All games can be browser based now...

[Samwise]

The problem brought up of latency is absolutely, 100% valid, but beyond that I haven't seen any other good, sensible argument why this would immediately "suck".

The fact that you're continuing to cheerlead this thing suggests that you don't understand what an insurmountable problem latency is.  Expect people to continue to explain it to you until you show signs of getting it.

All the other problems are at least potentially solvable; they're mostly matters of economy, not physics.  But no amount of money in the world lets you break lightspeed.  Until we invent the ansible, that is.

[BitWarrior]

I found a metaphor for you!

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines 

That's...not metaphor.

[BitWarrior]

The problem brought up of latency is absolutely, 100% valid, but beyond that I haven't seen any other good, sensible argument why this would immediately "suck".

The fact that you're continuing to cheerlead this thing suggests that you don't understand what an insurmountable problem latency is.  Expect people to continue to explain it to you until you show signs of getting it.

All the other problems are at least potentially solvable; they're mostly matters of economy, not physics.  But no amount of money in the world lets you break lightspeed.  Until we invent the ansible, that is.

I notice you've turned the conversation around. That's fine, I'll bite. If you want to point out where I identify this is the greatest technology ever that's going to solve all our problems, feel free. However, all I asked for in this thread was the argument against it:

Sorry, I didn't catch the thread where you shot this down. Why would a browser based, operating system independent game delivery system be bad again? Assuming the video can be pulled off (bandwidth dependent, largely), why is this a bad idea?

I found the primary negative, latency, and that's fine. It's a huge problem, and I absolutely agree as you quoted yourself. However yeah, I'm going to shoot down preposterous claims that X would be a problem when it very well might not be (or simply isn't), since I'm a jerk like that. Sorry if you feel I ripped you up a little, and I can see you're now taking the offensive, but if you're going to make claims you need to have evidence behind it. That's all.

[Fabricated]

hey guys people criticized the Wright brothers too, wrap it failures

[Samwise]

I found the primary negative, latency, and that's fine. It's a huge problem, and I absolutely agree as you quoted yourself.

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines  

So are you saying that you don't believe in airplanes, or are you saying that you think we're going to crack the problem of instantaneous communication at a distance in the next couple of decades, and that it's going to be cheaper to put that technology on every desk than it is to just have computers that can run games themselves?

[Lantyssa]

It entirely depends what you want to do with it.

Turn-based games without heavy graphics?  Sure, we could do Master of Magic/Orion over a connection like this.  Real-time interactivity in an analogous system to existing MMOs?  It will be unbearable.  For anything but fairly static or non-interactive games it isn't a "huge" problem, it's an insurmountable one.  That's why we're harping on it.

A smiliar idea which might work would be light-weight clients which have a small install, but use a common toolset.  That way a set of games can benefit from the same rendering engine on the client, bandwidth can be used for useful things, and shared assets can reduce install size.  (Texture are still going to eat an enormous amount of space though.)  That's at least starting to be a little more realistic than a snake-oil idea which can only work using quantum entanglement.

[Ingmar]

little shitty browser window.

Honestly, I have no idea why people get so excited over this shit.  "Have you ever played Quake?  Okay, now... have you ever played Quake... IN A BROWSER?"

Platform independence is the big draw. It is the same reason that as an email admin I want Google to get Google Wave hammered into a fully featured product, so I can give Microsoft Exchange the boot.

For someone who keeps a relatively up to date Windows system there's not a lot of excitement in this sort of thing, certainly, but for, say, Mac and Linux users there's a lot to hope for.

[Hindenburg]

All of those ideas are completely feasible. We'll just need to master quantum mechanics first. 

[BitWarrior]

So are you saying that you don't believe in airplanes, or are you saying that you think we're going to crack the problem of instantaneous communication at a distance in the next couple of decades, and that it's going to be cheaper to put that technology on every desk than it is to just have computers that can run games themselves?

I understand that you're trying to find a little room to be right somewhere in here, but I'm getting pretty bored of responding to your mislead idea of this conversation.

I am responding to the assertion that "It cannot happen". We as a species have said this many times before, recently it was the idea that "heavier than air machines" will never work. We all know how that turned out. Do you honestly have a problem with that? If you are prepared to make the claim that we are always correct whenever we state something cannot happen (especially regarding technology), be my guest.

I'm not going to respond to the issue of price, as I already have in a previous post. However, I will say this: You are extremely confused by my position.

[tmp]

Let me get this straight. The idea is to have a computer at the other end of intraweb tube that is beefy enough to execute the game, render video and sound the game generates, then use extra processing power on top of that to encode the graphics and sound into something that can be squeezed into said intraweb tube and passed to a computer on the other end, that's typically powerful enough to render that thing on its own in the first place? Then multiply that server computer by a number large enough to handle X players of Y games? They mention EVE-Online, it has up to 40k separate characters logged on at any given point... Not even to mention WoW.

Even leaving aside the whole latency thing, just the fun that'd be balancing the cost/utilization of server farms needed to handle that kind of service... well, good luck to whoever happens to be gullible enough to try that, it's like taking the concept of MMO launch to a whole new level

[Samwise]

You are extremely confused by my position.

I'm pretty sure everyone is confused by your position.  Possibly including yourself.

[Tarami]

This might have something to do with it?

[Samwise]

little shitty browser window.

Honestly, I have no idea why people get so excited over this shit.  "Have you ever played Quake?  Okay, now... have you ever played Quake... IN A BROWSER?"

Platform independence is the big draw. It is the same reason that as an email admin I want Google to get Google Wave hammered into a fully featured product, so I can give Microsoft Exchange the boot.

For someone who keeps a relatively up to date Windows system there's not a lot of excitement in this sort of thing, certainly, but for, say, Mac and Linux users there's a lot to hope for.

Thing is, with a setup like this you'd still need an up to date Windows system; you'd just be renting it and accessing it remotely instead of owning and running it locally.  It seems like it would be much more straightforward to just have a Windows install using something like Parallels or Wine, and play your games in that window instead of in a browser window.  I'm not sure how much of a pain in the ass it is to get Parallels set up in its current implementation, but that's a hell of an easier problem to solve than creating a giant rendering farm that magically teleport bits to your browser at superlight speeds.

[K9]

I am responding to the assertion that "It cannot happen". We as a species have said this many times before, recently it was the idea that "heavier than air machines" will never work. We all know how that turned out. Do you honestly have a problem with that? If you are prepared to make the claim that we are always correct whenever we state something cannot happen (especially regarding technology), be my guest.

Yes but you are arguing:

A) People state that certain things cannot happen
B) Later it is found that some of these things can infact happen
C) Therefore anyone arguing that something cannot happen is wrong.

I have a perpetual motion device and a time machine which I will happily sell to you if you are seriously interested though.

[raydeen]

I have a perpetual motion device and a time machine which I will happily sell to you if you are seriously interested though.

I already bought them tomorrow and have been having lots of fun with them both yesterday and today! Thanks in advance man!

[Sheepherder]

He's actually right guys.  As soon as we can make spherical space stations the point to point distance involved will be small enough to make this a reality.

[ghost]

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx

This could work..........

[Stephen Zepp]

It entirely depends what you want to do with it.


A smiliar idea which might work would be light-weight clients which have a small install, but use a common toolset.  That way a set of games can benefit from the same rendering engine on the client, bandwidth can be used for useful things, and shared assets can reduce install size.  (Texture are still going to eat an enormous amount of space though.)  That's at least starting to be a little more realistic than a snake-oil idea which can only work using quantum entanglement.

<molealert>

man, that sounds really familiar....

</molealert>

[Lantyssa]

Well played, mole.  Well played.

So we can go with moletech, or we can try to win a Nobel prize in physics.

[raydeen]

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx

This could work..........

Yeah, but really only on a LAN/WAN. We use this in some cases in the organization I work for and while it's doable, there are occasionally some graphics probs. We tried to run an old copy of Electronics Workbench and while it ran, we couldn't see the circuit paths being drawn. I assume it was a resolution problem between the PC and the Mac. From what our CIO said, Cytrix had a better solution but I don't know if we moved to that yet. Remote Desktop is pretty much relegated to very lightweight stuff that can't be run natively on a Mac and in cases where we don't have additional Parallels/Windows licenses.