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

str1f3 said:
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
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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.
 
shinchan72 said:
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.
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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!
 
raggedjimmi said:
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!
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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
 
shinchan72 said:
It's a myth it takes 2000-3000 to run PC games at high res.
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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!

rasmasyean said:
I can imagine that maybe if you are near a server, you can still play some of these twitch games.
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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.
 
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...
 
Ol3s said:
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...
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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) won't have support of Nintendo and their 2nd and 1st party devs.
 
raggedjimmi said:
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) won't have support of Nintendo and their 2nd and 1st party devs.
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Mobile projector technology using DLP micromachines have made it to market.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgnADSuF8MA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeJum-mGo7U
 
raggedjimmi said:
What did that have to do with my post?
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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 systems. And he said Intel Macs work. Maybe this will be Silverlight based since that only works on Intel Macs.
 
Macs can now play PC games.

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.
 
:eek: That's going to be some amazing server setup they'll need to pull off a service like that
 
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.
 
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. ;)
 
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.
 
pyromaniaque said:
You only need 1.5mbps internet. The iPhone can do 3.6mbp/s. I have 20mbps internet at home. Yup, do that math.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
raggedjimmi said:
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.
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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.
 
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