OnLive now FREE and WORKS in the UK!

Rather than start a new thread will post here.

Just tried it myself on a laptop, over wifi not receiving full wireless speed, on a BT connection that does a max of 6meg according to speedtest.net, using US servers and tbh considering all that it's fairly impressive. Yeah so there is some mouse lag and the resolution for my situation must be youtube quality at 360p but still.

I'd happily make it my gaming platform if they had EU servers and the support gamewise, I mean 30 games is hardly much at all >.< for it to be competitive it needs to have the level of games any other platform has otherwise users are missing out. As for the connection, there's 50meg+ with unlimited usage in the UK anyway now so not a problem, of course not everyone can afford it and the deal that onlive have done with BT is a concern.

But this is 100% the way to go, wish it would come sooner. Onlive might get screwed over if the bigs boys come to town though.
 
Aedus said:
Input lag is as bad as I thought it would be, tried Borderlands and couldn't handle the lag on my mouse. Un-installed it after, pointless. I'll stick with my PC.
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You sound like one of these people who doesnt turn on vsync because of the mouse delay, sure OnLive has a little bit but games on the whole are still very playable.
 
I have got to be honest I really dislike this model for the future of games development as it doesn't really provide manufacturers with any sustainable income for development.

They would only be able to get money from the scraps that OnLive paid them for the licence and looking at how music systems like Spotify work this would not be an awful lot.

This is okay in the music industry where the only major cost in the studio equipment, but games development costs lots of money (arguably to much), but it does never the less cost a number for professional development and I don't think this system provides that in the way of return.
 
Got an email just now -

For the next two weeks, you’ll have unlimited access to all of our PlayPack games. Play whatever you want, for as long as you want*. But do it now while the Free Beta lasts!

Play free now! Just sign in and select “OnLive PlayPack Beta” under My Games.
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Off to investigate.

You can play -

Alien Shooter
Defense Grid Gold
FEAR 2
Frontline: Fuel of War
King's Bounty
LEGO Batman
NBA 2K10
Ninja Blade
Prince of Persia
Puzzle Chronicles
Saw
Tom Clancy's HAWX
Tomb Raider: Underworld
Tropico 3
Unreal Tournament III
The Wheelman
World of Goo
Zombie Shooter 2

A bit pants but it's all free for two weeks (until 31st Jan)
 
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ic1male said:
Whatever did happen to the cloud computing of the 90s anyway? When I was working in IT during that time, Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Server were all the rage. Why did it all fall by the wayside? At that time, I thought by now all the corporate environments would be running thin clients.
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What happened is that hardware got a lot cheaper. Medium-High spec laptops used to cost upwards of a grand whereas now you can get them for £500. Given that you still need a terminal of some description even if you are using a thin client, it kinda makes sense to let people still run local applications (even a £300 laptop should be ok for general office productivity apps).

That said I wouldn't say cloud is dead and buried, there are other advantages like centralised maintenance so it might rear its head again .
 
Just bumping this as I've only just been made aware it's available, you'll need a decent broadband connection but it works very well actually. It's not really aimed at people with top spec gaming PC's obviously but I can see how this would be brilliant for my kids for example so they can play games on cheap PCs. Haven't really looked into how much it would cost long term or what subscription options there are , tried a free trial games and I have to say I'm impressed at how well it works, I was always very sceptical of this but I have to say they've proved me very wrong!
Have a look at www.onlive.com and see what you think, nothing to lose really...
 
Wow, I have just tried this at work on a Mac on a 4meg line and it worked a treat. Certainly way better than I expected. The resolution of the game was not the greatest but the game was smooth and very impressive for such a low speed line.

Can't wait t to have a go at home later on my 14meg line.
 
craig3000 said:
But this is 100% the way to go, wish it would come sooner.
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dmxdex2020 said:
Maybe this is the future. It proberly needs a few more years. Wonder if you can play console games on it against you friends who actually have consoles.
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The future for some games where latency is not much of an issue but from the sounds of things, unless we develop quantum entanglement or break the laws of physics we cannot transfer the data much quicker, we are bound by this.

But hey, there's always been a market for people who don't mind flaws, inferior products, so what does it matter to me ;)
 
I don't think this will ever replace my gaming rig but I got to admit when fibre optic broadband becomes the norm and were all running 100mbit lines this will really start to shine.

Latency (Input Lag) is gonna be the biggest hurdle. Fix that and its a winner!
 
There seems to be 4 possible responses when connecting to OnLive.

1) Connects without warning
2) Connects but warns of latency issues
3) Connects but warns of latency issues and warms of further possible problems with using a Wifi connection
4) Doesn't connect. Warns of latency issues and does not give the option to connect as performance would be too bad.

Just tried this on my new Virgin 50Mb line at home. It's a little laggy but the resolution is pretty high.

Annoyingly I keep getting emails about their latest deal but it's not available in the UK. You buy preorder Homefront and you get the console free! That's a pretty good deal right there if you ask me.
 
richardirv said:
I don't think this will ever replace my gaming rig but I got to admit when fibre optic broadband becomes the norm and were all running 100mbit lines this will really start to shine.

Latency (Input Lag) is gonna be the biggest hurdle. Fix that and its a winner!
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How do you "fix" latency and input lag from a streamed image, you can't.
Not without offloading some of the game offsite, which means more hardware and cost. Understand there's a limit to how fast data can travel, you cannot go past this limit.

It doesn't matter if you have 4Mbit or 100Mbit, there's a point where the data streamed to you will not increase in quality and your latency won't getter better.

Although for me, living on an island doesn't help, would need local servers.
 
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ChrisJSY said:
How do you "fix" latency and input lag from a streamed image, you can't.
Not without offloading some of the game offsite, which means more hardware and cost. Understand there's a limit to how fast data can travel, you cannot go past this limit.

It doesn't matter if you have 4Mbit or 100Mbit, there's a point where the data streamed to you will not increase in quality and your latency won't getter better.
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Remember that we're all connecting to US servers at the mo. There's no UK installation yet but latency will be hopefully be reduced, for us, when this happens.

I'm not aware of any way to see your ping to the server your currently connected to...
 
Surely as the speed goes up the latency will come down, I understand it is never going to be instant, there will always be latency but I would have thought it will get to a point were it is so low that it is almost instant. I may be wrong as I am not an expert in this area.
 
richardirv said:
Surely as the speed goes up the latency will come down, I understand it is never going to be instant, there will always be latency but I would have thought it will get to a point were it is so low that it is almost instant. I may be wrong as I am not an expert in this area.
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Not as far as I understand it, you can have the fattest pipe in the world, but if it still needs to stop off and get re-routed at the same junctions, it's going to take just as long as the 5mb pipe.
 
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