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.”
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