Crackdown 3 is the first game so far this generation where we might see Microsoft’s original promise for ‘the power of the cloud’ realized. The game will be using Cloudgine’s cloud technology to offload processing strain to a server farm, and will be able to lead to larger, more dynamic game worlds than would ever be possible via pure local processing- no matter how powerful the machine in question was.
GamingBolt had an interview with Cloudgine’s Maurizio Sciglio. Sciglio is the CEO and co-founder of the corporation, and truly believes that cloud processing will be the future of video gaming.
“We believe, in the not-too-distant future, the core games that aren’t cloud-assisted will be in the minority,” he said.“It’s true that developing with distributed computing paradigms is complex and requires skills not commonly found within the games industry — but we started Cloudgine with the specific goal of making the transition as smooth as possible. We are achieving this by cloud-enabling well-known and understood game engines and middleware solutions such as Unreal Engine 4, Havok Physics and Nvidia PhysX to work in a distributed environment with no additional effort for the developers. They can keep using the development environment they are already familiar with, and our cloud platform transparently takes care of all the intricacies of distributed programming.”
Cloudgine started as a project to facilitate this transition to cloud computing, with the aim of demonstrating a game experience truly unlike anything that local client computing could replicate.
“Cloudgine began as a project we started in early 2013,” Sciglio said.“After a long research phase on the state-of-the-art in distributed computing, we set an ambitious goal: create a development platform, based on grid computing paradigms, capable of delivering a virtually unlimited amount of compute power to craft game experiences never seen before. From the initial reaction to the Crackdown 3 demo at Gamescom, I’d say we may be on the right track.”
Certainly, Crackdown 3’s cloud powered multiplayer looks incredible and impressive beyond belief- and if it can work in real work conditions as well as it has been demonstrated, then the cloud powered future may indeed be closer than we think.
