f13.net

Did we not pooh-pooh this a few months ago?

Videos don't lie!!

You know what crapware needs?

Competition. We need crapware competing with crapware so the greatest crapware can reign supreme.

Iron Crapware.

Armature programmer?

What the hell does a small child need with a robot arm?

In theory?  The concept is awesome.

In practice?  It cannot happen.  At least not the way it's been proposed to date.

Quote from: Yoru on March 26, 2009, 06:03:06 PM

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...

If you want to see why this idea fails, try playing a game over VNC -- it won't even work well on a LAN.

If you want to see why this idea fails, try playing a game over VNC -- it won't even work well on a LAN.

Cold hard realism is no match for the inexplicable allure of playing an otherwise good game in a 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?"

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines  :wink:

I can see bandwidth being one concern, but then again that's a limited problem - in South Korea I believe plans are starting to hit 100mb/s. I can see latency being a problem, but that seems like a workable technical hurdle. Beyond that...I'm not sure what else could be a huge issue. To paraphrase, I guess I don't want to permanently shoot down the idea of streaming HD videos on the web just because its currently 1995 and everyone is on dial up.

Cold hard realism is no match for the inexplicable allure of playing an otherwise good game in a 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?"

It removes a number of hurdles for consumers and corporations alike. For example, consumers would be less inclined to constantly upgrade their machines to keep up with game development. Systems with even a basic capacity for video (laptops, netbooks even) would have the power to play games or potentially other pieces of software. Secondly, I can easily see a corporation like Apple getting behind this. A common concern regarding Apple computers is the lack of a game library - that concern would of course disappear overnight if tech like this were to be perfected.

Some computer somewhere still has to run the game, and someone has to pay for the maintenance of that computer.  Apple doesn't get any more games out of this than they do out of letting you install Windows on your iMac -- you still need to have a copy of Windows somewhere running the game. It doesn't really help their story any if you have to use their competitor's product to make it work.  

Consumers need to pay higher fees for their games to pay for whatever server is actually running it, PLUS they have to pay for a big fat broadband pipe to be able to play the games in the first place, which is going to wipe out any cost savings that might have been gained from centralizing the hardware.

Oh, and then on top of that you have inevitable problems with overloaded servers, and the fact that you're playing your game in a shitty browser window over latency that will at best be barely tolerable.  Yeah, I can see why everyone's jumping all over this bandwagon.

Actually these days you can play Quake in a browser, but it requires a plugin:

http://www.quakelive.com/

There's one thing you're missing.  Even if you had a 1000 gbps throughput, had ultra-mega-super servers, and costs weren't a worry, a great many games would be unplayable due to latency.

Physics has a hard limit and it says 'no' to this idea.

Perhaps this is more due to VNC not being designed with streaming media - least of all games - in mind. I'm trying to come up with a hilarious metaphor but I can't think of an argument with such fundamental flaws as yours. Well done, sir.

And finally, you claim that you will play the game "in a shitty browser window". Please explain to me why going fullscreen would not be possible? Flash already offers this feature today. Go to YouTube and click "fullscreen" on any video - gone is the element of the browser or any OS element.

Physics has a hard limit and it says 'no' to this idea.

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".

There's one thing you're missing.  Even if you had a 1000 gbps throughput, had ultra-mega-super servers, and costs weren't a worry, a great many games would be unplayable due to latency.

Also why did I suffer through all those physics courses if I can't use them at least once a year to give someone a reality check? ;D

Perhaps this is more due to VNC not being designed with streaming media - least of all games - in mind. I'm trying to come up with a hilarious metaphor but I can't think of an argument with such fundamental flaws as yours. Well done, sir.

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines  :wink:

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".

I found a metaphor for you!

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.

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.

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines  :wink:

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?"

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?

You are extremely confused by my position.

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.

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

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.

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

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