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Titanfall and Microsoft Azure

posted by LaminatorX on Monday March 10 2014, @11:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the Azure-waves-of-pain dept.

skullz writes:

"From engadget: A closer look at Titanfall's not-so-secret weapon: Microsoft's cloud

While you were busy running along walls and throwing missiles back at your opponents during the Titanfall beta, countless data centers across the world were making sure that each AI-controlled Titan bodyguard had your back. Much of the frenetic action in Respawn Entertainment's debut game rests on one thing: Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure.

Up until last November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's baby was mostly used for business applications, like virtualization and acting as an enterprise-level email host. With the Xbox One, though, the company opened up its global server farms to game developers, giving them access to more computing power than could reasonably be stuffed into a $500 game console. Since the Xbox One's debut, Microsoft has been crowing about how Azure would let designers create gaming experiences players have never seen before. Now it's time for the product to speak for itself."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HonestFlames on Tuesday March 11 2014, @08:23AM

    by HonestFlames (3704) on Tuesday March 11 2014, @08:23AM (#14595)

    The Xbox One has been out for... a few months. Am I supposed to believe that Titanfall is utilising huge swathes of cloud computing power in order to do some NPC AI? I am not only calling bullshit, I'm pretty sure I saw it come out of the bull and splatter on the ground.

    AI is pretty tricky, from a development viewpoint. There's not an enormous amount of middleware easily licensed that you plug in to your project that just 'does' AI for you after you feed it a parameter or five. Still, I point-blank refuse to believe that an all-singing, all-dancing uber console can't manage a few (tens of thousand) 'if this do that' decisions.

    What I'm more tempted to believe is that pushing it out to Azure was a way to solve a couple of problems. More than likely, the problems were latency and bandwidth, not "oh noes, the CPU is too weeeeak".

    Give it 12 months... 24 months... 5 years from now, then we will see some impressive stuff happening, but as of right now there isn't a publisher in the World who will spend the requisite money to provide a big chunk of Azure compute resources to every online player of game X.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @09:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @09:53AM (#14636)

    Still, I point-blank refuse to believe that an all-singing, all-dancing uber console can't manage a few (tens of thousand) 'if this do that' decisions.

    The console likely can, but I doubt that will help much in an online multiplayer game where everything is on the server.