Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud debut comes with upsides for devs

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/the-cloud/-i-microsoft-flight-simulator-s-i-cloud-debut-comes-with-upsides-for-devs

by jamesdco • 4 years ago

79 71 4 years ago

phor• 4 years ago

It feels like this was part of what Stadia promised, but never came to fruition.

Stadia actually worked pretty well the first time I tried it an I played a few games no issues, but the first time I tried Xbox Cloud Gaming, I got display artifacts and my computer locked up. The Windows Store Apps and especially the Xbox app sucks compared to steam and have very little going for them.

loudmax• 4 years ago

Stadia's problem was never technical, it was entirely due to bad management. The fact that they got games to play reasonably well at reasonably high resolutions is an impressive achievement, and it set the foundation to build a dominant gaming platform appealing to everyone. Then Stadia's management figured out a way to emphasize all of Stadia's weaknesses and play down its advantages and price it in such a way to appeal to nobody.

Stadia's failure to make an impact in the market despite its technical achievements brings to mind the proverb: An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

bobbob1921• 4 years ago

When I first read this and a few replies it made me think that Stadia had been shutdown, but a quick Google search shows this is not the case. Am I missing something and perhaps it’s planed to be shut down? (Or is it just not as successful as was anticipated)

silisili2• 4 years ago

I follow Stadia a bit, will try to answer. First understand, Google will never tell you the truth. Even if they were going to shut it down in 10 minutes, their last email to you would be to tell you it's not going anywhere.

Stadia shut down its own games division - the group who was working on in house games. Then, Stadia said it's going to focus mostly on b2b stuff - basically whitelabeling Stadia to others.

They've not said they'll shut it down, but the writing is on the wall.

invalidusernam3• 4 years ago

Apparently it has apparently been “demoted” within Google. The rumour also says it's getting renamed to Google Stream and will be licensed out to other companies to build their own game streaming platforms. I don't think any of this has been confirmed, so take it with a pinch of salt

dividuum2• 4 years ago

I wonder how they implement fast loading times. Flight simulator is embarrassingly slow to load and takes 2-3 minutes on my reasonable fast machine. I guess they have fully loaded game instances on standby and then sign you in once you connect using the mentioned new cloud gaming API?

EMM_3862• 4 years ago

I wonder how they implement fast loading times

Proper DX12 is still on the roadmap.

They will do it like this:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi...

sidewndr466• 4 years ago

I'm still confused by the existence of APIs like this. Why would a video game suddenly need a proprietary way to access a storage device? Have hard drives & filesystems gotten that much slower over the past 20 years?

sandos• 4 years ago

Pre-loaded machines work, but I imagine you would have to move away from that once you support enough games, but it should be "easy" to just resume a machine to different games start states from disk. Afaik games are mostly using lots of CPU when starting so youre basically pre-computing all that and using the disk as a look-up table.

markus_zhang• 4 years ago

I'm wondering if you can serve multiple clients with one fully loaded server that has a huge amount of RAMs.

samstave2• 4 years ago

Is it multi-player? Is it waiting for other users with slower connects/machines?

dividuum2• 4 years ago

It has multiplayer features, but that's certainly not the case here. Switching off all the online features doesn't change the loading time at all. It's just a lot of potential to make it faster: When you start FS on my machine it takes 2 minutes or so with only brief moments of CPU usage exceeding 2 of the available 24 cores. All while both GPU and IO are basically idle. I'm not sure what's going on. Wouldn't be surprised if there's a "GTA online" type of lazyness happening somewhere (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...)

Rebelgecko• 4 years ago

When I tried it a few days ago, the loading times to open the game were fairly bad. Couldn't actually see how long it would take to load a flight, because the UI was borked (or non intuitive enough that I couldn't figure out how to select a departure airport)

Animats3• 4 years ago

That's an interesting issue for the "metaverse". Once we get past the NFT clown car era, and big-world systems with user created content at high resolution come out, metaverse systems will have to face the bandwidth problem Second Life faces. Delivering assets to the user needs more bandwidth than delivering video. Even 4K video. Second Life delivers content on the fly, and you get to watch stuff appear as content comes in. With enough bandwidth and a gamer PC, it's not bad, but many users are on slow links with weak clients, and suffer badly.

If the work is being done "in the cloud", there can be much more bandwidth to the asset servers. At least 10GB between game machine and asset store, all within the data center. Flight Simulator needs that, because, like Google Earth, they have a whole planet of assets. A Ready Player One quality metaverse will have the same problem. Or, for example, the Matrix demo for Unreal Engine 5, where you download 16 square kilometers of highly detailed city.

There are performance downsides of cloud gaming. Too much lag, mostly. Speed of light alone is too much slowdown to allow remote VR rendering. At 120 FPS, a few hundred miles of transmission delay alone costs a frame time. Network delay makes it worse. You can't buffer the video ahead, like you can for pre-stored video. The pew-pew crowd gets unhappy above 40ms, although there are tricks for FPS games to make targeting work across laggy links.

kotaKat• 4 years ago

It is equally embarrassing to load over cloud. All it takes away is the compute/GPU resource requirements locally.

Controls are also awful right now as you're stuck using the Xbox controller - other Xbox compatible flight controllers, as well as the keyboard and mouse, aren't available yet in MSFS over xCloud. It's not (personally) enjoyable.

DethNinja• 4 years ago

Do these cloud gaming offerings really make a profit with current hardware costs?

I feel like large companies are pouring money into this with the hope that they will be able to lock users into their cloud offering. However, it is likely they are losing huge amounts of money because of the hardware costs.

zitterbewegung• 4 years ago

Not 100% about this guess that I have but if its "free" it probably means that they calculated that they have x% extra server availability and they provide that for "free". Google Colab makes it obvious when they provide you a GPU but I don't know about Microsoft.

YPPH• 4 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking, they can just use spare Azure capacity.

MikusR• 4 years ago

Microsoft is using Xbox Series X. Nvidia is using their own GPUs.

bentcorner• 4 years ago

Here's what the Xbox cloud hardware looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4Xqy8kG4&t=18s

samstave2• 4 years ago

On similar note, where is HW going once it completes its lifecycle in the cloud?

Are pods being donated to schools?

This would be a great idea, is to give a pod to a school with management tools etc and teach the kids how to interact with effectively [aws/gcp/azure] mgmt tools to build up a skillset early and accelerate how the yoots understand what cloud is and how its managed.

quantumduck• 4 years ago

I could be wrong, but I think the hardware cannot sustain outside their servers farms without significant investment in the things needed; it's not like the throw away entire server racks at a time, the probably only retire small pieces of the hardware at a time.

Animats3• 4 years ago

Do these cloud gaming offerings really make a profit with current hardware costs?

Judging by the ones that have gone broke, no.

"Cloud gaming" of the kind where the game runs on a server and the results are sent as video to the client has been tried, on and off, for about five years. Most of the early providers are gone. The trouble is that each user needs an entire server, one comparable to a gamer PC.

Cloud gaming services seem to come in two flavors - expensive, and loss leader.

Shadow PC is in the expensive category. Price is $30/month. When you connect, they launch a server for you and load your environment into it. So you're buying a part-time VM. Apparently you can stay connected as long as you want, although I'm not sure if there's a limit they are not mentioning up front.

NVidia GEForce Now is cheaper. Price is $10/month. You get kicked off after 6 hours. For $17/month, you get a better server with an NVidia 3080 and 8 hours before being kicked off. There's a free tier, where you wait to get in and get kicked off after an hour or two. Originally, the prices were lower, but that was in the loss leader phase. It also helps that NVidia makes GPUs. You can only run games that NVidia has ported to that system.

Google Stadia is $10 a month. Games have to be ported to it, and there's suspicion it may soon join the long list of former Google products.

Vortex's site now says they are no longer accepting new users, and their blog is a Google Stadia ad.

officeplant• 4 years ago

Keep in mind that the base tier of Google Stadia is completely free when it comes to free to play games like Destiny 2, or if you buy the game outright.

I still play Cyberpunk 2077 on the free tier of Stadia due to a promotion where the game was only $45 and came with a controller/chromecast. Sold the hardware to pay for the game and now I just play with an Xbox controller on whatever computer or phone I'm on at the time.

treis• 4 years ago

Shadow PC is in the expensive category. Price is $30/month.

That's surprisingly inexpensive. The graphics card they promise is nearly $1,000 by itself. For what you'd spend on a DIY build you could probably get 4-5 years of subscription.

popotamonga• 4 years ago

I am very amazed with GEForce Now. I thought the lag would be unbearable. I tried some fortnite and i'm not even a gamer and even won some rounds. Astounding. If it's that good for fast FPS then it's a no-brainer for slower types of games. Would gladly pay 50€+/mo if i was a gamer just so i wouldn't have to bother to keep upgrading my pc.

GauntletWizard• 4 years ago

It's quite a bit more than 5 years[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

mwint• 4 years ago

You get kicked off after 6 hours

Is that 6 hours of continuous time, or does it indicate a quota of 6 hours total for the month?

bob1029• 4 years ago

I think the primary technical challenge is the scale of AAA games.

For me, this stuff gets viable when one game studio goes all-in on building a streaming-only game experience that considers all economics of scaling GPUs.

If you reduce visual fidelity enough, you can get away with a lot more clients per host. Hell, depending on how you architect things, you might even be able to serve some clients from servers that dont even have GPUs.

The upsides of cloud gaming are pretty solid if you can get over the caveats. The biggest thing for me would be competitive gaming experiences that are guaranteed to not have any cheaters. That would feel really nice.

willcipriano• 4 years ago

Wasn't crackdown 3 supposed to have this tech but it got pulled at the last minute? There they were supposed to render the really complicated physics like when a building or similar collapses in the cloud. Thought it was a great idea at the time.

rjh29• 4 years ago

Sort of, the article is talking about two different things. One is using the cloud for data storage (because the full Flight Simulator map is huge, streaming off the cloud is basically essentially), the other is your standard Stadia-style play the whole game via the cloud on any device.

The Crackdown 3 stuff never really got beyond demo stage iirc. In fact Microsoft promised all kinds of Xbox One games that would interact with Azure, but nothing really came of it: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-crack...

Comparing with games like Red Faction Guerrilla, you have to wonder if the cloud is even necessary for physics simulation.

charles_f2• 4 years ago

Oh good, gives game devs a perfect excuse to start charging a recurring fee for what's an infrastructure detail on their side. Gotta get those sweet sweet subscription fees.

jquery• 4 years ago

This is undoubtedly one of the primary motivations underpinning investment in this area, and makes me quite wary of anything coming out of it. Is any of this "cloud gaming" being backed by a love of gaming itself? Doesn't feel like it.

charles_f2• 4 years ago

I mean for Flight Simulator, it's several hundreds of TB of data stored on Azure servers for all the maps services - I do see the appeal, and it looks like MS is not charging past the initial fee. But this seems like a very fringe use-case, I don't see a lot of other applicable ones.

endisneigh• 4 years ago

I’d be more interested in a mesh network where people can reliably share their compute when not being used but play their own games.

intrasight• 4 years ago

I've of the opinion that this is the future of gaming. Hard stuff will be done on cloud GPUs.

Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud debut comes with upsides for devs

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