2707

I used one for a while. It worked well for duplicating the audio output to analog 1/8 mini, coax spdif, and optical.

2708

Respawn developer demystifies Xbox One Cloud. Good stuff. Basically Microsoft is offering a really cheap solution for developers wanting powerful dedicated servers. It’s nice to get beyond the marketing talk to what it actually means.

2709

I am celebrating this.
The only thing between this and good gaming would be push-to-talk. Seriusly, all games withouth push-to-talk by default are completely unplayable.

2710

don’t they already offer that to any business in any industry that wants them?

2711

Yep, he even mentions competitors that offer similar services - Amazon and Rackspace (plus there are dozens and dozens of others). That said, MS may be upping the ante by providing not just Infrastructure as a Service, but Platform as a Service. They may be offering a platform on top of Azure that takes all the pain away for developers looking to host dedicated servers. Pain such as automating deployment, patching, automatically scaling with demand, regional points of presence, simplified management, no contract pay per use, etc - all at a lower cost than the current options.

I’ll believe that when I start to hear some more concrete evidence supporting it. At the moment, my guess is it is just IaaS priced cheap enough (maybe lead-lossing) to entice game developers into the Azure ecosystem.

2712

Not for free. Xbox One’s “cloud” is basically free Azure resources that the developer can do whatever it wants to do. Whether it’s offline processing to be consumed later like what Forza is doing, semi-real-time AI calculations, or for a game like Titanfall where Azure is already hosting dedicated servers, those dedicated servers can also be processing real-time AI.

2713

A dedicated server for a game already do the ai. The server handle the full state of the world and all game rules.

It would be fun to implement bots as a separate thing has the server. Hell, bots can be implemented clientside :-)
But we all know all this AI talk is marketing bullshit to wooosh 14 years old gamers.

2714

Now that sounds nice. So why didn’t MS PR just come out and say it in that way? Though with Ballmer in charge it seems like nothing comes for free. If a dev uses Azure is MS still going to charge those outrageous patch fees on small developers? Or do developrs give up a much larger % of net income?

2715

The Titanfall article says it’s not free. Just less than what comparable service from Amazon or other providers would be. Microsoft’s discussions certainly make it sound like it’s free (or paid for through Live subscriptions,) but that’s not the case.

But if it means that every big multiplayer game on the Xbone will have dedicated servers, that could be a huge advantage. Will Sony team up with Amazon and offer similarly prices services to compete, or just leave developers on their own?

2716

Multiplayer dedicated servers in the cloud make a lot of sense, when you think about it. Huge megahits like CoD and halo aside, the multiplayer for most new games has a huge spike in the first month that largely disappears shortly thereafter. Cloud’s agility in growing/shrinking server pools is a good fit.

2717

Wait, FREE? they charge 40k to allow a patch to go through and they are offering unlimited servers for free to these companies, for ever and ever?

I have trouble seeing any of this as anythnig other than’ Oh, finally’ because dedicated servers were the de facto standard for years until online multiplayer got more traction in peer to peer console land. They are using a decision to be shittier years ago to try and make it look like this is something new now. It isnt new, it’s just no longer as dumb.

Gee maybe now we will get a battlefield 1942 port that supports a proper amount of players, or tribes 1? heh.

2718

Not free but potentially the cost is subsidized?

Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it’s far more affordable than other hosting options – their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers.

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

2719

The only negative thing that I see to this, is that will give Microsoft way too much control.

What if Microsoft decide to charge a exorbitant quantity of money for this?

What if using this network required extensive middleware programming that is highly proprietary and inefficient?

What if Microsoft decide to optimize the network by limiting what resource games can use, so Office 233 (or whatever is called) have a smoother experience?.

Then there are a few external problems:

What if some part of this design depend on a patented technology, and some patent troll decide to attack?

What if Obama want to spy on people using this network? Will Microsoft say “NO”?

2720

So if they have to pay for these servers, why wouldn’t they just continue with peer to peer? It’s not like blockbuster games like MW2 performed poorly due to peer to peer multiplayer.

2721

But if you’re trying to stand out against Call of Duty, it helps.

2722

I still never understood why they don’t just release actual dedicated server software for ISPs,people,clans to run, gimped to require all players to use ps+ or live.

I don’t recall id having huge quake server costs they ever talked about, despite a jillion servers. Counterstrike had tons of servers, no bitching about cost, hell no budget at all for years.

Why is this suddenly hard? Decent bots? what? Why are they acting like this is expensive nasa shit?

2723

Maybe it’s not free, I just remember reading that earlier.

Now why didn’t they message it that way? Who fucking knows? Messaging on everything has been catastrophically terrible these last few weeks.

2724

Because they don’t want to give up control.

2725

On PC, you can expect the community to run the majority of the dedicated servers. On console this is less likely, for obvious reasons.

2726

My concern would be what happens to games that aren’t deemed commercially successful or no longer making enough money for the publishers to continue justifying the servers costs. It isn’t like PC gaming where anyone can run a dedicated server for most games. And if things like AI and CPU calculations get offloaded to the cloud, will we potentially see games that get shutdown entirely after a couple of years?