I am very curious about the use of a stripped down VM manager that creates and destroys multiple OSes.
"One of the machine’s operating systems boots up and is “created” when the machine turns on, Multerer said. Then it stays operating while the machine is on, and then disappears when the machine is turned off."
"There’s a third operating system as well that handles other kinds of services, such as the TV services. Switching between these operating systems quickly gives the system its instantaneous feel, Multerer said."
It isn't immediately obvious to me why we would want to use multiple operating systems? Is this a kind of super strong separation of processes? Why aren't standard processes sufficient? Is it done for reliability?
I am not criticising, I am just confused and this indicates that there are concerns here that I am not familiar with. Anyone with any insights?
I think it's so that the Game VM can stay constant, and game developers can develop for that for the next ~6 years knowing each XBox will have exactly the same behaviour, whereas the third one for TV services and internet can be continually upgraded and updated, without affecting the game one.
So it seems as though there is basically a Hypervisor OS and two Virtual Machines. One for TV and one for Gaming. Given that TV and Gaming have vastly different resource requirements and use cases it isn't surprising that you would optimise for each use case.
Also it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft in the future releases a cheap AppleTV competitor with just the TV VM and a cheap gaming only XBox with just the Gaming VM.
I think its well known that Microsoft are working on the former, a non-gaming Xbox (save for casual games perhaps), primarily designed for films, TV and music. Unfortunately I can't go digging for sources now, and a cursory search is swamped by results of this new announcement
From technical standpoint I'd guess that separating the game and "everything else" to different OSs allows tighter control of resources, ensuring that games run with consistent performance. It might not be completely unlike the approach taken by RTLinux <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux>;
Maybe it separates the development teams in a way that they didn't have to rely on the whole potato being literally integrated. Microsoft, like many huge companies, is known to be hyper territorial. With the computational resources available, this might have been both a pragmatic and easy choice. Each group perhaps wouldn't have to be so careful about crashing the rest of the system, and it might make it easier to develop and update each segment individually.
This might also make it easier to rip pieces off later, or add large pieces later, without needing to do a comprehensive integration across the Xbox One system, while keeping everything in its own sandbox.
"There isn't enough silicon on the box", "We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box", "The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering".
So, will it need always online? In that case, here is a console I will never buy.
Cloud doing any of these things is bonkers. The cloud is good at things like running Xbox live, making my profile available anywhere, saving my games. Using the internet, let me emphasis this, the transient, unreliable communication system that is the internet to deliver pivotal game deterministic results in nano seconds is unfeasible and unworkable.
Think of it this way: if the low-millisecond latency internet is good enough for multiplayer FPSs, i.e. exchange of player/missile coordinates, then why not use it for other aspects of game data too?
The article may have been a bit fuzzy in its discussion in general, but I believe it communicated clearly enough that gfx are on the GPU and longer latency stuff such as AI (which is _not_ computed in nanoseconds, nor does it need to be completely deterministic) can be done via external network interface.
Cloud AI has all kinds of other advantages, too, such as dynamically scaling difficulty, which we already see examples of in Starcraft 2...
Without wishing to flame, it's based on 12 years of professional experience working in the games industry. I could lend reason to AI, however I stand by my comment with regards to rendering and physics.
Not to put down your considerable experience but Microsoft is the largest software company on the planet - if anyone can do it then it would be them.
OnLive, despite failing, was not dissimilar to "cloud rendered graphics" and it worked. Lots of things people thought impossible 10 years ago are now commonplace.
So they're basically saying the same things that EA said for Sim City, and which, for Sim City, turned out to be a sack of lies (almost none of the game logic runs on EAs servers and it'd be entirely pointless if it did because SC requires a beefy machine anyway). OnLive, on the other hand, has been doing it properly for a while now, with some, but less than stellar success. Microsoft is in a much better position to deliver on the premise than either of these, but I remain unconvinced.
The basic question is, is it more efficient and overall cheaper to have #(max. concurrent clients) times the hardware running in a hosted (remote) environment than having #(all clients) times the hardware running locally. Clearly #(max. concurrent clients) is much lower than #(all clients). MS, as the owner of the platform is in a pretty good position of balancing between thin and thick client and forcing developers to work within this model, ie. making the client thin (read: cheap) enough that critical calculations need to be done on the server but thick enough to run some latency critical stuff and probably some of the rendering on the client.
If my SimCity simulation needs more than a quad i7 to simulate, how many high-CPU instances is that? How many to handle every connected user? Even EA's current SimCity instances on EC2 can't handle basic save operations.
No, according to an interview with the president of Xbox Live only internet specific features like smartGlass will need a connection, some games that use such features may optionally require a connection[1]
This could be for multiplayer though. It's been a while since I've had xbox live, but when I used to play Perfect Dark Zero, there was always a host. The host often had an advantage due to latency. Perhaps with Xbox live's increased computing power, more of this can be moved in to the cloud?
Well what percentage of the target market is that going to be? And when are they planning to make it a mandatory requirement for things.
Given that at the moment it appears to be related to things such as voice + facial recognition and processing (which frankly I would want to see the privacy policy around) that's fine. No internet, means I have to press a button rather than yell. OK with that.
If its offloading games physics and AI when playing, well that's fine if its optional. I appreciate that certain kinds of ANNs distribute really well on server farms, in a way that makes sense. But so long as its optional.
However I think it is only a few years before we look back and laugh at the idea of not having internet access available. At least I hope we will.
No, you're getting it wrong. It's not a matter of availability (although that is still a problem in certain areas). I just don't want my console to need connection if I don't play online, because it shouldn't need it, because it's a waste of bandwith, because it means that the software I buy may become unusable (or change their behaviour, i.e. not allowing cheating for fun in single player; or requiring some kind of game registration that hinders second hand games) via mandatory updates, and because it doesn't guarantee that the box is not being used as a surveillance machine for advertising companies.
I agree with you but I doubt very much that Microsoft does. Requiring it to have a persistent connection and offloading core parts of the game to the cloud is going to be delightful for their DRM team.
On the PC platform we've definitely seen it. Counter Strike been the obvious one.
But there is a different culture around PC and Console. Console has always had DRM, PCs drifted along with CD-Keys that limited online play, then Steam came along, which /r/gaming appears to fawn over, yet deride any similar change in DRM on the consoles.
As it stands, I think the PS3/Xbox360 are less restrictive because of their DRM than PC gamers who have to use Steam or Origin. The publishers needed a mechanism to stop what was told as rampant piracy. Steam filled that void.
Now consoles are moving more in that direction people are treating it as if its universally bad. It doesn't have to be. So long as it isn't a case of always internet, always on, from day one, I don't think it will be.
I remember people banging on about SmartClients less than 10 years ago. These were apps which would sync when the internet became available and gracefully handle the disconnection. Ironically Outlook was often the example. Nowadays most devs don't bother with that because there isn't the demand and its not worth the increased development and maintenance costs. I wanted some flowcharting software the other day, the first 3 hits were all online cloudy hosted type things. This is the way things are going, there are benefits, its not all bad!
I don't believe a single thing in this article. From start to finish it lists 'cool sounding' but mindless engineering or software choices. A virtual machine to run games so you can do two things at once? Moving rendering tasks to 'cloud tasks' on the GPU?
I'll believe it in a couple of years when someone finds jtag headers on the board.
Killing off XNA showed a huge support and commitment for the indie scene. Also the non existing homebrew scene showed how much exactly MS value the enthusiasts.
Don't even bother; you're replying to astroturfers. Microsoft pays people to browse HN and reddit so they can do PR damage control. Today is a very very busy day for them considering the public's negative reaction to the XBox One launch.
I personally know 4 students that were focusing 100% on XNA development; They're now scrambling to learn SDL and OpenGL ES after being burned by Microsoft. Seems the only developer embracing indies is Valve, and they're going to be the only ones focusing on that blue ocean this generation.
XNA was out dated and there are a lot of better options out there norm I used XNA for 2+ years but it wasn't worth keeping around any more. Plus, considering I just reinstalled 4.0 refresh last night, it does still work.
That's one thing I've noticed about Microsoft services: they're always down. Outlook.com was down for several days as I was trying to merge my GMail to Outlook. Xbox.com is seemingly always slow and frequently gives me page not found errors. The marketplace and Xbox Music Pass are down a lot more often than they should be. Technet is a nightmare.
Why does it seem like Microsoft has such a hard time keeping their servers running? Then the next question that comes to mind is why do they still have cloud customers? I mean, I'm one of them; I use Xbox Music Pass and Technet and Xbox Live and Outlook.com but I can't answer the question as to why. Why do people put up with it?
Looking it up post mortem it doesn't appear that it was several days, but it sure felt like it at the time. It was over 12 hours. There were significant outages on March 12th-13th [1], Feb 25th [2], and Feb 1st [3].
Thank you for providing the sources. Looks like you were right (except the few days part). It only affect a subset of users which explains why it went unnoticed for me. May have been related to the transition of Hotmail accounts but regardless if it keeps happening on a regular basis, I may have to find another provider.
"One of the machine’s operating systems boots up and is “created” when the machine turns on, Multerer said. Then it stays operating while the machine is on, and then disappears when the machine is turned off."
"There’s a third operating system as well that handles other kinds of services, such as the TV services. Switching between these operating systems quickly gives the system its instantaneous feel, Multerer said."
It isn't immediately obvious to me why we would want to use multiple operating systems? Is this a kind of super strong separation of processes? Why aren't standard processes sufficient? Is it done for reliability?
I am not criticising, I am just confused and this indicates that there are concerns here that I am not familiar with. Anyone with any insights?