Complete and utter destruction was the target set by Cloudgine and Reagent Games as they set about re-energising the Crackdown licence with Microsoft, but what this has spawned has the potential to change Xbox One games forever. That may seem like a bold statement, but actually what it’s really delivering is the full promise of the console Microsoft intended to launch in 2013, when the world of gaming turned against it over DRM and always-online functionality. This is the game that could take the Xbox One back to being a digital gaming powerhouse. A games console for the online age, using the full resources of the web to future-proof itself.
And it all started so very simply, building on the sandbox freedom and interactivity the series has already established. “We said if we want to do a true Crackdown 3 multiplayer, we really wanted to move that physicality into the online space,” says Dave Jones, original creator of Crackdown, GTA, APB and now president and co-founder of Cloudgine.
“We started off with a high bar of saying, ‘What if for the first time ever we could make the whole world in which you play fully destructible?’. That was what our goal was, because again it was all about this physicality and it begs simple questions, like why in a game can I not just shoot a wall with my bullets and that wall, rather than just having a texture decal stuck on it, why don’t my bullets just go through the wall? And if I want to shoot a bigger hole, why can’t I step through that hole? So it was about breaking down walls in videogames.”
At this point it all sounds promising, but hardly groundbreaking. Battlefield has been doing this for years, hasn’t it? Rainbow Six: Siege appears to be doing something similar. Except, there’s a twist in the form of cloud processing, which changes the potential for scale completely. Crackdown will not be limited to the 8-core CPU or 1.31 teraflops of graphics processing inside the Xbox One’s ample frame. This game will be drawing from Microsoft’s intimidating Azure Cloud server network, an interconnected web of server farms spread across the globe offering cloud computing services for companies, office applications and increasingly games. 2014’s Titanfall already felt the benefit of running on the Microsoft Azure server network and its 27 data centres around the world. It just needed to reach out to the nearest server cluster and find some space to host a clean, strong connection. It worked a treat.
“Unlike other games, this wall has compute power and memory on demand,” reveals Jones as he demonstrates how destructible Crackdown 3 is in a tech demo. “Each single bullet will take away a little bit of the geometry. And everything is physical. In true Crackdown style if I want to be at the top of a building, any building, and create a little sniper nest and shoot my friends from there so they can hardly see me, then that’s pretty exciting. That’s the kind of thing we can do.” And if you wanted to shoot a metal railing off the side of a building and then wield it, swinging it at the heads of gang members, that’s just fine too.
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Chances are you’ve seen some of the more bombastic responses to the latest Crackdown 3 tech demonstrations with claims of 13 times the power of the Xbox One being harnessed for the game. The reality is a more modest than that, but no less impressive. “It’s not the whole performance of the box, it’s just how much we would normally use in terms of physics,” clarifies Jones. What Microsoft Azure really gives Cloudgine access to then is (at present) 13 times the physics computing power of what the Xbox One would typically reserve for such data. Not as sexy, but theoretically that could just be the beginning of what this extra processing potential brings to Xbox One.
“Typical multiplayer games run on a server and if you’re lucky you get one server for your game, but most servers actually share games,” Jones explains as he switches to a debug mode on the demo to show us how the different servers interact with the online game world. “What you see here is that all the different colours are actually different cloud servers. So the cyan and the green are actually on physically different servers. We can just start to add servers and expand the world and make sure everything is at this level of detail. The system is so smart that you’ll see cyan blocks, as they cross physical server boundaries, change colour, as they move across servers.”
So, as you begin to destroy a 30-storey building, one server might be handling the debris and calculating impact while another server picks up the calculations for how this incoming impact will affect the glass tower that stands next to it. And all with no frame-rate drop. “You’ll see everything is physical, there’s cascade damage, everything hits everything else,” Jones continues. “The more damage we start to do, we’ll start to use more and more power. Let’s say we do enough damage to this tower on the right that if we keep shooting the base here eventually that should fall down, exactly as players, I think, would want it to work and expect to happen.
“So the whole thing will fall and everything on it is physical, it will hit the ground, it will damage things farther away, etc. Even when it’s on the ground it’s fully physical; you can stand on it and climb up.” And as we watch the devastation crank up we can see, thanks to a neat debug HUD option, how much additional processing power is being brought to bear. The bar for the Xbox One is full pretty quickly, and each additional bar represents an equal amount of processing from the cloud. One by one, more bars appear on the screen as the debris falls and scatters, destroying and taking chunks off other buildings.
http://www.nowgamer.com/the-game-that-c ... e-forever/ 