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This thread is inspired by another: view original post
6/10/2013 11:12:41 PM
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Cloud computing is a double-edged sword
Cloud computing is a double-edged sword.
On one hand you have the ability to offload processing to distributed nodes and get the work done quicker, which is great, but on the other hand you still need to push the results to clients across the network. For applications that approach or attempt to guarantee real-time responsiveness there are very serious technical, and consequently economic, details that must be taken into consideration. Namely, an application which expects a high-bandwidth and low-latent network connection will not perform well under sub-par conditions (think lag). You may recall the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive]OnLive[/url] service announced in 2009 which pushes just about every facet of their game console to the cloud, but at the cost of requiring guarantees on your network IO to be able to use it; needing to reside within a certain range of a specialised data centre (to avoid high-latency) and on bandwidth. While, at least to my knowledge, none of the current major consoles are pushing everything to the cloud, relying on it for certain things is still a problem.
What I fear is the ever-growing push toward network-bound applications being marketed to consumers with typical/average Internet connections from their ISP. Will they still be able to handle it? Do consumers know about these limitations? Do they know they may need to end up paying more for a better package from their ISP, and that still may not fix the problem? And while this may not exactly be too much of an issue for you if you are sitting on a nice fibre optic connection [b]and[/b] North America, a lot of people aren't, and these people should be listening carefully whenever someone mentions the "cloud" buzzword (and dedicated servers too) and understand how it might be affecting them.
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In my experience (which is focused and limited) the sharper edge of the sword (to use your analogy) is when the upstream traffic (from client to cloud) is basic user input and the downstream traffic (from cloud back to the client) is as lean and mean as possible. If either direction isn't optimized or is too bloated, the user-experience suffers. In some cases, (business related) it's far more wise for the users/company to not rely on the Internet and instead leverage their internal LAN/WAN and keep their "cloud" internal. For uses and applications that are forced to rely on the Internet (which we should all know is a fickle beast when it comes to latency and consistency, especially for consumer-users) an optimized client app (that can leverage the end user device's capabilities) would probably be far better than a generic remote session or "off the shelf" thin client. If (as a hypothetical) Destiny were to end up being a cloud-based game, the console/PC/client would still be better utilized if if were loading local resources (such as models, textures, animation routines, sounds, etc.) from the disc and the client app was focused on user input (upstream) and game data information (downstream). Such a hybrid COULD, be very bandwidth efficient, especially since the previous gen consoles were streaming that sort of game data between consoles, the host, and all were attempting to "sort out what really happened" in a realtime manner. In theory and properly done, such a game app would essentially be in "theater mode" but allowing players real-time control of their characters.
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Edited by o0MrCheesy0o: 6/10/2013 11:47:27 PMI don't really understand what you're trying to say. Latency is a big factor in online gaming, but ever since XBL console developers have been pushing for global matchmaking - which is inherently unfair. If Americans are playing on a server with 30ish pings and you throw in an Australian who's pinging 300 milliseconds it's a rigged game. Prediction is used to make the unplayable seem playable, but it's still heavily flawed. Using wireless controllers and playing on your large flat-screen TV adds unnecessary latency to your gaming setup. Consumers have just gotten used to it; they've adapted, and high latency's are considered the norm now. They'll adapt to the latency of retrieving whatever it is they're retrieving from the cloud. I imagine the majority wouldn't even notice the delay. For those on really bad internet connections, well, any activity online is dubious.
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3 RepliesI could have thought that North America (USA in specific) had one of the worst infrastructures for internet. Nonetheless, I definitely see your point on the argument. Really, there isn't much to argue here because it's not really the games that causes the problem, but the internet infrastructure. They certainly have to slowly push for more and more in terms of what they can offload to servers, but at the end of the day they're just sending back compressed images/video.
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I should leave my farm
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I doubt M$ would wake up one day and say "alright lads from now on we make all our games heavily cloud based". Baby steps are needed as internet speeds get better (which they will). Like you said only small things for now will be pushed onto the cloud and only for some games. From there on however It's anyone guess.
