is coming next year because it's not ready yet, that's why it won't be availible to all of us, because it's not even ready to be released yet.

stevenmu

"Cloud computing" for the Xbox is really about persistent dedicated servers for games.

This does have some great benefits. It means MP games aren't being hosted by someone with a crappy 3G connection. It also means that they're not hosted by some spoiled 12 year who rage quits and kicks everyone off if they get shot. It means worlds can be persistent, so when you leave the game, other things can be happening the meantime and the world can have evolved and changed by the time you get back. It enables MMOs to be played on consoles if you're into that kind of thing.

There could be some really great uses for this. Imagine a GTA game where you pile up some cars on a road, do a few laps of the city and come back to find them still there. Imagine shooting the arm off some NPC and then a few days later (of real time) you spot him coming out of the hospital (and then shoot off his other arm).

And while BK is very right, that AI is generally not big a deal computationally to do locally, it is usually limited to a relatively small number of characters at any one time. If it gets used correctly, "the cloud" could enable persistent virtual towns with tens of thousands of virtual NPCs going about their lives, day in, day out.



But it definitely won't make the graphics any better, unless all the rendering is done in the cloud and streamed to the console, but I don't think MS have announced any plans for that.

_Puma_

I argued with people in the Sim City forum before it came out that this cloud computing thing was complete PR spin and was just an excuse to keep you connected to the internet to implement their online DRM. In the end it turned out, bar the online leader-boards and some simple data transfers regarding your neighbours cities, to be true.

Even the Directors of Maxis even came out spewing the absolute rubbish that "Complex calculations needed to be offloaded to the cloud", which was in turn shot down by Maxis' own Engineers. I am in no way surprised to see it being bandied about again regarding the Xbox one.

gizmo

Gaikai's limitations have been known for some time. In fact, you can test out the service now on a bunch of different sites. The main benefit of the acquisition by Sony is that it will hopefully lead to more datacenters being built worldwide to support the PS4 integration when it goes live. That should hopefully alleviate the latency issues in the regions where it's present.

As for MS' cloud usage, they seem to be doing as much damage to the idea of cloud processing for games as EA did with SimCity. Misrepresenting the technology in its early phases will just make people more suspicious of it over time and, in the future, if/when some studio actually comes up with some inventive use for it, it'll be ignored because people will just remember the myriad of broken promises that preceded it.

Of course, it should be noted that any possible inventive use will probably require the game to be constantly connected so I'd wager that's going to happen anyway.

Rascasse

TNT2k_ wrote: »

Someone with a degree in computer science and would know far more about this than I ever would has explained the true workings of cloud computing and you're seriously still arguing this point? Microsoft has been incredibly vague about how they'll handle cloud computing and Sony didn't say anything about having to be a few hundred miles from a data centre.

Where did you get (or make up most likely) this total BS?

From what of read and talking to the IT infrastucture guys in work (I work for a tech company that has a couple of SaaS products and the guys that that run the Dublin datacentre sit about 8 feet from me). bk didn't 'explain the true meaning of cloud computing', rather offered his opinion on AI and cloud computing. Stevenmu more eloquently described what I had read about AI/NPC's and cloud computing in Titanfall and how it could be used in massive open worlds. If also read about it's use for graphics (the article he linked to mentions examples, such as fog) and lighting.

Regarding distance from the Gaikai's datacentre - it is well known that latency increases the further you are from the datacentre (there are other reasons also). A quick Google shows they have 300 servers across the US and reviews all mention how many miles they are from the server - because the distance (latency) matters.

TNT2k_ wrote: »

Gaikai is coming next year because it's not ready yet, that's why it won't be availible to all of us, because it's not even ready to be released yet.

And I'm sure when it is released you'll be in the Xbox threads telling us how its the best thing since sliced bread.

By the way, I assume the 2k in your user name is the year you were born, right? Perhaps try a little civility in your discussions and less of the angry teenager routine. We're only discussing consoles, it's not life and death.

Jacks Smirking Revenge

This was essentially the internet's reaction to Microsoft's DRM policies.

TNT2k_

Rascasse wrote: »

From what of read and talking to the IT infrastucture guys in work (I work for a tech company that has a couple of SaaS products and the guys that that run the Dublin datacentre sit about 8 feet from me). bk didn't 'explain the true meaning of cloud computing', rather offered his opinion on AI and cloud computing. Stevenmu more eloquently described what I had read about AI/NPC's and cloud computing in Titanfall and how it could be used in massive open worlds. If also read about it's use for graphics (the article he linked to mentions examples, such as fog) and lighting.

Regarding distance from the Gaikai's datacentre - it is well known that latency increases the further you are from the datacentre (there are other reasons also). A quick Google shows they have 300 servers across the US and reviews all mention how many miles they are from the server - because the distance (latency) matters.

And I'm sure when it is released you'll be in the Xbox threads telling us how its the best thing since sliced bread.

By the way, I assume the 2k in your user name is the year you were born, right? Perhaps try a little civility in your discussions and less of the angry teenager routine. We're only discussing consoles, it's not life and death.

Actually no, I'm not a teenager. The 2K was added purely out of a lack of imagination for another username as TNT was already taken. But I always find it humorous and ironic when somebody calls for civility yet patronises the other person by branding them an "angry teenager". I guess you called me that because I didn't agree with you. If I came across as being angry that is just you interpreting it that way.

Throughout all of this I have been level headed, but I honestly don't agree with this cloud computing farce and neither does a large majority of sources which I have read up on over the last week or so either.

JohnBoy26

stevenmu wrote: »

"Cloud computing" for the Xbox is really about persistent dedicated servers for games.

This does have some great benefits. It means MP games aren't being hosted by someone with a crappy 3G connection. It also means that they're not hosted by some spoiled 12 year who rage quits and kicks everyone off if they get shot. It means worlds can be persistent, so when you leave the game, other things can be happening the meantime and the world can have evolved and changed by the time you get back. It enables MMOs to be played on consoles if you're into that kind of thing.

There could be some really great uses for this. Imagine a GTA game where you pile up some cars on a road, do a few laps of the city and come back to find them still there. Imagine shooting the arm off some NPC and then a few days later (of real time) you spot him coming out of the hospital (and then shoot off his other arm).

And while BK is very right, that AI is generally not big a deal computationally to do locally, it is usually limited to a relatively small number of characters at any one time. If it gets used correctly, "the cloud" could enable persistent virtual towns with tens of thousands of virtual NPCs going about their lives, day in, day out.



But it definitely won't make the graphics any better, unless all the rendering is done in the cloud and streamed to the console, but I don't think MS have announced any plans for that.

That could be done in GTA Vice City back in the day on the ps2

AlmightyCushion

bk wrote: »

I'm sorry, but as a person with a degree in Computer Science and who actually works in the area of "cloud computing" * I can assure you that for video games, cloud computing is mostly bs.

The reality is that for most of the type of computation video games do, cloud computing simply isn't suited to it due to the limitations of bandwidth and latency of the internet connection between the cloud servers and your console.

Graphics need to be calculated in real time in order to respond to what is happening on screen.

It also might surprise people that AI isn't very computationally heavy. It has long been a solved problem, AI has to actually be limited or it ends up beating the gamer every time. There is little need to do it offline.

There are some limited scenarios where cloud computing can be useful, for instance online backups of saves, drivetars to play against, etc. But for the most part it doesn't really benefit video games and feels just like marketing BS for MS to try and make up for the fact that the X1 is significantly less powerful then the PS4

You can find a detailed article about cloud gaming here:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming

* cloud computing is just a stupid new marketing term for something we have always had in the computer industry back to it foundations, in the forms of mainframes and client-server model.

AI is a lot more complicated than you make out. It certainly hasn't been solved and it can be very computational heavy. A good example is Watson. An incredibly powerful machine that took a long time to develop and while it performed extremely well it still fell over, got things wrong and made mistakes.

If you take something like the commentary in FIFA, a simplistic AI would just have:
"[player_name] passes ball to [player_name]".
"[player_name] shoots".
"He scores!"

A more sophisticated AI would do thing like analyse the data of the pass (speed, angle, position of the players, etc.) and use that to determine if it was a nice pass, a poor pass or if the second player "was lucky to get to that one". This takes a lot more computational power than the previous example. To get more and more realistic reactions and responses to what happens on the pitch requires more computational power. In the future we could get a FIFA game where the commentators react to things that the developers never even considered. An example would be this video clip where two players get caught in each other and kiss. Currently, the commentators don't react to that which isn't realistic. An extremely sophisticated AI could pick up on this (something the developers didn't specifically program for) and react, even make a joke about it "I hope his wife isn't watching".

As for AI having to be limited, once again it's not about making AI more difficult it's about making it more realistic and less predictable. If we take the scenario where an enemy AI is looking for our player. A more realistic AI wouldn't use the most efficient pathfinding algorithm. It may follow its gut based on certain things it has seen. If it's scared or nervous, it could get jumpy and react to things it sees and hears that it normally wouldn't. This is where AI is going. More realistic and less predictable which is incredibly difficult to do and will require more and more computational power, not ruthlessly efficient and difficult.

I do agree though that currently cloud gaming is a bit hyped up for what it can deliver (although cloud saves are awesome). It's still young though, onlive is only a few year old. There definitely some things they can do with it that won't be too affected by latency but I don't see improving graphics being one of them for a while yet.

bk

AlmightyCushion you are correct, real true AI is VERY complicated and process intensive.

But real AI is almost never used in video games. "AI" used in video games is almost always very simple and formulaic.

In the past when they tried to do real AI, it turned out to be far too unpredictable and ended up not making for a very good gaming experience. So nowadays gaming AI is focused on very specific formulas and algorithms, to make it look random when it rarely is.

Also cloud computing will never significantly improve graphics. It will always be limited by latency. Even fibre to the home is still too slow and that data travels at the speed of light, there is no getting around that. It is physics.

Oafley Jones

Rumours starting to fly around that the One will now work without Kinect.

wnolan1992

Looks like those rumours could be legit:

BREAKING: @Xbox media relations confirms to me via email that #kinect sensor IS NOT required for #XboxOne. #privacy #drm #prism #microsoft"

Another reversal from Microsoft?
Photo credit: Microsoft
He than followed up with this bomb shell:

".@Xbox confirms NO #XboxOne price drop due to NO kinect requirement. #XboxOne is "competitively priced" & xbox is "confident with the value."

http://www.examiner.com/article/rumor-microsoft-removing-kinect-requirement-without-xbox-one-price-drop

TNT2k_

wnolan1992 wrote: »

Looks like those rumours could be legit:



http://www.examiner.com/article/rumor-microsoft-removing-kinect-requirement-without-xbox-one-price-drop

They just said a few days ago that they wouldn't lower their price and that it was already competitively priced and "gives consumers great value"

Great if true, but wtf are they at over there? At this point I'm honestly thinking they get up each day and say "what'll we enforce today and double-back on tomorrow?"

gizmo

The Kinect not being required to use the console is different than the unit not being bundled with it at all. The former happening would have resulted in a price drop so I'd imagine all they've gone with the former. I'm guessing they'll now be called on to remove the unit from the SKU entirely which, given the amount they've invested in the tech, is pretty unlikely to happen imo. Stranger things have opened though I guess.

Oafley Jones

gizmo wrote: »

The Kinect not being required to use the console is different than the unit not being bundled with it at all. The former happening would have resulted in a price drop so I'd imagine all they've gone with the former. I'm guessing they'll now be called on to remove the unit from the SKU entirely which, given the amount they've invested in the tech, is pretty unlikely to happen imo. Stranger things have opened though I guess.

One thing I can't see them doing is not bundling Kinect. It'd fragment the user base and be a pain in the hole for developers.

Richard Dower

They face a huge problem now!....if the Kinect isint needed for the hardware to work, why are they forcing a product on them that nobody wants, likes or is prepared to pay an extra 100 for?

They shot themselves in the foot with this one, they told a blatant LIE....they said it was a hardware issue, everybody knew it was bs, now this move confirms the Kinect stuff was *always* software related and could be changed anytime.

This is an onging PR nightmare for MS!

gizmo

bk wrote: »

AlmightyCushion you are correct, real true AI is VERY complicated and process intensive.

But real AI is almost never used in video games. "AI" used in video games is almost always very simple and formulaic.

In the past when they tried to do real AI, it turned out to be far too unpredictable and ended up not making for a very good gaming experience. So nowadays gaming AI is focused on very specific formulas and algorithms, to make it look random when it rarely is.

Also cloud computing will never significantly improve graphics. It will always be limited by latency. Even fibre to the home is still too slow and that data travels at the speed of light, there is no getting around that. It is physics.

Thankfully that's something Alex Champandard and the rest of the guys over at AiGameDev have been trying to change for quite some time. For any of you Game Development Forum users reading, give that website a gander for a plethora of fantastic articles on the subject.

The problem being AI is hard, expensive and the results, as you mention, are not always "worth" the investment. Cloud computing isn't going to change this any time soon either, at least not in real time instances.

Oafley Jones

Richard Dower wrote: »

They face a huge problem now!....if the Kinect isint needed for the hardware to work, why are they forcing a product on them that nobody wants, likes or is prepared to pay an extra 100 for?

They shot themselves in the foot with this one, they told a blatant LIE....they said it was a hardware issue, everybody knew it was bs, now this move confirms the Kinect stuff was *always* software related and could be changed anytime.

This is an onging PR nightmare for MS!

The hardware might work fine with it unplugged but I'd imagine every Xbox exclusive makes use of Kinect in some form and the media interface probably requires it (although this is far easier to work around than games). Kinect is something that they can't simply unbundle.

Pushtrak

The article is updated to how it isn't true. As soon as I saw the article, I went to the twitter of the person who posted it.

Richard Dower

Oafley Jones wrote: »

One thing I can't see them doing is not bundling Kinect. It'd fragment the user base and be a pain in the hole for developers.

If thats the case they shouldnt have said the Kinect dosent need to be connected for the console to work!...people clearly dont want Kinect, what they want is CHOICE!

Choose to buy a Kinect separetely or with the console, they are being forced to pay 100 extra for something they'll probably never use, regardless of wether developers integrate Kinect features into games.

They should have the option in the game menu to enable or disable any Kinect spefific features.

If they had choice i doubt many would pay 100 extra for a spy cam and a device to flail your arms about.

cadete

cant believe they will take away the kinect......... that was a great feature and the main reason i was getting an xbone

Oafley Jones

Richard Dower wrote: »

If they had choice i doubt many would pay 100 extra for a spy cam and a device to flail your arms about.

Not sure I'd agree given that 24 million people have paid more than that for the first gen. If this story is true it's to counter the fears people have of being spied on. Kinect will be a major feature of this console.

Pushtrak

Richard Dower wrote: »

They should have the option in the game menu to enable or disable any Kinect spefific features.

Something like this perhaps?

You are in control of when Kinect sensing is On, Off or Paused: If you don’t want the Kinect sensor on while playing games or enjoying your entertainment, you can pause Kinect. To turn off your Xbox One, just say “Xbox Off.” When the system is off, it’s only listening for the single voice command -- “Xbox On,” and you can even turn that feature off too. Some apps and games may require Kinect functionality to operate, so you’ll need to turn it back on for these experiences.

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/privacy

Pushtrak

cadete wrote: »

cant believe they will take away the kinect......... that was a great feature and the main reason i was getting an xbone

Oafley Jones wrote: »

Not sure I'd agree given that 24 million people have paid more than that for the first gen. If this story is true it's to counter the fears people have of being spied on. Kinect will be a major feature of this console.

The story isn't true. Check the article again.

Richard Dower

Looks VERY cheap!....and as stated should have been included in the X1 package as standard! http://ie.ign.com/articles/2013/06/21/xbox-one-headset-revealed

Varik

Looks better than the current base one but I can't see why they needed to change from the old setup with the 2.5mm.

Pushtrak

Looks crap and will likely break very easily like the one that came with the 360. I expect it will come free with the One, though.

TNT2k_

I think it actually looks decent enough tbh. A big improvement over the look of the old one. If it's not included though I would agree that it doesn't look worth it, if bundled though I'd be happy enough with it.

Edit: found out it's not included. Shame because it would have been quite good if you got it bundled. Given it'll probably go for €20+ I'd say it's not worth it.