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The Verge
StevieBallz
On The Verge since Jan 30, 2012
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I take 50 ms for a roundtrip to another Players console, just the same as for a roundtrip to a Server. The Player and his console take time to render react before even transmitting back. That is the time a cloud AI would have to react as well.
Given that Multiplayer works just fine why wouldn’t the same be true for AI running in the cloud if it takes just the same amount of time or is even faster?
about 17 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 3 recommends
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No, matter of fact is you don’t know about the Details of how lighting calculations are done today. You use a combination. For hard shadows you normally do dynamic calculations but those take too long (reaching up into the Minute area) for soft shadows. Of course there are in betweens and lots of trickery. But given that I actually learn about this stuff in University I’m rather certain I know how this works.
Lightmaps are similar to textures but they are NOT Images. They factor in at a completely different time in the Rendering process which also means that a single light map can Change the amount of light reflected from different perspectives (otherwise you would simply render the resulting Color Change through the lighting directly into the texture and be done with it).
I never said that you can’t do any dynamic lighting which would mean we don’t have any dynamic shadows. In reality we have dynamic shadows but most is still being done using lightmaps – static ones mostly at the Moment but that could Change to a more dynamic model.
about 17 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 1 recommend
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It Comes up latter on but those calculations are today still mostly done statically because current graphics Hardware (even on the PC) isn’t up to the Task of doing it in real time. The extra power of the PS4 GPU won’t matter much here.
But all in all I DO believe that People are misinterpreting what the Cloud can do for the XBox One and what it can’t do. It definitely will be able to bring gaming worlds that are more alive and enable new Features but it won’t drastically add to the computing power available for graphics. Most use cases of cloud assistance simply aren’t about the graphics.
That being said: even with the beefier Hardware in the PS4 I’m not entirely sure that even that 50 % gain in processing power will yield us noticably better graphics. Perhaps it will have some Impact on Frame rate but we’ll have to wait and see.
about 18 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 1 recommend
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Gaikai currently does not Support anything else than game Streaming. In theory it could.
Gaikai currently is the biggest Streaming cloud gaming Service but it isn’t the biggest General purpose one. Even if they would allow their Servers to be used in a more General way that would not make them surpass Azure. That’s where the error is.
But Azure and other General purpose cloud platforms aren’t merely about the interconnects and computing power but also about the Management platforms and development platforms on top of it and I’m just not seeing this from Sony anytime soon.
about 18 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 2 recommends
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From a Hardware perspective the PS4 would be able to do this just the same. The interesting part is the cloud computing platform behind it. Currently if any developer wants to use cloud computing they have to use their own Servers and write their own code on the Server, etc.
Assuming that Microsoft is using a comparable Modell to Azure for XBox One’s cloud computing platform it will mean that there is a pool of Servers in the cloud managed by Microsoft. They all offer the same functionalities (connectivity, etc.) so there is a lot for developers to build upon. It also allows for fast scale up/down when the games that are currently being played Change rapidly. E.g. many People Play Forza against other peoples Cloudatars but then some new game hits the Scene. People start playing it and most don’t Play Forza. That frees up Server resources that had previously been used by Forza and can now be used by the new game. The underlying platform supports automatically scaling up the new game’s instance Count and automatically scaling down Forza’s. This is possible as everything is using a single pool. If every Publisher did their own pool People stopping a game by EA and switching to one by Activision would mean lots of unused Servers on EA’s side and perhaps lots of Players unable to log into Activision’s Servers.
I hope it’s understandable what I’m trying to say.
But technically: yes, you could connect the PS4 to a similar System in the future.
about 18 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 2 recommends
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How many light maps can you precompute. Do you do that for any Situation that might occur. It’s limiting to do so and that Limit might be lifted using cloud computing. As for computing light maps dynamically in realtime: you would Need A LOT more power than what XBO or PS4 provide to achieve that.
Using light maps also does NOT mean that you only have static shadows in your game. It does mean that you don’t recalculate the whole lighting Situation all the time but only those parts of it that are affected by moving objects like Players, NPCs, cars and whatnot.
about 18 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 1 reply 1 recommend
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There have been some cases identified that would allow for better graphics. A lot of the lighting (especially diffuse lighting) is currently done using pre-computed light maps. That regularly means that during modelling the light map is created and stored on the disk and then reused.
If you now want to simulate stuff like the sun moving across the sky or fog wandering through a forest you can put the model of the fog into the cloud and let it compute those light maps and feed them back down. As they don’t depend on the actual Action inside the game and aren’t changing rapidly it is possible to offload them (latency isn’t critical).
There are lots of those precomputations in graphics nowadays so we might see an added Level of Change in gaming worlds that where more static before but those are basically the only things that are possible to offload (it was also an example that was given by Microsoft themselves).
about 18 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 1 reply 1 recommend
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Multiplayer in General does work over the Internet – doesn’t it? It doesn’t matter that much wether the one giving commands on the other side of the pipe is a human being or a Computer. Given that the latency for a humans Computer to render it, for the Monitor to Display it, for the human to see and to react to it and then Input link on the other Players Computer and then again the same Network latency back to the Server.
Especially AI is something that isn’t as critical on latency as realtime graphics Rendering and doesn’t Need an awful lot of data to be transmitted.
about 18 hours ago on Xbox One and Cloud Computing 1 reply 3 recommends
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On the Topic of Price per Month – students can get it for $100 for 4 years through dreamspark. Just thought I’d put it out there – won’t help you if you’re not a Student though.
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I think 2010 improved the UI greatly over 2007 with it’s Evolution of the Ribbons. This has continued with Office 2013 in my opinion. I’ve not run into trouble with Office 2013 so far.
1 day ago on Does anyone else hate Microsoft Office 2013? 1 recommend
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Didn’t you just answer your first question? Why aren’t there more games like Myst? Because there is not a lot of People who buy them.
1 day ago on The guns of E3: what can gaming learn from its bloody mistakes? 1 reply 3 recommends
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Sony opted to Keep the PS Eye out of the Box and sell it separately ($ 59). Then there is the HDMI pass through Hardware on the XBox One. All savings in SoC space by the shader Units that the XBox One has less than the PS4 is likely to be Offset by the eSRAM (6 Transistors / bit makes SRAM rather big – although it also makes it fast).
So basically the only component that costs more on the PS4 is the GDDR5 Memory. It seems plausible to me that this can lead to a lower price.
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The interesting question is: will they have those kinds of early sales? But yes, no AAA game – wether on physical disc or digitally distributed launches cheap. It takes them some time to come down.
1 day ago on XBOX games will be $60 1 reply
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Given Verizons Track Record I’m not sure that waiting will really improve the Situation. The 928 is very similar to the 6 months old 920 but it also has the benefit of weighing in at ~ 20 g lighter. Not as light as the 925 but it still retains the wireless charging capability – it’s still some Progress.
And if Verizon does not bring a new device in 6 months time than it’s likely the next flagship Nokia will Show up on Verizon around this time next year (so you might end up with a 1 year old device in a few months or with a completely different phone altogether). Therefore I’d suggest to perhaps wait for the Eos anouncement and if nothing for Verizon is announced then I’d go for the 928.
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To summarize: you don’t use your tablet for many things, so you don’t need many notifications? And the important ones can be on the lockscreen (although: they can be on WP as well).
Just to be clear: I don’t get the Need for all notifications to be there and in my face until I dismiss them. Installed an App update – fine by me, hope it works, don’t need to do anything about it. And if I miss it it doesn’t matter. Someone answered a comment in some Forum – fine, when I’ve got time I’ll go through my tiles and reply if I like. No need to dismiss every one of those. I do get that many People live in constant fear to miss something so perhaps that’s why this need arrises. Still don’t see why it’s better to miss stuff on the tablet than on the phone.
I’ll have to give you side by side Apps, although they don’t make much sense on small Displays (like on a phone). As for gestures – you have them in many cases on WP where they make sense. In others you don’t. I have used Win8 since the Previews on an Asus EP121 tablet and on my X1 Carbon Touch since January and it’s rather annoying to have so much functionality hidden behind gestures that is easily available from the App Bar in WP. I used WP since WP7 btw.
There of course are things that Win 8 does better – allowing to Close Apps easily for example. But many of the things that People don’t like on WP are just the same on Win8.
2 days ago on I dont care about Windows Phone 8. Windows 8 is what is still keeping me with MS. 1 reply 1 recommend
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A bug is something that is not working as designed. Not having separate volumes is not a bug but by design. If that is a good decission is another matter altogether.
What I don’t get is that you have a Problem with Toast notifications not being persisted to some notification Center on WP8 but have no Problem with it being exactlly the same on Windows 8. You have the Live Tiles for this and that’s it. Seems Microsoft will Change that wie WP8.1 but we’ll see.
So basically everything that annoys you on WP8 is the same on Win8 but on one it annoys you on one but not on the other.
2 days ago on I dont care about Windows Phone 8. Windows 8 is what is still keeping me with MS. 2 replies 1 recommend
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Yes and no – Devs on consoles generally rely on the Features of the GPU used in the console being there. So they most likely won’t implement Feature checks which in many cases will lead to Problems. Shouldn’t be a Problem with most recent Hardware but again might be a reason why it will take some time before we see any such results.
3 days ago on can xbox one games run on windows? 1 recommend
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The number in the link is an ID, not a Count. That aside: quite a lot of People don’t go through the whole list before entering a request so there are lots of requests in there several times.
As for Microsoft implementing suggestions that are on this list. Several actually have been closed with WP7.5 Mango and with WP8 Apollo. Especially language requests have seen many changes although the list also contains lots of open requests for additional language Support for speech recognition(and I guess it will remain that way for quite some time).
What is true, is that Microsoft is not going through this list from “most requested” to “least requested” and implementing it but rather is used in internal discussions on how to prioritize certain Tasks.
3 days ago on The Windows Phone features request list now is at 101801 items!! 1 recommend
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It’s more of a high bandwidth/high latency vs. low bandwidth/low latency discussion. We’d have to see Benchmarks to really know how much of a Performance hit the One takes due to lower bandwidth and how much of that is Offset by the eSRAM (and we don’t know how that is being utilized yet).
As for the virtualization – in most circumstances you won’t notice much of a difference given that the code actually does execute just the same on the underlying Hardware with only certain calls being intercepted (which is in newer Hardware done in Hardware as well). The biggest Problem historically has been virtualizing the graphics Pipeline but given that this time the whole OS is designed to run in that Environment the hit on Performance will not be that big.
The more interesting part of Kinect in “regular” games might be it’s ability to measure anxiety Levels in Players (pulse, facial Expression) and making the game react to that.
4 days ago on What is a next-gen game? 4 recommends
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It’s rather simple:
- you shed 40 g of weight
- you lose wireless charging (don’t know if you use it) and 16 GB of storageAt least for me that is not worth spending money again.
4 days ago on Worth it to go from the Lumia 920 to the Lumia 925? 1 recommend
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I’m in Austria as well and I can tell you that it is not Region specific but rather due to the privacy Settings of your friends. Given all those “click now here and there and disable this and that campaigns” following privacy Settings changes lots of People have restricted Access of Apps to their data and that is what is leading to Problems here.
Basically: you’ll have those same Problems with anything that isn’t the Website or the official Facebook App.
4 days ago on Facebook integration outside of the US 1 reply
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Would still only be a Software issue. Wether you use the Ethernet channel or real Ethernet should not be that much of a difference. But I don’t see the big benefit either – well maybe due to me owning a PS3.
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Most Devs have not been able to test on ARM prior to the Windows RT launch and still were able to develop for it. On WinRT it’s simply another compile target. Lots of WP and WinRT Apps are written in C# which by design is hardware plattform independent. Therefore I don’t see any reason why they would have to limit themselves to HTML5/JS (especially as most of the Apps on Win8 are NOT written using those tools).
5 days ago on The Xbox One needs a hat trick. It Needs to be at Build.
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Will be an interesting comparison. When maximum zoom is what you go for than the Eos won’t be able to compete with the S4 Zoom. Zoomed out I’d hazzard the guess that the Eos will yield superior results due to the PureView oversampling and the huge sensor.
From a practical standpoint the S4 Zoom will be a lot bigger than the Eos, as it’s a point and shoot Camera with a bolted on phone.
5 days ago on How many of you are buying Nokia EOS 41 Megapixel Lumia 1 recommend
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A $600 phone will never be able to compete with a $3000 DSLR. But as shown with the 808 already it will be able to compete with a $300 – $400 compact camera which is what it really is aimed at.
5 days ago on How many of you are buying Nokia EOS 41 Megapixel Lumia 1 recommend
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Most Nokia WP8 devices will get the glance clock and Double Tap to Wake so I’d take it for granted that it will be there on the Eos. As for the overall thickness – I’m not really sure about that. The connector on the back has only two pins so it might not be for the wireless charging (so far always had 3 pins) but instead for something else – although I would not know for what.
If wireless charging isn’t an attachment but built in it might weigh rather in line with the 928 than the 925.
5 days ago on How many of you are buying Nokia EOS 41 Megapixel Lumia 1 recommend
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Nokia was on the down turn even before they switched to WP. You take a point in time to define how they would have done after that which simply isn’t a valid assumption.
As for the money: Nokia right now is selling enough WP devices that even after deducting the 250 Mio / quarter in plattform support payments they still need to purchase additional licenses with their own money. So yes, at some point in time Microsoft will earn that money back. However Nokia in turn gets those licenses and don’t have to pay for the development and maintenance of the system software. They also don’t have to adapt that software in a major way to run on a certain SoC like they would have to with Android (also they would have to pay Microsoft for patent licenses which they currently have as part of the WP license).
5 days ago on Why it isn't Microsoft holding back Nokia 1 reply 2 recommends
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They would not have had to jailbreak the OS to do anything. As Elop has said: they basically have the power to touch every part of the system and change it. Also they are heavily involved in defining the feature set available in future devices.
- SMS quick reply feature in GDR1 – likely to be a Nokia request
- Ability to set a Camera Lens as default Camera App in GDR2 – certain to be a Nokia requestetc.
5 days ago on Why it isn't Microsoft holding back Nokia 1 recommend
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Ice Cream Sandwich released in October 2011
Jelly Bean released in July 2012 and was updated (4.2) in November 2012While 4.0 was a rather big update the additions with the two Jelly Bean updates have been far from the same magnitude (especially 4.2 was rather limited in scope). It’s currently likely that we’ll see fall 2013 without another major Android version. Aside from that a huge part of the devices haven’t been upgraded to the newest version yet (they are sometimes even released with old software 6 months after it has become available).
It’s similar with Apple – there is one version of iOS every year. The major WP updates seem to be rather at the same speed as the competition and compared to Android actually are arriving on devices that support it instead of taking half a year or more.
WP8 indeed did not change the UI in a major way but it did add a lot of options that Apps are now able to hook into (Lock Screen integration of Apps, Camera features, NFC, App-to-App communication, FileType associations, native code support, extended Live Tile functionality). Arguably lots of those have been available on other platforms before but all in all there were quite many important changes in WP8.
As for the App-situation – WP is not quite there yet but WP8 has given it a rather big boost – especially on the gaming side of things. It was rather unfortunate that it took quite some time after the release of WP8 for cross platform gaming engines like Unity to become finished but since they are there has been a lot happening in that regard.
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Nokia’s strategy pre-Elop was to keep Symbian alive until they could transition over to Maemo/MeeGo. They had a plan to write Apps compatible with both of those with Qt. Given the year long delays and the decline in the high end area Elop decided to axe the project and go with another mobile OS (basically he didn’t believe that MeeGo could develop fast enough to compete and that they’d likely not have enough developer support to do it on their own).
So they got into talks with both Microsoft and Google. In the end Microsoft seems to have given them the better deal so they went with them. I’d guess that Google was neither willing to invest money in that deal nor that they would have been able to leverage their mapping assets (WPs mapping technology on all devices (HTC, Samsung, etc.) is powered by Nokia’s data and engine so they are definitely getting license payments from those devices as well).
Another thing you should not forget is that Android itself does not support all those SoCs. Samsung is building support for the SoCs they use themselves, as do the other manufacturers. Therefore it would have been likely that this necessary system level customization would have led again to the delays that Nokia had become known for in the years prior to Elop.
