Cloudgine’s Maurizio Sciglio had an interview with Gamingbolt recently where they discussed the future of their service. Since Gamescom, where Microsoft showed off the amazing demo for Crackdown 3, people have been warming up to the idea of Cloud assisted gaming.
Cloudgine is a service which allows game developers to offload CPU or GPU intensive tasks to their server farms or Microsoft Azure, which then gives them near unlimited amounts of processing power. This can in turn be used to run AI tasks, Baked Dynamic Lighting etc. Games like Titanfall, Forza and the upcoming blockbuster Halo 5: Guardians all use the cloud for some of these tasks, and with Cloudgine the future looks bright.
“We believe, in the not-too-distant future, the core games that aren’t cloud-assisted will be in the minority,” he said.“It’s true that developing with distributed computing paradigms is complex and requires skills not commonly found within the games industry — but we started Cloudgine with the specific goal of making the transition as smooth as possible. We are achieving this by cloud-enabling well-known and understood game engines and middleware solutions such as Unreal Engine 4, Havok Physics and Nvidia PhysX to work in a distributed environment with no additional effort for the developers. They can keep using the development environment they are already familiar with, and our cloud platform transparently takes care of all the intricacies of distributed programming.”
Microsoft also purchased Havok, which they will use to integrate into systems like Cloudgine. This will force the gaming industry forward, as Havok is currently the most popular physics engine. Although some hurdles still remain, the future looks quite bright for gaming in general, where you won’t be limited by the amount of local processing power.
Halo 5: Guardians is currently available for pre-order and will launch October 27th on Xbox One.
