[Merged] Onlive - On-Demand / Streaming / Cloud-Based Gaming Technology

[evan g]

Debut Tech Interview 1 (http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47080.html)

Debut Tech Interview 2 (http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47082.html)

Well surprise from GDC! I would watch, because this is absolutely mindblowing. According to them, I could play Crysis full HD and everything, no problem, no lag, on this service. And all it takes a membership fee and a 1 MB plugin in my browser! :eek:

This is pretty darn crazy, if you ask me. :D

[Alphakline]

Seems to be pretty cool. Just need a fast enough broadband to use it. I'm curious on the pricing schedule.

[str1f3]

this is BIG!!!

advantages:

-no new hardware for gaming and no worrying about the specs (huge savings because of this)
-no more use for consoles
-can play games like crysis (on all HIGH SETTINGS!!!)on a macbook air or netbook
-mac+ pc games are out at the same time since it is all browser based (specialized browser) so you don't need boot camp for gaming
-small game makers now have a better chance of publishing a game without having to worry about console fees and disk manufacturing costs.

disadvantages:
-untested on a mass scale
-bandwidth. if you have dsl or dial-up you're out.
-pricing not available yet

this could potentially reinvent gaming. i hope they follow a netflix style pricing structure or the thing won't take off. all the major publishers are jumping on this so there won't be a shortage of games. gta4 and crysis are games that are going to be on onlive.

[roacch]

really really hope this will work. great idea.

[Tokiopop]

Check it out (http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/965/965535p1.html) :cool:

http://www.onlive.com/

[JackAxe]

That's not for me. Good luck to them. :)

[Dagless]

It's about time! A few of us were mulling over the possibilities of this kind of system way back in college. But urgh that thing looks hideous. Face buttons spelling out L-I-V-E?

It's a great idea but I just don't see it taking off yet.

[e²Studios]

OnLive is not the future of gaming, its a great idea but would bomb faster than the dreamcast.

[Tokiopop]

For someone like me, who doesn't have a PC good enough for Crysis (yet), it's going to be awesome. I quite like the controller too. But I can use my PS3 controller with my laptop :D:D

[sikkinixx]

how much per month? I call BS on their 1ms lag talk, and i dunno about never owning a game and instead having to pay a subscription for the rest of my life.

Neat idea but I'm on the fence.

[mongrol]

Vaporware. You have to transmit control info to the server (100ms+) process the input, update the game cycle then transmit an HD image at 30fps back to your screen. This is a hype machine pure and simple.

[SHADO]

This would go very nicely with my Airport Extreme :p

[Chone]

It's not a bad idea but hardly the future of gaming.

Like Jackaxe, this is just not for me.

Also good luck for them if the service becomes popular, they are going to be buying and upgrading computers left and right, not to mention the huge bandwidth costs.

[vaderhater245]

Seems to be too good to be true. Others articles say to expect a live showing sometime this week during GDC. Should be interesting to see if nothing goes wrong... I always remember when the PC clunks out when Bill Gates was talking about Windows on stage. lol

[Dagless]

how much per month? I call BS on their 1ms lag talk, and i dunno about never owning a game and instead having to pay a subscription for the rest of my life.

Neat idea but I'm on the fence.

1ms if you happen to live next to one of their servers and a T1 connection.

[Dagless]

I cannot see this being as smooth as what they're saying. And what happens when lots of people use the service?

Sorry. As I posted in the Onlive thread in the console forum I don't think this is the right time for such a service.

[campeao]

How about everyone waits to criticize until you actually see it in action?

[str1f3]

Vaporware. You have to transmit control info to the server (100ms+) process the input, update the game cycle then transmit an HD image at 30fps back to your screen. This is a hype machine pure and simple.

A hype machine for what? Engadget, gizmodo, 1up and others witnessed first hand that they were playing cysis on high using just a MacBook. I'm surprised that there are people rooting against this. I'm don't know if it's going to work but I'm hoping it does. Macs get continually screwed when it comes to games because of direct x. This way we get the same games at the same time.

I've owned every generation of consoles since the 2600 except this generation. Quite simply I'm tired of having lousy hardware that continually breaks, exclusive deals with certain consoles, and game prices rising.

With onlive I get to do gaming on my mac without ever having to deal with windows, no red ring of death, and always get to play the latest and greatest without buying expensive new hardware.

People act as if there is some great reason to owning a game. Do they feel the same way about netflix? Or how about that $70 game you bought is no longer supported is no longer supported by the next generation console hardware.

[e²Studios]

How about everyone waits to criticize until you actually see it in action?

Why when its business model has already showed that its flawed? There is enough we know now to criticize, chances are seeing it in action isnt going to change the subscription model or laughable latency rates they are talking about.

[rasmasyean]

Live website launch press conference here happenning now.
http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/

[rasmasyean]

live feed of website launch press conference at the moment.

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/

[PurpleCliff]

If this works ... it will be SO incredibly amazing.

All of you remember to go and sign up for the beta at http://www.onlive.com/beta_program.html ... I can't because I'm in Australia. :) But we need Mac users on the team! :D :apple:

[spyker3292]

live feed of website launch press conference at the moment.

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/

That press conference is pretty convincing, I just hope they offer a 1 week free trail. But I'm attempting to get into that beta too :D

[evan g]

I like the concept! Looking forward to giving this a shot.

[evan g]

I cannot see this being as smooth as what they're saying. And what happens when lots of people use the service?

Sorry. As I posted in the Onlive thread in the console forum I don't think this is the right time for such a service.

They seem pretty confident. Besides, a little optimism never hurt. :D

[campeao]

The simple fact that major game companies such as EA and Epic Games are backing it give it some sort of credibility.

Sure, there's a chance that it may become vaporware, but there's also a chance that it may be 100% successful.

So, give it a chance.

[rasmasyean]

They seem pretty confident. Besides, a little optimism never hurt. :D

I doubt it won't have it's share of problems on release. But it will improve and I wouldn't doubt that the end of the console era is marked with the XBox 360 / PS3 / Wii. And those poor saps who just got a $3,000 Vista machine for gaming...oh well, it's good for like 6 months. Then it can still surf the internet at least. :D

The only problem I see is broadband penetration. But we are getting WiMax and fiber roll-outs here and there. If anything consoles will prolly turn into multi-purpose entertainment service machines to compete.

[e²Studios]

The simple fact that major game companies such as EA and Epic Games are backing it give it some sort of credibility.

Sure, there's a chance that it may become vaporware, but there's also a chance that it may be 100% successful.

So, give it a chance.

You are using EA in the same breath as saying credible? hehe yea, you just lost me (and a ton others) there. EA has no credibility, they have a bad enough reputation for releasing crap games in hopes for making money over quality (games).

I'll give it a chance once it looks like something real, right now it looks like its bound for failure. They could have at least not BS'd us with latency figures. This won't leave the ground, its like that cool car you see at the car show, it'll never make it in the market even if it does get a chance to be released to market in the first place.

[str1f3]

If this works ... it will be SO incredibly amazing.

All of you remember to go and sign up for the beta at http://www.onlive.com/beta_program.html ... I can't because I'm in Australia. :) But we need Mac users on the team! :D :apple:

Signed up for it as soon as the website launched! ;)

[Miharu]

Sounds fascinating on paper. More real life experience needed. I'm certain there will be bigger lag once it launches and thousands of people try to play at the same time. Also it will most likely be a US-only service, at least for a few months when it's released. I can't see them making European servers except one for Western Europe. But it does sound promising and a great new idea :)

[takao]

The roundtrip times gonna kill it for everything that requires fast input..

how are they transfering the pictures then back to you ? (since i don't suspect the micro console will do any rendering at all) transfering/streaming also has quite a bit of latency. Something not normally relevant when watching some media like movies or music but with something requiring countless inputs it's gonna take forever

also high monthly fees will kill it since enormous hardware would be required: more or less 1 PC for each player since they wouldn't be running dedicated servers but would have to render everything which isn't exactly data center friendly
and then bandwidth fees:
normal IP-TV offers have problems getting people to pay their rather small amounts and they don't need as huge processing power in their data centers

[campeao]

Fine, their customer service blows (among other things), but they are still the largest game producer in the world.

Either way, even if you don't include EA, they have an impressive lineup supporting them.

http://www.onlive.com/partners.html

[iLao]

US-only.

[martychang]

So how do I make game mods? What if they decide to take a game down? They just going to keep ancient games on the service for the few who still play?

It doesn't really matter what the price is, freedom is more important. Centralizing all your games on someone else's hardware sacrifices that. And that all assumes it even works, I doubt their "ULTRA COMPRESSION ALGORITHM" is crazy enough to make this work in terms of bandwidth.

[hankolerd]

Saw this yesterday, if IGN says the were playing Crysis at 720 at 60fps then I think that most people should be able to it fine. The biggest thing would be onlive limiting their subscriptions so they don't overload their servers. I am sure this will be huge over in Japan or something were everyone has very fast internet. I think as the infrastructure in the US improves you would never see any lag in a service like this. I still think the people over at IGN put it best, they say for people that just want to try out a demo of a game, or play through a game though are interested in, it will be fine, but if they are a fan of the series, they will own a copy for their console or pc. :apple:

[cuube]

This is a kind of cloud computing. They will of course not use one "PC" per person playing a game.. They have huge farms of identical servers all running virtual servers on the fly. So if you want to play, they create a virtual server just for you. Each physical server has the potential to run many virtual instances of "World of Goo" for example.

They will not need to update servers left and right. They just add more hardware when needed. The hardware is abstracted, so they (and you) don't have to think about it. This will also scale along with the subscription fees from more and more users. So more users need more hardware - but also pays more subscriptions - allowing more hardware.

Also, everyone needs to sleep - so servers can mostly be serving US when Asia and Europe sleeps. So less wasted computing power for the planet :)

This is all based on my knowledge of cloud computing, which will be the future of all applications in the end :)

[2nyRiggz]

Sounds good but it seems too far away. The concept is good but how many people really have a fast enough internet speed to stream games plus play them online at the same time....this tech is on the horizon but not right now.

Personally I rather have a copy of the game than a digital copy.

Bless

[NoSmokingBandit]

This would be terrible. If i play a game i want to own it, i dont want to rent every single game i play (and it technically will be renting, due to the high amounts of drm they will attach to everything, even if i pay $60 for a game).
I only buy games that are on a disc/cartridge. If they stop making games on a physical medium then i will stop buying them.

[rasmasyean]

Yea, I agree it depends on the business model and how they can make it economical for people to prefer over consoles and PC’s . One thing you have to consider is that this method eliminates the physical distribution and production of the game. This is normally paid by you when you buy a boxed copy.

The reverse offset I can see is that you might have to upgrade your bandwidth tier if you have a slow connection. But I don’t imagine everyone can get 720p. I’m sure there is scale-down detection. And in the future, maybe 1080p scale-up options.

[JackAxe]

This is cool, but it doesn't fit how I game with my friends. I play both online through STEAM/Battle.net and locally. For local play, even when it's just me and 2 friends, none of us has the bandwidth for anything but SD content.

Anyways, it's impressive to say the least, but not for me, not anytime soon, and I'm not really sure if it will ever work for how I game. No matter how they buzz this, 720p video will never be as sharp as actual feed from my GPU running at that rez, and I can't imaging them ever really matching the performance of a local machine -- IGN even noted this. Unless they do break the speed of light, which I hope they do, as I want to travel to the stars... :o

They were also exaggerating about PC requirements, well, they are behind the times. I can run the Crysis smoothly on high and I let the game choose my optimal settings. My PC is a low/mid-range Quad, really an inexpensive PC by today's standards, so well under $k.

[rasmasyean]

This would be terrible. If i play a game i want to own it, i dont want to rent every single game i play (and it technically will be renting, due to the high amounts of drm they will attach to everything, even if i pay $60 for a game).
I only buy games that are on a disc/cartridge. If they stop making games on a physical medium then i will stop buying them.

Neflix bets otherwise.

[rasmasyean]

This is a kind of cloud computing. They will of course not use one "PC" per person playing a game.. They have huge farms of identical servers all running virtual servers on the fly. So if you want to play, they create a virtual server just for you. Each physical server has the potential to run many virtual instances of "World of Goo" for example.

They will not need to update servers left and right. They just add more hardware when needed. The hardware is abstracted, so they (and you) don't have to think about it. This will also scale along with the subscription fees from more and more users. So more users need more hardware - but also pays more subscriptions - allowing more hardware.

Also, everyone needs to sleep - so servers can mostly be serving US when Asia and Europe sleeps. So less wasted computing power for the planet :)

This is all based on my knowledge of cloud computing, which will be the future of all applications in the end :)


I thought cloud computing also uses the client computer's resources.
I can see that maybe 720p de-compression would be a bit faster if you have a faster computer. What about your computer "contributing" something an uploading data up to the cloud?

[rasmasyean]

This is cool, but it doesn't fit how I game with my friends. I play both online through STEAM/Battle.net and locally. For local play, even when it's just me and 2 friends, none of us has the bandwidth for anything but SD content.

Anyways, it's impressive to say the least, but not for me, not anytime soon, and I'm not really sure if it will ever work for how I game. No matter how they buzz this, 720p video will never be as sharp as actual feed from my GPU running at that rez, and I can't imaging them ever really matching the performance of a local machine -- IGN even noted this. Unless they do break the speed of light, which I hope they do, as I want to travel to the stars... :o

They were also exaggerating about PC requirements, well, they are behind the times. I can run the Crysis smoothly on high and I let the game choose my optimal settings. My PC is a low/mid-range Quad, really an inexpensive PC by today's standards, so well under $k.

I think they were talking about most "laptops" which is true that they can't run Cysis well.

If they can get 1080p, that's pretty close to today's local GPU graphics I think. But maybe they will sacrifice ray tracing effects and such because they may not be able to process all that for everyone. I don't think you can beat a high end DX10 system anytime soon, and DX11...I'm sure Microsoft will ramp up development just to remain competative. But the gap is closing for sure if this works well. Maybe Windows Gaming will be reserved to the niche enthusiast.

The way I understand it, most lag comes from the packets being processed and relayed all over the place. The "speed of light" argument is just some thing they made up on the spot to not get too technical with consumers. You can get light to go arround the globe in an instant for what humans can notice. But the trick is get it to relay faster. The internet is mosty fiberoptics, which means they have really long connections to reduce the jumps. When it gets to the local area, it turns into copper so it bounces all over the place because electrical resistance and interferance makes the wires have to be short.

[Dagless]

Looks I's can use big fonts toos.

So in their controlled press release they got it working fine?
How about when they have tens of thousands of people wanting to play games, they're going to need tens of thousands of very high end video cards that are updated frequently. If this gets past the starting line its going to need one hell of a subscription charge to pay for all this.

And of course what if you want to install a mod? What if they take a game down? You have diddleysquat.
You also don't need thousands. I've been planning a gaming PC with a 4870x2 and other high end components and that will cost £800 in total.

[takao]

This is a kind of cloud computing. They will of course not use one "PC" per person playing a game.. They have huge farms of identical servers all running virtual servers on the fly. So if you want to play, they create a virtual server just for you. Each physical server has the potential to run many virtual instances of "World of Goo" for example.

They will not need to update servers left and right. They just add more hardware when needed. The hardware is abstracted, so they (and you) don't have to think about it. This will also scale along with the subscription fees from more and more users. So more users need more hardware - but also pays more subscriptions - allowing more hardware.

Also, everyone needs to sleep - so servers can mostly be serving US when Asia and Europe sleeps. So less wasted computing power for the planet :)

This is all based on my knowledge of cloud computing, which will be the future of all applications in the end :)

i agree on cloud computing being the future and all but we aren't talking about dedicated game online servers here or scientific calculations where latency is irrelevant
also none of the games will be rewritten from scratch to maximize for cloud computing

we are talking about _clients_ here which means running multiple instances is out of question
show me the server who can run _2_ instances of far cry 2 or crysis: there are none especially since games rely on graphics cards .. of which there are none specially made for server boards and even less available
and if you use virtualization: that's a huge latency right there and all games use rather direct access to hardware through apis
and if they used shared network filesystem for let's say 10 clients each: even with 15k rpm drives the seek times for loading files would kill any in-game optimization or precaching

[sikkinixx]

I can't wait to see what Gamestop thinks about this.

[takao]

I
The way I understand it, most lag comes from the packets being processed and relayed all over the place. The "speed of light" argument is just some thing they made up on the spot to not get too technical with consumers. You can get light to go arround the globe in an instant for what humans can notice. But the trick is get it to relay faster. The internet is mosty fiberoptics, which means they have really long connections to reduce the jumps. When it gets to the local area, it turns into copper so it bounces all over the place because electrical resistance and interferance makes the wires have to be short.

"in an instant is simply not true"

for example the biggest theoretical distance on the earth in a straight line is 20.000 km (austria new zealand for example)
for transfering an empty message at speed of light means a latency of ~66.8 ms

remember that means straight line with not a single router in between (both impossible)
that means a round trip time of 133 ms which you can physically never reduce

let's be more realistically let's say the data center is 1500 km away physically and with all the running back and forth in the cables/ISPs you have easily twice or 3 times that distance which means with 4000km already a RTT of 26.6 ms with an empty message and with not a single router
let's say pro router jump you lose half a MS of latency and you have 10 jumps: that means 36.6 MS latency still without the latency of creating a stream (they claim 1 MS to do that.. i say BS) and sending the data and then converting it from UDP packages back into an image
etc.

speed of light is fast .. but it's not infinity .. latency will kill this idea for anything other than round based strategy games or RPGs etc.

[rasmasyean]

i agree on cloud computing being the future and all but we aren't talking about dedicated game online servers here or scientific calculations where latency is irrelevant
also none of the games will be rewritten from scratch to maximize for cloud computing

we are talking about _clients_ here which means running multiple instances is out of question
show me the server who can run _2_ instances of far cry 2 or crysis: there are none especially since games rely on graphics cards .. of which there are none specially made for server boards and even less available
and if you use virtualization: that's a huge latency right there and all games use rather direct access to hardware through apis
and if they used shared network filesystem for let's say 10 clients each: even with 15k rpm drives the seek times for loading files would kill any in-game optimization or precaching

Maybe they have multiple “Xbox boards” and “PS3 boards” stacked up in their servers. This way they can just load games from a central database whenever these boards get fired up and send video to their streaming servers onto you. And if they don’t have enough, then you get “queued” maybe??? They said they can scale it by just adding more racks so maybe it’s just a matter of producing more of these boards in China to meet demand as it grows.

But overall on the economical sense, it’s like you’re “sharing” your Xbox with everyone else. If you think about it, your Xbox mostly sites there doing nothing. So if you can just pay a smaller “subscription” to use it once in a while, it’s like having OnLive “renting” you an xBox / PS3 / whatever else boards along with games that they got. And you’re already going to have internet anyway…just some ppl will have to upgrade.

[rasmasyean]

"in an instant is simply not true"

for example the biggest theoretical distance on the earth in a straight line is 20.000 km (austria new zealand for example)
for transfering an empty message at speed of light means a latency of ~66.8 ms

remember that means straight line with not a single router in between (both impossible)
that means a round trip time of 133 ms which you can physically never reduce

let's be more realistically let's say the data center is 1500 km away physically and with all the running back and forth in the cables/ISPs you have easily twice or 3 times that distance which means with 4000km already a RTT of 26.6 ms with an empty message and with not a single router
let's say pro router jump you lose half a MS of latency and you have 10 jumps: that means 36.6 MS latency still without the latency of creating a stream (they claim 1 MS to do that.. i say BS) and sending the data and then converting it from UDP packages back into an image
etc.

speed of light is fast .. but it's not infinity .. latency will kill this idea for anything other than round based strategy games or RPGs etc.

Nice calculation. I guess it's pretty "long" when it's a matter of shooting someone before you get shot.

[rasmasyean]

live feed of website launch press conference at the moment.

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/

Archive:
http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324

[rasmasyean]

Live website launch press conference here happenning now.
http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/

Here is an Archive:
http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324

[takao]

Maybe they have multiple “Xbox boards” and “PS3 boards” stacked up in their servers. This way they can just load games from a central database whenever these boards get fired up and send video to their streaming servers onto you. And if they don’t have enough, then you get “queued” maybe??? They said they can scale it by just adding more racks so maybe it’s just a matter of producing more of these boards in China to meet demand as it grows.

yeah the problem is with such a board/slot system system that it has to be developed first and tailored for this use
there sure will be such systems in the future but they will come from current hardware makers and they will sell such systems to ISPs (keeping latency low) as additional services on top of you normal internet bill
also games will have to be developed with such systems/plattforms from the ground up



But overall on the economical sense, it’s like you’re “sharing” your Xbox with everyone else. If you think about it, your Xbox mostly sites there doing nothing. So if you can just pay a smaller “subscription” to use it once in a while, it’s like having OnLive “renting” you an xBox / PS3 / whatever else boards along with games that they got. And you’re already going to have internet anyway…just some ppl will have to upgrade.

yeah it's some sort of sharing but just like MMORPG developers they will have the problem of spikes:
who is gaming in the morning ? nobody
who is gaming at 7-9 pm ? a ridiculous amount of people
except that MMORPG developers have the advantage of needing way less computation power

sure its a good idea but it will take at least 5 years and then will only work for less action/fast paced games
and world wide is out of the question because of latency

[vaderhater245]

http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/03/24/behind-the-scenes-of-wows-bandwidth/

Speaking of MMORPG's, a recent article on World of Warcraft's Servers and Data Hosting. Until i read this, i was unaware that AT&T helped them.

[rasmasyean]

yeah the problem is with such a board/slot system system that it has to be developed first and tailored for this use
there sure will be such systems in the future but they will come from current hardware makers and they will sell such systems to ISPs (keeping latency low) as additional services on top of you normal internet bill
also games will have to be developed with such systems/plattforms from the ground up


Check out the press conference when you get a chance. They said they have been working on this problem for years and made new hardware. It doesn't sound like they just bought some off-the-shelf hardware from Dell or something and "tweaked them".

Maybe they can even patent some of these technologies and sell it for something else. Like another Cisco perhaps. Who knows.

[shinchan72]

I play only at 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 , and require zero lag for online shooters and minimal for mmorpg's.

I seriously doubt they can smoothly push 1920x1200 and up for thousands simultaneously.

[str1f3]

I play only at 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 , and require zero lag for online shooters and minimal for mmorpg's.

I seriously doubt they can smoothly push 1920x1200 and up for thousands simultaneously.

the res they stated is 720p which is just fine for macbooks and okay for MBPs.
considering that more & more macs being sold are laptops, that's not bad. you can still hook your laptop to your tv and use it as a traditional games console.

it's not meant for high-end pc gamers with $2000-$3000 rigs. you still have the option to buy discs or downloaded content

[Tokiopop]

Their video is up. It says it'll be here by Winter 2009.

I still like the idea, it's just if the execute it well.

[e²Studios]

Their video is up. It says it'll be here by Winter 2009.

I still like the idea, it's just if the execute it well.

This had release dates too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_(game_system)

The Phantom was a controversial video game console that was allegedly under development by Phantom Entertainment, formerly Infinium Labs. The cancelled device was supposedly planned to be capable of playing current and future PC games, giving the system a massive initial game library and making it easier for developers to produce games for the system. The system was supposedly designed to use a direct-download content delivery service instead of the discs and cartridges used by most game consoles.


Sound at all familiar??

Vaporware, either it wont be released or it'll die the minute it hits the market.

[srl7741]

I just watched the video and I like the idea. Now I will have to wait to the best part? The details on how it will really work will be a big factor. It could turn out to be a great thing. Steam has done well many did not think they would.

Should be neat to see how it will really work.

[rasmasyean]

I was thinking there might be a business issue too.

I mean, look at NetFlix, Hulu, etc. The content delivery portion are usually the old stuff that people rarely would buy.

I don't imagine they can just take any game at all and start charging people to play it on thier terms just like that. It's almost like pirating then. Like if I buy one copy and duplicate it across 100 instances and charge 100 subscriptions. It would depend on whether they can ultimately work out the deals with the big manufacturers. Otherwise, OnLive will be the place where you go play Mario Brothers. :D

[stainlessliquid]

The hype for this is going to disappear when they announce the pricing.

In essence you will be renting a high end computer, which will end up costing a lot more over time than just buying the hardware yourself.

Scrap this idea and let us run the server on our own computers, allowing us to play our games anywhere in the world through a web browser, similar to the PSP/PS3 game sharing feature.

[JackAxe]

I think they were talking about most "laptops" which is true that they can't run Cysis well.

If they can get 1080p, that's pretty close to today's local GPU graphics I think. But maybe they will sacrifice ray tracing effects and such because they may not be able to process all that for everyone. I don't think you can beat a high end DX10 system anytime soon, and DX11...I'm sure Microsoft will ramp up development just to remain competative. But the gap is closing for sure if this works well. Maybe Windows Gaming will be reserved to the niche enthusiast.

The way I understand it, most lag comes from the packets being processed and relayed all over the place. The "speed of light" argument is just some thing they made up on the spot to not get too technical with consumers. You can get light to go arround the globe in an instant for what humans can notice. But the trick is get it to relay faster. The internet is mosty fiberoptics, which means they have really long connections to reduce the jumps. When it gets to the local area, it turns into copper so it bounces all over the place because electrical resistance and interferance makes the wires have to be short.

In the live press conference video, they mentioned more than once that a PC gamer needed a tricked out rig just to run a game like Crysis on high, so this is why I mentioned it, as that's no longer the case with today's hardware being so powerful at such a lo cost. It was all marketing, and intentionally misleading.

You should watch it, instead of making excuses for them. ;)

If and when 1080 does become feasible, a compressed video will never look as good as the raw source. My midrange system can handle 1200p at more than 30 fps on high for most games and in some cases 1600p. IGN noted that the game looked fuzzy, which is what I was thinking would be the case, as it is a compressed video. I suppose if you're on a TV, it will be fine, but I don't sit that far from any of my monitors. I have to wonder if there will be noticeable screen artifacts, as I notice that on all digital content.

On the Direct X. Developers like Carmack stated there's nothing that can't be done in DX9, that can be done with DX10. MS is basically making it easier for the less experience developers to pull off certain effects.

They were saying that with fiber optics, they'll be able to get up to 1500 miles, and less with other connection. They also talked about going into hundreds of homes, trying lots of different connections and routers, to work on eliminating latency to get their packets to flow through. So what I gathered, which they commented on, is that eventually they'll need to setup their service all over the world, and that even the speed of light wasn't fast enough for someone living in Australia to play a game from a server in NA, even if it's a dedicated fiber line.

[rasmasyean]

In the live press conference video, they mentioned more than once that a PC gamer needed a tricked out rig just to run a game like Crysis on high, so this is why I mentioned it, as that's no longer the case with today's hardware being so powerful at such a lo cost. It was all marketing, and intentionally misleading.

You should watch it, instead of making excuses for them. ;)

If and when 1080 does become feasible, a compressed video will never look as good as the raw source. My midrange system can handle 1200p at more than 30 fps on high for most games and in some cases 1600p. IGN noted that the game looked fuzzy, which is what I was thinking would be the case, as it is a compressed video. I suppose if you're on a TV, it will be fine, but I don't sit that far from any of my monitors. I have to wonder if there will be noticeable screen artifacts, as I notice that on all digital content.

On the Direct X. Developers like Carmack stated there's nothing that can't be done in DX9, that can be done with DX10. MS is basically making it easier for the less experience developers to pull off certain effects.

They were saying that with fiber optics, they'll be able to get up to 1500 miles, and less with other connection. They also talked about going into hundreds of homes, trying lots of different connections and routers, to work on eliminating latency to get their packets to flow through. So what I gathered, which they commented on, is that eventually they'll need to setup their service all over the world, and that even the speed of light wasn't fast enough for someone living in Australia to play a game from a server in NA, even if it's a dedicated fiber line.

Yeah, well...you never know what they'll think of. How long ago did you think Youtube HD videos would have been unthought of. And before then...streaming video? I still remeber working on a project having a video conferencing line on this connection called ISDN which is 2 phone lines put together.

As for DX10 vs. DX9...even if what you are saying is true, it would be like WPF applications could have been made by "experienced developers" when Windows XP came out. And heck, if they are really good they can do it in Linux. If you were really really good, you can do a lot of things...given a lot of time. The real issue is the economics. Is it better to hire an expert expert for $200,000/year for a project that will take 2 years? ...and sell it for $50,000? Or a college intern for $10/hour that will do the same project over the summer via more advanced tools. It's like saying modern automation is useless because you can do the same production with an army of skilled laborers. :p

[JackAxe]

Yeah, well...you never know what they'll think of. How long ago did you think Youtube HD videos would have been unthought of. And before then...streaming video? I still remeber working on a project having a video conferencing line on this connection called ISDN which is 2 phone lines put together.

As for DX10 vs. DX9...even if what you are saying is true, it would be like WPF applications could have been made by "experienced developers" when Windows XP came out. And heck, if they are really good they can do it in Linux. If you were really really good, you can do a lot of things...given a lot of time. The real issue is the economics. Is it better to hire an expert expert for $200,000/year for a project that will take 2 years? ...and sell it for $50,000? Or a college intern for $10/hour that will do the same project over the summer via more advanced tools. It's like saying modern automation is useless because you can do the same production with an army of skilled laborers. :p

2004 if I'm recalling correctly, it was when Macromedia introduced support for on2VP6. I've been developing in Flash since 99, and I'm not one of those inexperience tween Flash guys that are bloatifying the internet with components while living on the timeline. There was never a size constraint on Flash video, I could encode something at any size if I wanted, the problem was performance and bandwidth. H.264 is just a better codec than on2VP6 -- which did a good job, but when going full screen it really taxed the CPU.

When watching YouTube in a browser, the image is only 640x360. I've noticed lots of sites advertise HD,then only offer SD video. :)

Yep, I recall ISDN. I worked out of a guy's house back in 96/97 that had one put in. My other friend back in 95 always joked about the phone companies charging more for doing less, as ISDN eliminated the need for analog to digital conversion, if I'm recalling correctly...

But still, even if 1080p were possible, it would never look as good as real footage, as long as it's being compressed. I'm not even happy with the current HD quality, as it tends to rip out so much information, just to make the image fit within a limited bandwidth.

This article actually confirms what I suspected about artifacts:
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/57855
Once I was in the game itself, I immediately noticed the unwelcome signs of blocky compression. It wasn't so compressed that it was entirely distracting from the gameplay, but it was also worse than I expected. The visual quality was high, but the experience was marred by the considerable amount of splotchy pixels.

But it is beta, so they have an excuse.

I agree with your last point, but most of the time ease of use and lack of inexperience comes with bloat and a shoddy end product, but I'm for progress. I'm glad I have a calculator as an example, especially when my mind is tired. :)

[macfan881]

as long as ip caps are around this will never take place especailly with Comcast and time warners this will never be mainstream

[NoSmokingBandit]

Neflix bets otherwise.

Im not subscribed to netfilx, so i dont see the point of your point.

[e²Studios]

Decent article, makes some great points

http://www.pcworld.com/article/161930-2/gdc_09_6_reasons_onlive_could_be_a_bust.html

[rasmasyean]

Im not subscribed to netfilx, so i dont see the point of your point.

You complain about not being able to "own" your purchase. People have been "renting" movies for a long time and this time it's online as well as through the mail. So since Netflix is so successful, it seems "renting" is a pretty good business, wouldn't you say?

Technically, you don't own that movie. You just own the physical media its on. The movie and it's parts are protected by copyright laws so what you have is the right to watch it at your will. It's the same thing with games.

Since many people don't need to "own" this in this fashion, they can charge you a smaller fee for "borrowing" it, if you want to look at it that way. It's cheaper this way because you have access to more products considering that each product's "useful life" is limited to the individual's enterainment out of it.

And many people begin to realize this after a while as well and rather watch a bunch of movies than have a few sitting on their shelves. That's why HBO exists. And you don't even have to go to the store.

In this gaming service, imagine if all your firends want to play Game X. Depending on the business model of course, as long as it's easily accessible, you can all play together withouth leaving someone out. Then if you don't like it or you move on...you didn't waste $60 on something you will never play again. So some of the "risk" is shifted onto OnLive rather than the consumer. If the game flops...you don't have to worry about it. They do. And they should be more "right" on average because they are pros...compared to the general population whom most only see bright ads.

[Dagless]

You complain about not being able to "own" your purchase. People have been "renting" movies for a long time and this time it's online as well as through the mail. So since Netflix is so successful, it seems "renting" is a pretty good business, wouldn't you say?

But games are different. They're not something you devour one after the other since they're only 1-2 hours long. They're getting stupidly epic and games are now criticised for being less than 9 hours long. It's nothing like the movie industry at all.

[rasmasyean]

But games are different. They're not something you devour one after the other since they're only 1-2 hours long. They're getting stupidly epic and games are now criticised for being less than 9 hours long. It's nothing like the movie industry at all.

Actually most games are "devoured" one after the other more or less. But like movies, sometimes you go for "reruns" after a while. EA specializes in games that only last until the next fad.

Because it costs much less to create a game than a movie, they can charge you "less" money per hour of entertainment because it lasts so long. But still not forever.

[Dagless]

They are but people generally don't complete a 15 hour game one evening and repeat the process for another game the next day.
These are 2 such wildly different markets.

EA specialises in fad games? Uh, what? I don't like EA but it seems like you just completely missed what they do.

[NoSmokingBandit]

You complain about not being able to "own" your purchase. People have been "renting" movies for a long time and this time it's online as well as through the mail. So since Netflix is so successful, it seems "renting" is a pretty good business, wouldn't you say?

I never said it wouldnt be successful, i said they wouldnt be getting any money from me. If the ps3/360/wii generation is the last generation of consoles then it will be the last generation i game.

[rasmasyean]

They are but people generally don't complete a 15 hour game one evening and repeat the process for another game the next day.
These are 2 such wildly different markets.

EA specialises in fad games? Uh, what? I don't like EA but it seems like you just completely missed what they do.

I'm just pointing out that it's limited in useful fun. You can perhaps switch to many different games during you subscription, but eventually, like titles you "own", most will sit on the shelf.

Look at all those EA sports games that come out every single year. They have "hits" that last a long time relatively, but most are just release and market to madness until most people forget it ever existed.

I too sometimes like to watch Terminator or Star Wars. But those are the exceptions. Not the rule.

[Dagless]

Then that isn't the definition of a fad. That's just a series that they make, year in year out that most people don't even class in the same league as Zelda, GTA, Halo etc.

I think anyone who is into competative play (as you mentioned before) is going to want to own a copy of a game that they're likely to pump god knows how many hours in. In my case take TF2; I've put about 250 hours into that since I bought it before launch (beta) and I paid £26 for that and 4 other incredible games. How much would that 260 hours cost if I had to 'rent' it?

And for other games thats why we have demos, why shops have a return policy, why eBay and Cragslist exist. Or just buy games for stupidly cheap from Steam (I have 50 games that I spent £100 on over the space of 5 years).

[Chone]

This is a kind of cloud computing. They will of course not use one "PC" per person playing a game.. They have huge farms of identical servers all running virtual servers on the fly. So if you want to play, they create a virtual server just for you. Each physical server has the potential to run many virtual instances of "World of Goo" for example.

They will not need to update servers left and right. They just add more hardware when needed. The hardware is abstracted, so they (and you) don't have to think about it. This will also scale along with the subscription fees from more and more users. So more users need more hardware - but also pays more subscriptions - allowing more hardware.

Also, everyone needs to sleep - so servers can mostly be serving US when Asia and Europe sleeps. So less wasted computing power for the planet :)

This is all based on my knowledge of cloud computing, which will be the future of all applications in the end :)

How many instances of Crysis or any other top-end game do you think a computer can run simultaneously?

We are not talking about World of Goo (anyone's computer can play that game), we are talking about users with EeePCs and Macbook Airs being able to play demanding games like Crysis, that's why OnLive is so interesting.

[Dagless]

Also, everyone needs to sleep - so servers can mostly be serving US when Asia and Europe sleeps. So less wasted computing power for the planet :)
No that doesn't work. I see just as many Europeans playing games on my Steam list at 6pm than I do at 1, 4, 6am.

This is all based on my knowledge of cloud computing, which will be the future of all applications in the end :)
I doubt it. From what I've seen from public reactions to DRM - they don't like it. And this is just another DRM. You don't own right to use the software, you're just renting the right over a laggy connection. Cloud computing can become a very bad thing, all our software being controlled by a series of companies that can change their software at any point, or remove the software completely leaving you with just a subscription bill? Nope.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article < some common sense.

[rasmasyean]

Maybe this will help.

Sprint WiMAX Begins the Era of True Wireless Broadband
It will come in stages, with 2-4 Mbit/s WiMAX (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/160800/clearwire_aims_to_reach_120m_people_in_2010.html) being the next plateau, then maybe 150 Mbit/s. Five years from now, we might expect gigabit wireless downlink speeds will be, if not immediately available, very close to it.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/161987/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

[e²Studios]

Maybe this will help.

I just don't think you are getting it (The valid points and facts people have been posting for you) unfortunatly.. :(

[rasmasyean]

I just don't think you are getting it (The valid points and facts people have been posting for you) unfortunatly.. :(

We'll see. Maybe it's you who has a lack of vision. :(

[rasmasyean]

One thing I have seen recently is a large amount of startups involving HD video conferencing. Not sure if this is related technology wise, but I do remeber puzzled by how all of the sudden there was this renewed insterest in video conferencing. Especially in HD. I didn't think too much of it after that, but I do remeber it looked really clear. I didn't get a chance to talk to the other people myself since I wasn't really that interested but I believe I asked if it required some dedicated line and the guy said "no".



EDIT: Here's a consumer version I found on Youtube thats like $100 or something.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtbPr5siC-Q

Maybe they use some of those patents that OnLive dude holds. His bio on the net says he has like 80 so maybe amoung them are HD streaming chips.

[JackAxe]

That would be cool. I'd actually like to see Dish and Cable service also adopt this.

Anyways, still not for me. I really don't want there to be a time where none of us have comps and we are all dependent on cloud computing.

[NoSmokingBandit]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article?page=1
Sorry if that has been posted before, but its a good read.

[Dagless]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article?page=1
Sorry if that has been posted before, but its a good read.

6 posts above yours :p

[rasmasyean]

That would be cool. I'd actually like to see Dish and Cable service also adopt this.

Anyways, still not for me. I really don't want there to be a time where none of us have comps and we are all dependent on cloud computing.

I think there will always be enthusiats and applications that you want to or need to use on your personal device. But one of these things pretty much makes it easier for "grandma" to see "grandchild" really clearly and easily. Plug and pray devices were a nice idea, but in all honesty, I wish people were computer smart. But that's just not reality. I don't know how much the "phone unit" will cost, but I'm sure it will be cheap considering the $100 buys you the laptop card. Or maybe the cable company will bundle or "rent" it to you for a small fee...much like a WiFi router.

[rasmasyean]

the res they stated is 720p which is just fine for macbooks and okay for MBPs.
considering that more & more macs being sold are laptops, that's not bad. you can still hook your laptop to your tv and use it as a traditional games console.

it's not meant for high-end pc gamers with $2000-$3000 rigs. you still have the option to buy discs or downloaded content

Here's one that can do 1080p. Maybe they use the same technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtbPr5siC-Q

[Cassie]

This is ridiculous for those of us who don't do online gaming. I want a console I can take out to the friggin' beach if I want to and not need an internet connection to play games.

[rasmasyean]

This is ridiculous for those of us who don't do online gaming. I want a console I can take out to the friggin' beach if I want to and not need an internet connection to play games.

Sprint WiMAX Begins the Era of True Wireless Broadband
It will come in stages, with 2-4 Mbit/s WiMAX[/URL (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/160800/clearwire_aims_to_reach_120m_people_in_2010.html)] being the next plateau, then maybe 150 Mbit/s. Five years from now, we might expect gigabit wireless downlink speeds will be, if not immediately available, very close to it.
[URL]http://www.pcworld.com/article/161987/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

[Dagless]

Do you get a flying car and silver jumpsuit with a Wimax subscription?

Guessing that Wimax is going to carry one hell of a subscription too and not actually be as good as they stated?
Some people simply don't want to connect online to play. If there's a power outtage for a few hours I'll play DS or PSP, or on the laptop until the battery died. There isn't even 100% mobile phone coverage in the UK (guessing US too?), so how is Wimax going to solve everything? There are games that require twitch responses and unless there is 0 lag they will not work.

[rasmasyean]

Do you get a flying car and silver jumpsuit with a Wimax subscription?

Guessing that Wimax is going to carry one hell of a subscription too and not actually be as good as they stated?
Some people simply don't want to connect online to play. If there's a power outtage for a few hours I'll play DS or PSP, or on the laptop until the battery died. There isn't even 100% mobile phone coverage in the UK (guessing US too?), so how is Wimax going to solve everything? There are games that require twitch responses and unless there is 0 lag they will not work.

Good for you. Technically, you don't need to leave you house. Just order food to be delivered.

I'm just letting you guys know that there is WiMax in the works. Not that you are forced to use it or pay for it.

There isn't a perfect solution everything. It's just an "option". You can gripe about your whole life for all anyone cares. There are people who play all sorts of games "connected" and find "single-player" a bit borring too. If you don't want to play these, so what? Why are you complaining that it exists? You can't stand the fact that people are having fun online without you? Didn't mean to make you cry, dude...but that's your problem! :rolleyes:

[Dagless]

Good for you. Technically, you don't need to leave you house. Just order food to be delivered.

I'm just letting you guys know that there is WiMax in the works. Not that you are forced to use it or pay for it.

There isn't a perfect solution everything. It's just an "option". You can gripe about your whole life for all anyone cares. There are people who play all sorts of games "connected" and find "single-player" a bit borring too. If you don't want to play these, so what? Why are you complaining that it exists? You can't stand the fact that people are having fun online without you? Didn't mean to make you cry, dude...but that's your problem! :rolleyes:

Your posts are making less sense each time :D crying? wtf!

I play single player, I play multiplayer. I put at least an hour into L4D a night playing online against friends, randoms. The only thing I have beef with are people harking this OnLive tech without giving it second thought only that "it sounds so awesums!". Look into it. Look into current technologies. Look into what they're promising... A vast network where hundreds of thousands of players can log on and play Crysis or UT3 with 1ms lag.

[myca]

I read the eurogamer post today and was planning on sticking the link in here, but I've been beaten twice.

Anyway, I'll believe this will work when I see it in someones home running lag free and not suffering from video compression artefacts.

[rasmasyean]

Your posts are making less sense each time :D crying? wtf!

I play single player, I play multiplayer. I put at least an hour into L4D a night playing online against friends, randoms. The only thing I have beef with are people harking this OnLive tech without giving it second thought only that "it sounds so awesums!". Look into it. Look into current technologies. Look into what they're promising... A vast network where hundreds of thousands of players can log on and play Crysis or UT3 with 1ms lag.

They said the encoding takes 1ms. I think the lag will be more than that. But for some games, it might be OK. I guess we'll see which ones it "works" for. But to say that this is completely impossible to accomplish is being a bit too skeptical. Who knows what kind of games they will eventually offer or what kind of business model they will have. Lots of games online play with acceptable lag. I guess ultimately, those that aren't acceptable will be weeded out.

[e²Studios]

Anyway, I'll believe this will work when I see it in someones home running lag free and not suffering from video compression artefacts.

So in other words.. Never. This is 10+ years off at best

[mac88]

The "lag free" comment really has me thinking. I would have to play this hands on to really make a judgement. It is a great concept though.

[rasmasyean]

I think some of you guys are expecting too much. For many games, under .5 seconds is good enough. It will prolly be faster most of the time, but it doesn't have to be "lag free". :cool:

[str1f3]

Do you get a flying car and silver jumpsuit with a Wimax subscription?

Guessing that Wimax is going to carry one hell of a subscription too and not actually be as good as they stated?
Some people simply don't want to connect online to play. If there's a power outtage for a few hours I'll play DS or PSP, or on the laptop until the battery died. There isn't even 100% mobile phone coverage in the UK (guessing US too?), so how is Wimax going to solve everything? There are games that require twitch responses and unless there is 0 lag they will not work.

I don't understand what the big deal is. You're games are not going away. Onlive is not replacing anything for the forseeable future so you can still play games and play them wherever you please. The laptop you're playing on, I assume, is a fairly powerful laptop. Maybe a Macbook pro. Not everybody has one. For those who have just macbooks, this is a great thing.

I have a MacBook pro. I like playing games but I'm not hardcore. I'm quite content to pick up a game a year that i really like and also play the latest and greatest through onlive (if everything works well).

Maybe onlive will work and maybe it won't. But there is no reason to slam any alternative before it can even be tried. I signed up for the beta. I can assure you if it dosen't provide me with a good experience then they won't be getting my money or anybody else's. In the world of pc gaming, where fps rule, onlive had better perform or it will die a quick death.

[e²Studios]

I think some of you guys are expecting too much. For many games, under .5 seconds is good enough. It will prolly be faster most of the time, but it doesn't have to be "lag free". :cool:

I think you are missing the whole point, i said that before. It does have to be lag free, and if there is artifacting it will ruin the gaming experience. The chances of a lag free, or even a lag experience that you are expecting, and no artifacting from compression is nearly impossible with current technology. This is 10+ years ahead of its time, yea a great idea in practice but in reality (where we all live) it is not viable right now. It's vaporware, or it will become vaporware fairly fast if they even dare to release this to market.

[MacRumorUser]

It definitely seems to be the future of gaming, and a service such as this with unified hardware and an easy distributable path would be attractive to all developers and publishers.

However I know my internet connection will barely handle standard definition, let alone the 720p stream.....

As others have said the reality is this is a few years ahead of itself. Maybe when 4G broadband launches in 2010/2011 with promised 45mb download speeds this will be perfect...

[Dagless]

I don't understand what the big deal is. Your games are not going away. Onlive is not replacing anything for the forseeable future so you can still play games and play them wherever you please. The laptop you're playing on, I assume, is a fairly powerful laptop. Maybe a Macbook pro. Not everybody has one. For those who have just macbooks, this is a great thing.
Nope, just a MacBook. Runs all my games (Source Engine stuff) great. But it's gaming on a laptop which is a bit daft to start with.

Maybe onlive will work and maybe it won't. But there is no reason to slam any alternative before it can even be tried. I signed up for the beta. I can assure you if it dosen't provide me with a good experience then they won't be getting my money or anybody else's. In the world of pc gaming, where fps rule, onlive had better perform or it will die a quick death.

As I said my problem is with people who think this is going to change everything and work flawlessly without actually looking into the service and using common sense. I've never been one to suffer fools so I apologise.

[Dagless]

I think some of you guys are expecting too much. For many games, under .5 seconds is good enough. It will prolly be faster most of the time, but it doesn't have to be "lag free". :cool:

Course it does! Right-
This thing seems to be aimed at people who want to play big, beefy games on weak systems (because a weak system will already play the smaller games). People who didn't use Bluetooth mice for gaming because of lag, people who buy special equipment that reduces lag, like Razer and Logitech.

The input has to be 100% lag free, but it won't be. We expect output lag in online games and games have been properly coded from the ground up to support lag prediction technology. Sometimes we expect bullets to miss because one of the connections in a game isn't going as fast as yours, we don't want movement(/input) lag and there's an entire market capitalising on this!

[shinchan72]

the res they stated is 720p which is just fine for macbooks and okay for MBPs.
considering that more & more macs being sold are laptops, that's not bad. you can still hook your laptop to your tv and use it as a traditional games console.

it's not meant for high-end pc gamers with $2000-$3000 rigs. you still have the option to buy discs or downloaded content

You can build a 1000 dollar PC right now that makes games run great at 1920x1200. For 300 more a 24" monitor that does 1920x1200.

It's a myth it takes 2000-3000 to run PC games at high res. Honestly you can build one even a bit cheaper than I stated that still screams in comparison.

1920x1200 on a 20mb cable modem connection playing a FPS with a 20ms ping will make playing at 720p with lag look like crap in comparison.

They tested this in a lab setting and many reviewers and attendees stated they could notice the compression , check out Shacknews , they stated it was very noticeable.

I just say that my guess is this won't be near as popular as they are making it out to be , as the slightest problems people have in their connection will be amplified x1000 having to actually pull the video content also. Add on to the fact that a cheap PC at the time will be able to run at twice the res and faster and it really won't have much of a point to it.

[rasmasyean]

You can build a 1000 dollar PC right now that makes games run great at 1920x1200. For 300 more a 24" monitor that does 1920x1200.

It's a myth it takes 2000-3000 to run PC games at high res. Honestly you can build one even a bit cheaper than I stated that still screams in comparison.


True, but are games going to stop comming out and stop advancing? Your $1,000 rig next year will be like a $400 rig now. The idea is to capture a market that isn't part of "PC Gamers Club" too.

Not everyone is going to upgrade their PC's just to play games. Not everyone is going to buy all sorts of consoles at their whim and research the games either. But without a doubt, interactive video entertainment has been gaining ground against stuff like TV, the park, clubbing, and traditional social getogethers. Look at that average size of Americans! ;)

Look at the iPhone App explosion. Do you think that iPhones had more applications than say...Windows Mobile? Do you think they are actually nearly as sophisticated (at least in the beginning)? When people can see a selection right in front of thier face in the AppStore and "one-click it", they would even buy $999 iAmRich applications! If you wanted an App for WM, you had to research the internet, participate in forums, download it, learn how to install it navigating multiple tree menu systems, make sure it doesn't have a virus, choose between Windows guided install and native executable, sometimes play with folder views in a 2" screen, learn and play with settings to configure the app for your specific device and hardware...shall I go on? :eek: Only the super geeks and hardcore business users (who have no choice) used these devices. It took years for people to aclimate to Windows Mobile. KIDS and your MOM use iPhones as their first smartphone ever!

[rasmasyean]

Course it does! Right-
This thing seems to be aimed at people who want to play big, beefy games on weak systems (because a weak system will already play the smaller games). People who didn't use Bluetooth mice for gaming because of lag, people who buy special equipment that reduces lag, like Razer and Logitech.

The input has to be 100% lag free, but it won't be. We expect output lag in online games and games have been properly coded from the ground up to support lag prediction technology. Sometimes we expect bullets to miss because one of the connections in a game isn't going as fast as yours, we don't want movement(/input) lag and there's an entire market capitalising on this!

Yeah, well maybe they used those Crysis examples just to hype up their revelation. In reality, they may just offer some other "lag tollerant" games. But You probably get a choice to play a whole bunch of different games without having to stock your closet. I can imagine that maybe if you are near a server, you can still play some of these twitch games. I still like the idea of the service. I think it will open up options for many users. Like RPG games would be ideal "big market" coverage for this service.

EDIT: I just noticed something. Maybe part of thier system uses the Windows Azure cloud computing platform. Those multiple video menu systems with videos on different surface angles is characteristic of Windows Presentation Foundation. Unless there's another development environment that does this or they made it from scratch, this looks a lot like WPF applications.
Check out this video. It looks a lot like those shown in Microsoft demos.
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47260.html

EDIT AGAIN: Since this is a "Mac forum", maybe some of you haven't seen WPF stuff. Here's a little clip that shows some simpliflied version of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tKj_zscwNE

[Dagless]

It's a myth it takes 2000-3000 to run PC games at high res.
Of course it is, a myth continued by people who aren't researching this properly. If you bought an £800 PC with a C2Q and 4870x2 you have a high end gaming PC that will continue to run games well for years. Hell my almost 3 year old (overclocked) iMac can run L4D at med settings at native res and that was never a gaming machine to start with! New consoles come out every 5 years and cost around £200-300, PC games can be bought new for £25. This isn't an expensive market. You don't have to update your graphics card every few months. Enough with the myths!

I can imagine that maybe if you are near a server, you can still play some of these twitch games.

A compulsory 1ms lag ontop of any connection lag says no. Even if you were connected via LAN right up to one of these servers you would still get lag, no matter how small, which would destroy the idea of fast games.

[Ol3s]

This sounds like a wonderful idea. I'm buying this once it hits europe.

Imagine a future where the handheld console market is controlled by the iPod Touch and the console market by onlive. Well except iTouch is unlikely to achieve this but onlive...

[Dagless]

Imagine a future where the handheld console market is controlled by the iPod Touch and the console market by onlive. Well except iTouch is unlikely to achieve this but onlive...

Yea, a market dominated by 1 product that's all we need. IMO this handheld gen has been the best yet because we finally have 2 successful systems, so it's not a 50/50 market split but it's the best competition Nintendo have had and it's showed. Plus the iPod Touch (iTouch is an old EPOS touchscreen software (http://www.itouchonline.co.uk/index.html)) won't have support of Nintendo and their 2nd and 1st party devs.

[rasmasyean]

Yea, a market dominated by 1 product that's all we need. IMO this handheld gen has been the best yet because we finally have 2 successful systems, so it's not a 50/50 market split but it's the best competition Nintendo have had and it's showed. Plus the iPod Touch (iTouch is an old EPOS touchscreen software (http://www.itouchonline.co.uk/index.html)) won't have support of Nintendo and their 2nd and 1st party devs.

Mobile projector technology using DLP (http://www.dlp.com/) micromachines have made it to market.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgnADSuF8MA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeJum-mGo7U

[Dagless]

What did that have to do with my post?

[rasmasyean]

What did that have to do with my post?

Another option for mobile devices. It makes you have a larger screen to play on like a wall, etc.


Hey, I just saw a clip that the CEO said it's relatively easy to port over a XBox game and will take a bit of extra work to port over a PS3 game.
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47079.html?type=flv

Perhaps this is a hint that it's one of the first consumer Windows Azure (http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx) systems. And he said Intel Macs work. Maybe this will be Silverlight (http://silverlight.net/) based since that only works on Intel Macs.

[Dagless]

What is going on this thread :D more meanderings than the Danube.

[pyromaniaque]

Well with this new piece of technology, your mac, or pc for you lame-os can "stream" in any game.
The video also features a REALLY OLD DELL LAPTOP with INTEGRATED GRAPHICS running Chrysis smoothly.

Watch this video for more information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a3h9VKQnpc <--Short Summary and discussion.
http://gdc.gamespot.com/video/6206692/gdc-2009-onlive-press-conference?hd=1 <--Press Conference, 53 minutes, but everything you need to know. Please watch this one also even though it's long, it shows you some ABSOLUTELY amazing stuff.

Note: This is designed by the creator of Quicktime, WebTV, and mova.
This has been under secret development for 7 years.

This has INSTANT gaming.

You only need 1.5mbps internet. The iPhone can do 3.6mbp/s. I have 20mbps internet at home. Yup, do that math.

[ynk1121]

:eek: That's going to be some amazing server setup they'll need to pull off a service like that

[pyromaniaque]

Yup, pretty cool stuff. I've signed up for the beta testing and everything. :)

[Cantunis]

Yup, pretty cool stuff. I've signed up for the beta testing and everything. :)

where do you signup ?

EDIT : Found it , but beta is US only

[jeremybuff]

Ah nice, this is awesome!

[pyromaniaque]

Yeah, the best thing about it is that it has literally no lag.

[raymondu999]

barring network latency issues, of course:D

[pyromaniaque]

barring network latency issues, of course:D

You only need 1.5mbps internet. The iPhone can do 3.6mbp/s. I have 20mbps internet at home. Yup, do that math.

[aznguyen316]

I'm a supporter of Online, if* it works, I think this will be amazing, especially for the portable users like myself =)

[acfusion29]

U.S. only... :mad: For the BETA at least.

If the full release is U.S. only as well, I will be pissed. Canada never gets anything.

[Abstract]

You keep bringing up the iPhone, but a theoretical limit is just that. You'll (probably) never see info transfered to an iPhone at that speed today.

And I think I have around a 6 mbps internet, which should bring up every large, busy webpage (think a MySpace page) up in around 1 to 1.5 seconds, and yet sometimes it takes longer.


I'm not trying to say this service isn't good, but that your expectations may be a bit high. Perhaps if your limit is far higher than 1.5 mbps, you'll have enough of a safety buffer to ALWAYS get at least that speed. However, lots of people don't, and like I said, I don't think I'm always getting a 1.5 mbps data stream all the time, even though I should be. Maybe this will be great when the internet infrastructure in North America stops sucking. ;)

[shinchan72]

From a gamesite editor who was one of the ones onsite.

"But unfortunately, the illusion faded along with the loading screen. Once I was in the game itself, I immediately noticed the unwelcome signs of blocky compression. It wasn't so compressed that it was entirely distracting from the gameplay, but it was also worse than I expected. The visual quality was high, but the experience was marred by the considerable amount of splotchy pixels.

Playing around in Rapture, I found that response-time lag was mostly unnoticeable--mostly. When turning quickly, there were disappointing moments of hitching here and there. It was an impressive technical accomplishment, but at the same time unquestionably inferior to playing from a disc."


Blocky compression signs and hitching while it's on the LAN in a test environment. Now take that and put it across the internet outside a test environment and saying there will "be no lag" is ridiculous.

Not really up for playing games where I see the compression algorithm in the visuals and for hiccups way more often than you would on a normal rig.

The Xbox crowd won't be into this , the pc gaming crowd who knows how to build a 800 dollar pc that can run this thing in the ground in visuals and response time won't accept the crap quality , so that leaves a niche of a niche.

Some don't mind playing with lag and crap graphics , so this will be for them I suppose.

[Dagless]

You only need 1.5mbps internet. The iPhone can do 3.6mbp/s. I have 20mbps internet at home. Yup, do that math.

Hmm, I used to tap into my uni's network (stupidly fast) for a quick game of TF2 between lectures and even then, even playing on local servers, there was between 5-10ms lag.
1.5mbps, lol. We have that an even with SD IPTV we can't stream good quality stuff. But I guess from the post above (and numerous other sites) the service is terrible anyways.

[pyromaniaque]

They use some sort of "super decompression" technology so it works really different from how online games normally would. But only time will tell, as we currently do not know how well this will work.

[rasmasyean]

Hmm, I used to tap into my uni's network (stupidly fast) for a quick game of TF2 between lectures and even then, even playing on local servers, there was between 5-10ms lag.
1.5mbps, lol. We have that an even with SD IPTV we can't stream good quality stuff. But I guess from the post above (and numerous other sites) the service is terrible anyways.

Often, uni's are pretty cheap compared to real world business. In addition, they don't pay that well so a lot of the "good IT people" are snatched by private industry with high salaries. This as well as the "conservative" atmostphere in academic administration leave most uni settings in the dust when it comes to technology. If there is anything "cutting edge" it's usually in a lab cut off from anyone not involved in the project unless they are "field testing" it on a limited scale even. When you are in uni, you may not have seen that much so systems and "staff" seem to be cutting edge because you don't know anything yet. With the exception of some reasearch efforts that havent made it to market yet. When you go into industry, uni stuff is like toys. And when you consider commercial and well funded government (often military) R&D labs, sometimes industry stuff are like toys.

[rasmasyean]

Here's some related news. Gaikai and OTOY have apparently come out of “secrecy” to announce their competing product with the revelation of OnLive. One of them has claimed to use an AMD supercomputer class cloud computing system.

http://www.gamespot.com/hardware/blogs/hardware-insider/909185655/26825286/streaming-games-onlive-gaikai-otoy-anyone-else.html

http://www.gaikai.com/

http://www.otoy.com/

[Dagless]

Often, uni's are pretty cheap compared to real world business. In addition, they don't pay that well so a lot of the "good IT people" are snatched by private industry with high salaries. This as well as the "conservative" atmostphere in academic administration leave most uni settings in the dust when it comes to technology. If there is anything "cutting edge" it's usually in a lab cut off from anyone not involved in the project unless they are "field testing" it on a limited scale even. When you are in uni, you may not have seen that much so systems and "staff" seem to be cutting edge because you don't know anything yet. With the exception of some reasearch efforts that havent made it to market yet. When you go into industry, uni stuff is like toys. And when you consider commercial and well funded government (often military) R&D labs, sometimes industry stuff are like toys.

Wait what? So in order to play this lag free I'm going to have to be in the military? My point was that at university our 100mb or whatever it was connection still provided lag with nearby servers. Even on my home 1.5mb connection I live in the same broadband exchange as one of my fave TF2 servers but there is still lag. Yet apparently my connection should handle 1ms lag of compressed SD video at 60fps.

Time to enlist I guess.

[zorahk]

A hype machine for what? Engadget, gizmodo, 1up and others witnessed first hand that they were playing cysis on high using just a MacBook. I'm surprised that there are people rooting against this. I'm don't know if it's going to work but I'm hoping it does. Macs get continually screwed when it comes to games because of direct x. This way we get the same games at the same time.

I've owned every generation of consoles since the 2600 except this generation. Quite simply I'm tired of having lousy hardware that continually breaks, exclusive deals with certain consoles, and game prices rising.

With onlive I get to do gaming on my mac without ever having to deal with windows, no red ring of death, and always get to play the latest and greatest without buying expensive new hardware.

People act as if there is some great reason to owning a game. Do they feel the same way about netflix? Or how about that $70 game you bought is no longer supported is no longer supported by the next generation console hardware.

It's vaporware simply because it's like the phantom, which people seemingly don't remember

[aznguyen316]

Here's some related news. Gaikai and OTOY have apparently come out of “secrecy” to announce their competing product with the revelation of OnLive. One of them has claimed to use an AMD supercomputer class cloud computing system.

http://www.gamespot.com/hardware/blogs/hardware-insider/909185655/26825286/streaming-games-onlive-gaikai-otoy-anyone-else.html

http://www.gaikai.com/

http://www.otoy.com/

Very interesting lol.. haven't read them yet but do they have some big publishers backing them at all?

[Ol3s]

It's vaporware simply because it's like the phantom, which people seemingly don't remember

how is it vaporware, people have used it, people have seen it, it is coming out in 3/4 of a year, it already has 9 developers and 16 games available

[-SD-]

I really don't see how a company like OnLive can have the capital to actually take this to market. Sure they've developed the whole system but that's only the first step. I believe the company is looking for someone to buy them out, or at least licence the technology.

Imagine if Apple decided to become involved. Write an :apple:TV native version of the decompression software (a Mac version exists anyway) and make the game purchases part of an App Store for the :apple:TV. Immediately a £195 :apple:TV would be able to compete with the Xbox360 and PS3.

Just need to let the Apple designers loose with that controller to make it a little more ergonomic and pleasing to the eye.

:apple:

[Dagless]

would be able to compete with the Xbox360 and PS3.

No, not really.

[neiltc13]

According to SpeedTest.net I get a 54ms ping to a server in London. Just imagine that, a 54ms delay on EVERY input you make in a game.

I can't believe this has gained this much traction. It will be a disaster.

[rasmasyean]

Does anyone else see the social media implications of this? This looks like the dawn for the Facebook of games to me in some sense. I don’t think it has to have sub 50ms around the globe latency for it to be successful. It’s not about the traditional way of playing Xbox shooting games. It’s much more of a community based gaming system where you will also have access to a wide range of games.

[NoSmokingBandit]

According to SpeedTest.net I get a 54ms ping to a server in London. Just imagine that, a 54ms delay on EVERY input you make in a game.

I can't believe this has gained this much traction. It will be a disaster.

Im not 100% sure how ping delay is measured, but wouldnt it be a 54ms delay going in, then another 54ms delay coming back, so it would take 108ms for you to see the effects of your actions? Not to mention the little bit of lag from the game itself (its not much, but every game has a little controller lag), the lag from the video being compressed and encoded...
Until we all have T1 connections i just dont see this as a reality. And i am happy about that.

I love console gaming. If there is no PS4, xbox720, or nintendo whatever, i will be very sad. If i cant own the console or the game i am playing i will not play it. Heck, i dont even "buy" dlc from PSN (i say "buy" because you never really own the content and the devs can take it back whenever they feel like it). I buy games that are on discs or cartrdiges. If i cant sell my game when i am done with it then it is a terrible investment on my part. Thats also one reason i dont buy from iTunes. Perhaps i have an old-school mentality (though im only 19), but i dont like buying things i cant prove i own.

[trose]

I really don't see how a company like OnLive can have the capital to actually take this to market. Sure they've developed the whole system but that's only the first step. I believe the company is looking for someone to buy them out, or at least licence the technology.

Imagine if Apple decided to become involved. Write an :apple:TV native version of the decompression software (a Mac version exists anyway) and make the game purchases part of an App Store for the :apple:TV. Immediately a £195 :apple:TV would be able to compete with the Xbox360 and PS3.

Just need to let the Apple designers loose with that controller to make it a little more ergonomic and pleasing to the eye.

:apple:

Somebody discovered Opt-Shift-K...

Sheesh, I get it, the Apple logo is spiffy.

[trose]

Im not 100% sure how ping delay is measured, but wouldnt it be a 54ms delay going in, then another 54ms delay coming back, so it would take 108ms for you to see the effects of your actions? Not to mention the little bit of lag from the game itself (its not much, but every game has a little controller lag), the lag from the video being compressed and encoded...
Until we all have T1 connections i just dont see this as a reality. And i am happy about that.

I love console gaming. If there is no PS4, xbox720, or nintendo whatever, i will be very sad. If i cant own the console or the game i am playing i will not play it. Heck, i dont even "buy" dlc from PSN (i say "buy" because you never really own the content and the devs can take it back whenever they feel like it). I buy games that are on discs or cartrdiges. If i cant sell my game when i am done with it then it is a terrible investment on my part. Thats also one reason i dont buy from iTunes. Perhaps i have an old-school mentality (though im only 19), but i dont like buying things i cant prove i own.

Ping are measured in the time it takes to "Ping" the server and then receive the response. So, 54ms is his total trip time.

Controller lag is extremely minimal. Like... not even a ms, unless it's wireless. Even then, modern fast RF used for controllers is such a tiny amount of latency, it's barely worth mentioning.

Also, they claim that the video can be compressed and decompressed in 1ms. Seems unlikely to me, but let's just assume they're correct...

This idea could *feasibly* work, but it's not going to work great for everyone, unless OnLine has servers spread throughout the US and its other operating territories.

If I was able to connect to one of their servers with a ping of 50ms, and IF their technology performs as fast as they claim, it would be acceptable. Under 100ms is not bad.

It's still not going to come close to playing the game locally though, and I just don't see how they're going to handle the compression as well as they claim. Especially given the resolutions they are touting... even at 720p, that's only 1280x720. That's already behind the curve... I game at 1680x1050 on my Mac, and wouldn't want to go any lower.

Great idea that *will* eventually become reality when bandwidth has expanded and more folks have fiber directly to their homes. Until that time, I don't see it being feasible.

[rasmasyean]

I would suspect that on average, speed in the US are > T1 (1.5 mbps). I’m sure OnLive and other services will have chosen areas that have a higher concentration of high bandwidth homes to start off. There are a lot of potential customers out there. No, sorry, this service wouldn’t be available to the same extent for everyone just as some people can still only get dialup. The world isn’t going to wait for you if you are unfortunate. Fact of life and get used to it.

But of course, like DSL, cable, fiber, WiMax, whatever…more people will get their turn as time goes by.

OnLive may have made a “grand entrance” with those super-graphics high-twitch games to “show off”…which is natural for any business wanting to hype their product before launch. But it’s certainly not limited to playing signature FPS titles nor is it simple a “console substitute”. It offers much more potential than what consoles can do in different aspects of community gaming. I think it has a lot of potential for casual gaming too. I imagine most people here are pretty hardcore because of the forum title, but you should know that the amount of casual gamers outnumber us by A LOT! And I’m sure the depth of games can be higher as you’re not limited to a CD or even a Blu Ray GB limit. Nor are you limited to the static processing power of your console or $3,000 Vista SLI area heater. There is a reason why WoW failed to come to fruition on the Xbox. And by some aspects that’s an old and low power MMO. Those issues are greatly decreased on a cloud supercomputer. And no…not everyone is going to play these uber games and kill the computer. I bet most people would play scrabble type games with each-other. Don’t forget PokeMon. Raise your hand if your Mom plays Crysis regularly. Yeah…anyone? …that’s what I thought.

Honestly, I think there will be a range of single player and multiplayer games that will be better on the Xbox or whatever for a while still. But the social / collaborative features might be a lot better on OnLive.
Maybe the “spectator feature” will interest people as well. It doesn’t have to be a “tournament”. It could be just for “reviewing”. You also can potentially learn from someone else playing…sort of like “hints”. It will make people close the gap better since they can actually see what works for others rather than read some huge wiki that misses a lot of details. Perhaps OnLive can introduce some banner ads here too to stem some of the costs and make subscription cheaper. Because I imagine that you would need a subscription to watch others play. Unless they can just cover spectator costs with just Ads.

[Dagless]

Controller lag is extremely minimal. Like... not even a ms, unless it's wireless. Even then, modern fast RF used for controllers is such a tiny amount of latency, it's barely worth mentioning.
Exactly, there's a whole market that caters to lag-free gaming. People don't like lag, anywhere. Even the non-hardcore gamers.

It's still not going to come close to playing the game locally though, and I just don't see how they're going to handle the compression as well as they claim. Especially given the resolutions they are touting... even at 720p, that's only 1280x720. That's already behind the curve... I game at 1680x1050 on my Mac, and wouldn't want to go any lower.
Even on my 3 year old iMac I always play games above 720. The more modern games are limited to a minimum of 800-900p and this is on an ancient DX9 card. Therefore who is the market for this if even a low end graphics card, or even a built in one can handle games quite well?


[FONT=Calibri][SIZE=3]I would suspect that on average, speed in the US are > T1 (1.5 mbps). I’m sure OnLive and other services will have chosen areas that have a higher concentration of high bandwidth homes to start off. There are a lot of potential customers out there. No, sorry, this service wouldn’t be available to the same extent for everyone just as some people can still only get dialup. The world isn’t going to wait for you if you are unfortunate. Fact of life and get used to it.
Once you're done you'll realise a service like this is going to need subscribers. Brilliant thing about Steam? Anyone, no matter their connection can download games. Brilliant thing about getting games from shops? You have them instantly and they're yours to keep forever.

So you're saying what; stuff anyone who can't get a fast connection, can't afford a fast connection, doesn't want to break their bandwidth limit?
Onlive's market is then limited already.

But it’s certainly not limited to playing signature FPS titles nor is it simple a “console substitute”. It offers much more potential than what consoles can do in different aspects of community gaming.
What do you mean by community gaming? Steam, Xbox Live. They've both pushing the boundaries of what you can do with other people surrounding the game.

I think it has a lot of potential for casual gaming too.
Uh, how? Casual gaming is noted by its visual simplicity and lack of high end system requirements. We gave away a Pentium 2 system years ago to a neighbour who played card games and other casual titles. Any system will run casual games and they're also very cheap.

And I’m sure the depth of games can be higher as you’re not limited to a CD or even a Blu Ray GB limit
Nope. Look at the disc size of games like GTA IV, Crysis, Fallout 3 or Oblivion. They're epic in scale and they're not limited at all by their medium.

Nor are you limited to the static processing power of your console or $3,000 Vista SLI area heater.
Or a £400 mid-range PC?

There is a reason why WoW failed to come to fruition on the Xbox.
Link to this evidence please.

Don’t forget PokeMon. Raise your hand if your Mom plays Crysis regularly. Yeah…anyone? …that’s what I thought.
Pokemon is owned by Nintendo, point?
No my parents would rather just play casual games as they already do on their computers and not sign up to a laggy internet streaming service to do so.

But the social / collaborative features might be a lot better on OnLive.
I don't get why you mean by the social/community side of Onlive being better than anything else ever, a new system trying to build a community is suddenly going to overtake the vast communities of Steam and Xbox Live?

[rasmasyean]

Nope. Look at the disc size of games like GTA IV, Crysis, Fallout 3 or Oblivion. They're epic in scale and they're not limited at all by their medium.


Actually, those may have high graphics clients and all perhaps, but they are considered "simple" games compared to say...MMO's. You might think highly of them, but they are by no means complex or even remotely sophisticated compared to others out there. So if that's your point, I'm afraid you might be a victim of marketing hype.

What I'm talking about is stuff like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nydW9XUA5VQ

But either way...it depends on what you want out of gaming. If you don't think cloud computing offers anything past client server whatever...you'll be banging heads against industry movers like Ray Ozzie, etc. who have been working toward cloud services (and the service vs. product model) for the past couple of years. And his team and others arround the globe have spent billions to make this happen.

[rasmasyean]

Link to this evidence please.


Just google it if you're really interested. Here's one that explains a little on why it can't readily happen.
http://www.massively.com/2008/06/25/don-t-expect-world-of-warcraft-on-the-ps3-or-xbox-360-ever/

If you know anything about these types of games and how they work, you can just see the obvious reasons why it can't work.

[rasmasyean]

Even on my 3 year old iMac I always play games above 720. The more modern games are limited to a minimum of 800-900p and this is on an ancient DX9 card. Therefore who is the market for this if even a low end graphics card, or even a built in one can handle games quite well?

If all people want in games is a high resolution picture, they should go to a museum and look at paintings. Are you joking? Or are you just trying to pick topics to vent and argue about. Gimme a break. LOL

[rasmasyean]

I don't get why you mean by the social/community side of Onlive being better than anything else ever, a new system trying to build a community is suddenly going to overtake the vast communities of Steam and Xbox Live?

I suppose it's hard to beat something like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUBQknWUEYU

[Dagless]

^ edit: oh you posted again. Well done for posting something of utter bare relevance to this topic. Your joke posts aside the 360 has a massive community that people are willing to pay for and other systems are trying to emulate.

First of all please don't write 3 individual replies when you can do so in one post, thanks.

If all people want in games is a high resolution picture, they should go to a museum and look at paintings. Are you joking? Or are you just trying to pick topics to vent and argue about. Gimme a break. LOL
I never said that. You don't seem to understand much about games - its more than resolutions. Take an old game like Duke Nukem or Doom, they have about the same number of enemies on screen as similar genre titles such as Doom 3 and Crysis. But their AI is much improved. Games have progressed a lot and need more powerful systems to render them. Take something like Left 4 Dead; it's not the most visually demanding of modern games when compared to Project Offset or the Crytek Engine 2, but on my 2ghz C2D it can render 300 zombies all with their own (albeit basic) AI and physics.
Photographs aren't interactive either. What kind of argument is that?
Besides which, if you honestly don't think people don't care about graphics then why are these big graphic games such big business? Seen the sales figures for GTA IV or any recent major release? Why people buy new consoles?

Just google it if you're really interested. Here's one that explains a little on why it can't readily happen.
http://www.massively.com/2008/06/25/don-t-expect-world-of-warcraft-on-the-ps3-or-xbox-360-ever/

If you know anything about these types of games and how they work, you can just see the obvious reasons why it can't work.
Of course I know how games work I'm a developer myself. But that link doesn't prove any of your claims, you said it was specs but both the 360 and PS3's HDD are upgradeable. They also say it's down to patch verification and their services wanting a cut of the subscription fees. My 1.5ghz G4 PowerBook can run WoW. A monstrous (compared) 360 or PS3 would technically run it.

Actually, those may have high graphics clients and all perhaps, but they are considered "simple" games compared to say...MMO's. You might think highly of them, but they are by no means complex or even remotely sophisticated compared to others out there. So if that's your point, I'm afraid you might be a victim of marketing hype.

What I'm talking about is stuff like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nydW9XUA5VQ

But either way...it depends on what you want out of gaming. If you don't think cloud computing offers anything past client server whatever...you'll be banging heads against industry movers like Ray Ozzie, etc. who have been working toward cloud services (and the service vs. product model) for the past couple of years. And his team and others arround the globe have spent billions to make this happen.

What that video has is something called post-processing effects, everything else looks very basic, infact the textures look terrible and the human models look very poor.
It's basic logic that big, powerful engines need big powerful systems to run (not counting bad ports). I don't know why you'd think otherwise. That's why my old computers are relegated to running weaker software :D it's not some global conspiracy.

And cloud computer will have its place. It's just not going to be christened with some laggy online gaming service on connections that only an absolute minority of internet users will be able to use. Especially a subscription service!

Still waiting for an answer to what you think this "community" thing OnLive will have over any other established services?

[rasmasyean]

Still waiting for an answer to what you think this "community" thing OnLive will have over any other established services?

Not everyone plays games...or will play games...or will start playing games...like you, dude.

I've already listed some social feature that make it different. You're just not accepting the fact that it can't be done on the XBox. Even some posted videos and those floating arround have obvious implications. Maybe you just find it superfluous. But that's just being stuck in the "old way". To each his own. It's the majority that decides fate in capitalism.


What that video has is something called post-processing effects, everything else looks very basic, infact the textures look terrible and the human models look very poor.

You might want to turn up the volumn and listen to what they say. Sounds like you watched it as a silent movie.

[Dagless]

Not everyone plays games...or will play games...or will start playing games...like you, dude.

I've already listed some social feature that make it different. You're just not accepting the fact that it can't be done on the XBox. Even some posted videos and those floating arround have obvious implications. Maybe you just find it superfluous. But that's just being stuck in the "old way". To each his own. It's the majority that decides fate in capitalism.

So you're saying a market with 11 million or so users on Steam (last time I read years ago), home consoles with hundreds of millions sold are going to be overtaken by a subscription service hindered by lag and limited to a selection of people with very fast connections who live near to these server farms?

Oh dear :D

And that video again- If you read the website it's just a method of streaming data through a plug in. Whilst it sounds as if the end user PC renders the data it is only displayed until the cache fills up. So again you're limited by connection speed. It's like taking Google Earth and saying it's the most powerful and largest textured 3D object "in the world" but all it does is stream individual sections. The end result is impressive but that's not something you can base a game off. A game engine has to be constantly "on", not streamed bit by bit. You are still going to need a fast computer to render all them polygons, a fast connection to stream it all without texture and model popup and a lot of ram to store the streaming data. You will not be able to run such a service off an old PC without taking a performance hit.

[rasmasyean]

So you're saying a market with 11 million or so users on Steam (last time I read years ago), home consoles with hundreds of millions sold are going to be overtaken by a subscription service hindered by lag and limited to a selection of people with very fast connections who live near to these server farms?

Oh dear :D

No...and not overnight. There are still people who read newspapers. And magazines too. Maybe if you were here 10 years ago, you might be saying that there are 11 million New York Times subscribers and hundreds of millions delivered to newstands...blah blah and news will be limited to people who have internet? lol

[Dagless]

No...and not overnight. There are still people who read newspapers. And magazines too. Maybe if you were here 10 years ago, you might be saying that there are 11 million New York Times subscribers and hundreds of millions delivered to newstands...blah blah and news will be limited to people who have internet? lol

Could you reiterate this point again? What have newspapers got to do with this? Without trying to sound too much like a dick could you keep your arguments coherent.

[rasmasyean]

Could you reiterate this point again? What have newspapers got to do with this? Without trying to sound too much like a dick could you keep your arguments coherent.

Ha, your stoop to vulgar insults just proves that you yeild. You can try to dish out sarcasm...but can't take it...especially when you think you are a know-it-all but find out that you don't really know something as much as you thought. :rolleyes:

[Dagless]

Ha, your stoop to vulgar insults just proves that you yeild. You can try to dish out sarcasm...but can't take it...especially when you think you are a know-it-all but find out that you don't really know something as much as you thought. :rolleyes:

No really, I'm sorry I didn't understand that post :). I'm not trying to insult you, I stick a smilie after an insult just incase they're not recieved properly :o. I love a good discussion.

I don't get what the NY Times has to do with anything. Could you explain it again?

[rasmasyean]

No really, I'm sorry I didn't understand that post :). I'm not trying to insult you, I stick a smilie after an insult just incase they're not recieved properly :o. I love a good discussion.

I don't get what the NY Times has to do with anything. Could you explain it again?

The adpotion on internet based media as a service model.

[cathyy]

I'm honestly really sceptical about this mainly due to latency issues. I don't see how they are able to stream the image to the user, get the user's input, process the new image, then send it back to the user while maintaining a smooth playable experience for the player.

I mean, people are already complaining about the latency while FPS gaming with a wireless internet connection or with a wireless mouse. Maybe this might work in South Korea where the entire country is hooked up like a gigantic LAN network, but no, not in the US.

[bobertoq]

I'm honestly really sceptical about this mainly due to latency issues. I don't see how they are able to stream the image to the user, get the user's input, process the new image, then send it back to the user while maintaining a smooth playable experience for the player.

I mean, people are already complaining about the latency while FPS gaming with a wireless internet connection or with a wireless mouse. Maybe this might work in South Korea where the entire country is hooked up like a gigantic LAN network, but no, not in the US.The video compression techniques are able to compress the data up to 200x. Pretty much, your latency will relate to how far away you are from server. Even if you are hundreds of miles away it will stream as smooth as TV is streamed to your television.

When you press a button, it sends that message to the server, at the speed of light. It computes the next frame as fast (or even faster because they have better servers) as it would locally on an Xbox 360 or a PS3. It then sends the next frame to your computer or television at the speed of light again. This whole process takes just milliseconds.

That's what I've been told anyway :confused:

[rasmasyean]

.

When you press a button, it sends that message to the server, at the speed of light. It computes the next frame as fast (or even faster because they have better servers) as it would locally on an Xbox 360 or a PS3. It then sends the next frame to your computer or television at the speed of light again. This whole process takes just milliseconds.

That's what I've been told anyway :confused:


That is incorrect. First of all, if you get down to the minute timing, the speed of light in a vacuum is faster than in glass or copper.
Second, your data (bundled in packets) is relayed by various computers called routers (good ones, not the ones at Best Buy) which pretty much introduces most of the delays. You do not have a straight fiber-optic line to an OnLive server. The furthur away you are from a location usually corresponds to the number of random "jumps" your packets take to get to the destination.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm

[rasmasyean]

I'm honestly really sceptical about this mainly due to latency issues. I don't see how they are able to stream the image to the user, get the user's input, process the new image, then send it back to the user while maintaining a smooth playable experience for the player.

I mean, people are already complaining about the latency while FPS gaming with a wireless internet connection or with a wireless mouse. Maybe this might work in South Korea where the entire country is hooked up like a gigantic LAN network, but no, not in the US.

I think you will have to be close to the servers to get a decent performance with twitch games. However, I think they choose those popular titles mostly for marketing purposes to hype the product. They will have other types of games that aren’t as latency dependent like MMO’s, Role Playing, strategy, puzzle, and the social services that go along with it. Don’t be surprised if one day they sport World of Warcraft or something. It’s entirely possible for them to do this and it would actually be a pretty good lure even if they take a loss on it considering how popular this online title is.

[Huntn]

Onlive (http://www.onlive.com/) was featured in the Oct09 PCGamer. If it works as advertised it will be miraculous and a exciting new option for those with any ole intel Mac. I just signed up for the beta, with the intent of using my MacBookPro, cause it would be nice to see this service upfront. :)

Speed of Electricity/Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity)
In contrast, electromagnetic wave propagation is much faster, and depends on the dielectric constant of the material. In a vacuum the wave travels at the speed of light and almost that fast in air. Propagation speed is affected by insulation, such that in an unshielded copper conductor it is about 96% of the speed of light, while in a typical coaxial cable it is about 66% of the speed of light [2].

Even at 66%, electricity is still FAST! Regarding comments regarding electronic input traveling at the speed of light, if it was just you hooked up directly to a server, it would be fast, but what about the internet, conjestion, servers, processors, dropped packets, and other obstacles to speed? I've played lots of online games, and they tend to experience slow downs enough to intermittantly interrupt game play. Think about a service like this, especially if it takes off. Will they be able to keep adequate throughput? :)

[rasmasyean]

Here's a taste.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-w56hQxmnY

http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming1080p

[soms]

This won't take off, at least for mainstream gamers, for quite some time. We are talking 5+ years, until the US has internet speeds like that of the rest of the world.
Onlive may work for simple games, but games like CoD, WAR, etc will not work at the resolution/fps that people are used to playing them at. Not only that, but you will EASILY go over a 250gb cap in a week or two.

[rasmasyean]

This won't take off, at least for mainstream gamers, for quite some time. We are talking 5+ years, until the US has internet speeds like that of the rest of the world.
Onlive may work for simple games, but games like CoD, WAR, etc will not work at the resolution/fps that people are used to playing them at. Not only that, but you will EASILY go over a 250gb cap in a week or two.

There's also this technology that looks promissing. Thought it's Windows only and will likely stay that way. :(

http://vimeo.com/2812472 (http://vimeo.com/2812472)

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9284 (http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9284)

[rasmasyean]

There's also this technology that looks promissing. Thought it's Windows only and will likely stay that way. :(

http://vimeo.com/2812472 (http://vimeo.com/2812472)

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9284 (http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9284)

Actually, scratch that for now. It looked like Microsoft pulled the plug on that at the last minute for RTM and pissed a whole bunch of ppl off. One guy says that he was going to purchase 1,000's of servers but now has to scrap the entire project. LOL

Horray for MicroShaft! :D

http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/06/19/changes-to-remoting-model-in-rdp-7.aspx

[apfhex]

Not only that, but you will EASILY go over a 250gb cap in a week or two.
Agreed about internet speeds, I think latency will really be an issue regardless of how much they deny it.

But as for DL caps - I've been steaming HD episodes of Lost on Netflix starting from season 1 earlier this month (halfway through season 4 now), which are rather high quality (better than Comcast HD :rolleyes:), and in addition to my regular internet activities (large software updates, torrents, web browsing, music streaming, etc.) I've only had 8GB/day as my peak and only 72GB total for the first half of September. Unless OnLive is going to be using significantly more bandwidth than something like Netflix, I don't think it will be an issue, well... at least for me. :) But I don't see myself really using the service anyway; I think for the most part people will stick to their consoles and gaming PCs and OnLive will find a niche somewhere.