So the Xbone's 8 core CPU isn't able to handle the load placed upon it by the software? That is not confidence in a product.
Here's a fact; Less than 5% of the world's population (350 million or so) have the internet speed necessary for cloud computing to be feasible for what Microsoft thinks it will be capable of.
"I'm Jonathon Blow, and Explosions are shit. Let's have a look at some colors!"
OT: I dunno, I bet Microsoft could do it (Host that many servers). Now, hosting that many servers and letting them all work is a different thing entirely. But I bet they could host 300,000 servers (With most of them lagging or being terrible).
It's SimCity all over again. Why would they spend the amount of money required to boost the performance of your computer for free? They wouldn't.
I have no doubt that Microsoft has the infrastructure to crunch that much data. But I refuse to believe that they can afford to do it without a fee that hardly anybody would be willing to pay.
Well, noone claimed Cloud gaming will improve graphics to begin with.
Physics, AI, Offsite calculation - sure. Graphics - not possible. You can imrpove graphics offsite if tyou stream them, but thats not clouding.
Microsoft already claimed they'd be able to quadruple the power of the Xbone using cloud computing. This is patently bullshit on any level though. You're not going to be able to offload any meaningful calculations from the game install on someone's console to servers since the bandwidth provided by even the fastest internet connections doesn't compare to what you get in the machine being used for the CPU, RAM, GPU, and other components to talk to each other. Only way it might work at all is if you're running some major calculations only on the server side and sending the results to the players machine, but you're still looking at latency becoming an issue for most people, as well as it being a fucking technical nightmare to code a game that runs most of it's code on separate machines.
I don't see most developers using this at all, even if it is possible. At best, you might get some online only games doing it, but even then, take a look at what happened to Diablo 3 or Sim City at launch. And they weren't even running that much on the actual servers. Most developers don't even have the resources to attempt what they did (and failed at), let alone to try and scale it up to even more insane levels.
Someone sounds bitter, seems like a non-story. I guess the real secret to this profession is to turn two or three sentence comment into a full page article.
Topic could have read:
Jonathan Blow Bitter Over Microsoft
Jonathan Blow refutes Microsoft's claims on Xbox One. Claims, "Bullshit. I don't know how exactly but bullshit anyways"
I'm just going to post this again, as it's relevant:
thesilentman said:
The "Cloud" can be used like this, but only for real data crunching. If it's for on site programs, forget it. I'd find the chat that I had with DoPo over this in the Linux group, but I can't find it for some reason. I will update if I do.
Main point? MS is a bunch of twats for thinking this. True data crunching is really the only practical reason, and I don't think MS wants games to stream at 2 MB/s from Xbox to Xbox. -.-
DoPo said:
Welp, sharing a random thought I had - it's about possible future for Linux gaming. How Linux can suddenly be Up There? with other platforms, on equal footing when it comes to playing stuff. And I don't know why I didn't think of it before but - streaming games. Yep, it's that easy - stream the games and it doesn't matter which platform you play them on.
And Linux already has that covered and has had it for...decades. OK, technically UNIX but whatever, Linux can do it too - this entire idea of streaming stuff is how stiff already operates. You don't have to be on your own machine to do stuff, you could just as well just have keyboard and a screen and get your session over SSH from another server. Or have an X session running on another machine but shown on your screen. Or numerous remote desktop variations. It's a complete non-issue to get a game displayed to us and send back control inputs, the only thing is network speed and a good enough game server to give us the performance. Network is being sorted out for us (technology marching on), so we only have to worry about what runs the games.
I've seen talks about streaming games (and there is OnLive, still, I thing, but dunno how good it is) but never actually connected to Linux or mentioned that we have the facilities to do it just lack some tech to support it properly. And it does seem like a viable direction to expand in - never heard much talk about that either. Get a beefy machine to run the games for you and you won't need specific consoles/PCs/whatever in the house since it can direct the output anywhere you want it to, on multiple screens if you wish and the controller just needs to be "whatever fits the game". So can cut out ports in one fell swoop - there needs to be just one version of the game.
I understand that there would also be difficulties but...it's still too little discussed thing, I believe. There is only OnLive but it's just...there - rarely if ever do I hear about it. When some 4G technologies were being discussed there was a brief mention of "Oh, that means you'll be able to stream games on mobile phones" and...that's about it, really. Now with PS4 we have a brief mention of streaming games but no real big hubbub of the possibilities. Just bizarre.
@DoPo: I thought it'd be a pretty viable thing, or at least it will be in the near future, with a device sort of like Ubuntu phone's docking. You load up your OS via device to a screen, keyboard and mouse combo with a dock and from there are able to play any sort of media, high end games as well.
Though, last I heard the major hurdle was internet connections? I attempted to try OnLive and Gaia but my flash package wasn't up to date -_-
@Lucem712: Internet connections are on their way to becoming a non-issue...well, OK not everywhere at all times but there have been places with stable 10Mb/s or so download speeds for a decade. Furthermore, you won't care much for internet connection if you deploy it over LAN at home and my impression is that everybody and their dog has easy access to home LAN solutions. And for, like, at least 5 years home wirelesses have been popular. It's a bit limited, yeah, but it's there, it can be used.
@DoPo: Streaming and web-based games is how I see Linux growing as a viable alternative to Windows or da Mac. Sooner or later, it won't matter what most of us need to do as it will all be in the high and mighty cloud. I already see Google Docs up there, and a nice group word editor called Etherpad doing this. The future is heading more towards streaming and the almighty "cloud", something that pisses me off personally, but I respect in a sense.
@thesilentman: Well...cloud is something else I've been musing about. It's not a bad idea, quite good in fact, and it sort of feels like a golden hammer...which isn't as good. However, it does have a great potential and for anybody working in technology, I'd suggest to go and start getting familiar with it. Myself included. For good or bad, it should become more and more relevant as you observed.
But at any rate I had an...interesting idea the other day - P2P cloud computing. Which has been around for a while in a way (well, all those "loan us CPU to compute a cure for cancer/Einstein's theorems/etc") but you could grow it out into an actual P2P computing. So like torrents but instead of using the network's hard drives, you can also use CPU as well. So more or less, you can loan CPU power to others ("seeding") and claim some back later ("leeching"). It's of limited usefulness but it can work in some situations. There are ways to do it, there are obstructions, to but it is possible. But then I realised it'd just a giant botnet to be operated by mostly anyone. Ugh, not a pleasant thought.
@thesilentman: Don't you know those projects about solving theorems or cancer research and stuff? How they work is you install their software and then specify how much CPU you want to give them - you could go for 10% or 80%, if you wish. Nowadays you can happily give them a core or two to use, I suppose, the first time I encountered them was around when WoW started out, so 2005-2006 when multicore CPUs were almost unheard of for normal users. But anyways, once you specify how much processing they can use, they'll just feed your computer small chunks of data to be processed and when finished they just get the result back. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's distributed computing really similar to the cloud but...not the cloud. Here is one I remember from back then. You can extend the idea to a P2P network, too - feed others the processing you can't do, they'll do it for you then spit back the results and voila. In the downtime you get fed processing requests.
It's not useful for all things, say, if you're playing a game you really need that data NOW and latency isn't really an option, however if you have to crunch through large volumes of data it can really speed things along, assuming, of course, you can split off the data in discrete chunks. Presumably each of these would need some time to be processed, so each could be a complex mathematical formula, for example or maybe you have a batch of images which need some automated manipulation that just takes time. Of course, you could just distribute the bruteforcing of a password or even a DDoS.
@thesilentman: Yeah, not every type of computation would lend itself well to parallelisation but if it does, then it'd just be useful to have it.
I remember one guy giving a talk on the CUDA technology which allows you to run your software on nVidia cards. Now, even if you have, like 8GHz CPU, some software just doesn't need power, it needs more processes and the video card has that in spades - at the time (three years ago) you could easily pick up a card with 128 cores which would run any CPU to the dust with sheer parallelisation power. He had rewrote some software that simulated...earthquakes or volcano eruptions - one of the two, but some science lab somewhere was studying them and providing warning for a nearby area (I believe it was somewhere in Africa). So basically, they were in a high risk region and when the sensors picked up something that could possibly indicate the disaster, they'd run the software to see where and how it'd most likely hit. Problem is that on a normal CPU (well, probably not off the shelf but a bit more beefy). While the rewritten application, utilising some normal nVidia card, was still not realtime (he showed a demo - it advanced with about a frame or two a second) it would at least finish in just a few minutes as opposed to the 5-8 hours or so, the original needed.
So yeah. I'm pretty passive here and decided to listen more than suggest any ideas, but this can probably shed some light on something as it talks about the method that MS is trying to put into practice. I don't see it working after DoPo explained it, and after some further thought, I had to agree.
Any thing you guys want to discuss on this from the technological side? Just join us in the Escapist Linux group here. We're pretty lenient and all, but we can talk for hours on tech. And we have too. :-D
On site calculations (physics and AI) will not work for this due to the streaming that's involved. As fast as we have Internet and other networking today, nothing beats RAM, a good hard drive, a good CPU, and a good GPU.
You know, which all happen to be in a games' console. Or a PC, MS. Just pointing that out...
It has nothing to do with improving consumer experiences. They only want to move to the "cloud" because once they do, everything you buy will be wholly controlled, and streamed directly from their servers. The apex of "always online", remember that? Do you need it spelled out for ya? :|
Tired of people acting like MS are "fools" that don't know what they're talking about. They know EXACTLY what they are doing, they are just obfuscating the truth and giving out bs about how it "improves your experience".
It's because he's made one mediocre game and acts like he's the savior of the game industry and the only one presenting original concepts. Coming from someone with only a 2D platformer under his belt I'm not sure I would say he's offered anything new.
Does he? Is 'having an opinion that differs from the rest' now such an offense that the wholesome of the internet 'hates' him and everything he says is dismissed with the phrase 'wasn't there a reason we hate this guy'?
In the end he is a rather smart guy who sees gaming in a different light than others. It is a valid stance and many of his statements show that he puts lots of thought into what he says. Does he need to offer something 'new', especially with limited options, to say that there are things in dire need of improvement to move gaming out of the 'just entertainment' zone, trying to find the strength of gaming as a medium without copying the stregths of movies or books in that regard (a valid point in regard of the interactive medium we talk about).
I just don't get what warrants such hate from a vast majority against someone who did nothing wrong. And all I can see is just dire failure of understanding his position.
There's nothing wrong with having opinions. There's not even something wrong with having controversial opinions. However presenting your opinion as undeniable facts is stupid.
Also yes, if he is to complain about how stale the game industry has gotten, then he better offer something remotely original. 2D platformer, save the princess... yeah, he is a part of the stale game industry that he condemns.
I don't follow everything he says, so I might be judging him from limited source material, but from my point he just seems arrogant. I would love to be proven wrong on this.
Yeah, but he is right more often than not.
I could probably run a couple thousand virtual servers on my PC if I made them tiny enough, so once again Blow is correct
True, but I actually think the pretentious wanker actually has a point in regards to cloud servers increasing hte power of the Console. If anything, since it will only affect consoles that are able to use the cloud servers, their 'boost' will not affect them , weakening MS's claims.
Also, I figure it would be slightly MORE draining having to keep checking the cloud server is working and saving/loading from there. I am probably wrong on this, but this is my interpretation of events.
As I said elsewhere thats a pretty big problem, I know full well he's right, I was just saying that he's generally disliked for being pretentious. You're taking resources away from the system to access this "cloud" (all my hate for the use of that term for anything, the cloud is anything outside of your local network), for what likely amounts to cloud storage of maps, or a server for a game,s o basically technology we already use day to day.
He's absolutely right, Microsoft are full of shit. Not to mention the other issue I raised: this will devour your bandwidth, rendering your connection useless to anyone else int he house, which will make you very unpopular with your parents/brother/sister/partner/spouse/tablet using dog.
Zombie_Moogle said:
SkarKrow said:
Evil Smurf said:
Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?
Yeah, but he is right more often than not.
I could probably run a couple thousand virtual servers on my PC if I made them tiny enough, so once again Blow is correct
I already adresseds the actual issue elsewhere in the thread. Blow is correct, it's a load of marketing bullshit. It's a glorified dedicated server at best, which is existing technology, not a next generation solution to give you lower hardware cost. If it does indeed lower the hardware cost you can bet your ass you'll pay through the teeth for Xbox Live and acess to these servers, and it will be mandatory.
Also, bandwidth issues, issues for poor or slow connections, issues with ping timings to the servers from parts of the world not the US.
I know the US is their biggest and strongest market but Microsoft is a global corporation targeting global markets, it really should take into account Europe at the very least and factor it into it's plans.
Actually no, people don't have a reason to hate him. I haven't seen any reason that is more valid than my subjective 'dislike' of game development houses that don't cater to my platform of choise or people that I don't understand.
There, I said it. People hate him because they don't understand him. Not that I try to defend his words, in many cases he has a vastly different view on the whole gaming genre than most people do but fuck, more often than not people clearly don't get what he is saying.
I wouldn't go so far as to say I 'hate' the guy (that word is thrown around far too liberally), but I dislike him because he is poorly spoken and has currently put out one rather average puzzle-platformer that had pretensions of being some 'deep' story which in reality was a load of piffle, but despite that speaks out to the gaming media as if he's some savant who will bring us into a Gaming Renaissance and they listen to what he says because Braid; He's either a master troll or a pretentious wanker.
Not to say that he's necessarily wrong to speak up about this. And personal opinions shouldn't really weigh in on how much you listen to a guy's word, you can despise somebody and acknowledge they're correct at the same time. Personally, I don't give a toss about "cloud gaming" or whatever. I want the actual hardware to be able to pump out that performance, not to rely on some nebulous promise that my spotty internet connection might possibly improve my experience. Well, there's also the fact that I never connect my consoles to the internet. So, if Microsoft is really going to push so hard for cloud gaming and whatever else, then they've lost at least one console sale.
Also yes, if he is to complain about how stale the game industry has gotten, then he better offer something remotely original. 2D platformer, save the princess... yeah, he is a part of the stale game industry that he condemns.
I don't follow everything he says, so I might be judging him from limited source material, but from my point he just seems arrogant. I would love to be proven wrong on this.
Braid was rather cool, I'm looking forward to this one because it looks nice too.
Also what he basically said wasn't that he "doesn't know what he is talking about", but that from his limited experience developing games he knows what they are claiming is bullshit (which isn't hard, because most people with a basic understanding of what is involved in what Microsoft is claiming would probably say the same) but doesn't have the deeper knowledge to explain it in-depth and wishes for someone more proficient in that particular field to do so.
Yes, I have seen his game and while it looks promising that doesn't change the fact that he's released one game and seems to think that Braid is the only thoughtful game ever released.
As for the rest of your post. I am not talking about his stand on this Microsoft thing. He is most likely right. I am talking about things he has said in the past and why those things make me dislike him because that's what this discussion is about. I would say this might be the first time I agree with him, but he does often spout bullshit.
Anyway, I will judge his new game on its merits rather than my opinion on him and I am not going to disagree with him on this issue just because I dislike him. I agree with him here, his game might turn out to be decent, but I don't like him.
Blow is a known blowhard who likes to talk without any real substance. No, not talk. Rant. Essentially, he's a gamer who rants about stuff with no real basis who gets credibility because he made Braid.
I'd like to have the capability to put out a hit indie game. Then, any stupid thing I said would be news. I'd screw with gaming media SO HARD.
So basically, he's just a dude who made one thing that a few people said was above average, which ended up inflating his ego to the point where he's become a hipster with pushing power. Great...as if I didn't need another reason to dislike indie developers.
OT: Look, if you're gonna make a claim, back it up. Show some evidence that it will fail, don't just assume it will and then say you're right but someone should come and show people why, that just shows you're a lazy ass who like to fire without thinking. Sure, Microsoft's claim is quite bold and does sound a little skewed, but I want hard factual evidence to prove that it is bullshit before I agree with the claim.
Edit: Assuming this does actually work it would in all likelyhood devour your bandwidth and render your connection unusable at the same time for anyone you share it with. I can't speak for everyone but I live with other people and they all use the internet, this would not go down well.
That's only the consumer half you're talking about here.
As a developer, you would have to make your game with this in mind, thus making it always-online and pissing your customers off, or put in several different modes which would end up having the same difficulty as making the game for the PC in the first place.
Just generally on the DirectXBox "One": Hardware is adequate, knowing the low TDP of AMD's APUs it's probably built to last this time around. On the software side of things we have too much buzzword bullshit, indicating that the lead designer was either micromanaged by someone who doesn't know the realities of the market the XBox has, or wasn't an engineer at all. The internet infrastructure we're having at the moment is not ready for all these cloud and streaming services, and, living in Europe, I can assure you that I can dig up an old Satellite receiver and get better quality TV than with the XBox "One". As for the Kinect 2, the idea that MS had with that thing will probably get picked up in a German court sometime after the thing hits stores. Dragon costs me about 115 euros less (it's something like 35) and does a better job at voice recognition.
Edit: Assuming this does actually work it would in all likelyhood devour your bandwidth and render your connection unusable at the same time for anyone you share it with. I can't speak for everyone but I live with other people and they all use the internet, this would not go down well.
That's only the consumer half you're talking about here.
As a developer, you would have to make your game with this in mind, thus making it always-online and pissing your customers off, or put in several different modes which would end up having the same difficulty as making the game for the PC in the first place.
Just generally on the DirectXBox "One": Hardware is adequate, knowing the low TDP of AMD's APUs it's probably built to last this time around. On the software side of things we have too much buzzword bullshit, indicating that the lead designer was either micromanaged by someone who doesn't know the realities of the market the XBox has, or wasn't an engineer at all. The internet infrastructure we're having at the moment is not ready for all these cloud and streaming services, and, living in Europe, I can assure you that I can dig up an old Satellite receiver and get better quality TV than with the XBox "One". As for the Kinect 2, the idea that MS had with that thing will probably get picked up in a German court sometime after the thing hits stores. Dragon costs me about 115 euros less (it's something like 35) and does a better job at voice recognition.
I only addressed the consumer half as I don't have the full understanding of how it would affect developers, though I am aware it would likely end up being more demanding of their time and effort, and essentially bloat the development procedure and thus the cost.
Hardware is okay, the only concern I have is that the GPU is substantially less well equipped than that in the PS4, at least if those specs anandtech had were accurate. In the long run that in itself could just lead to xbox games being 720 whilst their PS4 counterparts could be in 1080 or 1600x900. However what also concerns me is that know AMD's APU's with a degree of familiarity, it could mean that it's CPU ends up being of a lower class too and that would lead to other issues. As for an actual TDP I saw 100W thrown around for both consoles system wide...
The issue with xbox longevity isn't that the thermal output is bad, it's that the cooling is atrocious, it's a tiny passive heatsink with poor quality thermal compound. I've opened a few to try fix and found that modding the cooler and applying a small amount of high quality compound is generally the fastest route to a fix. It'd be much quieter if they had an active cooling system and set the whole thing to a lower fan speed if you ask me and still resolve the heating problem. Maybe the extra $30 that could cost microsoft was too much.
And yes in Europe this thing is gonna be a huge issue, most of the infrastructure can't deal with streaming games very well and the video streaming is likely to be of relatively low quality. That said they haven't announced any of those features for the European territory anyway, so it doesn't affect us.
And yes the Kinect 2 is kind of pointless and it's potential for intrusion is eventually going to end up being dragged in front of a court somewhere in the world. But thats never stopped Microsoft before!
At any rate, just on paper and from wht we know so far, I think the PS4 might well be Sony's chance to find the mass market favour again.
A cloud could save the user some diskspace on the tiny Xbone harddrive. That's it.
What an internet connection cannot do is compete with an internal 256-bit wide bus with a bandwidth in an order of magnitude of 100GB/s and a latency measured in nanoseconds.
There's no way the cloud can assist with GPU computations, so prettier visuals are unlikely.
At best, theoreticly, you could offload the AI to the cloud and get a slow-reacting AI (could work for a game like chess, where a little latency won't make a difference).
Yeah it sounds like a lot of bullshit to me as well, though I've been wondering if they're going to use it as an excuse/justification for the continued annual fee for using Xbox Live? Like will you be able to use these 'cloud' features if you're not a paying member?
It's been a long time coming, but I think we may have a challenger to Sega's old "Blast Processing!" marketing gimmick.
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