All games can be browser based now...

[CharlieMopps]

http://play.tm/news/25439/dave-perry-shows-off-gaikai/

I wasn't even really sure where to put this. But wow, this really solves lots of problems... Games are easy to start playing. No patches. I think this would make it harder to cheat. It's really impressive technology.

[Yegolev]

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

[CharlieMopps]

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

I dunno, I did a search for it. They have a video on there... looks like it runs pretty well. Videos don't lie!!

[schild]

You know what crapware needs?

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

Iron Crapware.

[Yegolev]

Videos don't lie!!

LOL

[CharlieMopps]

You know what crapware needs?

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

Iron Crapware.

Being an armature programmer myself, I'm up for the task! But I need investors. Schilds rich right?

[Yegolev]

Armature programmer?

[Moosehands]

You program robots?

[rattran]

With negative ping code!

[Brogarn]

Armature programmer?

[CharlieMopps]

no no, you got it all wrong... this:

[Salamok]

lol I actually had an armatron back in the day.

[CaptainNapkin]

<--- still have mine. Robot arms are the future I tell ya!

[Soulflame]

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

[schild]

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

You're asking the wrong question.

[BitWarrior]

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?

[Lantyssa]

In theory?  The concept is awesome.

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

[BitWarrior]

In theory?  The concept is awesome.

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

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines 

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.

[Lantyssa]

Latency is not a workable technical hurdle for a great many games if the calculations, rendering, etc. are happening at the server.  c is a pesky number sometimes.

There are some games this would not be a problem with, but even then a great number of games only function because they have gigabytes worth of data on a local client, they are designed with latency in mind, and their network footprint is miniscule.

Bandwidth is actually the least of this technology's problems, though.

(Thread where we discussed this before)

[rattran]

From that other old thread

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...

<edit> Beat me by that much...

[Ethereal]

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

[Samwise]

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?"

[BitWarrior]

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

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.

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.

This idea very much mimic's the idea of cloud services, or Software as a Service. I'm looking forward to seeing how they come up with solutions to deal with the latency issue.

[Trippy]

In theory?  The concept is awesome.

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

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines 

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.

Google on:

lcd "input lag"

It doesn't take very much latency between your input controls and a delay in what you see on the screen to totally mess you up when playing shooters and other twitch games.

[Trippy]

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?"

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

http://www.quakelive.com/

[Samwise]

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.

[BitWarrior]

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.

I can't help but get the feeling you're really not getting the bigger picture here.

Although I could get into the details of number of licenses of Mac OS vs. Windows, I'll just say this: having more games immediately available in your native environment (ie: convenience) is a good thing. Period.

Regarding fees, you claim "there will be higher fees" without any source of information. Who knows, when one calculates the TCO of a gaming machine plus game purchases, a service like this may be cheaper. It's purely hypothetical and I make no claims to know what a price structure looks like, and neither should you. Regarding broadband, broadband speeds continue to increase and costs remain (roughly) the same, provider dependent of course. Consider that perhaps 7 years ago you were likely paying the same price for a dial up connection as you do for, say, a 15MB/s connection today, you cannot claim that in the future prices will simply "go up" as speed goes up.

Regarding "overloaded" servers, how is it that you are able to claim server overloading? I could assert that before major search engines came along, the world would need to have a number of different search engine providers to handle a worldwide load. As we know, Google successfully handles something around 80% of the worlds internet searches daily without fail. Again, you are making claims with absolutely no information other than your presuppositions.

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.

Anyhow, I'm not claiming that this is the be-all end-all of technologies by a long shot, I'm simply wanting to see some more objective arguments here (if, really, there are any). 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". Like all new technologies there are hurdles to climb over, and this is no exception, but we shouldn't be pulling arguments out of our asses.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[schild]

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?"

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

http://www.quakelive.com/

That plugin is basically Quake.

[raydeen]

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.

This. Here's a good experiment to try if you or friends have multiple machines and all play the same online games. I used to play CoH with some of the kids at the school and we noticed that running the game on side by side computers there was AT LEAST a half second delay between one of us making a move or firing off a power and it showing up on the other guy's client. Now it's not a big deal because there's no real twitch to standard MMOs and everything on your client is responding pretty much immediately to your key presses. But if you're having to send the key press down the intarwebz to a remote terminal server which is then going to be communicating with the actual game server, getting the response, updating the remote client and then firing back a video feed to you, even WoW is going to be unplayable. And the video is going to have to be compressed out the wazoo. There's a big difference between remotely watching video and controlling it.

[Ethereal]

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

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.

VNC certainly isn't optimized for games, but it's the same concept, trying to solve the same problems, with the same pitfalls. There isn't any magic way to improve it -- better video compression might double or triple the video quality, but that's still a fairly miserable gaming experience.

There are three technological issues that make remote gameplay a bad idea.
-Fundamental latency issues, as discussed previously.
-Limited bandwidth to the client requires massively compressed video, which is terrible quality compared to local rendering.
-Video compression and decompression has to be done at realtime, and is staggeringly computationally intensive.

Pointing at VNC wasn't a formal argument; it was a "try it and see" if abstract numbers weren't convincing you. But please, point out what "fundamental flaws" you see in the comparison -- I'm quite curious.

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.

You can make any video fill the screen, but that doesn't increase its resolution. The issue is that any video compressed enough to fit over modern broadband is crappy quality, especially when compared against local rendering.

Let's try some math.

Uncompressed video is massive. My monitor resolution is 1680x1050 and has 24 bit color with a 60hz refresh rate. That's 5.292MB of data for every frame, and at 60 frames a second that's 317.520MB/sec. That would require at least a dedicated OC-48 to stream video that could match local rendering, which is definitely not feasible.

Let's assume that most potential customers don't have my exacting standards about video quality, and downgrade to what could realistically stream. I have a good internet connection in a major US city, and I can sustain about 10Mb/sec downstream transfer. Typical DVD video is about 7Mb/sec, which fits comfortably inside that. And while DVD quality isn't terrible, it certainly doesn't look good on a 20in monitor 16in away -- it's a very noticable downgrade from uncompressed video. And DVD compression doesn't have to be done in realtime, so it's far better than what remote gaming could achieve.

And it would require a massive amount of bandwidth to actually provide streaming DVD quality video -- that's not cheap. Quality would undoubtedly be far below that, probably closer to what YouTube, Netflix, or the like are currently streaming. And those videos are terrible.

You can wave your hands and say that broadband is getting faster, but computer hardware is also getting better -- and thus cheaper -- and it's getting better faster. It's still doubling roughly every twelve to eighteen months, while broadband infrastructure is moving far slower. By the time broadband is fast and pervasive enough for streaming high quality video to be feasible, a computer to render it locally will be relative pocket change.

[UnSub]

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

Physics smysics! This idea runs on the power of dreams, and dreams say 'yes'!

[Lantyssa]

Dreams!?!  Bah!  i am the Hopecrusher!

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?

[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".

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?

I assume you're not referring to me, as that would imply you don't actually read posts.

[Tarami]

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.

I found a metaphor for you!

Same words were said against heavier-than-air machines