OnLive - the future of gaming?

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KellyP

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#31634 25-Mar-2009 07:22

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/24/onlive-killed-the-game-console-star/#comments

Hopefully I didn't just waste 1.7k by buying all 3 consoles. Buyers remorse aside, I can't see this taking off here unless our data caps change overnight.

Your thoughts?

xpd

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#203177 25-Mar-2009 07:50

Data charges, latency/routing..... interesting concept though

XPD / Gavin

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vexxxboy

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#203190 25-Mar-2009 09:06

i can see why it is attractive to game publishers,it cuts down on piracy and you dont need to tone down graphics for the average pc user and i would think it would stop most hacking of games that are played online which i know is rampant in the online games i play

Common sense is not as common as you think.

H3L0

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#203237 25-Mar-2009 13:50

buying all three consoles and not wasting cash..... not going there.

will it take off in NZ? nah... and if it did, it would need some kind of local mirror. so its years away even if it does.

I think latency would be the biggest issue for game play and then the local cost.

Gaming over citrix basically.

For the US domestic market it makes a lot of sense for try before you buy.

I could dial up the latest game, play it for an hour or two, decide if I like it, then trot across to ebay and get free shipping of a hard copy to my door. If I like it, why would I pay to play every time - (I laugh at WoW players)

and lets be honest, the target market is US based laptop and MAC users.

Will it slow down PC enthusiest from i7 quads and triple SLi 290's? - not really.

will it stop hacking?...no, just slow it down.

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richgamer

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#203371 26-Mar-2009 00:53

the website is here:

onlive.com

it only needs a 5Mbps broadband connection to play the games in hd 720p.

it has a secret compression technology. i wish they released that compression technology as open source so YouTube and millions of other websites could use it.

KracsNZ

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#203392 26-Mar-2009 07:37

This whole structure is fundamentaly flawed.

(a) Why would anyone (espeacially PC gamers) want to go back to 720p gaming. I play at 1080p and that's on my laptop (SLi lappy), others play at 2560x1600. Granted, this may be an option to casual gamers who don't own gaming rigs, but then again how many casual gamers are going to want to fork out for a dedicated gaming service.

(b) Even in a perfect world with local servers you're going to get input lag. At least with a PC game you get immediate response even if that isn't reflected immediately on the game server. Having to wait for the video feed of your action being returned to you from the server is going to be a real problem for twitch based gaming (i.e. FPS). Yeesh, look at the advantage a players in CS:S with 40ms ping time has those with 100ms+. Imagine if we were forced to play of an Aussie server...

(c) As others have already pointed out, download caps. Infrastructure issues aside, playing for more than a few hours a day will eat through most of our current ISPs reasonably priced plans fairly quickly. Our ISPs would have to go through a root level change in the way they define their service plans for this to become a consideration. Then of course there's our copper network...

As several sites have pointed out, the problem with the GDC demo is it's a perfect world, controlled environment, demo. I'd hate to think of the server cloud they're going to be requiring to render thousands (millions???) of gamers using this service if it does take off. Hundreds / thousands of nVidia Tesla servers??? It would have to be something exceedinly powerful to be able to render 60fps for all their users so as not to add any extra lag to the game.

Maybe in the future when we're all on very low latency, high speed connections. Heading back to the dumb terminal or only requiring very low powered devices in the home feeding of powerful servers is probably the way things are heading. But for now it just doesn't work. And their target market the US has just as bad an internet service as we do /shrug.

Think Valve's ideas with Steam are a much better way of doing things. Unique user downloads (signatured), authenication for online play etc... Already used Steam for HL2 + episodes, TF2, CS:S, LFD etc... Apart from the occasional overload when a new highly anticipated game is released, it actually works really well.

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tstone

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#203398 26-Mar-2009 08:18

Personally (and rather cynically) I think the infrastructure required to make it work in NZ is not here yet and the cost to set that up would be prohibitive. I think it's a great idea though.

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KracsNZ

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#203403 26-Mar-2009 08:27

I do hope the OnLive version of the games still plays online with the PC version of the games. If there is any introduced latency there will be easy kills :)

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mdf

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#203443 26-Mar-2009 10:30

Would depend on the type of game, surely. NZ-specific issues aside, I would have thought this would have worked relatively well for RPGs and RTSs. FPSs though would be another story.

Its interesting how history always seems to come full cycle. Now everyone is focussed on cloud computing and thin clients (again). I wonder what future "disruptive technology" will shunt the processing power back to the desktop?

garvani

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#203452 26-Mar-2009 11:06

I recall seeing something like this a year or so back, it was flawed then and dissaperead i expect the same from this, it sounds good on paper, but in reality i can't see gamers putting up with the lag. Sure outsource your kickass servers etc for photoshop and cad, that would work brilliantly, but where >200ms of lag is going to kill any gaming experience i cant see it working.. thats my 10c worth

H3L0

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#203454 26-Mar-2009 11:13

KracsNZ: I do hope the OnLive version of the games still plays online with the PC version of the games. If there is any introduced latency there will be easy kills :)

same. I was thinkin that too. stat padding on those servers..woot!

KracsNZ

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#203478 26-Mar-2009 12:39

mdf: Would depend on the type of game, surely. NZ-specific issues aside, I would have thought this would have worked relatively well for RPGs and RTSs. FPSs though would be another story.

Actually you may find the opposite for RTS and large scale PVP MMORPGs. You are right that since RTS and single player RPGs won't be as affected by lag as twitch based games like FPSs (could consider some MMORPG twitch games as well, lag is a real killer in PvP MMOs), they have a different issue in the sky-rocketing server power requirements.

Some of the modern RTS games are real system killers. RTSs like World in Conflict and Supreme Commander are both CPU and GPU intensive. And if you start getting graphically intensive RPGs like Age of Conan with large scale sieges and PvP battles occurring the server processing requirements are surely going to be extreme.

......

Be very interesting to know what they've already had to cut back on to make this work. At 720p we're only talking about 1280x720 (or 1366x768), so not too intensive. But are they also removing features like anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering? One of the games mentioned is Crysis: Warhead. What will they set the games settings at? low quality? medium? high?

Games like Crysis, Farcry etc... really stress bleeding edge gaming rigs. What level of parallelism are they going to need in their cloud to handle thousands or millions of users playing these sorts of processor intensive games? And what is going to be cut out of games to make them fit?

This isn't even taking into account the rendered frames being transcoded into the delivery format.

Granted this is cloud computing, they could just add more nodes to increase the parallelism, but man, the logistics... /boggle.

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toprob

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#203497 26-Mar-2009 13:33

In the Gamespot video, linked from the Onlive site, the first audience question is an Aussie asking about performance at a distance, and he is pretty much fobbed off -- they don't seem to have any plans to go beyond the US at the moment.

And the presenter seemed confused by the concept of a 150GB data cap -- he had heard of a 250GB cap:) So although the idea is pretty revolutionary, and seems to make sense to me, I'm not holding my breath. It is entirely possible that we might all be playing this way is five or ten years, but in the meantime I'll get plenty of use out of my Xbox.

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