OnLive's Epic Plan For a New Type of Video Game 137
An anonymous reader writes "OnLive's had a tough twelve months any way you look at it, but as a new profile of the cloud game streaming service points out, throughout it all, service never dropped, and the number of platforms it's on keeps growing. Up next is the tiny Ouya console, but in a wide-ranging interview, OnLive's general manager talks up plans to bring MMOs to the service, and even a whole new type of video game, one that will run on many servers, not just one PC: 'Look at how CGI has changed cinema over the last few years — you can do CGI essentially realtime. It could completely change what a video game looks like. That leads us to new technologies. Then game designers say, "What could I really do with a computing platform that is so powerful but also available across so many devices?" You're no longer constrained by computing power — that has tremendous opportunity.'"
Not constrained (Score:3)
Yeah, OnLive isn't constrained by computing power, but they're still constrained by bandwidth.
Is there a big enough market for their service in the few areas that are able to use their service?
Re:Not constrained (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget constrained by bandwidth, the real problem is latency. Unless they can put a data center in every city they plan to service they can basically forget about it.
Re:Not constrained (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess: They have sold a lie to investors and are stuck in it.
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What OnLive might do is consider making commodity boxes packed full of GPU power that are made to sit on LANs. This way, game commands for rendering are coming from a server at most a hop away.
Plus, people would more than pay for central render/streaming server than have to upgrade each PC's/devices graphics card each time a new Crysis hit the stores.
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The problem is that your keyboard / mouse latency to the OnLive center, and the graphical latency coming back, add up; on a residential line you are looking at ~30ms each minimum, and likely more; this means that each of your input commands is 30-60ms behind what you're seeing, which is itself 20-50ms behind what is actually happening on the game server.
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Exactly. Local games 'cheat' by moving your character or performing your action immediately, without waiting for the server to say it's okay. You can't do that when rendering is done on the server.
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So while it is probably infeasible over current ADSL services, it is quite feasible over Gigabit ethernet
Somehow, I doubt they'll be using that as their advertising slogan.
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Turn based-anything comes to mind. Turn based strategy for example.
But that's pretty much it. Anything real time is dead on that latency.
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An MMO could handle the latency issue better than most other types of games, but it would still suck. Back when I used to play MMOs, my ping was routinely 200ms. It only really got annoying when it was above 500ms. But then the rendering was all done locally and only my position and commands were sent to and from the server, so the game seemed somewhat responsive even when latency was going on behind the scenes.
Absolutely forget any sort of FPS.
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One of the main reasons why WoW is so popular is that its so damn responsive due to very permissive ruleset on what client can do mostly independent of server. Things like moving around for example.
Having latency on your every motion is utterly horrible in MMO. It goes against one of the core reasons why WoW is so successful.
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An MMO could handle the latency issue better than most other types of games, but it would still suck. Back when I used to play MMOs, my ping was routinely 200ms. It only really got annoying when it was above 500ms. But then the rendering was all done locally and only my position and commands were sent to and from the server, so the game seemed somewhat responsive even when latency was going on behind the scenes.
Absolutely forget any sort of FPS.
By MMO I assume you mean MMORPG.
In which case the combat is still turn based whilst the animation is in real time. The animations are only in real time because they are done locally.
What the OP said is still correct. Forget anything real time. Because none of the processing is done locally you need to send both the input and output over the network which makes latency of 40ms quite noticeable. I can play FPS's with a ping of 200ms I even play some with 300ms but this is tolerable because the amount o
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There is a reason why people don't play football while wearing 10kg shoes on each foot. By your argument, that doesn't matter as long as all parties wear 10kg shoes.
Has it ever occurred to you that benefit has NOTHING to do with enjoyment if no one is enjoying it due to retarded lack of responsiveness due to latency?
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I would go that "it's going to be worse then my E-450 laptop" in terms of responsiveness. It may have better graphical fidelity though.
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But the point here is that if the latency is large, but even, then it doesn't provide a benefit for some.
But the gaming experience sucks for everyone then, otherwise you would get gaming servers introducing artificial delays to make sure every player had pretty much the same latency.
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Lack of controls responsiveness would mean that such game would have to have zero micro management and would still be painfully uncomfortable to play.
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as long as the ISPs care more about bumping their stock prices and giving their CEOs mega-bonuses than actually laying lines shit like this just ain't gonna fly.
Does laying lines of coke on hookers' backs count? Because with all that money, they're definitely doing that.
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Latency (forget bandwidth, its irrelevant here) has been steadily decreasing over the years. I rather imagine that getting business-class latencies for residential customers would be cost-prohibitive.
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I don't know if you're a current gamer/customer of OnLive's, but let me tell you they've done a fantastic job at solving latency issues. In fact, the only time it's noticeable is for driving games (unplayable quite honestly).
For other twitch type games, first person shooters Onlive works surprinsgly well. I've played through Red Faction, Home Front, and a few others and they all play very well. Some of the slower games, Patrician for example, play very well on OnLive.
I won't sit here and tell you that la
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Constant workstation upgrades are a thing of the past. 20 years ago onlive made sense, today my 4 year old PC is over the top for any modern game since they are all constrained to the PS3 and 360. This will change with the PS4 and 720 but not again for another 10 years. PCs have gotten good enough.
If driving is unplayable something like CS would be impossible to play.
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A transatlantic connection likely is going through one hop. Your measurement completely ignores the fact that MOST latency is caused by routing delays in urban areas, with speed-of-light delays only becoming significant on long hauls.
All of that aside, you completely mis-interpret what that link is saying. The latency for a single pixel to change on an LCD monitor is generally, worst-case, going to be sub-15ms, and usually sub-10ms. The speed of light in fiber crossing the atlantic on its SHORTEST span w
Re:Not constrained (Score:5, Insightful)
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MMORPGs players are picky about graphics? Everyone I know put the graphics at minimum to prevent loading lag.
Truly 1337 players turn off graphics entirely and play by feeling the 1s and 0s directly flowing over the screen, like in the Matrix. Or something.
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Re:Not constrained (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not constrained (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't think so small. You could write a real-time ray-tracer using LOGO and turtle graphics. Talk about geek cred!
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There's a peak where you start losing points instead. This is well into that part of the function.
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No. Peak, as in local maxima.
Geek points is Y, X is the complicated-geeky-contrived solution factor. Points go up as X does, to a point, but then it swings down in a negative slope and does not return.
(also: probably this is a woosh)
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if he can't make the finances work by renting one pc for a guy.. how the fuck is he planning on making the finances work by renting some guy five pc's worth of hw??
where it would have an unique angle would be on massive real time action, with all pc's meshed on a fast connection between each other up and no chance of cheating.
nobody fucking cares about his pr shilling. get some meat on the story. "You can do CGI essentially realtime." NO SHIT SHERLOCK - I'm doing CGI realtime right now on this pc in backgro
Re:Not constrained (Score:4, Insightful)
if he can't make the finances work by renting one pc for a guy.
This is the best question about their whole business model. The stereotypical gamer is supposed to be a lumbering herd animal, right? Everyone plays the same game at the same time together online? So you can't make money off over subscription. So instead of the user directly financing a gaming PC, they'll intermediate themselves in between that transaction by providing .... Um...
I can't see the health club model working either, where you get people to sign up for new years resolution and then never see them again.
So when you strip away the tech angle, what is their business model exactly?
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I suspect it was "selling ultimate DRM to publishers".
Then publishers noticed what kind of turd it was and pulled the financing.
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I think it would almost have to be ...
1) Make streaming video game service
2) ???
3) Profit
For me, a cloud based gaming service is a non-starter. I play video games only infrequently, and have recently disconnected my XBox from my network because I was starting to see ads in games.
Combine that with paying for your network bandwidth, and I can see a lot of people deciding they're not interested.
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exactly. the compromises for all the network bandwidth costs are enormous. I don't think people realize that if you really wanted a quality onlive-equivalent experience it's probably going to be $50+ a month, which could easily translate to a high end computer every 2 years.
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I knew things were bad when a dragon in Skyrim asked me to bring him a cool, refreshing Coca Cola.
SecondLife with Post Crysis graphics?? (Score:2)
of course that would post likely bring half the Internet to its knees but hey a guy can dream.
(challenge for an animator create a tummy rub animation that can be used with the WereHouse Dire Wolf)
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Don't forget network latency...lag will become far more furstrating, and affect your single-player games as well!
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actually they're constrained by relevance - mostly a lack of.
Please remind me again (Score:2)
Why would I want a cloud game streaming service?
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As long as you have a 8mb+ connection
And in America or other 3rd world locales, that means you're easily wealthy enough to afford multiple consoles and laptops...
So you can't afford a $200 one time xbox but can afford $150/month to the cable company, plus your access device which probably costs more than the xbox anyway. Hmm.
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http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/q3_2012_soti_infographic.pdf [akamai.com]
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ [akamai.com]
Average connection speed in the US is 7.2mbps. The absolute top is South Korea, with 14; I believe we're somewhere around 10th place, but you have to knock one or two places off since theyre counting Hong Kong as a country, which it really isnt.
Re:Please remind me again (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you could just, you know, get the PC version of the game and install it on your laptop?
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Well then they're in for a big surprise since OnLive only plays PC games.
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Because it's got cloud in it... that's where it's at, mate... And by a stroke of luck, rainy days, when there are more clouds, is when people game the most...
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Precisely. We have such powerful GPUs inside our consoles and computers, but they want us to have things rendered remotely along with the added latency? I'm sure it's great for developers who don't want customers illegally uploading copies of their games, but how exactly does it benefit consumers?
What a pointless waste of good bandwidth.
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I'm sure plenty of people have low-end computers but, taking a stab, even integrated Intel graphics are capable of rendering OnLive's 720p resolution with ease. Of course integrated graphics will only improve, and while OnLive's rendering can take advantage of the same technology increases, I suspect that 'advantage' will become increasingly redundant, leaving only the convenience of not having to muck about with game installation.
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No need to download and install a game, it's ready to be run in seconds. It's also platform independent, so you can play the same games wherever you have a screen and an Internet connection.
History (Score:5, Funny)
That's funny, I read the title as "OnLive's Epic Plan For a New Way To Screw Its Employees"
I had forgotten about them. (Score:3)
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There is just no way to ever solve the latency problem.
You could put a server in every house with a direct connection to a monitor, then you only get one frame latency.
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One frame of latency? Only on CRTs. Modern games want to run at 60fps, that is 16ms per frame. Modern LCD screens do so much postprocessing on the video signal/image that it typically takes them at least 30 to 40ms to display that image on screen. Or as Mr. Carmack put it: "It's faster to send data packets across the atlantic than to display a frame on the screen" (QuakeCon 2012 keynote, quoted from memory)
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It sounds suspiciously unlike a server at this point, and more like "we're renting you a PC".
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I'm sorry, but that's BS, what you're talking about is completely different from what he's talking about, and you're being deliberately obtuse. What takes the most time is designing the things to be rendered. And yes, if you throw enough computational power behind it, I'm pretty sure you can get it to essentially real time. Whether or not that's cost effective is a completely different matter.
Also, you're a douche for taking it out of context.
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Throwing more computer power at it was always possible. The context of the quote in the article indicated the speaker thought movie grade CGI can be done in real-time because of advancements made in the last few years. In any reasonable interpretation of the word "possible" it is not possible. In other words "essentially" you can't do CGI real-time and anyone who says you can is either lying to sell you something or doesn't understand the technologies they're talking about.
Why are you so defensive about
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's that rotating cube he's talking about. EPIC!
The future, not yet, but soon maybe. (Score:2)
It's too bad Onlive will be the "prodigy" of online gaming services. By that I mean, early to the party, home in bed before it gets started.
The delta between quality of graphics, render times and bandwidth to send completed frames is getting smaller ever day. I just don't think it's where it need to be for anything beyond local broadcast.
What we will see is road gaming using a user's local console first. Cloud needs to be everywhere before we can outsource the frame generation to a laggy internet-shared ba
Pricing failure (Score:1)
I never purchased anything from onlive because the pricing wasn't competitive with steam/amazon/greenmangaming/etc.
I would have expected the pricing to be even cheaper because I don't have a copy of the files locally in case they go belly up.
constrained by latency and video compression (Score:1)
Solving a problem that doesn't exist (Score:1)
Mid-range hardware is insanely cheap these days and will play all but the most high end games. Even tablets and smartphones can handle some pretty intense gfx. The next gen of consoles looks like it won't even be trying to push the envelope on performance because it is already good enough. My gaming rig is about 4+ years old and I'm pretty happy with it. Why exactly would I want to push rendering into "the cloud"?
If they can produce a kick-ass game that cranks everything to 11 with no lag, it might gen
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Mid-range hardware is insanely cheap these days and will play all but the most high end games.
It'll probably even play high end games if you play with the settings. Of course, to people who need to crank up the AA to the highest it'll go and have max settings, this probably isn't acceptable...
Gaming in the cloud is good if you don't like owning property.
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Gaming in the cloud is good if you don't like owning property.
You're trying to sex it up by implying that it's either for (a) dedicated anarchists living off the grid as they work to subvert the system or (b) gangsters/drug dealers/spies who don't want to leave a financial trace that could convict them.
Distributed physics (Score:2)
The interesting part of this, to me, is the potential to have both a larger and more intricate physics simulation. Essentially you would be distributing the physics across many processors, then player interactions would be fed into that. Thus there would be a single physics simulation occurring for everyone, instead of the more typical method where each client is performing its own simulation on local objects and simply reporting back to the server the raw position of various affected entities.
Whether the
AI would be better (Score:2)
It could also translate into much better AI. For MMO AI is very important.
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MMOs don't need "better AI". They need CONSISTENT AI.
In many cases, AI being too good is actually a very bad thing for a MMO.
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Genius (Score:2)
I think this is a smart move by OnLive.
My experience with the service showed the technology worked, but the pricing model sucked. There was no way I was going to pay almost full price for a game I don't actually own. It would be like Netflix asking $19.99 for every movie you wanted to stream. A monthly fee for all you can eat would have been much better. Of course OnLive was at the mercy of the game publishers who, I'm guessing, didn't make a Netflix-like business model possible.
If OnLive can get games prod
Worst case scenario (Score:2)
No, OnLive, go fuck yourself. Your idea will never work technically or logistically and you need to hurry up and die.
Still streaming (Score:1)
NVIDIA's Grid (Score:3)
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OnLive still owns patents regarding this market so until someone bigger gobbles them up, they are very relevant.
As I'd never heard of them, I had a quick look on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and it seems as though their patents aren't worth as much as they like(d) to think:
"It was revealed in October 2012 that OnLive was sold for only $4.8m. For a company that analysts once estimated was worth approximately $1.8bn, there was some surprise at the low figure for which the company was sold off. Some analysts speculated that the true value of the patents held by the company was potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but that the firm's poor bargaining position led to the cheap sale."
Call me old-fashioned, but in my eyes a company that sells for $4.8m is worth, well, $4.8m.
realtime CGI? (Score:3)
you can do CGI essentially realtime
So, wth have video games been doing thus far?
Best anti-cheat possible. (Score:2)
The only reason I would go for this over the game running on my local machine is that it could make it much more difficult to cheat in multiplayer games.
Lie 'aimbots' that read the games state, and fake input to automatically shoot opponents; 'warping', where fake movement commands are sent to the server; 'wallhacking' where obstacles are rendered transparent, etc.
Some automation would still be possible, with image recognition and virtual input device drivers, but at least the bots couldn't do anything the
Snakeoil for sale (Score:2)
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I live in the middle of nowhere Okanogan county Washington. Even this far out, i have access to a 10 meg connection.
Right, so everyone in the whole world must also have a 10 meg connection, yes?
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And they are going to pay for that how?
I suggest they try kickstarter, and ask for $5000 from each contributor, so that they can get a slower, lowe resolution "cloud" version of the games they already have on their PCs., but over the internet.
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Much more fun than playing Onquack Lifailure.
Haha, did you see what I did there?
No.
Just in case you didn't pick up on the joke, I changed "OnLive" to resemble Barack Obama's name.
No, you didn't.
I am the funniest person.
No, you're not.
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Being able to buy a game on physical media, insert it in my game PC which is not connected to the Internet, and play it is my only unchangable criteria for whether or not I buy a game.
Only old people use physical media, didn't you get the slashdot memo?