Titanfall uses Xbox Live Cloud on Xbox 360 and PC
Microsoft has made some nebulous claims regarding the "power of the cloud." Respawn Entertainment, developers of the upcoming Titanfall, finally make clear what the cloud actually is, and why they're so fond of it.
Microsoft has made some nebulous claims regarding the "power of the cloud." Respawn Entertainment, developers of the upcoming Titanfall, finally make clear what the cloud actually is, and why they're so fond of it.
The cloud is, as many people assumed, an extension of Microsoft's Azure platform, which has been running for three years. It's a service that Microsoft is investing heavily in. The cloud enables Titanfall to have "dedicated servers," instead of problematic player-hosted servers that are so common in gaming today. The reason they are used so frequently in modern games is because "it doesn't cost money to run the servers."
Xbox Live Cloud differs from the standard dedicated server model by letting Azure dynamically scale resources up (and down), depending on demand. "It's far more affordable than other hosting options," Respawn's Jon Shiring explained.
"With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don't have to worry about estimating how many servers we'll need on launch day. We don't have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don't have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server. That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacenters all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter," Shiring details on Respawn's blog.
While "the cloud" has useful applications, the explanation offered by Respawn makes us question why it's a feature touted by Microsoft as exclusive to Xbox One, when any internet-connected device could take advantage of cloud computing. Even Shiring points out that "Titanfall uses the Xbox Live Cloud to run dedicated servers for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox 360."
Perhaps it's because developers haven't figured out exactly how to leverage the cloud computing possibilities afforded by Xbox One. "Over time, I expect that we’ll be using these servers to do a lot more than just dedicated servers," Shiring postulates. "This is something that's going to let us drive all sorts of new ideas in online games for years to come."
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Titanfall uses Xbox Live Cloud on Xbox 360 and PC.
Microsoft has made some nebulous claims regarding the "power of the cloud." Respawn Entertainment, developers of the upcoming Titanfall, finally make clear what the cloud actually is, and why they're so fond of it.-
For the people who think this is new technology made just for the Xbox One and Xbox Live... news for you: this is the existing Windows Azure cloud computing service which is already available today... MS is merely allotting a certain amount of server bandwidth for developers to use at a discounted rate of what the normal Azure rates are... there's nothing from stopping a PS4 or Nintendo game (or any other game) from using the very same server technology being used by Titanfall on MS's servers to run one of their games since Azure is available to anyone to do with whatever you choose much like Amazon and their EC2 technology.
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My guess is the big deal over time will be the cost savings of using the azure backed service for Xbox exclusive features. Sony does not have an equivalent service today. Gaikti is not the same - that is for streaming. They could make it more azure / amazon EC2 like, but that takes time.
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The application they are using it for right now (or at least what they are talking about here) is simple and could be done anywhere. The cloud computation part (which we probably wont see much of for a little while) that's a bit more complicated and not something we've really seen done before in a games console. I'm not a hardcore hardware/software guy... but I think that is something which needs to be built into the OS to be able to do. Farming out non-latency dependent AI/physics/scene rendering to the cloud is what I'm more curious about... If that works how they've been hinting at than it could give Xbox a leg up in the long run.
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Oh my god, MS has invented dedicated servers. All bow to the great masters of innovation!
Oh, and never mind that this also means the end of custom servers... Or mods... Or anything that requires at least some kind of access to the game other than playing it. At least, that is if other shooters use the same model.-
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At the hands of these exact same developers, no less.
The only entities that are going to preserve user-run dedicated servers in future released games are Valve and indie FPS game developers. And Valve wants to do nothing but DOTA 2 these days, and there is no such thing as an indie FPS multiplayer game developer who isn't running an infrastructure-based free-to-play game.
The subgenre of user-run dedicated-server multiplayer FPS game is dead, and greed killed it.
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They have not confirmed if it will or won't use it, but it'll work with it if Microsoft allows it. It's just Azure, after all.
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Whether Microsoft wants clients who aren't registered to Live for ad revenue (or Gold for subscription), that's a business call to be made by Microsoft.
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because people don't know WTF, not that they know what the cloud actually is its a word they've heard that they think is new and good.
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lol that is awful
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where would be the question.
i was just pointing out to the "lol latency 1996" crowd that there are still large parts of the world that have questionable connectivity to where businesses choose to locate datacenters due to customer density. you're in western australia, all three of you will have shite latency to these elastic resources. does that discount the fact that 98% of their customer base will have good connectivity? no. does that mean that their cloud infrastructure eliminates the inherent limitations of the internets? no.
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ugh. Even with client side hit detection 100 ms is a pretty poor baseline.
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Considering the previous console generation, no I don't.
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what spazzium is saying is that the entire infrastructure will catch fire on launch day, i tend to agree.
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so the worst case is status quo for online game launches
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yes, but this will be ALL the games :)
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every day that Netflix doesn't cause the entirety of AWS to collapse is a miracle. Amazon engineers sit around breathlessly with each new Netflix original series premiere.
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whoops, i was thinking about the xbox one launch, not the titanfall launch. Yeah, the titanfall launch should be fine.
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well that has been the point of cloud services for traditional web sites/services for years now. Notice how getting slashdot'd/digg'd/reddit'd is not nearly as common as it once was, it's a lot easier to build a scalable web service and only pay for what you need (particularly that extra capacity when you're getting more PR than ever before). This type of architecture hasn't been used in games much yet but it's exactly the solution for the launch woes we've become accustomed to for online games. As the bombcast noted during the D3 stuff, there's a math problem where every company knows they probably can't handle the day 1 load but it doesn't make sense to buy 30% more servers which will likely never be used again 2 weeks after launch. So until developers figure out how to leverage these types of cloud services for games in the same way that web services have already we will continue to suffer from launch day woes for big releases (note there's obviously a difference between a shitty implementation/execution like Simcity and a company like Blizzard still failing at it with a product like Diablo 3)
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You're forgetting that at some point, somewhere, somebody is doing capacity planning. It doesn't matter if you suddenly start calling it the cloud. We all know Google wouldn't have enough storage if in the next hour everyone managed to use the entire capacity of their gmail inbox. But that's exactly what some launch day scenarios become. The fact that you're serving more customers with the same service does not change this particular underlying problem.
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While "the cloud" has useful applications, the explanation offered by Respawn makes us question why it's a feature touted by Microsoft as exclusive to Xbox One, when any internet-connected device could take advantage of cloud computing.
This statement, while technically accurate, is pretty vague and not necessarily something anyone with a background in programming with Microsoft products (or Azure Cloud integration) would ever say. It also really makes no sense within the context of this topic or article, as they are clearly talking about platforms that can access Azure as opposed to Cloud computing in a general sense. It really just seems like more biased Xbox hate.
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I think the person with the MS background is the biased one...
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Well, they directly reference this in the blog post. That being said, there's a difference between "everyone has the possibility of accessing the cloud" and "Microsoft is offering cloud computing at a cheaper price than other cloud platforms directly to Xbox One titles". It makes it a built-in feature of the platform available to developers on that platform. Given that MS is known for providing decent developer tools (compared to Sony/Nintendo) I wouldn't be surprised if they have been leveraging their tools development to make it easy to include cloud access.
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Yeah this is kind of what I was trying to get at with my post above.
I'm not familiar with the integration tools that MS is providing to game developers, but I would have to think accessing the Azure Cloud from a Microsoft-based product, including games tailored for the Xbone, is pretty easy using the developer tools they provide.
Anyone who's familiar with Microsoft products and/or programming will know that Azure is really better off as a platform/storage service for Microsoft products, but you can connect to it using other platforms/languages too. For that matter, PS4 games could probably tap the Azure Cloud too but it's obviously pretty absurd to think this would ever happen.
In order for TitanFall to provide dedicated, Cloud-based servers for PS4 users, it would need to utilize a different Cloud service entirely... and the PS4's Cloud service isn't something we know a ton about yet (at least I don't) so I don't know how appealing that would be for them.
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99.95% uptime still means 262.8 minutes of downtime per year.
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They've had several days of downtime in the last 12 months. My gf's work has their corporate site on azure and it vanished from the internet for over two days earlier this year, and for a few more days last autumn.
Apparently the reason was that azure only has one engineer per 10,000 sites (or something like that, I forget) so if there's a serious problem it can be days before they get through the backlog and put yours back. It's one of the reasons azure is so cheap.
They are moving off azure as soon as they can.
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TLDR: DGAF about Xbox cloud. If it works well, like most aspects of good IT, I won't notice it.
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Boner has become instantly flaccid...
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Pretty amazing that gamers have become so jaded that all I see are dumb "ololol the cloud" or "dedicated servers are already on pc eheheh" comments
Can you guys seriously not see the amazing potential here? developers will have the ability to shape their games post-launch in a way that would NEVER be possible through patches. For example, large-scale events that affect the game world in concrete ways based on the way the community plays the game. Or perhaps on a much more personal scale, where elements of your game world persist even when your console is offline. I think it opens up thousands of new gameplay options.
Just think about everything that's been possible to do recently with MMO's... but now instead of having to take the huge risk of deploying a multi-million dollar infrastructure just to support those features, devs can use the Microsoft platform at a discount, and build this stuff via easy-to-use APIs. That's never been possible on a console; not even remotely!
Looking at this strictly through the lens of the past 20 years in console gaming, you won't see the promise. But how useful is that really? Is it that hard to apply a little creativity? how about looking forward instead of backward?-
I don't want an MMOFPS. Also, you under-emphasize the capability of what patches can do, probably precisely as an effect of most developers not having enough money or man-hours to actually follow through with such a plan. The cloud doesn't change the macro view of that; the developer still needs man-hours to plan all the changes.
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You do realize this has been available to PC developers for years, yes? And we're not talking about MMO developers who have to spin up their own infrastructures, we're talking about other clouds, HP Swift, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud, and yes, MIcrosoft Azure.
EA's been testing with it for awhile (hence SimCity's usage of EC2). As Archvile pointed out above, these resources have existed, but the problem is getting developers to care enough to not treat their games as fixed-products. That's the real issue.
Everything you've seen so far about Microsoft's usage (drivatar avatars in Forza, dedicated servers in Titan Fall, and ... ?) are all traditional examples that either could be done on EC2, or be done on the console themselves. Forza's is particular egregious, since it is something Forza 1 supported and fighting games have been doing for years (both Tekken and Virtual Fighter supported fighter AIs based on your playstyle). So no, we're not impressed with what is being offered, since it's entirely a gimmick right now.
I'll care when they do something that is actually innovative with it.-
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More and more I'm starting to hate the word "cloud".
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I'll be getting the PC version. Thank you very much.
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I hope this means Titanfall isn't gonna be a GFWL or Windows 8 Xbox game only game. One of the rare occasions I'de actually prefer something to be on Origin.... :/
