Does Microsoft's future plans for the Xbox brand sound like a good idea for us gamers?

make sme laugh, using the cloud, Microsoft cant keep azure running properly to keep office online available all the time, so when live goes down then crackdown will become a 2D side scroller, lol

 

Its a mute point, it has massive limitation's and at the end of day if it could do what a lot of people here want it to ms wouldn't be looking at upgrading hardware.

 

farscape thats incorrect, the cloud is only used on the multiplayer side of crackdown, not the single player, so if xbox live was down it would not matter because you cannot access multiplayer anyway

 

MS have to look at what the developers want to use, MS can design the best system in the word if the developers don't want to use it or can't or are happy with what they have, it will get passed by regardless of how good it is.

it also takes time for developers to start using it, eg if you half way through a game cycle you simply can't change it.

Bagless vacuums were thought of well before they took off, because the manufacturers were happy with what they had, you wouldn't think that looking at them now.

The cloud system has massive potential but the issue isn't with MS, well i guess you could suggest they could invest heavily on the development side, but if a company is happy developing how they are, they aren't going to change, and thats why games are
stagnant at the moment.

For it to work MS also needs all platforms to utilize it, which could be the reason MS is moving to have a more open system with cross play and the like.

 

@enen

No it works exactly the same as other dedicated servers and the ai are run on the server your playing as expected, I can post a link to respawn explaining it if you would like.

 

www.respawn.com/.../lets-talk-about-the-xbox-live-cloud

Point 1 under dedicated servers

 

if you mean this one:

www.respawn.com/.../lets-talk-about-the-xbox-live-cloud

it says;

Your saying the Ms cloud is just a bunch of servers, and they say.

But it’s not just for dedicated servers – Microsoft thought about our problem in a bigger way. Developers aren’t going to just want dedicated servers – they’ll have all kinds of features that need a server to do some kind of work to make games better. Look
at Forza 5, which studies your driving style in order to create custom AI that behaves like you do. That’s totally different from what Titanfall uses it for, and it’s really cool! So it’s not accurate to say that the Xbox Live Cloud is simply a system for
running dedicated servers – it can do a lot more than that.

 

now move down after the explanation of what everything else is and read What is the Cloud?

 

Yeah I read it, the only thing it brings to titanfall is scalability, as far as gameplay is concerned nothing else

 

so your saying because they say its different but because they play the same, they are the same?

 

They are the same a cloud is a collection of servers, whats running on them may be different but so far its been nothing out of the ordinary, crackdown excluded.

 

the article doesn't actually explain what it brings to titanfall, it simply explains the cloud in a generic way for people to understand.

at the top it says

"I have seen a lot of confusion online and I think it’s worth explaining more about what we’re doing on Titanfall and also more generally about Cloud computing and dedicated servers."

Because you the gamer don't see a difference, is a very very good thing, and I don't know anyone that faults TF's gameplay.

In princple they are the same, but a server is only a PC like you have in your house in a different box running different software, and your happy to call a server and server and a pc a pc, but they are different and the same.

 

If you read under the "how is this different to other dedicated servers" they sum it up for you, its cheap easy and scales.

 

"Because you the gamer don't see a difference, is a very very good thing, and I don't know anyone that faults TF's gameplay."

Could be. But the difference I did not see was something that could not have been done before. It is not like they where doing something special here. The AI was not the smartest, honestly have played games with better AI, and it was not like the matches
were overcomplicated with the amount of players.

Forza has a cool idea. I like the AI learning and then racing like players. Racing against people on my friends list without them being there is fairly cool.

Crackdown seems to show what this kind of thing can be. Mostly in terms of AI and Physics. Physics stuff more so in the case of Crackdown. The inherent weakness is keeping these things running. It is one thing to rely on the servers to run matches. But
when you need other servers to run the physics, AI, and things that grows the potential problems exponentially. So, a group of servers drop. Typically you would have matches running that would end. Well, now that group is AI only or Physics only. The question
becomes: Can the match proceed? And then, How does it effect gameplay/

Imagine the servers running some of the AI for a game crashes. Now the AI is mindless and does little until a connection is re-established. Could, and probably would, be game breaking no matter.

Same situation with physics. All of a sudden the game loses the connection to that part. A lot of those features would not work.

Yes, in these situations you could have a backup that kicks in. But that makes the amount of servers a whole lot larger overall. Not really viable. Plus, it would still create issues that would be, almost certainly, game breaking for a time.

There are many issues here. We are nowhere near close enough to make this viable on a large scale outside of MP for sure. MP already requires the internet and servers and stuff so that is not new. It is just that the system becomes so much more complicated
and a small issue can now seem huge when they happen.

I could see this being a bigger thing in 5-7 years. Still think that, even then, it will be a lot longer than that before any of these kinds of things like Crackdown shows become viable for most.

 

@Rambo, its general information to try to explain, if you think they are going to discuss every single aspect of it, it would last forever.

If you look for a tutorial on programming they are all fairly samey, its up to the programmer to develop it, signalr is a good example most of the tutorials are simple chat applications but its an amazing library.

@Guerrero, if MS developers use it in everything and utilize it to spark the imagination of other developers it will take off quickly, if MS leave it for the developers to dream it won't take off.

(there will be back ups if one part goes down)