Remember all the Cloud functionality that Respawn Entertainment hyped up for Titanfall? With the game having been released, there’ve been criticism that the Xbox Live Compute function is actually non-existent. Engineer Jon Shiring refuted those claims in a podcast session with Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb.
“There’s a lot of things we’re doing in [Titanfall] that’s really different from how any other game has done it before. In sort of the traditional model of dedicated servers is you go to your server and that is your home base and you love it.
“One of the key things that is interesting about the Xbox Live Compute that runs on Azure is that they’ve commodotised servers so much, that we just don’t care. I can ask for a server, use it for 10 seconds, and then go like, ‘ah we don’t need it anymore’ and throw it out.
“We bounce people around server to server, and so you’re hitting a lot of different servers and that let’s us do cool things. But it completely upends the old model of like, ‘I’m going to find my server and stay there forever’.
“And so there’s been a lot of interesting changes because of that idea that’s gone through everything from matchmaking and skill and how we do the training in the beginning of the game and all these things that are – no one’s really tried before and kind of left everyone scratching their heads for a while when we were figuring out how we were going to do it. But it was really interesting to me.
“And I know that the internet is very sceptical that this is real. Hopefully less so now that Titanfall is out and they realize that they really are playing on these servers out there.”
Shiring repeated the points that Respawn revealed about just what the Cloud functionality is capable of. It allows Titanfall to “go crazy and do things like throw AI in multiplayer and have these ships flying around the world and all these things that in a peer-to-peer hosted game – I know this is a little technical, but in a peer-to-peer hosted game, the bandwidth isn’t there.
“You’re not going to find all these home consoles that have the amount of CPU and bandwidth you need to be broadcasting that there’s 400 things moving this frame. It just melts down everything that is there. So once we can just tell the designers, ‘yeah don’t worry about it, just spawn that thing and make it move. It’s fine.’”
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