Crackdown 3 Will Have a Destructible World Unlike You Have Seen
A few months ago, we wondered if Crackdown 3 had been canceled as it had been radio silence from the Crackdown 3 marketing team for quite some time. When the question was asked to him, Phil Spencer squashed those rumors indicating that the open world game currently in development by Reagent Games is alive and well. Since Phil went public about the state of the game, things have quieted down but this past week, during a panel at GDC 2017 in San Francisco, Xbox Azure Gaming Proncipal PM Joseph Cusimano gave more information on how cloud compute will work in Crackdown 3.
During the panel, a video was showcased comparing physics running on an azure cluster ( as you can see in the picture below, on the left) and physics running on a local machine. Unfortunately filming was not permitted, so there are are only images available. We should note the “local machine” is not an Xbox One, but a high-end PC equipped with a GTX 980 TI, a powerful processor and lots of memory.
You’ll notice that on the left side, the buildings have an overlay with different colors. As Dualshockers noted, each color represents an individual physics server spun-up on demand as the game plays. As destruction increases, the single local machine can’t keep up and frame rate drops, while the Azure cluster is able to distribute computations on multiple servers to cope with the additional processing power required. Interestingly, the physics simulation is also done several frames in advance, and can cope with multiple possibilities. All the data gets returned to the game server, with with streams configured for each game client, enabling ” lot more physics capability of what we’ve seen in the past,” creating a “truly massive destructible world.”
Xbox Azure Gaming Proncipal PM Joseph Cusimano also added that with multiple players in the same world, the destruction goes beyond what a single machine can handle, which is why the setup with multiple servers that you can see above has been developed on the backside in order to support the game.
Crackdown 3 is coming this year for Xbox One and Windows 10.