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Why Project Flare Might Just End the Console War

Posted by samzenpus on from the to-the-cloud dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Project Flare, the new server side gaming technology from Square Enix, turned heads when it was announced last week. The first tech demos do little more than show the vast number of calculations it can handle with hundreds of boxes tumbling down in Deus Ex, but the potential is there to do much more than just picture-in-picture feeds in MMOs. As a new article points out, what's most interesting is the potential to use the technology for games that use more than one system — OnLive may have used this tech before, but only to play games you can buy on discs in the shops anyway, but the future is in games that need the equivalent of dozens of PS4s or Xbox Ones to power them. Ubisoft has already partnered with Square on the project."

12 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. IMO, it is not going to work by faragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.

    1. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.

      One example is to provide functionality which cannot be provided by the console machines themselves. For example, games for the Xbox 180 are going to have the option to use Azure to run game servers. One of the major frustrations of console gaming today is that one of the game consoles has to play server.

      From the summary, though, the idea is to provide games more powerful than what your console can actually run. With a large enough playerbase it might actually be feasible. It costs a lot of CPU to perform a lot of physics calculations, but if you only have to perform them once for a whole bunch of players' updates because they're all looking at the same thing, then you're going to save some cycles there.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by Moryath · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Works great till you realize the USA is currently worse than a third-world country in terms of broadband penetration and up/down speeds...

    3. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by SuricouRaven · · Score: 5, Informative

      Write a mod for ut2k4 and you'll soon start seeing how it works. The local game runs a simulation, but subject to correction by the server. Extrapolating events until the packets catch up. Really latency-sensitive things like sniping are handled locally. This can lead to some very strange things happening at times:

      1. Run past a window.
      2. Clear the window.
      3. Your movement is passed to the server, and then to another player.
      4. Other player snipes you.
      5. Snipe victory is reported back to the server, then to you.
      6. Half a second after passing the window, you drop dead. Headshot. Even though from your perspective, you were in a place you should have been out of sight. Serves you right for running past a sniper-visible window.

      Generally the game is good enough that almost all of this is transparent though. Only the exceptionally observent notice it. Still rather strange to code for, as everything you write is actually being executed three times in parallel (On the server, on the client, and on everyone else's client), and you need to make sure that all three executions eventually give the same result, even if not at quite the same moment.

    4. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by WaffleMonster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Its very simple - power savings, and cheaper thin consoles for end users.

      What power savings? Power is being consumed somewhere else where as a customer YOU are paying for that too. Lets not forget about additional power requirements required to push insane number of real-time bits for trivial reasons over the Internet.

      This would not work too well for multiplayer because of the latency between user-server-user, but would be great for single player.

      Since everyone would experience input latency and there is no network latency for the multi-player link latency would be about the same persistent problem whether it were single or multiplayer game. The only lag assuming lack of operator incompetence would be in the form of input delay with very limited opportunities to compensate with prediction algorithms. Nobody who plays on anything approaching a competitive basis would touch this thing.

    5. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Informative

      Don't forget the ISPs have more or less killed net neutrality and will soon be charging $$$ for bandwidth on the lines run with your tax dollars.

      --
      Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    6. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by clockwise_music · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Works great till you realize the USA is currently worse than a third-world country in terms of broadband penetration and up/down speeds...

      Sorry, have you been to any third world countries? In many you're lucky if you can get dial-up speeds, yet alone a constant connection.

  2. Console DRM? by Hsien-Ko · · Score: 5, Funny

    Imagine your game not starting because the 'physics' servers are down or you can't connect to them.....

  3. Right... by Pinhedd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OnLive was such a bastion of success wasn't it?

  4. No thanks by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's a reason I've cut cable tv from my life. Being remote controlled and the only game in town, it's become overpriced, ad-laden, and content thin. If that's where gaming is going I will have to cut that too. The prospect of overpaying to 'stream' a laggy, ad-filled game experience with overly-constrained lossy-compressed AV doesn't sound inviting either. I LIKE the idea of having power under the hood locally, so to speak, just like I want server binaries for games to run my own servers and mod tools to make my own mods/maps. This way the game stays alive as long as there are interested players and doesn't die the moment it stops making money for its creators. To top it off, the current 'cloud' model for a lot of software now charges the 'owner-controlled boxed software' prices of the 90s for what amounts to a rent-a-go arcade level of service. What a rip-off.

    The more computing looks like ibm's wet dream of 'service', the less interesting and more oppressive it gets. No thanks.

  5. Obvious: latency by De+Lemming · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even with modern broadband, latency is still an issue for these kinds of applications. In the article are some examples of currently used server side gaming enhancements, like "Forza 5 will even use cloud computing to monitor the way you drive, and alter virtual drivers’ AI (artificial intelligence) accordingly." That has no need for low latency. But if you want the environment to immediately react to players actions, there need to be low latency. And you can't remove the distance (and related network infrastructure) between the player and the data center.

  6. Microsoft just debunked this for FPS games by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some people kept saying "It's not that bad right now, it'll work eventually!", but Microsoft just (accidentally) tested OnLive's idea for low-latency games by introducing some small input lag into Windows 8.1. Guess what? FPS gamers noticed.

    Other game types which don't need super low latency, I'm sure, will eventually get here if only because game companies are still annoyingly DRM-focused and this will make piracy impossible.