f13.net

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/OnLive-Promises-Hard-Core-Gaming-Minus-the-Hardware-66605.html (http://www.technewsworld.com/story/OnLive-Promises-Hard-Core-Gaming-Minus-the-Hardware-66605.html)

Basically video compression, so both client and server are on the server, client is 'dumb cheap' display.



Wat?  Dawn Lives!

saw this earlier as well, seems like if true it would eliminate most hacking in multiplayer games (except macro based stuff).  Also might be the answer to mmog + destroyable environment w/accurate effects (everyone sees the same shrapnel from that hole you just blew in the ground).

I smell a Phantom. It sounds like it's using a Citrix like tech, only with video instead of stillshots streamed out. And Citrix, while cool for what it does, blows monkey ass for speed. Short of negative ping code, I remain skeptical about the viability of this service.

When I saw this on NGaf, my first response was "Servers will be on Ebay within a year."

I'm thinkin it might be doable at low resolution 480x320/15-20fps or somesuch, if so it would be pretty sweet if they released a mobile phone client.  Then again that would be the only decent use for that level of performance. 

This might be okay for MMOGs or other games that don't have to be pretty or demand good reaction times.  I can't see it taking off for FPSes any time soon.  Even if the tech actually works and the average user has enough bandwidth for it.

This has been kicked around for a number of years. The theory is that if you've got a connection to watch streaming HD video on your PC, why can't you "watch" the game be rendered for you and then just streamed to your PC as a video. It's an interesting idea, but isn't going to work for FPS games right away, for the same reason MMOFPS games aren't really MMO in the way PS tried to be right now.

The other problem of course is that all it really does is put the onus of both server and client overhead onto the developer/publisher. I don't know what that does to the resource and maintenance costs, but it would seem like it's at least adding a cost of $900 per user on your system. Right now MMOs rely on hundreds of thousands of those consumer-owned PCs doing the work for them.

So while it's cool, is it really worthwhile? What's the benefit to the company?

I really want to know. I've been wondering that for years.

Are game servers only $900?

Hey guys I have my own secret psychic netcode, can I get shitloads of venture capital to spend on marble desks and air hockey tables!??

You would have to send input to the server for it to be reacted upon.  I think most people will shortly say "fuck this noise" and upgrade their PC when they realize the response time of their character is limited by their round-trip ping.

Oh gods... Steve Perlman...

Game timesharing.

Everything old is new dumb again.

I need to come up with something amazingly stupid and amazingly awesome and get incredibly dumb fucking investors to just hand over money to give myself a fat paycheck and come back in 3 years with dismal failure.

This is, in fact, so fucking beyond stupid that I wish I was at GDC just to publically ridicule these retards.

I have had this idea on a tech to replace ethernet.  Instead of shooting out a packet at random, I think it would be far better to have each computer take turns transmitting on the wire.  This would eliminate packet collision and lag would disappear!

No. That was just my guesstimate for the extra cost per account holder, based on building a good enough gamer PC to drive the graphics that would then be streamed.

This is reason #13728318273 that this idea is just fundamentally stupid.

Wut? I know this is an old adage, but I don't think it's exactly true. When I have to time a feign death to just before I get taken out, or I have to time stuns/interrupts to the beginning of a casting animation...Maybe not fps razor's edge speed, but not ye olde 'autoattack + sandwich'.

It's not even really worth discussing at length, it won't work for fucking anything, it's goddamn stupid.

Yea, but here's the thing: lots of business people are talking about it. They see "WebTV" and "Quicktime" (with the obvious allegory to $$$ Appleomgrichesiphone!!!1/) and are all wondering about it. Telling them they're too stupid to see the truth doesn't prevent them from wanting to spend their money investing in it. :grin:

Print up a flier that says "You are an untrained, knowledgeable douchebag."

And then hand it out to anyone that looks interested in OnLive. On the back put "You can thank me later."

I agree with this statement.  :awesome_for_real:

I actually saw a segment on "Up to the Minute" about this... WTF?

Oh man! I'm hijacking this thread. I have to write a thesis paper on video game consoles and how they will drastically change how we interact with media. Is there any new tech coming about? Stupid stuff like Head2Go and all that jazz.

Old solutions for new problems (http://www.acaciart.com/stories/archive6.html), I bet you could even sell the idea to IBM if you could just come up with a jazzy new name for the talking stick network protocol.

Just seeing 'WebTV' would be enough for me to flee in terror.

From one of the articles I read, the video is super compressed and has a stream time of around 1 millisecond. Not bad there, but what is the time for the set top box to transmit the control signal to the remote server? The video may be fast but I'm betting the remote control isn't. You're basically remote desktop'ing into a server which might be nice on a LAN but over the internet? They're gonna need negative ping code especially if/when they have several hundred/thousand/million clients all connecting to their own virtual system.

One hour video on GameSpot (http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324).

Check out the footage of the games in action. Laggy even ven on what I'm sure is a highly tuned presentation tech. Now put the entire internet in the way  :awesome_for_real:

PC Worlds take on it -
http://www.pcworld.com/article/161930-2/gdc_09_6_reasons_onlive_could_be_a_bust.html (http://www.pcworld.com/article/161930-2/gdc_09_6_reasons_onlive_could_be_a_bust.html)

I'm not saying they're wrong but they did pull some pretty weak reasons out. There are a lot of much better reasons to slate the concept on.

50 ms for the stream to go from their server and reach your box at a best case.  200 ms for your brain to process it and hit a button at best case. 50 ms for the command to reach them, 1-5 ms for processing and then 50 ms return time seems like a reasonable model for gaming with, basically thats only 105ms delay between you pressing a button and seeing the effect.

BUT

The 1 ms time to receive the packet is meaningless and arbitrary without knowing the bandwidth and the packet size.  Even assuming a 5 Mbs dl speed and 32 bit words this gives a payload somewhere around 150 words.  How the fuck do you turn 150 words of data into acceptable graphics?

You can do it with a full client because the words just say move pc pov to x, play animation y, change numbers[z] and all the data and processing on doing that is on your side of the pipe.  It doesn't make sense to say you can do that with nothing doing processing on the receiving end.

You'll need to include Dave Perry in that group now, too. Although I'm not clear on whether said group is supposed to be retards or VC-fleecers living large.

OnLive video games on demand service shakes loose a competitor: Dave Perry (http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/25/onlive-video-on-demand-service-shakes-loose-a-competitor/)

"...He plans on raising a round of venture money..."

Great idea, wrong implementation.  This uses existing executables.  Net win = 0.

I want an MMO with server-side rendering, designed to draw many views of a single scene.  From a tech standpoint, getting the vertex/texture data to the card is harder than the actual drawing.  Right now, every client has to go through the whole rendering process.  Imagine if that was only done once per zone.  The server has all the data needed for an entire zone on the GPU at all times, and can render your view better than your high-end gaming PC, and stream it to any PC that can watch Hulu.

:headscratch:

Ookii, for shame, you could've just gone with
You're wrong.

Just for clarity are you suggesting that the server should maintain in memory every pixel needed for the entire zone and the perspective of every client in the zone and then just stream the result at their native resolution directly to each client at 60 FPS?

That's exactly what OnLive is doing.  It runs a version of the game for each client, on their servers, and streams you the output.  N scenes, N copies of the graphics data, renderered N times.  Lots of server hardware, minimal win.

I'm saying that's not the right way to do it.

1 scene, 1 copy of the graphics data, rendered N times.  Exponentially faster, and capable of doing things even the best gaming PC can't (because the server controls the hardware).

Both ideas are stupid. These guys would probably have a cheaper and more reasonable businessplan running Netflix for PCs. Like, actual computers, because this business, unlike what I just said, is doomed to fail, whereas you might SOMEHOW MAGICALLY, if you have enough customers, manage to last a few years with my stupid ideas.

The whole thing is a fucking jump-to-conclusions map, Their idea, your idea, my fake idea, all poop.

Here's how I understand it's supposed to work. The remote computer is doing all the game rendering and processing. You, the player, are basically watching a live streamed video of said game which you interact with via a set-top box or controller plugged into your computer. I'm not sure if we're at crossed paths here or not, but as I said, the video probably isn't a problem. I'd like to see just how well that remote machine can respond to the button press/joystick move that I make on my end. There's got to be a noticeable lag between when I hit my button, when the remote machine picks up on my button hit, makes all it's calculations, updates the display and then streams it back to my screen. And considering all the sessions HAVE to be virtual server logins, do we have tech that can handle that? We use remote desktop/server software where I work to connect Macs and PCs and such and it's, umm.... not as good as actually sitting in front of the real machine. Even doing voice chat over Ethernet connection produces very noticeable lag when two or more computers have their audio going in the same room. I just can't see this being viable without some wicked fast connection.

In it's simplest concept, it's basically replacing monitor cables and keyboard/mouse cables with the internet. And supposedly their compression makes it work (assuming servers ≥  top of the line pc/mac/consol). Rendering has really nothing to do with weather it will work or not. It's purely about the compression and connection speed (up and down). On average the networks i connect to at friends houses, my house, work etc.. run around 1.7mbs down and 0.5mbs up (this is just an example).

That said, I can't expect to play crysis at 720 on my tv with out it being downgraded. However I could and should expect good or better quality on my small macbook anywhere I go. It won't be the best, but I'm sure it will be enjoyable.

Now, imagine for a second onlive licences the tech or partners with some devs for iphone or android phones... classics like diablo2 fully functional on your phone anyone?

Here's their bandwidth requirements: For Standard-Definition TV resolution, OnLive needs a 1.5 Mbps connection. For HDTV resolution (720p60), OnLive needs 5 Mbps.

All I can say is good luck with that. Maybe in a few years, but I live in the SF Bay Area and can't get those rates for a reasonable fee. Not to mention I already have problems with my wife watching Hulu and screwing up my online gaming. Having every game I "own" be at the whim of my net connection? Nu uh.

:facepalm:

:awesome_for_real:

I don't understand the business model, did the underpants gnomes write it?

Thinking of the datacenter costs bandwidth/servers/peak load/rendering/hvac. The cost of whatever the subscription/per access/game charge, there's no fscking way they can beat a gaming pc/xbox/ps3 cost. That's forgetting about the cost of the customer support they are going to require.

I want them to make it, to see it crash and burn as someone ddos's their rendering/app servers :drill:

Yeah, I think it will be much more interesting when we see what they plan to charge. I can't see it being less than $20 a month just for access, and then rental and MMO subscription fees on top of that. All I can imagine is they are hoping a lot of people sign up for he service and then not use it all that much.

The presentation is cool to watch. I think they are trying to do things that are interesting, for instance not just seeing that a friend is playing a game, but being able to watch them play. Even if they die a miserable death this magic compression technology of theirs could be a real boon to the internet at large.

Pikers.

Let me know when I can use quantum coupling to render the client in a solid state chip. Embedde in your skull. With a sledgehammer.

Then all of you will dance for me.

Dance my puppets! Dance!

What OnPoint is doing is dumb and will not catch on.  It's the distributed computing version of a PhysX card.  Excuse me for throwing out some ideas for how this might work in a high-bandwidth, low-latency future.

Regarding latency, "fat games" are running into the same problems.  As environments become more interactive, developers can't rely on traditional client-side prediction as much anyway. (The code that makes your avatar move immediately even though [...] speed of light).

There's nothing about their tech that would not allow them to do what you are describing, but existing games are not written that way, and would be non-trivial to port. I imagine an OnLive based MMO would infact keep most of the geometry in memory, since at any given point someone is looking at almost every object. However if they want to have a reasonable stable of games on day one they are going to need to use existing binaries, and that means multiple copies being rendered individually.

Err, I thought we had this all covered on the first page.

• They are hosting the game and the entire graphical processing on their end.
• They need the equivalent of one gaming rig per user account to pull this off. Unless someone tells me there's some way around this (and not retcon some future-state invention  :awesome_for_real:), this is a requirement.
• They are sending video streams equivalent to HD video to people who barely get that good enough on their TVs.
• They are expecting to recognize in pseudo-realtime the inputs of a gaming controller.
• They set the bar at the level of FPS games.

You only need to look at the games your cable provider offers in the Channel 900s range. Solitaire is going to be a pita, and using your TV remote will drive you back to your laptop right quick. Just look at the Gamespot video from GDC. On the best connection they could bring to the show, with none of that pesky internet in the way, they barely had playable FPS games.

As a way to play Peggle? Yea, no problem. Any turn-taking game would be fine.

And that doesn't even get into the business model, which I'm sure will end up being some combination of tiered subscription, premium OnDemand MTX, and embedded advertisement.

Seriously, good idea in the same theorycraft land that it's existed for years now.

Here's the scary part: Early word back from GDC is that a substantial majority of the AAA publishers/developers are wildly excited about this and want to throw money at it.

Good.  It's going to be super awesome when they put this in a few homes and the early adopters all get their internet cut by Comcast because they exceeded their monthly bandwidth caps in one day.

This is exactly what boggles me, they are expecting to sell high (Ok 720p isn't that high end in the pc gaming market) graphics solutions. You still need a dedicated gpu per person unless they have some self created directx that can spawn out d3d rendering to multiple gpu/cpu's like a bastardized WARP (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx) (which from reviews is slow on the highest end i7 CPU's).

If not they seem to be using a rack mount processing workstation, but more realistically a workstation with framebuffer capture middleware + magical compression to their client.

The other thing that sticks out to me is that part of their technical solution is taking absolute control over routing information within the packets to obtain maximum throughput.

Tell me how long taht will last when Vonage and all of the other business models that depend on reliable internet throughput are shut out by cheating the RFC for transportation/routing protocols (can't remember which one it is atm--287 I seem to remember?).

We got pissed at Comcast throttling--what's going to happen when 10 or 20 of these rigs show up on your local Cable network loop?

You doubt my Glorious Vision Meat Puppet? the Future is made of awesomeness! And negative ping code running on Vax/Vms terminals sticking out of the side of your head. Now go attend your Daily Hate, Prole.

Technically they need one rig per user during peak usage hours. Steam has something like 12 million users, but their peak is shy of a couple mil. Still, it's a non-trivial amount of hardware.

More details are out on what Dave Perry (Earthworm Jim, MDK, Shiny, Acclaim) is saying about his competing approach. It's named Gaikai (http://www.gaikai.com/).

The big difference is that it's browser-based with no plugin beyond flash. So, it doesn't go direct to TV easily like OnLive, but there's also no little box (http://www.onlive.com/service/microconsole.html#) you need to have.

From what little info is available on both approaches, I don't think he's addressed latency at all, unlike OnLive, although he does say he needs to make a deal with an ISP. I would think the solution would involve QoS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service#Applications_requiring_QoS) (see Vonage etc.), and sending button presses and stick wiggles doesn't require a lot of data, but I don't know much about what's going on with ISPs and QoS nowadays.

Entire GameDaily interview (http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/gdc-exclusive-david-perrys-entry-into-serverbased-gaming/?biz=) below.

Please humor the nearly-computer illiterate-

Is the problem here something fundamental (breaking the internet laws of physics or something like that) or is it merely a function of "stuff ain't fast enough to do that yet" (in which case, this will be adopted by everyone in ten years when all those magic box speed and memory numbers are 100x greater)? 

"Thin clients" for high end games is stupid as hell.  Why in the world would you want to have to maintain all the CPUs/GPUs/ram on the backend?  What's the billing model that's going to justify this nonsense?

I'm sure there are a lot of stupid gamesdev execs who are drooling over this due to promises of:
- no piracy (the bits never exist on the untrusted client)
- no used sales / trading (the user never even has media)
- "more flexible pricing" (exciting new ways to gouge the user)
- etc

At the end of the day though, it's doomed to fail horribly for anything where latency and quality really matter... so it will only be feasible for trivial stuff, turn based, etc, which really don't need much client resources anyway (people can use flash as a platform), so what's the point.

Also, Perlman is insane.  I know a number of people who worked with him at webtv, rearden, etc.  He is just totally nuts.

It pretty much fails on both counts.  Control responsiveness alone would be fucking hateful, because the signal would go controller -> console box -> big truck -> game server -> processing, add to that the requirement for something along the lines of a FiOS connection at your end, and basically a bare-bones gaming PC with a custom OS per concurrent user at their end ($599 is a reasonable estimate :awesome_for_real: ).  Of course, maybe they will do some really weird shit with process threading, but a fucking quantum computer in every house is probably an easier sell at that point.

Latency is going to be the big problem for any real-time app.

Remember how people were bitching about WARs control responsiveness?  It will be like that but worse, because the signal has to be processed on the far end before it packages it all up and sends it back.  Even if their tech can instantly render the scene, it's going to suck for responsiveness.

Imagine watching a streaming video and there is no buffer.  Only what happens in the video depends on your input.

Exactly, which is why this is perfect only for games that don't require instant ongoing input. Casual games, for example. Maybe some of the light persistent worlds.


That's a good point. I wonder what they expect their peak concurrency to be? Still as you say it's not a trivial amount of extra hardware. And that's only 1/3 of the total problem.

But companies will throw money at it anyway. Though not because they think this is viable but rather because they think someone else thinks it's viable. Network affect hype. Nobody wants to be the naysayer, so they're forced into stating support because everyone else is.

I predict we will see a bunch of PopCap titles on this for Fall, but that's it. Not because those games are crap. Quite the opposite (they're all fun, but my favorite is Venice). But rather because those are the only games that make sense for something like this with today's tech. As OnLive will soon find out when the companies throwing money at them unleash their techs, and as gamers get ahold of betas..

At management level, yes, amongst the actual production people? Not so much. Pretty much every engineer in the industry which has talked about it is saying how stupid it is.

1600 x 1200 @ 32 bit color depth with 60 FPS = ~460 mb/s, with loss less compression perhaps half that, although compressing that amount of data in real time is sure to add both extra latency and require a computer of fucking doom. I think we can safely assume they're going to compress the shit out of it using a lossy compression scheme, most likely using something at hardware level for it to be cost effective. The whole thing actually represents a very simple network model, which surprise surprise, no twitch games get away with using. Even with very stable ping at sub 100 ms levels the input lag is very noticeable. Also, anything requiring any form of timing won't be fun if there's any spikes.

It's not scary. It just proves that the substantial majority of AAA business people need to be replaced. Fucking chuckleheads.

Heh, glad to see in my denned duplicate thread, where I said it looked like negative ping code, that I'm not the only one to think this is doomed!  Dooooomed!

Yarp. Do a tracert between their PC and their favorite COD4 server. That's the hops taken the moment you move the analog stick/mouse enough to send a signal. Because the client app doesn't do any of the magic that minimizes what is actually needed on the client vs the server. Oh, then strip away the graphics processing that are entirely client based.

This is a wet dream for people who don't want anything to do with retailers. It just doesn't survive first contact with reality.

It's going to fail, then LodgeNet will buy it up to provide AAA gaming service in hotels/hospitals (any closed loop system).

On your first point, it's called fucking Flash.

As for the second point and all the non-technically-inclined in the thread: No, it will never work. Period. Leave aside the bandwidth issues detailed above. Leave aside the cost of a server cluster that can do both your server and client-side calculations including real-time rendering. Leave aside availability, peak concurrency, and all that other shit. Look entirely at latency.

There's a theoretical speed limit to data transmission. No information, encoded in any way imaginable, can break the speed of light. 299,792,458 meters per second works down to 299.792458 kilometers per millisecond. Round to 300 for sanity.

For every 300 kilometers separating your end terminal from their datacenter, there is an absolute floor of 1 millisecond in data transmission time, one-way, or 2 milliseconds round-trip. This is assuming you're using a laser in an evacuated tube; in reality, your current best-case scenario is a fiber line directly from you to their datacenter, which transmits around 2/3 the above speed, or about 200 kilometers per millisecond, and it's not running in a straight line. And then there's the latency involved in optical switching, plus converting from electronic->optical signals at the source and optical->electronic at the source. This gets slower still if you make the system all-electronic, as you still need to do switching but suffer from the slower speed of electrical wave propagation compared to light - impossible best-case scenario is 97% of light, average-case probably in the 70% range.

Even presuming you had the OnLive datacenter in your hometown with an awesome fiber link just a hop or two off your ISP, your latency floor will be around 20-30 milliseconds one-way. This is much slower than even early LCDs, which no one used for gaming precisely because of the awful, awful response times. Hell, they were painful enough just for desktop use, as you could move the mouse and perceive the delay between your motion and the pointer getting updated.

In reality, again, you can't have a datacenter in every major metropolitan area unless you're fucking Google. Instead you'll get, maybe, one per time-zone. Your latency floor is now around 30-50 milliseconds, one-way. 60-100 milliseconds to see a response on the screen. It doesn't sound like much until you try it and throw your game controller through the window because it's so fucking frustrating.

Now add in all the other shit mentioned before I got into the math, and you should get why anyone who's been on the tech side of things is laughing into their coffee. Or, if they're sneaky, coming up with knock-off business plans to fleece the suits who think this sounds like a FANTASTIC idea, like Sun's THE NETWORK IS THE COMPUTER thing in the 90s, only Web2.0 and jazzy and hip.

If you'll excuse me, I have a date with a word processor...

It's not even useful for these.  Those games will run on just about any machine, and their entire model is based on being cheap to produce.  Why suddenly introduce hardware costs on their end when before all they needed was a web-server to either initialize the app or allow a download?  Ignoring the technical reasons why this is stupid, the costs aren't beneficial to the people who might have a use for it.

I certainly don't work in IT and aren't exceptionally technical, but thats the first thing I thought of (without the specific numbers and stuff) when I read about this.  If the investors don't understand something that a dumb shit like myself knows then they deserve to lose all their money.

So I actually played OnLive today and it is both  :ye_gods: and :drill:. I started playing Crysis Warfare on a Dell laptop using a mouse and keyboard. I think you can all guess which one it was. It was actually playable, but it was very unpleasant. The booth worker actually said that a PC FPS player would likely not be happy with the performance and boy howdy she was right. If you tried to turn the hard left or right to look for opponents your view jumped wildly. It actually felt like render lag it was so jerky. It was quite lovely when I stood still though.

Later I popped back over and tried console games with a Logitech gamepad. I gotta say, it played very smoothly. I wanted to be angry and find something wrong, but it felt good. I tried Lego Batman and and the latest Burnout and both played well. There were a couple hiccups in Lego Batman where there was clearly a network glitch, but otherwise it was as good as local. With Burnout I didn't notice a single difference from playing on a console. Watching other folks play and listening to them chat most people seemed to agree that it was much more pleasant with a gamepad than mouse and keyboard.

The basic menus were fairly snappy and the whole watch a friend thing was pretty darn cool to see live. Honestly I could see getting this for my living room if I had the pipe and the subscription fee wasn't ridiculous.

Did they say how far away the servers where located?  Where they 3m away in the next room?

50 miles. They are located in Santa Clara.

what kind of display was the console experience using?

Umm, big TV. I'm not sure on specifics, but probably about 40 inches.

Probably a 40in 1080i box since they're only rated as sending 720p signal.


Yep. See page 1  :oh_i_see: And to clarify: casual games are not automatically Flash, which is why I meant casual games. I'm talking PopCap fullscreen stuff you try/buy (and on XBLA), not the free ad-served crap on miniclip.


Yep. See page 1  :oh_i_see:

Seriously, the only reason why I said where I think this will end up (casual games) is because they're gaining enough momentum to be on the hook to end up with something. It's not like the collective gasp of geeks is going to prevent contracts from being written and down payments being made against guarantees. ;-) So OnLive is probably destined to launch in some form, even if it's shy of it's overall jesusvampireninjarobot dream. Easier to beg forgiveness and shock niavete later.

In any case, I imagine "launch" this year will be specific markets only, and I don't mean just U.S. I mean things like a San Francisco, Atlanta and Boston launch, if that, wherever they can fund datacenters. As Yoru points out, physics gets in the way. But as everyone else (and he) have said too, this only works with really close datacenters. And unlock WoW, they can't just one per timezone.

Which begs the question of whether you'll be restricted to multiplayer sessions within your local area. Not too much a loss if you have a good enough density, but you better pick your markets right.

According to the presentation, you are indeed limited to multiplayer by the cluster you are on, at least for twitch games. It sounds like for turn-based or at least slower paced games they can hook up players across data centers. It sounds like they are planning on having three data centers at launch; the Santa Clara one, one in the midwest, and one on the east coast.

Interesting. That's a tipoff right there then. "Santa Clara" vs "midwest" vs "east coast" will probably turn into Santa Clara, Dallas, Boston. This wouldn't work for a person in Maine connecting to a center in Atlanta any better than it would someone in New York trying to connect to Chicago.

The "rental games" model would work far better on something like Steam. They already do "free weekends", trials and all that jazz. It wouldn't be a big step to offer access to a game for $X, or a full unlimited-use purchase for $Y.

The best part about that is that you get the recurring revenue as well as offloading the hardware costs onto the consumer, and likely saving on bandwidth costs compared to streaming video, particularly for power users.

God, if steam offered a rental service that gave you the whole catalog for $x per month, even if it was just Steam games, yeeeeeeow, they'd be a bigger threat than they already are.

Only $3 more to access Ubisoft games!

Only $3 more to access id games!

Only $3 more for your eternal soul!

Yeah, their supposed range is 1500 miles but that sounds like the ranting of a crazy man. Based on what I saw yesterday that would take pure magic.

This. The very concept makes me erect with delight. A Steam rental service with full multiplayer connectivity, user name and gameplay records stored on your Steam name as opposed to each game's server browser. That would be an unstoppable, Blizzard-WoW-level juggernaut.

If you're going to enable something along the ballpark of 500K simultaneous players (guessing), you'll end up with 500K larger than 1U units (find me decent graphics hardware that fits 1U or 2U). That'll make for one or more huge datacenters. It'll generate heat as a motherfucker as well (the graphics card). That'll require intensive cooling, power bill says hi. Virtualization is out, unless they're going the software renderer route, which still needs considerable CPU power to get anywhere close to fluid framerates, throwing it out anyway. There's also the issue of lag, which would increase compared to a local game client since there's more data clogging your pipe (250KB/s+ media stream vs 15KB/s multiplayer data). Then due to bandwidth constraints, you'll playing low resolution artifact ridden graphics. Especially artifacts are an issue for any gameplay involving things at a distance (sniping, spotting enemies from far, whatever). Also, realtime encoding 720p comes with the trade-off of shitty quality. And finally, all this net neutrality and volume cap bullshit.

That's a whole lot of bullshit. There are no mechanics in IPv4 to influence routing. As soon the packet reaches the border router peer, OnLive is out of control. The most they can influence is on what carrier the packet leaves their datacenter. Anything beyond that requires making big assumptions about the inside of all autonomous systems of your ISP and all those between you and OnLive, IPv6 (lol) for routing information headers to actually override routing (whose usage reduces the maximum data payload) and hope that said RI headers aren't ditched.

It was a paraphrase of a paraphrase from GDC, so I probably shouldn't have mentioned it (or at least disclaimed it), but that's what they said on the floor according to some folks there.

Seriously, these fuckers need to be tarred and feathered and whoever invested in them needs to lose all their money so they can never invest in bullshit again.

The whole thing just smells like shit.

I'd pay a fat sub for this.  GameTap is dead to me due to their PC games not working on a 64-bit OS.

My wife keeps asking me if I have canceled "the Steam subscription" yet.

I talked to some people at GDC who had played the demo, some said it was awesome and some said it was basically unplayable with horrible latency and bad compression artifacting.

I don't understand how it could be good, 3D games use interpolation to smooth over networking issues but I don't think that would work with single video frames. There instead of interpolating between an old position and a new one to cover up client/server discrepencies you'd be interpolating raw video data.

For any action game I can't imagine it working. Turn based games? Sure. Though thos are in short supply these days.

How the hell does he think people are going to get 80 ms roundtrip to his servers as a worst case.  God that's rich.

Mythic seconds.

 :drill: :drill: :drill: WINNAR!!!  :drill: :drill: :drill:

Take over google? Seriously their peering over the past few years is pretty epic.

I'm assuming that he expects his servers to be installed at the head end of cable broadband providers (or in a datacenter that's very close to that).

Of course you need to be better than 16.66ms to react within one frame (at 60fps) or 33.33ms to react within two frames, so even his best case is probably going to be noticed in twitch situations.  His worst case is nearly 5 frames lag.  Ouch!

OnLive Founder is a non-tech savvy douchebag.

News at 11 on ObviousTV.

NECRO!

Presentation from Steve Perlman from early November (http://tv.seas.columbia.edu/videos/545/60/79?file=1&autostart=true).  Just recently saw this linked in a thread on GAF.  I'm no tech expert, so I don't know if anything he says here makes OnLive sound any less like unrealistic bullshit, but it was interesting viewing nonetheless.

It's funny, he does things before they're ready. My comment there is a little off point. He might be brilliant but the tech just isn't there yet. Might be ready for stuff like Peggle games and such though. He strikes me as an idea man though, what with XBand and such. So, tech be damned! We're moving forward! LIMITATIONS OF THE INTERNET WILL NOT STOP US.

And will still most likely fail.

Edit: I wish I was clever enough to convince investors to give me money 5-10 years before products should exist. Not only would I be a visionary, I'd be a rich visionary.

You'd be McQuaid.

I was digging through some junk the other day and found the old Xband modem. Man, that thing was awesome. My whole introduction to chat/email/online gaming was on the SNES.

No, he's done.

This guy isn't.

And Brad is NOT ahead of his time.

He then goes on to not name any of the publishers, thereby proving that they clearly wish to associate their company names with him at this point.

They were all on the screen behind him.

Indeed. It wasn't a marketing thing, it was a school presentation - basically, at least.

Actually, I think this thing could work out really well for casual games. Casual games being, ironically or not, the kind of thing 90% of the people using this service would be playing 90% of the time.

Why do you say that?  I can understand the service being useful (maybe) for games with a low overhead, and casual games certainly qualify, but those are also the games where you'd least benefit from it.  Even my Grandma's PC can run Peggle, and I'm not sure how being able to connect to a remotely hosted game would be cheaper or more convenient for her.  The stuff you'd want this for as a consumer (as far as I can follow) is the bleeding edge stuff, where you don't have an up-to-the-minute processor but still want to play Crysis IV with all the details turned up for the day or two it'll take you to run all the way through it.

The stuff you'd want this for is people who won't even bother to buy a high end computer, and who don't want to have to deal with installing games and setting shit up. The market they should be aiming for is grandma who wants to play backgammon on her tv computer in 5 years.

:facepalm:

I don't really see grandma and other casual gamers getting rid of devices with greater functionality just to play Sudoku or Backgammon while paying monthly fees.

This is getting into Field of Dreams territory here though.  You can't build a Peggle platform and expect all the grannies to come out of the corn field.  Peggle is just a bonus, it's not why they bought their PCs, netbooks or cellphones.

So what you're saying is that the ideal games for this are a market that doesn't currently exist: bleeding-edge casual. Photorealistic time-management games, realtime rendered Riven, and the world's most expensive hidden object mysteries. Basically trying to sell the YOU CAN PLAY THE SIMS XII on your IPHONE market? Maybe grandma wants to play a backgammon game vs. a perfectly rendered Omar Sharif in a hotel patio overlooking the French Riviera in1979, but I don't think she wants to pay a monthly fee for it.

Please, everyone knows that bridge is Omar's game.

Question anyone get in their beta?

For mods:

Yeah I have similar thoughts that there is not much market for this.

Everyone can already play Facebook games, browser-based games, etc. For big console-style games the trend is mostly towards higher graphical fidelity, bigger display devices, etc. The next generation of consoles will probably output 1080p for real. In that sort of environment it's hard for me to imagine playing with input lag and video compression artifacts.

The high-level pitch for this seems to be that you can play Crysis on a netbook, but how many people want to do that? People who want to play Crysis are graphics whores and tech heads, exactly the people who don't need this service and would reject its compromises.

yes

Are they doing an invite system?

No, I think they are only selecting based on distance from the data centers. (I live in San Francisco)

If they do I will report back for sure.

And for anyone interested in OnLive I would direct you to this video (http://tv.seas.columbia.edu/videos/545/60/79?file=1&autostart=true) from previous in the thread, best overview I've seen.

Has this become any more realistic? Still seems like a great pitch for a new video compression and medium-agnostic play. Both have potential unto themselves. But the internet itself still feels like it stands in the way.

His comments about having worked out deals with all the ISPs to presumably get primo connections still doesn't address anything beyond regional routing. He could blow through his 80ms round trip cap with five hops much less the usual 10+.

Plus, all of the big games he showed still look like they're running at 10-15 fps at best. Perfectly fine for Peggle. Not so much for Crysis.

I'd love to see this work. I just don't see how it can once all the people they hope show up will bang on it.

I'd like to see the business model behind this. Because it requires a rather powerful server per customer. You could cheat by running multicores with tons of memory and multiple video cards, but I don't see today's x86 processors doing multiple streams at WVGA or higher in realtime in an efficient video codec, next to already running multiple games. Then it'll require a fat pipe and some serious network equipment. Several hundred kbits per game instance vs. a few ten kbits per multiplayer game connection (in the case of multiplayer games). Plus, the US ISPs are probably getting another shit fit, since they're giving Google already hell for Youtube.

--edit: Actually, since it probably has to fit in 1U or 2U, the multiple graphics cards idea is probably out again. WDDM2, which allows GPU resource scheduling and virtualization, isn't available yet. That takes at least Windows 8.

He claims in the video that when they started they had some crazy setup per user, like dual Xenon Quad cores at about $5,000 each, so about $10,000 per end user. Then somehow over time they were able to reduce this to about $25 per end user.

I really am interested in whether this is in negative ping land or if there's something here. I imagine eventually it will be like this, but there just seems to be too much internet in the way to make it viable, even if everyone got Fiber Optics into their house. Unless they create some type of limitless-range ansible, I just don't see how this can work without a server in every neighborhood and local p2p matches only.

This.

I can confirm I am in the beta.

Beta Review (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=859&type=expert&pid=1) from some guy at some tech website.  He yoinked it from a friend, so he's outside of their testing area.  It's about what you'd expect.  Video included.

They doing invites yet?

Perlman is right that this is the way "it should be done."  But, I dont agree with his application at this time.  The net really has to change itself to support what he's trying to do.  This whole "cloud culture" crap that's pervading all these think tanks lately is all nice and dandy, but good luck trying to cut the middlemen out of the datastream.  The net's too regulated, not wireless enough, and way too brokered.  Half the ping he's trying to conquer actually comes from guys just like him.  Quite literally, the net would have to go back to its roots - packet radio.  Good luck with that.  Works in a good sci-fi novel but not in the RL of Wall Street.

Now, where this service would do well is a setup like Trion World Network (MMOs, interactive TV, episodic adventure gaming, etc.).  Take your game anywhere and play it on any device with a small client.  Since everything is server-side, the world becomes totally maleable real-time.  Pings dont matter as much, because you're essentially playing a turn-based game.  

So... it launches June 19th, $14.95 a month (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3178294).

Even if it was amazing, I just tuned out right there.

Anyone else think this tech. is more suited for developing countries?
Maybe a gaming-fanatical place like Brazil perhaps where the import taxes pretty much make it impossible for anyone to buy good hardware (one could buy this in lieu of a console).  I could see onLive working there, but in America where most every household already has a next-gen console and/or high-end PC, not so sure.  Might've been good for travelers, but the ping on wireless is still too high and most public wi-fi sights arent reliable enough.

I'm still scratching my head with this one.

Do they have the amount of people with sufficient internet bandwidth to support this? (Likely no)

The heavy says : NO!

Monthly + Rental fee, 1Mb / second bandwidth, 720p gaming and latency issues? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Especially when it is taking them a lot of server resources to offer a service few people will care about.

Yep. What's the fucking point if you have to pay a fee for every game you play?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir4B0rgta0Y

Apparently you have to BUY the damn games and still pay a subscription fee. What in the fuck!

Heh, you think that's fail. Check out this OnLive demo on the iPad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpFzpF0msrU)