Ken Moss, Electronic Arts‘ Chief Technical Officer, wrote a lengthy post on Medium about Project Atlas, which is the codename for Electronic Arts‘ cloud gaming project.

With Project Atlas, designers will be able to create mountains with their surroundings in complete realism within seconds by giving power to the artificial intelligence, which helps with the deep neural network in terrain creation.

With machine learning and AI, developers can create „in-game interactions with non-playable characters or NPCs in a way that is virtually indecipherable from human interaction. So, instead of a pre-scripted, pattern-based logic for NPC behaviour, this would make it possible for an NPC to engage in a way that is dynamic, contextual and absolutely believable,” according to the post, which then brought up Madden as an example. Another quote fits here: „The AI is working with your gameplay. It’s responding to your needs as a player.”

Project Atlas, which Electronic Arts dubs as „cloud native,” there’s a possibility for „cloud distribution of engine services to process the rendering, physics, and simulation of a game instead of being entirely constrained to the specs of a single client-side computing device” (like a console, a PC, or a smartphone). With the power of the cloud, „hyper-realistic destruction within new HD games” which would be „virtually indistinguishable from real life” would be possible.

Moss then talks about the current limitations in multi-player gaming: „In typical multi-player games today, game performance is a balancing act of the demands of different resources and quality constraints — memory, CPU, GPU, fidelity, resolution, and framerate. Today, the balancing act of all those different constraints generally tops out at about 100 players competing at the same time on a map of a few dozen square kilometres. But the cloud starts to erase those limitations. Thousands of players could compete on a single map hundreds or thousands of kilometres wide, in a game session that could last for days, weeks, or years and with the progression and persistence of realistic seasons and campaigns.”

He also thinks players will be able to create content and mods in a much more safer way than nowadays. „You need a cloud-enabled engine that seamlessly integrates services. You need an accessible build of the game and a moddable asset database. You need a common marketplace for sharing and rating player creations. All that doesn’t exist yet today, but this is exactly what we are working towards with Project Atlas,” Moss wrote.

Electronic Arts has ideas, and, with the acquisition of GameFly, they also have a technological leg to stand upon. This technology might be kicking in during the next console generation. Or maybe not. Still, the thoughts are promising.

Source: WCCFTech