Titanfall is a new hit game for Xbox One. It was released by Electronic Arts and is scheduled for release in March 2014. Titanfall is a first-person shooter that has hosted much of its artificial intelligence service, physical computing, online matchmaking, and standalone multiplayer servers in Windows Azure. This means several things:
Azure IaaS provides dedicated servers for near-infinite bandwidth multiplayer with low server benches and anti-scam Windows Azure: Changing the PaaS Online Gaming Landscape
Azure aaS is used to produce physics calculations and special artificial intelligence to learn your style of play
PaaS and dedicated servers are automatically scaled to quickly make dynamic content work on a flat scale for players around the world
Multiplayer infrastructure background
Traditionally, multiplayer games are played using a client / server paradigm. This paradigm usually involves a computer running a separate server for the game. This dedicated server accepts connections from a certain number of players and receives communication between clients / players. The server does not usually perform game-related calculations, but it acts as a central repository where players send update information, which is then shared and consumed by each client.
Recently, the game development community has moved from a separate server model and replaced it with a player-host model due to ownership costs. A player’s host model essentially means that one player hosts the game and all the other players connect to the host. This new paradigm has several drawbacks to network multiplayer, but was introduced to save the use of dedicated servers as game hosts.
This is how Azure solves this
A quick reaction game is a reliance on cloud infrastructure. Video games usually run in a continuous loop created by the game engine to update all game information (artificial intelligence, particles, physics, player movements, event management, etc.) repeatedly and to draw this information on the screen. A considerable amount of CPU and graphics card power is required to compute and reproduce all objects at the necessary speeds to reach the target of 60 frames per second. Second.
Titanfall’s developer, Respawn Entertainment, uses Azure PaaS to handle several expensive calculations, usually performed by a local host (console or computer). These calculations are usually performed by the local host to minimize delays for the player. Because these calculations are downloaded to the cloud and do not affect the game, developers can customize the Xbox One hardware to handle more graphically intensive environments. This strategy could also extend the life of your Xbox One in the future.
Cloud services like Azure have ensured that dedicated servers are financial again. Thanks to automatic server scaling and incredibly low virtual machine costs, server costs and total uptime are significantly reduced. The more calculations you perform in the cloud, the more you can work with the available hardware. Another way to look at this is that the more computations you can do in the cloud, it will have a huge impact on the starting point of other hardware platforms. If a developer can handle 90% of the heavy computing in an Azure data cluster, the hardware needed to run the game can be anything from a tablet to a workstation. This has the ability to significantly increase the installation base.
Games are real-time applications that depend on milliseconds and timing. Azure efficiently performs real-time application calculations and delivers results to multiple parties simultaneously. If Titanfall’s release goes well, you can expect hundreds of upcoming Xbox One games to use Windows Azure to make the cloud (and Azure) the dominant force in multiplayer for years to come.
