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Stadia (Google's next gen gaming console) will use AI to achieve negative latency in games
Speaking with Alex Wiltshire in Edge magazine #338, Google's top streaming engineer claims the company is verging on gaming superiority with its cloud streaming service, Stadia, thanks to the advancements it's making in modelling and machine learning. It's even eyeing up the gaming performance crown in just a couple of years.
"Ultimately, we think in a year or two we'll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally," Bakar says to Edge, "regardless of how powerful the local machine is."
This would be achieved using Google's homegrown streaming tech, which it's been teasing ever since Stadia was first announced late last year with Project Stream. The company believes its tech is capable of overcoming the hurdles presented by over-the-web gaming, despite its extensive web of datacentres sitting potentially hundreds of miles away from a user.
Specifically Bakar notes Google's "negative latency" will act as a workaround for any potential lag between player and server. This term describes a buffer of predicted latency, inherent to a Stadia players setup or connection, in which the Stadia system will run lag mitigation. This can include increasing fps rapidly to reduce latency between player input and display, or even predicting user inputs.
Yes, you heard that correctly. Stadia might start predicting what action, button, or movement you're likely to do next and render it ready for you – which sounds rather frightening.
With enough latency, the game will play itself and the console will just stream the game-play movie. I have the feeling a Netflix subscription will be cheaper.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:39PM (12 children)
This sounds a bit dumb. Predicting user input also doesn't sound broadly applicable to all games out there. Might work fine for Super Mario Bros.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Saturday October 12 2019, @11:53PM
It's probably just a smarter version of texture pre-loading where instead of having the level designer divide up the map or base everything on the point of view and some random range, they'll have an AI thrown into the mix that would profile which and how often certain textures are loaded and queue them up accordingly.
compiling...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:00AM (1 child)
It's probably not as dumb as it sounds. MS has been "cheating" for years by repositioning bullets to account for latency. Basically repositioning the bullet so that it hits the thing that appeared to be aimed at when the player pressed the button to fire, even if the player's display was slightly out of sync with what the weapon was actually aimed at when the button was pressed.
In this case, I doubt they're going to be trying to predict anything beyond the next second or two, as the reaction time of even bad gamers isn't going to require it. A typical reaction time isn't going to require more than a second of predictive capabilities and most likely less during games that would benefit from this. During that amount of time, there's a limited number of possible things for the player to do.
This isn't an easy thing to accomplish, but it's not impossible. In many cases, it's probably going to feel like lag messing with a key press did. Weird at first and after that people are probably going to get used to it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Sunday October 13 2019, @09:42PM
This won't be predicting the next second or two - this will be predicting actions in the next 50-100ms or so. Lag is a huge issue for First Person Shooters and other twitch-reflex games. I'm OK in principle with the corrections that games perform today (as an earlier poster said, adjusting for what appeared on the players screen at the time of their action rather than the actual state of the server), but deciding to shoot an opponent because I 'probably' will do so really soon sounds dodgy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 13 2019, @02:48AM (1 child)
Sounds to me like an incentive to "play weird" where the advantage goes to the player that the AI can't predict, so they are constantly glitching into unpredicted futures.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Mer on Sunday October 13 2019, @08:00AM
Not so much of a concern for multiplayer games. Those have already proven they can do lag comp well if the lag is not that bad and horrendously if you go too far.
The real
exitingfrightening prospect is seeing your single player experience lag.Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @05:07AM (1 child)
Maybe it's predicting action and only using the action if it matches actual action. It's kind of like predictive execution on chips. It may even pre-render multiple actions so it's ready with the right one.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 13 2019, @05:48AM
You gotta wonder how much hardware they will dedicate to each active player (let's say of graphically demanding, newer titles).
Does the capability utilize the custom hardware they are partnering with AMD for? Maybe a Google TPU?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @10:31AM (4 children)
Brain circuits fire rather predictably in the short term, while consciousness is busy imagining itself "in control".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Neuronal_prediction_of_free_will [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 13 2019, @11:11AM (3 children)
Google Stadia doesn't have access to your brain waves... yet, and incorrectly predicted user input could lead to janky results.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @02:21PM
"Likewise, it has been found that decision history alone can be used to predict future decisions. The prediction capacities of the Soon et al. (2008) experiment were successfully replicated using a linear SVM model based on participant decision history alone (without any brain activity data)."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294282/ [nih.gov]
If the system's predictions will be near enough so that user will feel his corrective actions are "refinements" instead of "overruling the stupid machine", all will be just peachy. Including the user's sense of self-worth being stroked by "being smarter than a computer".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 14 2019, @02:58AM (1 child)
It's gonna be fine. I mean, look, can't get worse than Trump being re-elected, can it? (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 14 2019, @03:08AM
7.5 billion frameskip (60 FPS)
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:40PM (2 children)
"I know what you want better than you do."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday October 12 2019, @11:53PM (1 child)
(don't upmod me, parent post's actually making the joke, I'm just explaining it for idiots like myself)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:49AM
Dear god they better not bring back "Clippy" to say that.
(Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 12 2019, @10:52PM
They actually have human players playing the game for you, kinda like that translator stuff they got in those "smart" speaker thingies that are all the rage
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @11:41PM (3 children)
The Brazilians found a way to cheat in the online games. The latency is worse in Brazil and they're using that to cheat other drivers on the track by bumping, pit maneuvers, and sideswiping cars off the track. The other car gets the penalty because the latency makes the other car register as the one that made the aggressive vehicle contact.
There's also cheating at the race countdown timer while the cars are in auto drive mode. If car in position #5 puts the game in the background that car and all the cars behind it pause... while the cars in front keep going and get a head start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12 2019, @11:47PM (2 children)
You can make your own latency:
http://lag-switch.com/how-to-lag-switch/ [lag-switch.com]
I saw a friend of a friend using a homemade version of this a decade ago, to cheat on their Xbox 360.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:02AM (1 child)
Who could ever have predicted that that would go wrong...
(Nope, I have decided to not draw comparisons with "Ms. Monopoly" in this post.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @07:26AM
Anyone ever introduced to the concept of "affirmative action"... where people are judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:02AM (1 child)
Most online games already have latency compensation that is better than this could ever get. The ideal solution for those games on Stadia is to run their prediction engines *ahead* of the Stadia endpoint, to make up for the latency between Stadia and the user. Machine learning is just going to take the player out of the game even more.
"Ultimately, we think in a year or two we'll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally,"
This can only be true if they're both playing the game for you and accurately predicting how you'll play the game. The only real value in this is to help train their war augmentation tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Sunday October 13 2019, @09:18PM
A case of selffullfiling prophecy, by shaping up what best player mean.
Like
- I invented this shaving machine. The user just put his face in and the sharp blades do the rest
- But each face have a different conformation
- The first time, yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday October 13 2019, @12:14AM (1 child)
This is basically the same as branch prediction in CPUs. You calculate a few possible "realities" on the server, and once you get the user input you subtract the latency and pick the correct precalculated state for the game.
The crucial variable is just how efficient and accurate they can get this with machine learning. I'd imagine that it's trivial for fighting games since you have relatively few possible inputs and players, and not especially effective for battle royal games where you have dozens of players in 3D space.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 13 2019, @05:19AM
That is where I was headed. Yeah, one player online, the server can pretty quickly learn to predict what he's going to do. Three to ten players, maybe. Those MMO games, with hundreds and thousands of players? Not so easy, right? Then, what about PvP, and/or multiple PvP games? In effect, the AI is going to be picking a winner in player vs player combat.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ilsa on Sunday October 13 2019, @02:28AM (1 child)
I swear it's starting to feel like Google is seriously jumping the shark with their ideas. It's already bad enough that they can't be trusted to keep a product going with abandoning or replacing it within 2 years, but now the new stuff they come up with is just dumb. Negative latency indeed.
I suppose this is at least better than the criminally negligent idea of allowing web apps to directly access bluetooth devices through chrome.
(Score: 4, Funny) by coolgopher on Sunday October 13 2019, @04:25AM
Well they've got negative reputation down pat, so why not negative latency too?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @04:52AM
Dead Reckoning [wikipedia.org]
This is such a dumb idea. A single local internet outage, or Google cloud going down (which it increasingly frequently does) and it's GG. Actually it's not because you couldn't play any of your games. So it's more like NG.
Give it less than two years before this goes the way of every other new Google product.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday October 13 2019, @09:36AM
Hopefully this will remove appeal to the retarded hobby of being an e sports spectator, which is slightly less retarded than being a sports spectator...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13 2019, @02:08PM (1 child)
I suspect that all the journalists (and commenters here) speaking about player predictions, negative latencies and all that, are just wildly speculating and that it's absolutely NOT what Google engineers do.
The quality of tech journalism is simply awful, guessing and extrapolating from one or two words from the source and copying each-other. I know because I see what journalists have written about products that I helped develop, and they always get everything wrong.
My guess, from the initial presentation at Google IO, is that Stadia will just be more a bit more clever to avoid network congestion by detecting buffering and bandwidth jitter in advance, instead of reducing bitrate when it's already too late. That's all. No quantum simulation of the many-world hypothesis of the player action.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday October 13 2019, @02:50PM
As a persistent critic of bad tech journalism, I mostly agree with you with the exception that it was Google, and not journalists, that came up with the jarringly non-causal term “negative latency”.
But to your point, “predicting user input” is last on the list of performance improvements, but seems to be drawing the most discussion. Also, the claim about “increasing fps rapidly to decrease latency” sounds like nonsense that came from a confused tech journalist.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 14 2019, @03:10PM
I already have enough problems with getting a good gaming experience without introducing 100% online connectivity for all of my games. This whole endeavor is the antithesis to GOG. It's removing any sense of ownership at all and replacing it with 100% rent. That's stupid beyond words.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"