New Tech To Revolutionize Gaming?

[Prospero]

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

[Venkman]

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

<stuff about latency and physics>

Yep. See page 1  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.

Ignoring the technical reasons why this is stupid, the costs aren't beneficial to the people who might have a use for it.

Yep. See page 1 

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.

[Prospero]

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.

[Venkman]

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.

[Yoru]

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.

[schild]

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!

[Prospero]

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.

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.

[HaemishM]

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!

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.

[TripleDES]

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.

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.

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.

[Stephen Zepp]

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.

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.

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.

[schild]

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.

[Yegolev]

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.

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[Murgos]

http://kotaku.com/5194510/onlive-founder-defends-game-changing-service-it-will-work

"The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds," he says. "We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds."

-Steve Perlman

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.

[Sheepherder]

Mythic seconds.

[raydeen]

Mythic seconds.

  WINNAR!!! 

[fuser]

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.

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

[Quinton]

http://kotaku.com/5194510/onlive-founder-defends-game-changing-service-it-will-work

"The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds," he says. "We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds."

-Steve Perlman

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.

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!

[schild]

OnLive Founder is a non-tech savvy douchebag.

News at 11 on ObviousTV.

[Velorath]

NECRO!

Presentation from Steve Perlman from early November.  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.

[schild]

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.

[patience]

You'd be McQuaid.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[schild]

You'd be McQuaid.

No, he's done.

This guy isn't.

And Brad is NOT ahead of his time.

[Azazel]

"We have nine of the largest game publishers in world signed up," Perlman said. "They have spent several years in some cases actually going and reviewing our technology before allowing us to associate with their company names and allowing us to have access to their first-tier franchises."

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.

[Prospero]

They were all on the screen behind him.

[schild]

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

[Goreschach]

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.

[Kail]

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.

[Goreschach]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[Hayduke]

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.

[pxib]

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.

[Ingmar]

a backgammon game vs. a perfectly rendered Omar Sharif in a hotel patio overlooking the French Riviera in1979

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

[fuser]

Question anyone get in their beta?

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