Microsoft makes the case for Xbox One's 300,000 server cloud, but what do developers

At E3 last week, in a behind closed doors presentation called Xbox 101, Microsoft engineering manager Jeff Henshaw - not a member of the PR team, he points out - tells a small gathering of journalists that Xbox One's 300,000 server cloud gives the next-generation console a unique advantage.It's a somewhat abstract claim that Microsoft made first only a few weeks earlier during its Xbox One reveal event, and it's been dismissed by more than a few developers, including The Witness creator Jonathan Blow, as little more than a marketing trick. Digital Foundry's In Theory analysis concluded: "Microsoft needs to prove its position with strong ideas and practical demonstrations. Until then, it's perhaps best not to get too carried away with the idea of a super-powered console, and there's very little evidence that Sony needs to be worried about its PS4 specs advantage being comprehensively wiped out by 'the power of the cloud'."http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/art...x-1/quality/91Forza 5 will use the cloud to make AI with human intelligence, Microsoft claims.

Turn 10 Studios has discussed how Forza 5 will use the cloud to make more lifelike AI with "human intelligence", but I've struggled to imagine how Xbox One games would benefit directly. To Henshaw's credit, he does focus on what matters most: the games - albeit in prototype terms.The pitch begins with solar system exploration, displayed on a huge TV and running live on a Xbox One connected to the cloud. The Xbox engineering team gathered an enormous set of data from NASA, covering the position and orbital trajectory of every celestial body of matter in the solar system as well as about 30,000 light years beyond it.An Xbox One engineer rendered a subset of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, what amounts to 40,000 visible asteroids, which we see on the TV. The Xbox One's processing power is used to animate their orbital trajectory in real-time, all accurate to the current time and date of their actual position in near solar space.Doing this, Henshaw insists, requires about 10 times the computing power of the Xbox 360. "We've crammed the horsepower of over 10 360s into this one elegant design that lets us do computationally insanely complex operations," he says.Bigger is always better, of course, and that's where the cloud comes in. With the program connected to the 300,000 servers powering Microsoft's platform, the 40,000 visible asteroids rises to an eye-watering - and screen-filling - 330,000 asteroids, all being computed and rendered in real-time. This amounts to a whopping 400,000 updates per second from the cloud to keep each position of each asteroid current. It's an impressive, albeit bleak, display of virtual outer space.But what's the point? How do asteroids, asteroids and more asteroids benefit the kind of games we love to play? Henshaw notes that as we move through the asteroid field, objects farther away skip a little. That's fine - they're in the distance, and so the program doesn't need to be as precise with them. For the asteroids nearby, however, the program needs to be "ultra smooth and ultra precise", Henshaw explains. The computing for the up close asteroids is offloaded to the cloud, keeping them moving smoothly.

"The cloud will enable developers to infinitely increase the size, scope and scale of gameplay elements."
Xbox One engineering manager Jeff Henshaw

Henshaw says this prototype maps directly to the way next-generation game developers are building games, and, he says, some are even doing this now. Developers will be able to dedicate all of the local processing power on Xbox One to making sure experiences are snappy and responsive and reactive, but offload things around the player, such as foliage, an infinitely large world, enemy AI combatants or event real human combatants who are playing online from across the world, to "infinitely increase the size, scope and scale of any of those gameplay elements".Henshaw adds the cloud will allow these games to persist in real-time because the cloud is always running and always available. So, if you leave a game it may persist with other players and feel the effects of time, wear, damage and weather so when you come back online it will have evolved.In truth, for all the criticism Microsoft has rightly endured for its controversial Xbox One authentication policies, Henshaw puts forward a tantalising proposition. If what he's saying is more than marketing - and there remains a degree of scepticism on this point - Xbox One games could be made significantly better by something we can neither see nor touch, something intangible, unknowing and, therefore, alien. As I watch Henshaw's asteroids slowly move around the TV, I wonder how much better Skyrim's open world would have been had Bethesda been able to offload calculations to the cloud.Certainly it's a concept we're not used to. Games have pretty much always been limited by local processing power. Not any more, Microsoft claims. But what do developers think? Henshaw says some are already using the power of the Xbox One cloud to help better their experiences. Which ones?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...velopers-think