OnLive Begins Beta Testing 80
Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, has announced that beta testing is now underway for the cloud gaming service that aims to take the processing burden for cutting-edge games off a player's computer and use remote servers instead. Reaction to this service and competitor GaiKai has been interest tempered with skepticism, but users can now sign up to test it themselves and see if the reality matches the hype. There will be hardware and connectivity restrictions to start: "When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we'll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration."
world ? (Score:4, Informative)
somehow they assume that the whole world lives in the United States...
Re:Linux (Score:4, Informative)
quoting Onlive's beta sign-up page:
so not right now.
Re:Stupid idea (Score:5, Informative)
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensating_Methods_in_Client/Server_In-game_Protocol_Design_and_Optimization [valvesoftware.com]
Re:world ? (Score:4, Informative)
They should, however, be picking beta testers at the edge of that distance, on streets with lots of contention, with crappy PCs, with ropey old DSL modems, etc., so that they can iron out problems.
You also don't start your beta test with those crappy situations, especially when it is a completely new service. That's why you often start with an alpha or a small closed beta.
It's much easier to find the problems when you start with a small set of potential problems and work your way down to those users running a 28k modem on windows 95.