Greetings everyone. Microsoft showed last year the Cloud Computing for their XBox One, where the cloud enabled massive destruction in the scene which was not possible locally:
It was a protoype for their exclusive game CrackDown 3:
At that time no one did give such importance since noone believed it was feasible in a real game. But today, at GamesCom, at the Microsoft conference, they showed CrackDown 3 gameplay which at the ending, contained massive destruction of the buildings through the entire town: 20 times more than what can be done locally :
Here is a video showing more of the Cloud destruction system :
Since CarckDown 3 is using UE4, I really wanted to know about UE4 Cloud Computing capabilities on PC and PS4 (since XBox One can already use it now): whether it can be used to enhance graphical features like massive destructions or dynamic GI with unlimited bounces etc. We need to know anything about it on PC and PS4 (since Sony has now their own Cloud service called Playstation Now after acquiring both Gaikai and Onlive).
It would be really kind if the responsible of Cloud Computing at Epic to talk about the cloud possibilities of UE4 on all platforms and show us some examples and teach us how to use it. Thanks.
I’d like to know about this as well. I found this to be pretty impressive. Though, I’m not sure about if the PlayStation 4 will be able to use this technology (because they’re rivals) or if Sony has something similar. It would be great to have something like this available for all platforms.
Since it’s a feature designed for Microsoft’s servers, it’s not going to be something that would work with PS4. It’s probably possible to work with PC since that’s still connected with Microsoft, but given that Crackdown 3 is the only game doing this type of thing at the moment I’m going to guess that the ability to use that feature is going to be very exclusive unless you make it yourself. The deal is that it uses quite a bit of processing power, more than say running a multiplayer game or serving a website, so it’s expensive to run the hardware.
I still wonder how this will be used. If for example, in Crackdown the buildings destrcution and collapsing are only possible through cloud and are part of the gameplay, what will happen if the internet connection is shut down? I presume it’s like extirpating bars of RAM or cores from CPU or GPU from the machine. And what will happen? The game shutting down? Or the game being run at 2 FPS like in the video?
This isn’t really hard to implement yourself (which it looks like they’ve done here). Essentially they’re just processing Physics on the Server and replicating results back to the clients.
I wonder if they’re even using PhysX at all, or their own Deterministic Physics system. I’m betting on using the latter, and all they do is replicate the impulses applied. It’s just far too bandwidth-consuming to replicate position, velocity and rotation for hundreds of objects over a network, and do client-side prediction and reconciliation for all of them.
P2P wouldn’t really work either, you’d be waiting for updates from other clients, which would first have to go through the server and then to each client. Unreal’s default networking model doesn’t support any form of P2P, and clients never directly talk to one another.
Crackdown 3 senior producer John Noonan talked further about the game’s tech on Twitter stating that the destruction is completely based on compute and does not require any sort of rendering. Interestingly, when asked if Azure would be necessary for the Windows 10 version, Noonan said, “I don’t think we’ve said anything about Windows, but the destruction massively outpaces what our giant dev PCs can compute.”
Azure is not a Windows/Xbox only system. If I am not wrong, you can run linux on it as well. You can use it for any sort of computation really. I think Apple’s ICloud is built on Azure.
