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

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.
 
evan g said:
They seem pretty confident. Besides, a little optimism never hurt. :D
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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.
 
campeao said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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 :)
 
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
 
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.
 
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:
 
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 :)
 
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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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... :eek:

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.
 
NoSmokingBandit said:
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.
Click to expand...

Neflix bets otherwise.
 
cuube said:
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 :)
Click to expand...


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?
 
JackAxe said:
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... :eek:

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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
cuube said:
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 :)
Click to expand...

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
 
rasmasyean said:
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.
Click to expand...

"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.
 
takao said:
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
Click to expand...

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.
 
takao said:
"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.
Click to expand...

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