I think it's more along the lines of the cloud is simulating the entire game world and downloads snapshot data (enough to recreate the experience) periodically, and maybe pulls more data for closer-in locations.
Well just read like a sentence or 2 farther
BunzHoles said:Or have a constantly running simulation of the entire world.. but that might be overkill.
They could have one simulation for all users, but that couldn't take into account what the user has done in the world. I've killed a dragon that another player hasn't.. so they'd need an entire simulated world for each individual user.
Might really be overkill. Don't really know, was just sort of discussing possibilities.
Either way most games aren't merely "freezing" what is happening in a town or something when you leave it, hence why I discussed it that way. But the characters do generally follow a simple series of pre-defined paths, and I'm just guessing that some sort of quick routine runs to determine where they are in that town when you get near. If I leave someone walking across a town in Skyrim for instance.. and come back.. they are likely to be on the other side of the town.. but I think the game just "knows" in some sort of database "time of day, where are the NPCs" and quickly throws that together.
And even if they didn't end up freeing a single bit of processing power on the local CPU, I'd consider this still a massive benefit, because they're still providing you with an experience that would simply be impossible offline. I do agree that anyone who thinks this will contribute significantly to improving how a game looks is likely going to be disappointed on that front, but I'm excited to see how people who will be working with this can improve how games play - which, in the end, is what we all care most about.
Certainly.
I'm very curious about it as well.. but as you said, for the possibilities of how it can augment games, not for performance reasons. It mainly seems to get talked about as this "thing that will make Xbox One's power infinite!" and it's just untrue.
MS is probably quietly deploying GPU's to their cloud, but I'm still not sold on the idea that we'll end up with fully cloud-rendered gaming from them.. and I'm not convinced Sony's Gaikai purchase is going to work out for them.