Comments on: Why Cloud Computing Gaming is Going to Happen

By: Darrin

Darrin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:06:40 +0000

OK, so latency is an issue today. During a latency bump in today’s Internet games, the game will continue to control and render smoothly (all done locally), but will fall out of sync with the server and will jarringly resynch when network connection is resumed.
With server-side game rendering, the multiplayer sync problems wouldn’t be any worse than they are today, but latency problems would also affect the player’s own character control (since player input is processed remotely rather than locally).

George, I agree, that you can probably build hardware setups that scales better than linearly. But even in that worst-case scenario, that wouldn’t be a deal breaker so that’s not worth debating

By: George

George — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:17:41 +0000

I don’t buy this: “Hardware requirements scale linearly with the number of concurrent users.”

I’ve been able to do that where I work, and you get more than twice the amount of users if you double the hardware. For example we recently doubled server capabilites and are now hosting about 6000 users on one machine; previously we were only able to host 2000 users on hardware half as good.

I think it’s more like car engines, the total horsepower is far greater than the sum of the parts.

8 core CPUs will be mainstream very soon, I expect that we will see smaller, cheaper “mini-clouds” not too far away. You can all ready get 4 motherboard rack mount clusters (4, 2 processor boards in a 2U chassis).

By: yodaddy

yodaddy — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:34:58 +0000

I got 15megs down and 1 up… does that count for anything ?

By: P5ycH0

P5ycH0 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:24:52 +0000

I like the idea. Not for the games, but for the improvements ISP’s need to make in order to coop with this. They were slacking the last couple of years.

By: Emrah

Emrah — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:32:11 +0000

@john: I agree, but if they could make come up with a sufficient response time for all players involved to be almost as responsive as local play, which is what they claim, multiplayer would be piece of cake as the game would be hosted at the same place as the video servers.

It is just that their claim is not achievable on today’s infrastructure. A tenth second of latency is VERY frustrating to any player, since your game state will also have to be updated a tenth second later, unlike current games which predicts the current state on the client side)

By: John

John — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:02:01 +0000

> It will probably NOT have this problem 7-8 years from now, the latency and
> bandwidth will indeed be very less of a problem.

I doubt it. If the bandwidth has improved tremendously since the 56K days, the *latency* has not, and in most times it’s worse. Pings of 50-100ms are commonplace nowadays, and worse pings even on the latest fiber connections are not unheard of.

>BTW, multiplayer will be very easy to tackle
>if they get single player to work

This isn’t as easy. The perceived lag in multiplayer is influenced by the combination of all lags from all players. This is why you tend to see high ping players getting kicked from servers (on private servers), and why private servers are so highly valued for clans training.

By: Devils

Devils — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:25:26 +0000

Just wanted to thank Darrin for providing something to read on this site besides stuff about mockers. please do even more of this mate.

By: Devils

Devils — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:25:07 +0000

Just wanted to thank Darrin for providing something to read on this site besides stuff about mockers. please do more of this mate.