Dedicated Servers Or Not?

If you have a concern about trolls, report the post you think is trolling. Thank you.

I would say with Microsoft's cloud statement today, any post that doubts the freeness of either XBL Compute or dedicated server hosting as being totally free is now a troll.
 
This is the best old-news ever, but to have it reaffirmed for everyone along with details Flynn posted is quite refreshing from the usual doom and gloom.
 
Like I said, it's 100% free to developers. It's like an extension of the box itself... You can just use it without fee, or charge.

That said, there is a knowledge-base and expertise level that comes with taking advantage of it... You need to consider scalability and resilience testing, etc...

Like I said, there will be justification for not using it for all titles out the gate, but as time goes on and expertise improves - we should expect to see many games use cloud compute for all kinds of things... Not just dedicated server-like functionality, but things like drivatars, AI, persistent worlds (even in SP games), etc...


So just to make sure we're clear. It is 100% free for 3rd party developers to use Microsoft's azure service for dedicated servers for their games? And if that is precisely what you meant then I must ask why the Titanfall devs specifically stated that it was "cheap" but not free. I'm not trying to attack you or anything so I hope my post doesn't come off that way. I'm just seriously interested in this topic, and I'd like an honest answer that I can take to the bank because like I said earlier. I'm really conflicted on which system to get first and I'm looking for anything that can push me to one direction or another.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.



The thread is definitely stinking of concern trolls.



Most of the time i'm pretty damn pro xb1 but not everyone is as rabid a fanboy as you are. Please chill with the troll comments. This is actually a serious concern for people such as me. I don't want to be lied to and I refuse to just buy into the bullsh*t that majority of you guys post when you don't even know what the hell you are talking about. I need to make an informed decision on which console to purchase and I don't have very long to do it. 1 month to go!
 
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So just to make sure we're clear. It is 100% free for 3rd party developers to use Microsoft's azure service for dedicated servers for their games? And if that is precisely what you meant then I must ask why the Titanfall devs specifically stated that it was "cheap" but not free. I'm not trying to attack you or anything so I hope my post doesn't come off that way. I'm just seriously interested in this topic, and I'd like an honest answer that I can take to the bank because like I said earlier. I'm really conflicted on which system to get first and I'm looking for anything that can push me to one direction or another.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.







Most of the time i'm pretty damn pro xb1 but not everyone is as rabid a fanboy as you are. Please chill with the troll comments. This is actually a serious concern for people such as me. I don't want to be lied to and I refuse to just buy into the bullsh*t that majority of you guys post when you don't even know what the hell you are talking about. I need to make an informed decision on which console to purchase and I don't have very long to do it. 1 month to go!

Your comment is a troll because you are doubting the freeness of the free servers that only X1 provides, that is now absof***inglutely confirmed.
 
This is so wrong it hurts.

And no I don't misunderstand this technology. I build complex computing systems for a living.

Nope. It's a basic example like I said but the principal is right.

I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with you on it. You build complex computer systems? I design enterprise infrastructure. My dick is bigger than your dick. Blah blah blah.

Wait and see come November or whenever the first multi player games using the Xbox cloud start to come out.
 
So just to make sure we're clear. It is 100% free for 3rd party developers to use Microsoft's azure service for dedicated servers for their games? And if that is precisely what you meant then I must ask why the Titanfall devs specifically stated that it was "cheap" but not free. I'm not trying to attack you or anything so I hope my post doesn't come off that way. I'm just seriously interested in this topic, and I'd like an honest answer that I can take to the bank because like I said earlier. I'm really conflicted on which system to get first and I'm looking for anything that can push me to one direction or another.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
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Albert Penello said:
Two takeaways from this video.

My head is huge.
Man I do more of the Italian hand-talking then I thought.

So one of the requirements I had for doing this video is I wanted to speak accurately and factually. I’m not sure how you can say there was marketing spin in this. I wanted to tie all of this back to actual features.

I talked about the tangible benefits of “the cloud”: Save games, roaming profiles, content re-download.
I talked about the future-stated benefits of cloud rendering, and never made any outrageous claims about it.

When I talked about Smartglass, I talked about real features, and game implementation.

I’m not sure you could claim any of these as being speculative or sensationalist.

Also to be clear. One of the benefits of publishing games on Xbox One – ALL game developers get Dedicated Servers, Cloud Processing, and “storage” (for save games) free.

If you want to do dedicated servers on other platforms, you have to prop them yourself. But on Xbox One, while developers can choose to use their own methods, we make it available to everyone.

There should be no confusion on this point. We do not charge developers for Dedicated Servers.


Most of the time i'm pretty damn pro xb1 but not everyone is as rabid a fanboy as you are. Please chill with the troll comments. This is actually a serious concern for people such as me. I don't want to be lied to and I refuse to just buy into the bullsh*t that majority of you guys post when you don't even know what the hell you are talking about. I need to make an informed decision on which console to purchase and I don't have very long to do it. 1 month to go!

Well there you go, confirmed by Flynn, Albert Penello, and Phil Spencer (he posted a link to the article).

There is nothing to guess about or question on this front, it is confirmed beyond doubt.

Sounds awesome to me, and I'm looking forward to the downplaying/spinning that will inevitably come from them re-confirming this.
 
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Nope. It's a basic example like I said but the principal is right.

I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with you on it. You build complex computer systems? I design enterprise infrastructure. My dick is bigger than your dick. Blah blah blah.

Wait and see come November or whenever the first multi player games using the Xbox cloud start to come out.


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Whatever you were describing in the previous post sounds off.

That is not how dedicated servers work.

You guys are all assuming that traditional client-server systems will be running this thing. With the addition of compute resources existing in the cloud, a game could be designed where each player has a compute node existing in the cloud then those compute nodes communicate with each other via a peer to peer topology, and it happens exactly like he said.

It probably will not work that way, but it could, and the type of network topology he described is certainly much more feasible with a resource like Azure than it is without.
 
Except someone paid for it at some point. Probably Gold users over the years. Either way the last person I'll listen to is someone with his head up Microsoft's ass.

Yeah, and the developers aren't going to use it even though it doesn't cost them money because Joe Prissypants' Gold sub fees were used to help pay for it. :smash:
 
Haha only Sony fanboys can take what Albert says and spin it to mean that Sony must have dedicated servers for all developers as well.
 
Just wanted to point out, that while there are only 10 or 11 data centers either open or being built around the world, the CDN's (content delivery nodes) for Azure exist in 24 countries (as of 2011, not sure if there are more but I would presume so) with 8 of them being in the U.S. alone.

What D-V-ANT described is crudely how it works. A person connects to their closest CDN and that acts as the conduit to Azure and to other uses. So someone in Washington would connect to the Seattle CDN, while someone in Florida would connect to the Miami node, instead of them both trying to connect to the datacenters in Cali, illinois, Texas, or Virigina. The speed between the CDN's and the Datacenter's is going to be much much greater than whatever someone is getting on residential lines. Where the dedicated server spins up would most likely be determined by whichever datacenter would provide the best experience for all users connecting, although I doubt that once the user is connected to a CDN that which DC in the US is selected wouldn't matter a whole lot.
 
Well there you go, confirmed by Flynn, Albert Penello, and Phil Spencer (he posted a link to the article).

There is nothing to guess about or question on this front, it is confirmed beyond doubt.

I'm not calling it until we've gotten confirmation from an anonymous dev, preferably one that doesn't have their viewpoint tainted by having had to work with the XB1. :crazy: /trufFaq'd.

Seriously, this is freaking awesome news - where it may end up paying huge dividends down the road is for indie and small developers, since they'll get all that neat stuff too.
 
Just wanted to point out, that while there are only 10 or 11 data centers either open or being built around the world, the CDN's (content delivery nodes) for Azure exist in 24 countries (as of 2011, not sure if there are more but I would presume so) with 8 of them being in the U.S. alone.

What D-V-ANT described is crudely how it works. A person connects to their closest CDN and that acts as the conduit to Azure and to other uses. So someone in Washington would connect to the Seattle CDN, while someone in Florida would connect to the Miami node, instead of them both trying to connect to the datacenters in Cali, illinois, Texas, or Virigina. The speed between the CDN's and the Datacenter's is going to be much much greater than whatever someone is getting on residential lines.

I had considered that, but my quick googling around found that the peering lines between Azure CDN are not common carrier. They would have to be inter process communications to use the peering lines. Thus the need to use the also free compute nodes that Azure provides each X1 console.

But even then the Azure Service Bus, as it is called in the Azure SDK, does not guarantee a low latency connection everywhere, as there are not peering agreements between every Azure CDN. So Microsofts interprocess communication channel only guarantees this resource if both nodes exist in the same CDN.

The end result is that while that low latency network does exist, game packets will all be transferred by common carrier.
 
Haha only Sony fanboys can take what Albert says and spin it to mean that Sony must have dedicated servers for all developers as well.

I don't want to go vs that much. But by midnight there will be a gaf post detailing Sony's advance peer to peer technology coming from an anonymous dev, then that article will be referenced by all the usual suspect blogs then by this time tomorrow Sonys advanced P2P technology will be all over redit.
 
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Well there you go, confirmed by Flynn, Albert Penello, and Phil Spencer (he posted a link to the article).

There is nothing to guess about or question on this front, it is confirmed beyond doubt.

Sounds awesome to me, and I'm looking forward to the downplaying/spinning that will inevitably come from them re-confirming this.



That sounds very promising as long as it actually works that way when its game day. I just hope there isn't any word trickery and bs down the road where they will say something like "oh we meant dedicated servers for match matching" or something like that. I'm going to go ahead and be optimistic about it though and assume that won't be the case.

Thank you for all the info. =)
 
Albert Penello said:
I must add one thing. As usual, someone asks a question which I didn't consider in my original post. To me, it was assumed, but it may not be assumed to everyone reading.

We provide Dedicated Servers for MULTIPLAYER games. That was implied since we're talking about multi-player gaming, but just in case, I want this on the record :)

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=86177635&postcount=410
 
So just to make sure we're clear. It is 100% free for 3rd party developers to use Microsoft's azure service for dedicated servers for their games? And if that is precisely what you meant then I must ask why the Titanfall devs specifically stated that it was "cheap" but not free. I'm not trying to attack you or anything so I hope my post doesn't come off that way. I'm just seriously interested in this topic, and I'd like an honest answer that I can take to the bank because like I said earlier. I'm really conflicted on which system to get first and I'm looking for anything that can push me to one direction or another.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.







Most of the time i'm pretty damn pro xb1 but not everyone is as rabid a fanboy as you are. Please chill with the troll comments. This is actually a serious concern for people such as me. I don't want to be lied to and I refuse to just buy into the bullsh*t that majority of you guys post when you don't even know what the hell you are talking about. I need to make an informed decision on which console to purchase and I don't have very long to do it. 1 month to go!

I respect your persistence in getting firm/clear details. If everyone were as keen on such, I think we'd have many more sensible discussions on forums like this... so thank you... and I don't take it as off-putting in any way. Again, I appreciate it.

The Titanfall devs specifically didn't say 'free' was because while the X1 cloud services are free - that parthadn't been announced when they made their statement (as far as I recall), and the same services are not free for PC utilization... but they are *very* reasonably priced compared to physical dedicated servers, and other cloud services.

To be clear, the cloud services/SDK is 100% free on all levels for developers to exploit. MS wants it to feel like an extension of the box itself... but it does require expertise on the development and test fronts which not all devs have... so no one should expect custom cloud services for ALL MP games on X1 necessarily, though they should certainly see more and more of that as this generation goes on.
 
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That sounds very promising as long as it actually works that way when its game day. I just hope there isn't any word trickery and bs down the road where they will say something like "oh we meant dedicated servers for match matching" or something like that. I'm going to go ahead and be optimistic about it though and assume that won't be the case.

Thank you for all the info. =)

There's no trickery of any kind here.

The cloud SDK/cloud compute cycles are free for developers to use... and while they certainly can be used for hosting sessions for MP games, I'm quite confident we'll see it used for much more than just that.
 
Nope. It's a basic example like I said but the principal is right.

It's not about a pissing match, it's about not posting wrong information publicly on the internet.

The fact that MS is using virtualization has little to do with the end user themselves. That simply allows them to dynamically allocate server instances and smaller processing units, it's what makes the cost feasible.

I didn't have time at work today, but this is just utter nonsnse dude.

You connect to multi player. You are put into a hosted service that's as local to you as possible. Your friend on the other side of the world connects to multi player. They are put into a hosted service that's as local to them. You join each others game. Your service stays local and your friends service is local. The cloud infrastructures takes over the match making and let's both of your connections stay local..

Completely made up malarky. The game server itself will be on one instance.. whether that instance is on some server in MS's cloud, or whether that instance is running as a listen server on someone's Xbox One is really the issue.

Matchmaking millions of people across the world requires centralized servers.. and that statement has nothing to do with whether the software running that server is virtualized or not. It's just... how it works.

It doesn't magically remove latency and allow you to play online games effectively with someone halfway across the world. Unless you are in a party and forcing it you and your friend are unlikely to be match-made into the same game if you are so far from each other.

Really barely anything changes for the end user because MS is using Azure and offering up endless hosting to devs. Other than the greater chance those devs will use dedicated servers... increasing the amount of games that use dedicated servers.. increasing the amount of games that use distributed computing in general.

Server = software. YOU are the one stuck in the world of physical machines if you even felt the need of accusing me of that. Whether a "server" is software running directly on an installed OS.. virtualized OS... or some other virtual execution platform doesn't suddenly change how people connect to things like XBox Live and how game servers will execute their code for multi-player games.

And again.. MS doesn't have an Azure datacenter in every town in the world. Azure is geo-dispersed well but it's not going to make someone with bad latency to the nearest Azure server have a good gaming experience, "dedicated" or not.. and they would be better off connecting to a listen server running on a more local Xbox One.
 
If there is any negative to MS offering dedicated servers for free........people will find it.
 
There's no trickery of any kind here.

The cloud SDK/cloud compute cycles are free for developers to use... and while they certainly can be used for hosting sessions for MP games, I'm quite confident we'll see it used for much more than just that.
Not to change the topic but Flynn, do you know if the BR/DVD player in the X1 can be controlled with voice and/or hand gestures?
 
Good to see MS step up to the plate. Seems MS is allowing devs to make use to dedi servers if they wish. Nobody is forced to, and according to Respawn it does cost money. They said they got it cheap or on discount.

So it's up to devs to use it or not.

With all the cloud stuff, it benefits devs to choose MS's servers than trying to do their own server services. Though we all know some companies like EA like to control their own destiny for te most part so despite Respawn and Titanfall going the MS server route, they'll likely do their own server stuff for BF and such.
 
Good to see MS step up to the plate. Seems MS is allowing devs to make use to dedi servers if they wish. Nobody is forced to, and according to Respawn it does cost money. They said they got it cheap or on discount.

So it's up to devs to use it or not.

With all the cloud stuff, it benefits devs to choose MS's servers than trying to do their own server services. Though we all know some companies like EA like to control their own destiny for te most part so despite Respawn and Titanfall going the MS server route, they'll likely do their own server stuff for BF and such.


Incorrect. Respawn said they were much less expensive.

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

Today we learned that the much less expensive price is free.

This is a game changer no matter how much some want to downplay it.
 
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Incorrect. Respawn said they were much less expensive.

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

Today we learned that the much less expensive price is free.

This is a game changer no matter how much some want to downplay it.
Ah thanks. Sounds great. Some devs will still be stubborn and control their own gear, but most will jump on board. The more dedi servers, the less games bombing out when the host quits. God bless you MS.
 
Good to see MS step up to the plate. Seems MS is allowing devs to make use to dedi servers if they wish. Nobody is forced to, and according to Respawn it does cost money. They said they got it cheap or on discount.

Respawn is referring to the cost for X1 and PC. It's free for X1, very reasonable for PC... therefore, if you're speaking holistically (which the dev was), then collectively/holistically for PC and X1, the price is very cheap... since one of them is completely free.

With all the cloud stuff, it benefits devs to choose MS's servers than trying to do their own server services. Though we all know some companies like EA like to control their own destiny for te most part so despite Respawn and Titanfall going the MS server route, they'll likely do their own server stuff for BF and such.

Actually, you'll probably see EA and others use Microsoft's cloud SDK for X1, and their own solutions for the other platforms... because it's not free to host your own services. If it costs X each month to run your service for X1, PS4, and PC (and it sold the same on all platforms), then it would cost X-33% to run the X1 services on Microsoft's cloud SDK, while you continue running the other services yourself.

It's a HUGE bargain for developers to utilize. Not to mention, it's easier to test, easier to develop for, and easier to maintain than any home-grown solutions... so I actually wouldn't be surprised to see even the big players all move to MS's solution for X1.
 
Respawn is referring to the cost for X1 and PC. It's free for X1, very reasonable for PC... therefore, if you're speaking holistically (which the dev was), then collectively/holistically for PC and X1, the price is very cheap... since one of them is completely free.



Actually, you'll probably see EA and others use Microsoft's cloud SDK for X1, and their own solutions for the other platforms... because it's not free to host your own services. If it costs X each month to run your service for X1, PS4, and PC (and it sold the same on all platforms), then it would cost X-33% to run the X1 services on Microsoft's cloud SDK, while you continue running the other services yourself.

It's a HUGE bargain for developers to utilize. Not to mention, it's easier to test, easier to develop for, and easier to maintain than any home-grown solutions... so I actually wouldn't be surprised to see even the big players all move to MS's solution for X1.
Sounds good Flynn. Too bad dedi servers is something that can't really be PR'ed as loudly as other things. And it's something you can't really show, but has to be experienced to enjoy it.
 
Sounds good Flynn. Too bad dedi servers is something that can't really be PR'ed as loudly as other things. And it's something you can't really show, but has to be experienced to enjoy it.

Let me give you an example of how this fundamentally changes the game.

Game developer releases really compelling game. Game runs on x1. Uses the users compute units to mine for bitcoin. Developer makes money by releasing free game.

It really can't be overstated, this is a deathblow to Sony, they can not, and will not recover from this megaton. Bankruptcy in 18 months.
 
@BunzHoles

I'm on a mobile so it's to much hassle to break your reply into quotes. I, nstead I'll just respond like this.

I'm not posting incorrectly about this. And to make sure we are on the same page regarding our argument , I'll summarise it here. You said that the cloud model is basically the same as standard dedicated servers where if you are far from a data centre, you won't see the benefits. I'm saying that's not strictly true because the cloud operates in a different way. Fast. And powerful. Fast because it tries to stay localised and powerful because of rapid scalability. Granted that my initial explanation was crude, but that does not make it wrong.

Let's take some working examples.

Call of Duty. Peer to peer, local host, listen service.
Battlefield. Dedicated servers.
Ghost recon. Cloud service
Gta online. Cloud service

This example is based on myself and three friends, which I'll name by where they live so as it's relevant to the example. Dublin, LA, Philliy, Berlin. S
Between Berlin to LA your talking nearly one side of the planet to the other.

When we play call of duty it's nearly impossible for Dublin and Berlin to play with LA. If Philliy hosts a private game we can sometimes get it going OK.
On battlefield if we carefully pick a server we can usually get a game. Either Philliy and LA are on yellow bars or Dublin and Berlin are on yellow bars.
Ghost recon. All four have green bars. No matter who launches the game, match making takes about 1 minute. Either we all have lag or no one has.
Gta online. Same. We pop in and out of the Co op missions with ease, jumping between hosts, and experiencing zero lag. Some delays on the map zoom out zoom in function, but that's it.

That's a practical working example of the difference between the three.
 
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