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

2Mad2BeMad

ShiverinEskimo wrote: »

Fantastic input to the thread there yourself chief. It's entirely relevant when discussing a seemingly major privacy concern people have with the X1 and mandatory Kinect.

its still a load of bollox :pac:

Stone Deaf 4evr

when is comic con on? arent they going to have units available for play at that?

Stone Deaf 4evr

ShiverinEskimo wrote: »

Fantastic input to the thread there yourself chief. It's entirely relevant when discussing a seemingly major privacy concern people have with the X1 and mandatory Kinect.

maybe its just thread fatigue setting in - by why are there still concerns? If you dont want it, disconnect from the internet or dont buy it. if you do connect to the internet, expect it to harvest data the same as any other internet capable device.

I'd much rather a discussion on the positive features like the integration of smartglass, the new games, video recording etc.

ShiverinEskimo

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

I'd much rather a discussion on the positive features like the integration of smartglass, the new games, video recording etc.

I couldn't agree more but any attempt to concentrate on the positives is drowned out by posters hell-bent on telling people repeatedly why they won't be buying it.

I also blame MS for such a cluster fúck of a PR drive creating a lot of the vague and unconfirmed details about the negatives.

Stone Deaf 4evr

ShiverinEskimo wrote: »

I couldn't agree more but any attempt to concentrate on the positives is drowned out by posters hell-bent on telling people repeatedly why they won't be buying it.

I also blame MS for such a cluster fúck of a PR drive creating a lot of the vague and unconfirmed details about the negatives.

I hear you buddy. I was reading an interview with infinity ward about the smartglass integration. Apparently one of the main issues they're trying to avoid is creating an unlevel playing field between those who have smartphones and tablets and those who don't. So expect it to be something like real time scoreboards or spotting with a UAV.
It would be awesome to be able to have a second player calling in supply drops / controlling sentries etc.

Richard Dower

Cerny calls MS out on their cloud bs! http://www.videogamer.com/news/ps4s_cerny_attempts_to_boost_graphics_wont_work_well_in_the_cloud.html

gizmo

Richard Dower wrote: »

Cerny calls MS out on their cloud bs! http://www.videogamer.com/news/ps4s_cerny_attempts_to_boost_graphics_wont_work_well_in_the_cloud.html

Except he didn't.

He said "trying to boost the quality of the graphics... won't work well in the cloud". Which is completely correct. However, the only rendering aspect MS have commented on with respect to the cloud is pre-calculated lighting which could work.

The article is basically ****ing nonsense.

Stone Deaf 4evr

gizmo wrote: »

Except he didn't.

He said "trying to boost the quality of the graphics... won't work well in the cloud". Which is completely correct. However, the only rendering aspect MS have commented on with respect to the cloud is pre-calculated lighting which could work.

The article is basically ****ing nonsense.

The interview with respawn showed how the cloud can take off the load on the gpu. Those big space battles and ships you see when you look to the skies are all being handled by the cloud (apparently). what'll be really interesting is to see what those features will look like when you play on xbox 360 - maybe some sort of static background or traditional skybox?

The way i see it working as well is in it possible application for AI. giant RPGs will be able to have more charachter depth for NPCs, rather than making them carbon copies of each other (an arrow to the knee, anyone?)

Also, a big gripe with shooters / steath games is when you kill someone, then turn a corner to see a guard standing sentry, completely oblivious to the racket you just raised 30 feet away from them. Imagine if they hear noise, then set up defensive positions in anticipation of your attack, then when you're within a certain range it hands it over to the xbox to ensure theres no lag.

the only concern i would have is that since they've done the U-turn on the whole always on thing, there could be games that a) perform differently when connected b) all games will suffer due to developers not being able to rely on definite cloud usage.

Fingleberries

I'd agree that there are certain processes or bundles that can be offloaded to a server in the cloud that free up processing cycles in the GPU, which can then be used for something else - this would mean that the GPU could be used for other processing (indirectly allowing for improved graphics).

Still, if it is seamless and doesn't have lots of pop-in or artefacts when they're using it, then it will be cool. But, if it's like playing Fable 2 without installing it to the HDD, where the DVD seems to be constantly spinning and the environment is slow to load and prone to pop-up, that could be a disaaaaaster.

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

the only concern i would have is that since they've done the U-turn on the whole always on thing, there could be games that a) perform differently when connected b) all games will suffer due to developers not being able to rely on definite cloud usage.

For something like Titanfall, that won't be an issue on Xbox One. It's a Multiplayer-only title, there's no single player campaign, so the Dev will know that the Xbox is always online and can definitely factor in use of the cloud-based servers for the gameplay.

pleasant Co.

For me, the cloud processing wreaks of marketing chatter but it'll be easily proven/disproven as seeing is believing, i certainly wouldn't put it in the x1's "pro's" category just yet...but with ms' wealth of knowledge...and monetary wealth, they could pull it off.

ShiverinEskimo

My opinion on the cloud entirely depends on whether their figures for servers are true. No company is going to invest in hundreds of thousands of servers for a cloud if the cloud is 90% marketing and spin.

That scale of investment requires a serious belief in the service those servers are for.

pleasant Co.

Unless most of the cloud investment isn't actually for the processing aspect, but rather in order to facilitate a move towards making game downloads more efficient as the games files will be rather large, more server investment would mean faster, more reliable download service...and lets not forget that ms are heavily pushing the media aspect too so that would have impacted on such an investment decision.

ShiverinEskimo

I wouldn't say Steam have 300,000 servers though and the traffic through Steam around a time like now would be astronomical.

Like I said previously though - this is based on whether that figure of 300,000 is accurate. That could be part of the spin quite easily.

Stone Deaf 4evr

ShiverinEskimo wrote: »

My opinion on the cloud entirely depends on whether their figures for servers are true. No company is going to invest in hundreds of thousands of servers for a cloud if the cloud is 90% marketing and spin.

That scale of investment requires a serious belief in the service those servers are for.

I may be wrong, but I think the whole cloud is something that is going to be integrated into every aspect of their portfolio - p.c.'s tablets , phones etc. much on a basic level, the same as the way google docs operates. So its an overall infrastructure - not something thats solely for xbox.

Stone Deaf 4evr

ShiverinEskimo wrote: »

I wouldn't say Steam have 300,000 servers though and the traffic through Steam around a time like now would be astronomical.

Like I said previously though - this is based on whether that figure of 300,000 is accurate. That could be part of the spin quite easily.

Plenty of lads complaining about steam being down while the sales are in operation, so its a fine line between enough for daily use and cost / value of being able to cope with busy periods.

gizmo

The real difference between cloud-related talk from both companies is how they've chosen to invest in the area. Sony, for instance, have bought Gaikai for $380m whereas MS have just invested nearly $700m in one data centre to support XBox One and Office 365 cloud-based functionality. One could argue that Sony's investment will offer far more tangible benefits for gamers whereas the benefits of MS' approach are far more nebulous and will all come down to the services/accessibility they offer publishers and developers.

None of that changes what is and isn't possible via cloud computing of course nor does it make phrases like "Matchmaking is done in the cloud and it works very well" seem any more daft.

pleasant Co.

ShiverinEskimo wrote: »

I wouldn't say Steam have 300,000 servers though and the traffic through Steam around a time like now would be astronomical.

Like I said previously though - this is based on whether that figure of 300,000 is accurate. That could be part of the spin quite easily.

Good points.
On steam downloads, they aren't the speediest, but fine for steam users, and my thinking is that ms don't want regular people complaining that their DL's take hours upon hours to complete, or worse - that the DL while you play stutters.

Stone Deaf 4evr

gizmo wrote: »

The real difference between cloud-related talk from both companies is how they've chosen to invest in the area. Sony, for instance, have bought Gaikai for $380m whereas MS have just invested nearly $700m in one data centre to support XBox One and Office 365 cloud-based functionality. One could argue that Sony's investment will offer far more tangible benefits for gamers whereas the benefits of MS' approach are far more nebulous and will all come down to the services/accessibility they offer publishers and developers.

None of that changes what is and isn't possible via cloud computing of course nor does it make phrases like "Matchmaking is done in the cloud and it works very well" seem any more daft.

As always, I may be wrong, but are they talking about separate game matchmaking - as in you're playing one game, whilst searching for a different one in the background.

Fingleberries

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

As always, I may be wrong, but are they talking about separate game matchmaking - as in you're playing one game, whilst searching for a different one in the background.

No, you're not wrong. Though that quote was from the interview with Mark Cerny, the Lead Designer of the PS4. He was taking a dig at Xbox One, and he said that PS4 does cloud computing: We do matchmaking in the cloud now, and it works OK.

Pretty much any internet connected device can 'do' cloud computing. It's using it as a basis for offloading useful bundles of processes that free up local resources.

I know this article is hardly impartial, but the additional items that could be rendered in the NASA demo increasing from 40,000 asteroids to about 300,000. There are other articles from Polygon which quote Jeff Henshaw from Microsoft.

Polygon wrote:

It's an example of the possibilities of the system, which according to Henshaw includes the ability to feature "10,000 or 100,000 enemies in-game" while maintaining a high level of realism and fluidity in the near-field view by offloading it to the cloud. Comparatively, to get the same result from last-generation consoles it would require "10 and a half Xbox 360 consoles all working in parallel" in terms of computational horsepower, he adds.

"This is how the cloud will change the gaming experience," he says. "If a developer wants to do really crazy stuff we can see how he can map and compute 330,000 asteroids in real-time via global cloud computing. There are 500,000 updates per second from the cloud to Xbox One. Developers tell us this is a miracle for them. Even the highest of highest PCs could not do all of this at once, it really takes global cloud computing resources."

(emphasis added)

Although I'd definitely tone down the "Developers tell us this is a miracle for them" with a whole sack of salt as marketing spin.

gizmo

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

As always, I may be wrong, but are they talking about separate game matchmaking - as in you're playing one game, whilst searching for a different one in the background.

Fingleberries wrote: »

No, you're not wrong. Though that quote was from the interview with Mark Cerny, the Lead Designer of the PS4. He was taking a swipe at Xbox One, and he said that PS4 does cloud computing. We do matchmaking in the cloud now, and it works OK.

Nope, the actual search/matchmaking doesn't take place on the client machine regardless of the approach used. What they're essentially doing is substituting the term "server-side" for "cloud" and as as I said earlier, the only thing that accomplishes is the cheapening of the latter term.

FlyingIrishMan

We still don't know if they are 300,000 physical servers, or 300,000 virtual servers. Makes a world of a difference.

gizmo

FlyingIrishMan wrote: »

We still don't know if they are 300,000 physical servers, or 300,000 virtual servers. Makes a world of a difference.

In an interview last month an MS Engineer referred to one of their demos as "pulling in virtualized cloud computing resources" so between that and a healthy dose of common sense, I'd be inclined to say it's the latter.

As for the difference that will make, given the services they'll most likely be offering I don't think it'll make that much, if any, to the end user which figure it is.

Fingleberries

FlyingIrishMan wrote: »

We still don't know if they are 300,000 physical servers, or 300,000 virtual servers. Makes a world of a difference.

Very True, a massive difference ... Although if we are to take the Microsoft details literally (where they plan roughly a 3:1 ratio - 3 Xbox servers for every physical Xbox). They must be talking about 300,000 physical servers, which can then run multiple "virtual" XBoxes or Xbox Live servers, or else they're only planning on selling 100,000 Xbox One's (which would explain why their initial marketing seems to be trying to discourage people from buying one )

stevenmu

They haven't gone into much detail on how the cloud infrastructure works. What makes the most sense is that they're using a SaaS (software as a service) structure rather than an IaaS (infrastructure as a service), the bits they've said about the Cloud SDK and the handful of samples shown would lean in that direction anyway.

In that case it doesn't make sense to talk about virtualised servers, only physical.

What they haven't indicated yet (I don't think) is if this server capacity is dedicated for Xbox, or shared across other Azure cloud services.

bk

stevenmu wrote: »

What they haven't indicated yet (I don't think) is if this server capacity is dedicated for Xbox, or shared across other Azure cloud services.

This is the important point, MS has massive datacenters full of hundreds of thousands of servers for it's overall Azure cloud services which it sells to enterprises for the likes of Office365, Sky Drive, etc.

These "cloud" servers are used through out MS products and services that it sells to both enterprise and consumers.

But this isn't unusual, Amazon has even larger datacenters for it's cloud servers which is used by the likes of Netflix and Dropbox amongst many other services. Oracle, IBM, Facebook, Google, etc. all have similar "cloud" datacenters.

It doesn't make sense for MS to have dedicated servers for Xbox. The whole point of cloud servers and virtualisation is that you can dynamically provision servers to do different tasks depending on the demand * .

I'm certain the 300,000 figure applies to the total number of servers in their Azure cloud datacenters, not just for X1.

The other thing to remember is that there is absolutely nothing to stop Sony from doing the same if it did prove successful. Nothing at all stopping them from building their own datacenters or using Amazons, IBM's, etc,

* The whole idea of cloud services was initially popularised by Amazon as they needed a massive number of servers to deal with the big increase in demand the few days before Christmas. But these servers sat doing nothing for the rest of the year, so they came up with the idea of selling capacity on their servers to other companies throughout the rest of the year. Obviously it has now come a successful business for them in it's own right.

the groutch

not sure if mentioned yet but Forza 5 is being pushed out as a half-finished game, with buyers having to download the rest of the game online.

http://ie.ign.com/articles/2013/07/16/forza-motorsport-5-requires-one-time-internet-connection

kearneybobs

I think it's rather disgusting. The game you buy should be in working order when you buy it. Simple as. Especially games that are not reliant on cloud computing, i.e. most single player games

2Mad2BeMad

the groutch wrote: »

not sure if mentioned yet but Forza 5 is being pushed out as a half-finished game, with buyers having to download the rest of the game online.

http://ie.ign.com/articles/2013/07/16/forza-motorsport-5-requires-one-time-internet-connection

if anyone buys forza 5 for the single player they should be shot :pac: the multiplayer is what forza was made for, single player is really repetitive , ai is terrible, dont really care the way they go on about this new technology where the ai is more advanced , ai is always going to be bad in racing games :L ( exception to driveclub ) at least they have mentioned some improvement to ai but i havnt seen a video yet to prove it (il hit youtube soon enough)

half finished game? ah sure why not most games are half finished when released anyone with all the dlc available from day 1, least it will be free

although i think forza 5 was been made with microsofts previous policys and when the change happened it kinda f*cked them over abit regarding always online but then again who knows :P

FlyingIrishMan

I don't think its as bad as some people are making it out to be. They won't be finished in time for release, so doing it this way will give them another month or two to work on the game.

CatInABox

FlyingIrishMan wrote: »

I don't think its as bad as some people are making it out to be. They won't be finished in time for release, so doing it this way will give them another month or two to work on the game.

I get the feeling that this is going to become more common as time goes by. I certainly don't like the fact that it won't even work without the update, but it's not a deal breaker for me.

Then again, perhaps I'm more mellow than most people, I've never had a problem with day one patches, or with DLC being on the disk.