Thin computing for gamers

[Evilsod]

People opposed Steam (and still do)

It wont be a sudden thing, it will permeate slowly until "live" gaming is the norm...

No it won't... Steam offers advantages and some people my just disagree with them, but having a 100ms lag on your inputs is nothing than a severe disadvantage that would horribly put anyone off gaming.

Maybe the idea of it will work in the distant future, but as it stands now your average bandwidth is usually what, about half of what you pay for? And can be much less in peak times. And ISPs already started whining about BBC iPlayer. How are they going to view people streaming huge quantities of information on an even more regular basis for gaming?

 

[Retromatic]

Eww, onlive.

+10

When I first heard about Online a long time ago, the idea seemed great - compared with the other service (can't rem the name) but looking at how the Americans have got on with it, it doesn't seem very good at all.

I think for a very casual gamer with a netbook/notepad or similar who wants to play some games in 720p it might be acceptable but for anyone remotely serious about gaming it's a no-no.

I read a few weeks ago that BT were considering taking on the UK incarnation of this venemous hariidan, if everything else didn't put you off this might. I'm actually with BT and although I haven't had any ping/connection problems, can you imagine going through BT's customer services for Onlive? No thanks.

 

[Margaret]

People opposed Steam (and still do)

It wont be a sudden thing, it will permeate slowly until "live" gaming is the norm...

You're really dumb if you think this is even comparable to the Steam ordeal.

 

[Evilsod]

I think for a very casual gamer with a netbook/notepad or similar who wants to play some games in 720p it might be acceptable but for anyone remotely serious about gaming it's a no-no.

If a very casual gamer wants to play some games using a netbook he's going to be looking at the likes of Peggle, not Call of Duty. And of course theres the requirement of the internet which won't happen out or about that well. Seriously what could possibly be the advantage to just a regular install or a steam offline version?

Not having to install the game before you play it seems utterly useless for everyone but the developers. HD space isn't exactly expensive and unless you dl games like chapparal you'll be fine

 

[HangTime]

When I first heard about Online a long time ago, the idea seemed great

When I first heard about Onlive a long time ago, the idea seemed really bad (for serious gamers at least)

OK so there are some games, turn based stuff like Civ, FM etc, where this could work nicely. But for fastpaced games the idea of my client effectively running remotely scares the life out of me.

I think a much more likely 'version' of this to come to the fore is an increase in subscription based models, where you still run the client locally but have to pay a monthly fee in order to play the game. Essentially an extension of DRM. So for example instead of paying £30 for Call of Duty X, you'll pay £20 and then £5/month or whatever.

SaaS doesn't really lend itself well to latency-critical applications and FPS gaming is pretty much as latency critical as it gets.

 

[Tefal]

People opposed Steam (and still do)

It wont be a sudden thing, it will permeate slowly until "live" gaming is the norm...

Not until internet speeds become sort of 50mb standard and more importantly completely unlimited.

Got download caps or fair use policies? what's going to happen when playing a game for hour means downloading 10's of GBs of data?




How much bandwidth does it take to stream 1080p without buffering and without horrible compression?

 

[Nymins]

Good idea imo, just nowhere near ready.

 

[Garonazz]

Good idea imo, just nowhere near ready.

Agreed, curious how its gonna end up.

 

[zo1d]

It's the latency that's the killer.

100ms round trip for control input would be annoying as hell to play on.

This would seem to be the biggest draw back to this concept of gaming, although not sure how much bandwidth would be needed to update the users console if playing at a high resolution?

However if the above 2 issues could be resolved surely this concept of playing games remotely has allot to offer, for example you'd never need to upgrade and combined with the electricity saving (a thin terminal would use a small fraction of the energy of high end gaming pc) could potentially save allot of money!

Of course for many people on this forum (my self included) that's part of the fun as we enjoy the upgrading, modding, overclocking etc

 

[d_brennen]

You're really dumb if you think this is even comparable to the Steam ordeal.

I'm not dumb, thank you. Delightful man. And what is the ordeal with Steam? Too complicated for you?

Not until internet speeds become sort of 50mb standard and more importantly completely unlimited.

Got download caps or fair use policies? what's going to happen when playing a game for hour means downloading 10's of GBs of data?

How much bandwidth does it take to stream 1080p without buffering and without horrible compression?

Like I said, cloud gaming is a way off. But it IS coming.

Publishers love it - You pay per play. No pay, no play. Piracy is squashed. No physical media, no opportunity to copy

Service Providers love it - They get to offer another service for a monthly fee

Where do you think all the money poured into OnLive has come from? And that company headed by visionary (R.E. nut) Dave Perry?

Finally, bandwidth caps won't matter. The service is provided by ISPs in conjunction with the cloud provider, for a fee. You buy your service from BT, Virgin etc.

Yes, at the moment, streaming 1080 is a while off for most people but what internet connection did you have 5 years ago? How about 10 years? And where did this 100ms number come from?

I won't say I told ya so when cloud gaming comes to pass. I promise

 

[ChrisJSY]

It all comes down to latency for me, living on an island, multiplayer games with anyone outside of it will increase it considerably, there's only so quick data can travel bound by our current laws of physics.

But, this is a great idea if onlive games were exclusive to prevent cheating for example, but it may turn around to be an optional platform thing.

 

[kylew]

I won't say I told ya so when cloud gaming comes to pass. I promise

You'd get laughed at if you tried it, the people you've quoted haven't said it'll never ever happen, they're saying currently the technology isn't there for it to successfully work on a large scale.

 

[Retromatic]

When I first heard about Onlive a long time ago, the idea seemed really bad (for serious gamers at least) .

When I first heard about Onlive a long time ago, the idea seemed great - compared with the other service.

 

[Tefal]

How much do you think it costs to make a computer capable of running current games at high settings?

Now do you think they'll have a such a dedicated box for each player or do you think they will be run on over taxed hardware at lower settings and low frame rates.

No pay, no play Piracy is squashed

dream on, if that where the case there wouldn't be WoW piracy.

And that company headed by visionary (R.E. nut) Dave Perry?

Really? visionary?

Honestly I can't remember a game he's been apart of in the last decade or so aside from the terrible matrix ones.

Yes, at the moment, streaming 1080 is a while off for most people but what internet connection did you have 5 years ago? How about 10 years? And where did this 100ms number come from?

So isp's are currently saying the bbc should give them money due to the strain the iplayer puts on their networks, most have a fair use policy and caps.

How do you think they'll cope with people downloading hundreds of gigabytes a day?

 

[p0ss3s3d]

...but can it max out crysis?

 

[Tefal]

Also it's all well and good saying "but bandwidth ect will catchup".

And yes it will eventually catch up to current video requirements but by the time it does video requirements will have equally advanced.


Look at how far games have come in the last few years compared to how far the average users connection has come.


By the time you can reliably stream 60fps 1920x1200 footage in real times i'd imagine 2500x and 120 fps (for 3d) is closer to the standard .

 

[Evilsod]

This would seem to be the biggest draw back to this concept of gaming, although not sure how much bandwidth would be needed to update the users console if playing at a high resolution?

However if the above 2 issues could be resolved surely this concept of playing games remotely has allot to offer, for example you'd never need to upgrade and combined with the electricity saving (a thin terminal would use a small fraction of the energy of high end gaming pc) could potentially save allot of money!

Of course for many people on this forum (my self included) that's part of the fun as we enjoy the upgrading, modding, overclocking etc

Maybe i'm just ignorant but what beast of a machine(s) would be required elsewhere exactly? It may seem fine now at there end because they have sod all customers, but how exactly would it handle EVERYONE? I dunno maybe i'm getting the wrong idea.

 

[Tefal]

No mods either

 

[Aedus]

Yes, at the moment, streaming 1080 is a while off for most people but what internet connection did you have 5 years ago? How about 10 years? And where did this 100ms number come from?

I won't say I told ya so when cloud gaming comes to pass. I promise

Well your ping is still going to be higher than if you connect directly through a server.
Instead of going You - Game Server - You
It'll be: You - Cloud server - Game server - Cloud server - You

Unless when you play on onlive it only lets you play with others also playing on onlive, where it'll be the: "You - Game server - You" situation again because they will host their own, but having something like that will totally segregate the gaming community so people can't play together unless they buy the same service.

 

[olivier renault]

...but can it max out crysis?

Actually it can, since the game actually runs on dedicated hardware.

Some games maybe ok to play, but all action games will just suffer too much from input lag. In fact, I don't think even an RTS would be much fun with 100+ ms lag on inputs.

It's too early. Until we get the Internet 2, and everyone runs on fiber optics, with sub 20 ms latencies. It's an interesting concept, but just not feasable right now.

<technical mumbo jumbo>
Online games go to a lot of trouble masking the input latency away from the player. It's a of way of patching up the shortcoming of the internet (latency, bandwidth, unreliability). Mainly, lag compensation, and client-side prediction. Basically, Most online games let the client run their inputs locally (client-side), and constantly stream the inputs to the server to verify.

If the server detects that your inputs and resulting calculations diverge from his authoritative state, he then sends a correction packet so that you can re-align your local results with the server results. And that's where you see collision glitches like in CS:S when you bump into another player, since player-player collisions cannot be predicted locally accurately. You think you are somewhere, but the server says different, and your character is pinged back (with some interpolation to smooth it out).

You cannot do that with OnLive, and you will always lag behind no matter what. It just takes inputs as they come, compute the current frame, compresses it, and send it back to you. It's like streaming an interactive movie.

It would be like playing the old Quake on the Internet, when they didn't do any trickery, and was suppose to be ok for LAN gaming.

</technical mumbo jumbo>