One feature that Microsoft did not went into great detail during yesterday’s Windows 10 event was cloud gaming. Microsoft have been pushing the cloud ever since the launch of Xbox One and the lack of a demonstration at the event was a bit disappointing, especially after the promising demo shown at last year’s Build event.

However it seems that Microsoft are not yet ready with the technology as they are currently hiring a software engineer, according to a job listing on Microsoft’s official careers website. The company is looking to “create cutting edge titles for Microsoft platforms” and the candidate needs to have expertise in “cloud compute, and game/service interactions” to achieve the same.

It’s interesting to note that this is simply not limited to Xbox One as the company plans to make it available across Xbox Live, Kinect, Xbox 360, Windows and even future products (Windows 10, may be) as well.  Hopefully Microsoft will showcase more on cloud gaming during GDC in March.

Microsoft have been at the forefront of cloud gaming and even though nothing has been practically implemented, they have showcased their technology and have stated in the past that several effects can be improved in their games. In our conversation with Geomerics founder Chris Doran, GamingBolt asked whether this is a viable solution in the future and will Enlighten, their lighting middleware will use it anyway.

“Cloud is obviously going to be a key component of gaming in PS4 and Xbox One. Both Sony and Microsoft have made it clear that the user experience is much better if your device is always connected. Things like background downloading of game updates are a big improvement on the user experience. We will also see games where the game world becomes so large that it can only be stored in the cloud, with parts of the world streamed down,” he said.

“There is also plenty that Enlighten can use the cloud for, particularly for user-generated content. Aspects of a game developers lighting pipeline can be easily moved into the cloud, opening up the possibility of exposing the pipeline to the player through their console. This is not straightforward, but is being actively researched,” he added.

Stay tuned for our full interview with Chris Doran next week. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Just before the new generation of consoles began, Microsoft have been pushing the so called power of the cloud for the Xbox One. A few months ago, Microsoft showcased their Xbox One cloud technology indicating that the new gizmo indeed has the potential to ramp up the physics and save processing power. In our interview with David Miles, CTO of BabelFlux LLC which created Navpower, we asked whether this could probably be used for improving the AI in the company’s  pathfinding package.

“That’s definitely something that we’ve considered. Although the new console machines have a lot of memory and CPU horsepower compared to previous generations of consoles, most of those resources are continuously in use rendering and simulating the world. Being able to leverage cloud resources would let you temporarily run processes which might consume a lot more memory or a lot more CPU,” he said to GamingBolt.

He also revealed that one of their clients is already using the cloud to build worlds. “For example, we already have clients who are using the NavPower build process on PC games, both locally on the client machine and on MMO server machines to dynamically rebuild sections of the world. Of course you can do that directly on consoles and we’ve had people do that in more limited situations but by leveraging the resources available on the cloud you could do that for a much larger section of the world.”

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments section below.

Microsoft have been hyping up the so called power of the cloud for some time now but besides the one technical demo we haven’t actually seen anything that may indicate its use in a practical set up. However, in a blue print released by Microsoft, the Redmond based company has revealed how the cloud enables massive multiplayer games.

The example used in the blue print is Wordament and shows how at the end of each round, players are ranked. The system then outputs a list of optimized results which includes best words, best of the hour, best of the day and best of the week.

The blue print also explains how the cloud can be used to collect all the game scores from different players in a Game Room and how the system stores that data into Azure SQL servers. Obviously, the user needs to be authenticated via the Xbox or Facebook account for this to happen. Much of this is technical jargon but can be easily followed by opening the image above in a new tab.

You can download the blue print PDF here. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Xbox One cloud has been subject to much controversy with Microsoft hyping it up in the past and simply not talking about it at their press conference during last week’s E3. Microsoft have promised that using the cloud they can offload intense operations and free up the CPU to work on other processes.

GamingBolt recently got in touch with Joe van den Heuvel from Cloakworks. The company specializes in easy creation of high-performance cloth simulation and their technology has been used in games like the recently released Thief. The technology is based on CPU, so will the Xbox One cloud help improve their cloth simulation technology in the long run?

“Certainly!  The limiting factor with cloud computing for gaming has always been latency; with too much lag between the user’s actions and the results on screen, the result is a frustrating experience for the user.  So for situations where there is no or limited user interaction during the physics simulation offloading the processing to the cloud and cranking the quality is a viable option,” Joe  explained to GamingBolt.

“But in platforms like the Xbox One where part of the processing is local and part is in the cloud, the most responsive actions will be the ones calculated locally.  So the motions of the player’s character, and how the cloth reacts to them, will likely remain something that is calculated locally for a while,” he continued.

It’s indeed true that the average internet speeds are still below than what is required by cloud for enjoyable user experience, so Joe makes a pretty valid point.

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments section below. Stay tuned for more coverage on Cloakworks.

When Microsoft showcased the so called power of the cloud at the recent Microsoft Build event, many were taken aback by the potential of this technology. After all Microsoft has claimed that the cloud could make the Xbox One 32 times more powerful than it already is. But is that really the case? GamingBolt spoke to Persistant Studios’ CEO Camille Mirey to find out.

Persistant are working on PopcornFX, a middleware tool that focuses on 3D real time particles in video games. The middleware is being used AAA titles like Black Desert and is currently available for PC, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PS3. PopcornFX is mostly dependent on the CPU for compute power and since the cloud promises more compute power, this should ideally enhance particle effects. But Camille believes that the technology is still a few good years away to realize its full potential.

“This question is a bit hard to answer! Probably in the future, if connections really allow for computation offloading to servers or if full streaming becomes a widespread solution (unlikely in the upcoming years due to latency of current infrastructures). Even with ever-increasing compute power, our challenge is to get the best of any hardware with tailored optimizations!,” Camille explained to GamingBolt.

Given that Microsoft has been pushing the cloud on the Xbox One for some time, it’s high time that they show us a practical demonstration of the power of cloud running in real time on the Xbox One. May be the upcoming E3 will have some answers.

This is just a snippet of our interview with Persistant Studios and we will have more in the coming days.