New Product Release丨Modern Game Development Adds Powerful Tools

Today, we're excited to announce the Azure Game Development Virtual Machine, an Azure service that makes modern game creation easier, opening the door for game developers to complete game production in the cloud.

Game studios around the world are anticipating a new work model that can support the complexities of remote and distributed team collaboration, including Microsoft's own game studios. Microsoft sees these challenges in the game creation world, and the pressure that comes with this endeavor. We're also seeing an increasing adoption of Azure by Microsoft's own game studios for more collaborative and efficient game development workflows.

Let's explore some of the game-making models we've seen studios adopt on Azure, and review some of the solutions that exist today. We'll also share some of our plans to close existing gaps and make cloud production even better in the future.

Key Benefits of Cloud Game Creation

With many teams working remotely due to mixed work scenarios or geographical dispersion, game studios see a major advantage in moving a small or large portion of their game development process to the cloud.

When it comes to the cloud, some of the key advantages game studios consider include:

• Powerful computing power: Game studios need to enable powerful computing resources for GPU-intensive work and access it without lag to support their high-performance tasks.
• Remote studio support: Use Parsec or Teradici with cloud VMs to work remotely from anywhere. This way, the cloud machine acts as your desktop with persistent, highly scalable storage so you only pay for computing resources when you use it.
• Global Expansion: The speed and accessibility of expansion around the world is a huge advantage of cloud computing, enabling studios to take advantage of the cloud platform's global backbone fiber network.
• Asset Management: Centralized asset management helps game developers complete tasks efficiently. By deploying Perforce agents and replicas, your partners and employees can get to work faster.
• Faster builds: Bursts of computing power enable faster builds, especially when using technologies like Incredibuild to accelerate compilation and asset creation across hundreds of distributed cores.
• Deeper collaboration: With high-fidelity, low-latency desktop options like Parsec and Teradici, game creators can get shorter production and test cycles from anywhere. Parsec's high-performance seamless screen sharing also allows you to share your desktop or creative work easily and securely. Collaboration and high performance are enabled by Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming.
• Efficient testing: The cloud increases testing efficiency by giving game testers fast turnaround times to get compiled builds to test faster.

At Microsoft, we continue to strengthen our commitment to making Azure the cloud platform of choice for game creators so they can take advantage of the cloud. That's why we introduced the Azure Game Development Virtual Machine. Microsoft works with top game development partners to leverage Visual Studio, Unreal Engine, Perforce Helix Core, Parsec, Incredibuild, Blender, Teradici, DirectX/GDK/PlayFab SDK and more in customizable Azure Workstations to make deployment of game authoring environments easy Simple, seamless and secure.

Introducing the Azure Game Development Virtual Machine Release

To help developers complete these first steps in migrating to the cloud and quickly experience using core game development tools to build remote workstations or servers in the game development pipeline in the cloud, we are announcing the public preview of the Azure Game Development Virtual Machine.

• Working with top game development tool partners, Microsoft provides preconfigured game development virtual machines in Azure with core game development solutions such as Visual Studio Community Edition 2019 pre-installed
• Unreal Engine
• Quixel Bridge
• Perforce's P4V Client
• Parsec
• Incredibuild
• Blender
• Teradici
• Tools such as DirectX/GDK/PlayFab SDK

This enables developers to quickly spin up a working game development workstation or build server in about five minutes, making it easier to verify development performance, pull code or game assets from a Perforce repo, and develop and test games directly from the cloud. Plus, it saves hours of download and configuration time, and gets you right into the environment you need for game creation. As your studio becomes more experienced with Azure, you can use a pre-built game development virtual machine as a base image, build your own custom workstation environment or create a server with additional tools you need (eg additional artist tools, SDKs and frameworks).

We want to put the game development virtual machine in the hands of game developers and get feedback on how to improve it. In the future, Microsoft will not only provide new tools and options based on the game development virtual machine, but also pay more attention to deeper integration and simplification with the core game solutions used by game developers, working with partners to provide Game development provides the best experience.

With the release of the Game Development Virtual Machine, Microsoft has built stronger partnerships within the Game Development Partner community and will continue to collaborate on new ways to make game development in the cloud as seamless as possible on-premises.

We are committed to making Azure the cloud of choice for game creators, so we will invest more in the following areas in the future:

• More powerful computing and GPU resources;
• Tighter integration with partners to improve cloud-native authentication;
• Provides high-quality end-to-end examples and documentation for running game development pipelines in Azure;
• Better options for cloud development pipelines with Xbox development and more.

In the meantime, we encourage you to explore the new game development virtual machine, which we believe will become an important component in your game development pipeline in Azure. To try it now, visit our game development virtual machine documentation.

What does a complete game development pipeline look like in Azure?

The diagram above shows a basic implementation of a complete game production workflow in Azure.
On the left and right are developers working directly in Azure using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) via virtual machines with GPUs. These workstation virtual machines can be created using the new game development virtual machine. At the heart of the pipeline is the Perforce Helix Core, which acts as this control, and Azure DevOps, a powerful integrated SaaS CI/CD solution. You can also set up an automated test farm in Azure. In the above scenario, workflow, data, and distribution are all centralized in Azure, resulting in overall faster iteration, less physical IT administration, and higher overall security.

The above scenarios are ideal for cloud-native builds, but we know that most game studios today already have on-premises infrastructure to run production environments. Therefore, direct translation on a large scale is largely impossible, as it would disrupt normal business operations. These studios need to take a viable route to the cloud. In this case, the diagram above serves as a template for the final cloud workflow. We believe that by judiciously migrating individual components to the cloud time after time, studios can better manage their overall migration risk while starting to unlock the benefits of the cloud.

The key here is the complete and customizable suite of solutions available on Azure. Studio technical directors are free to pick and choose components to run into Azure at each stage and ensure that there is a complete solution stack to meet each end goal.

When a game studio wants to move any component to the cloud, it starts with connecting the internal network to Azure via ExpressRoute for the fastest private line connection, synchronizing identity information to Azure Active Directory, and ensuring security compliance. Once networking, identity management, and security are set up, to ensure critical efficiencies in the game development pipeline, version control should be deployed, replicated, or proxied to Azure, accessing assets in the pipeline with minimal latency, and reducing traffic back to the on-premises network to lowest. When game assets are available from the cloud, it's time to build your development pipeline.

We also know that many current endpoints (i.e. how code and assets are actually generated and used) are still not in the cloud, and the resulting flow of data in and out is a drag on efficiency. This is where game development virtual machines come in handy. It can become an essential part of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to complement the entire development workflow in the cloud. Of course, each studio will have its own package list, but the game development virtual machine has dozens of major pre-installed packages, forming a solid base image for you to use out of the box. Additionally, the Game Development VM can be used in the build process itself, as a build agent for Azure DevOps, leveraging key building blocks such as Perforce, Incredibuild, Visual Studio, GDK, and other similar pre-installed software.

The first step in the cloud migration of the studio

Migrating any workload to the cloud requires an investment of time and resources, but when done right, the benefits of the cloud can quickly become apparent.

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