With the beta of Titanfall over it, friends that played it seemed to not notice the forcing of traffic to the USA. Being located in NZ, we generally end up accepting a latency ~150ms. Australias announced Azure block seems to be happening, but probably won't go online till the end of 2014 (most mentions say "live 12-18 months from announcement" which was March 2013)
This does concern a few consultants I work with in regards to Microsoft's push for O365, VoIP all cloud all the time. Being a gamer means we know, almost automatically adjusting to our 150ms hop, and accept that things can be a little mistimed between the game and the locally hosted voice comms. But as a Lync user stuck in the cloud I've seen a fair whack of consternation coming out. Why that latency in the office?
Back to games. I've played a little with some of the services, standup time and latency bothered me a fair bit, especially since the Unity app I was made relied upon that data. It's a good choice though, as far as free options. Unity worked rather nicely with the Azure addon from BitRave.
The app: a Warhammer Badlands campaign was prepped among the gentlemen. I thought "I should make something for it".
Get Unity to render a hex map of individual items, throw a mapped background against them like a spritemap, then load players and their armies.
Each player can then take ownership of a tile and it adds a semi-transparent material to it denoting colour of owner.
This data is stored to Azure on save, and loaded when needed. Worked like a charm once I figured out the gotchas of configuring the SQL tables via visual studio vs hosted database management console vs tables management console and their interaction through webservices and the json responses.
Lesson learnt: Follow the setup using the samples! It'll save you having to delete and recreate parts in the management of Azure to find the right bit.
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