Sony: 'of course' PS4 can do cloud computing
What about Sony's next-gen machine? Can it also follow Microsoft's step in offloading computation to the cloud? "Of course," Sony's Shuhei Yoshida said.
Microsoft has been keen to promote Xbox One's use of the cloud. Xbox One's official website, for example, states that "thanks to the power of the cloud, Xbox One will keep getting better." Cloud computing supposedly makes Xbox One four times more powerful. It also justifies why Xbox One is effectively an always-on console.
But what about Sony's next-gen machine? Sure, it can stream games via the cloud-powered Gaikai. But can it also follow Microsoft's step in offloading computation to the cloud? "Of course," Sony's Shuhei Yoshida said.
"Linking, matchmaking... there are already many computations being done on the cloud side," Yoshida told Polygon. And although PS4 won't require an internet connection to use, Yoshida said that "if your title needs [an] online connection to provide some online features: Go for it."
There you go. Both consoles can do cloud computing. Although be warned--it's all pretty much a load of rubbish either way. Hooray for marketing!
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Shacknews
replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Sony: 'of course' PS4 can do cloud computing.
What about Sony's next-gen machine? Can it also follow Microsoft's step in offloading computation to the cloud? "Of course," Sony's Shuhei Yoshida said.-
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'offloading stuff to the cloud' is basically just sending information back and forth over the internet. This is a software feature, not a hardware feature. You can offload computing to the cloud on any device - One of the older examples is SETI@home, which basically does exactly that (but in reverse admittedly).
There is nothing special about the Xbone hardware that would make it any better or worse than any other device with an internet connection since, however you want to spin it, remains the one component you have to do it with in every case.
Aside from that, another company claimed that cloud computing was necessary for one of it's services not too long ago. I don't really see how it's impossible that MS is lying about it aswell.
Though, on the other hand, you're right - Sony is not doing the same thing MS is. They're simply keeping it optional instead of making it mandatory, or at least making it seem like that.-
Go here : http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=virtual-machines
Microsoft have amazing cloud services that they've been building for years ... Azure is very very cool.
However all those services and virtual machines cost money, will they really allow games to make use of them and if so how much. It COULD be a huge deal though, and no Sony don't have the facilities to do it.-
Azure and the cloud as meant for the Xbone are very different things. They may use Azure infrastructure though, but this would be interesting to see - Azure clients being impacted by Xbone usage.
If both Azure and the Xbone suddenly grew in popularity and usage over the course of a few weeks, MS would have major problems aswell keeping up with the hardware demands and at the very least you'd have a short time where the performance for both would be very, very bad. Of course, only the customer would actually feel the impact so they won't care ;p-
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SQL Azure is fucking awful. Windows Azure is better, but it's still kinda meh to me.
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I personally don't like SQL Azure at all. From an Operations standpoint, it sorta works like SQL but there is too much missing compared to real SQL. Azure Storage (table/blob/etc) is a better solution normally but you lose the RDBness of course. Normally this isn't a big deal and is just something you work around and end up finding you didn't absolutely need.
The compute roles (standard worker/iis/linux/etc) and service roles (service bus, ad, etc etc) are great when you fully design your service/app around them. Nothing on the market comes close to those infrastructure pieces.
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Listen to the Respawn folks on this week's Bombcast; they do a really good job of explaining how the cloud network architecture on the Xbox One actually does make a difference. Fanboys will write off their response as bullshit, of course, but it sounds like it creates a lot of interesting possibilities for developers.
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I don't recall them saying anything in particular about it except that it is being used for spinning up multiplayer servers, something S3 and Gakai already do.
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There's absolutely no way "the cloud" will be used for AI.
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They're lying, unless the AI is extremely lazy. It may need to respond to player actions very quickly, but how does it do that when there's at least a 100ms delay (depending on your connection) for information to go back and forth from console to server, and you still need the time to actually do the calculations?
If the Titanfall AI really is cloudbased, be prepared for one of the worst AI's in gaming history. Any challenging AI NEEDS local resources to be fast enough to respond.-
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You literally have no idea what you're talking about.
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being shot.. must hide...
not being shot.. must kill stuff...
or ya.. for global AI/pathfinding for random npcs or something just like fucking around town, n animals n shit. The 100ms delay should be a non issue i would think.
i dont see why it couldnt, but i dun really know wtf im talking about either.
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Can you cite a source? All the information I've seen (and on the Bombcast extended talk with them), they're only using it for dedicate server spawning in different regions.
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yah but the experience could vary greatly depending on latency... everything is fine when your ping is good. But if the server response creeps up to 200ms+ you'd likely notice as your enemies would be lagging.
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It's not quite the same thing, since the simulation is happening on the same machine as the AI in that case
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Nah, you can host a game with bots on one machine and connect to is as a normal player from another machine.
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the simulation is still happening on the host
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Macro/micro AI could be different.
Maybe like strategic vs. tactical AI?
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It's a marketing hoax or MS would have laid out the technical specs. Not to mention you can see they videos of their games for yourself and there's nothing to show these games have 10x the processing power of anything current.
Here the TitanFall guy says it's really only used for dedicated servers, which is hardly new.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kZy3VIVqAY4#t=67s-
Yep. Marketing buzz word designed to make up for hardware shortcomings.
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It's not going to work for anything like AI, too much latency. I think we will find that very few multiplats will use it since it's not a guaranteed to be there (ps4,shitty Internet, etc)
Xbone exclusives might use it but it's not going to make this crazy difference in graphics or performance.-
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Cloud computing isn't about running stuff on the server, it's about harnassing the cpu of the xbone that's not being played at the moment. So you need to push game state information to those idle xbones and receive the reply in a reasonable amount of time. Because you have to do this frequently and dynamically, there is a lot of network processing to be done. XBones come on and off the cloud unpredicatably so you probably always need to push new game state with each bundle of processing to be done. The latency likely isn't the problem so much as the waste incurred in trying to have latency-sensitive items processed asap. So I would imagine this would be more useful for larger bundles of processing such as random level generation or perhaps video decoding.
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this is not even remotely what cloud computing means... you seem to think this is Cell processing redux, it has nothing to do with using other peoples' idle Xbox
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hmm well I was wrong about how XB1 will work, I assumed that's how they would implement cloud computing. Having that many servers to reinforce the XB1 would be very expensive, I'm surprised they are promising such robust servers. But i guess they can promise anything, we'll see what actually happens.
However, most of the issues with network processing are still present even in the server cloud they are promising. You can't really rely on it for anything latency sensitive.
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Some may try it but i doubt that experiment will last long. Offloading stuff to cloud computing relies on a stable and fast internet connection. If enough of your target audience gets a (really) bad experience due to internet connection problems or server problems, you're going to get really, REALLY bad PR. Look at EA: Just a few months after SC5's launch they're backpedalling on the entire issue and even scrapping online passes and such. Ubisoft tried it with a few games and dropped it real quiet last year.
Also, the only devs willing to use the Xbone cloud thing are first party (exclusive) games. Halo, Fable, Gears of War and Forza are currently the only franchises which would possibly make use of it like that right now, barring any new exclusives from very likely the same developers. This is for a simple reason: You don't want to shut out the PS4 audience, like you wouldn't want to shut out the PS3 one right now.
Whatever way you want to put it, if you make a game for both the 360 and PS4 you *double* your possible market (both consoles sold around 70-75m times iirc). Why would you only want to dev for the 360 if you can attract 70m more people by making relatively minor changes to release it on the PS3 aswell?
The same will happen for the next gen devices, especially since the PS4 will likely have a far larger installbase in the first few months than the Xbone due to all this hoopla. It doens't make any kind of financial sense to shut out such a large audience from your games, taking a risk on MS servers staying stable and up and trusting consumer internet connections. You'd only set yourself up for a big fall.
All of that, plus what i posted in an earlier comment - Your internet connection will still be the limiting factor in all of this. The big attraction of consoles for developers is that everyone has the same hardware. However, they cannot have a guarantee about the internet connections. IF they use the cloud thing, they may only use it in a very limited way to make sure they don't overreach and require consumers to at least have 100mbit connections to sync up properly. Lag is also a damning factor in all this - You can't have a server in every city, village and hamlet on the world so some people will have lower performance even if you assume the bandwidth will be identical. Add multiplayer to the equation and you can see how volatile a mix this is.
There are so many points where this online only approach can go wrong. You may argue that it's no different for an MMO, but in that case you're not trying to play a singleplayer game as would be the case for the cloud idea from MS, which basically acts as a DRM device rather than something that adds to a game. Diablo 3 showed how that can go wrong already over a year ago. Does MS think i really want to have a very laggy and buggy singleplayer experience just to have a 'friend comes online' popup while im playing?
Just imagine playing Shadow of the Colossus and being booted out of the game because your ISP goes down for a 5 minute period - The game being unable to calculate a tree off in the distance. Just imagine being kneedeep in a dungeon in Skyrim, not having saved for an hour, being booted out because the cloud couldn't sync up an NPC picking it's nose in a town you haven't been in yet. How does this add to the game?
So, well, long rant over - I'm a pretty big sceptic about this stuff. If i worked at MS, i don't see how it can work without seriously risking the experience your customers can have. The only way i can justify a move like this is because some manager would be convinced that this would reduce piracy and increase the possibility for targetted advertisements, plus another reason for pushing the Xbox Live Gold service. Justify for the company that is, not the customer.
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Why don't you fix your games freezing first on your new PS4 system hardware, than trying to compare your cloud computing to the real deal of xbox one. not even in the same level of computing from software side sony. fix your hardware first, than request Microsoft to come help you figure out how to improve your cloud computing and UI.
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ur stil hear
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Can we just get this account banned?
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There's dissent, and then there's psychosis.
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It's either a marketing account or an account that is posting too much made up information. Basically they are constantly lying, it's all they do. Yes, ban all of those accounts.
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I second that motion!
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HWATCHA GONNA DOOO when the XBONE and the largest cloud in the gaming industry RUNS WILD ON YOU
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Were the ps4 demos freezing? I remember the thread about the of the xbo demos crashing to desktop but not this.
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Also I guess Knack crashed at some point on the floor too: http://www.exophase.com/60285/knack-crash-reveals-new-ps4-details/
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Wy don't you fix your mother being a whore son?
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I am an Xbox 360 fan but people like you embarrass me.
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MS makes such awesome hardware I bought 3 xbox 360s!
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only 3 I made it to five if you include the upgrade version.
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I just love him with my morning coffee... he's the funniest thing on shack!!
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I want more Blast Processing!
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I doubt either PS4 or xbone can play useful formats
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Its not that it cant, its that it WONT. You seriously think ms and sony can get deals with media companies if their devices are also the number one way to play pirated content? Nope.avi
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People said the same about MP3 players at one point. Then someone realised despite the *IAA's being pissy bitches there was plenty of money to be made in actually providing people what they want (despite what it may be used for) that it became a huge market.
Lots of torrents are in mp4 format now anyway, it's only really the Blu-Ray HD rips and people making their own libraries who are heavy into MKV's. Seems a silly feature to leave out just because of how it might be used, and it's not as if they are really stopping that stuff being played on their devices thanks to how Windows has plenty of programs available to transcode on the fly.
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It's amusing how dedicated servers are now being used as some sort of marketing thing. Look, we have the power of THE CLOUD!!!!11
The best compute thing this can be used for is converting your captured game footage into another video format. And even that probably won't happen due to the upload bandwidth required. -
Sounds like a new arms race.
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they have to also convince a bunch of developers to use it & pay MS for the privilege
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I think they are counting all their Azure virtual server stuff in that - most of which would exist anyway for the push they are doing on that end. Its like if amazon said the kindle has access to the sum power of EC2/AWS - technically it could via some software, but thats not the sole use of that hardware.
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That makes no sense at all. Companies don't put time and money into infrastructure just to abandon it usually.
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You underestimate how much marketers like the words "the cloud".
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