Today we are announcing that Zync Render, the visual effects cloud rendering technology behind Star Trek Into Darkness and Looper, is joining the Google Cloud Platform team.
Creating amazing special effects requires a skilled team of visual artists and designers, backed by a highly powerful infrastructure to render scenes. Many studios, however, don’t have the resources or desire to create an in-house rendering farm, or they need to burst past their existing capacity.
Together Zync + Cloud Platform will offer studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manage costs. For example, with per-minute billing studios aren’t trapped into paying for unused capacity when their rendering needs don’t fit in perfect hour increments.
We’re excited they’re joining us. We’ll have more details to share in the coming months — stay tuned!
Second Question, Can a game make use of cloud services to play high speed high graphics games, with only physics on the client, and the world “baked” in a few directions/angles each frame?
I had a chance to speak with one of Epic’s engineers who works on the networking features of the Unreal Engine. He explained that even over a perfect connection with data travelling at the speed of light, the planet is big enough that a signal can still take a good 50 milliseconds to get from one peer to another. And, of course, no connection is ever perfect so there’s always more latency than that.
His job was to hide that latency from the player, but even that’s just for low-level events about who fragged whom. You’re talking about full HD graphics sent in realtime over existing broadband infrastructure; a mouse, keyboard and monitor on my end and a computer on your end, basically. Every single action I make- every keystroke and every click- would take the latency of my internet connection before I see the response on my monitor. For most clients, it would be unplayable.
It’s not impossible, though! All you would need is for your clients to have extremely high-speed internet, and a CDN around the globe to work around those pesky laws of relativity so that no client is too far away geographically from their server. But if I can afford all that, I can probably afford a new GPU as well…
Until there is faster than light com, I prefer my input signal path to be only a few feet. Also with the Internet being as crappy, old, and monopolized as it is… I prefer to keep as much offline as I can. TO HELL WITH THE CLOUD!
Where I am, the cost of getting good enough Internet to use one of these clouds effectively would surpass the cost of building my own render farm. Thanks Level “holier than thou” 3!
Or the game could know what you are going to do before you do it:
How many years ago was it considered impossible to have a hand-help personal computer in your pocket with HD video streaming to it? The future arrives awfully quickly these days.
