10 ms·

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

79 points by jamesdco 5y ago

charles_f 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jquery 5y 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.
  - stuu99 5y ago
  - charles_f 5y 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.
phor 5y ago
It feels like this was part of what Stadia promised, but never came to fruition.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  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 5y 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 5y 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)
  - invalidusernam3 5y 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
  - silisili 5y 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.
    - ChicagoBoy11 5y 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. Oof this rings so true. I hear it SO OFTEN about Google, and I can't imagine that this kind of reputation doesn't hurt their ability to get folks to choose to build services/buy-in to their offerings. Are they just at a scale such that they genuinely don't care about concerns like this?
      - silisili 5y ago
        I honestly don't think it's purposeful dishonesty, just complete disconnection between groups and/or employees and management. I've always said it feels like Google is a company where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. So the Stadia team probably has zero indication their product is dead until the day of.
dividuum 5y 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?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- EMM_386 5y 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 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi...
  - sidewndr46 5y 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?
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      If I understand that announcement correctly, most of the performance benefit comes from cutting down the number of kernel-to-userspace transitions, similar to userspace networking on Linux. Another possibility is that DirectStorage requires use of raw NVMe devices or at least raw partitions to achieve top performance... basically cutting out the NTFS filesystem too from the code path. NTFS is extremely old and complex to implement, meaning that a "tiny" file system e.g. without journalling, permissions, ACLs and the likes makes more sense.
      - 5y ago
DethNinja 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking, they can just use spare Azure capacity.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      The only problem is you need powerful machines with GPUs which will only be a small subset of spare capacity.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- MikusR 5y ago
  Microsoft is using Xbox Series X. Nvidia is using their own GPUs.
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    Here's what the Xbox cloud hardware looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4Xqy8kG4&t=18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4Xqy8kG4&t=18s
willcipriano 5y 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 5y 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-crackdown-3-wrecking-zone-what-happened-to-the-power-of-the-cloud 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.
endisneigh 5y 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.
Urinal_Pube 5y ago
intrasight 5y ago
I've of the opinion that this is the future of gaming. Hard stuff will be done on cloud GPUs.

79 points by jamesdco 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jquery 5y 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.
- stuu99 5y ago
- charles_f 5y 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.

phor 5y ago

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

encryptluks2 5y ago
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 5y 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 5y 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)
- invalidusernam3 5y 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
- silisili 5y 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.
  - ChicagoBoy11 5y 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. Oof this rings so true. I hear it SO OFTEN about Google, and I can't imagine that this kind of reputation doesn't hurt their ability to get folks to choose to build services/buy-in to their offerings. Are they just at a scale such that they genuinely don't care about concerns like this?
    - silisili 5y ago
      I honestly don't think it's purposeful dishonesty, just complete disconnection between groups and/or employees and management. I've always said it feels like Google is a company where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. So the Stadia team probably has zero indication their product is dead until the day of.

dividuum 5y 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?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
EMM_386 5y 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 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi...
- sidewndr46 5y 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?
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    If I understand that announcement correctly, most of the performance benefit comes from cutting down the number of kernel-to-userspace transitions, similar to userspace networking on Linux. Another possibility is that DirectStorage requires use of raw NVMe devices or at least raw partitions to achieve top performance... basically cutting out the NTFS filesystem too from the code path. NTFS is extremely old and complex to implement, meaning that a "tiny" file system e.g. without journalling, permissions, ACLs and the likes makes more sense.
    - 5y ago

DethNinja 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking, they can just use spare Azure capacity.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    The only problem is you need powerful machines with GPUs which will only be a small subset of spare capacity.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
MikusR 5y ago
Microsoft is using Xbox Series X. Nvidia is using their own GPUs.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  Here's what the Xbox cloud hardware looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4Xqy8kG4&t=18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4Xqy8kG4&t=18s

willcipriano 5y 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 5y 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-crackdown-3-wrecking-zone-what-happened-to-the-power-of-the-cloud 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.

endisneigh 5y 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.

Urinal_Pube 5y ago

intrasight 5y ago

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