OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval 198
Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."
Yet another infomation-free summary... (Score:5, Informative)
The guy logged in using credentials 'borrowed' from an authorised beta tester, from more than twice the recommended distance from the server, acknowledged multiple high latency (due to distance) notifications, and the best he could do is damn the service with faint praise.
Sounds like a realistic test to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Because guess what? In the real world, people live all over. Onlive isn't going to be able to say "Just move closer to one of our data centers," at least not if they want to pitch themselves as the "cheaper than buying a graphics card" option. Sounds to me like they've been controlling who gets in to the beta to try and create an overly rosy impression. This guy was a more realistic test, a person who doesn't happen to be near their few locations.
That's just the reality of this. If it is to work well I can'
Re:Sounds like a realistic test to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Because guess what? In the real world, people live all over. Onlive isn't going to be able to say "Just move closer to one of our data centers," at least not if they want to pitch themselves as the "cheaper than buying a graphics card" option. Sounds to me like they've been controlling who gets in to the beta to try and create an overly rosy impression. This guy was a more realistic test, a person who doesn't happen to be near their few locations.
That's just the reality of this. If it is to work well I can't only work well for a few people in a few locations.
Imagine a movie-listings website for the greater New York City area. Now imagine some from Wyoming complaining that the theater in Cheyenne isn't listed on that site. The response that person would get is the same that your objection gets:
If you don't live with our covered-area, feel free to use another service. We have plenty of customers within our area and we have decided not to cover yours.
Not every business on the planet expects to serve every customer one the planet, and yet somehow they can still turn profits.
Makes it not so attractive as they hyped it to be, especially against powerful $100 graphics cards (the low-mid range of graphics is great these days) and $200 game consoles.
I think one of us has missed something. Either you're right, and OnLive expects this to kill all other gaming everywhere, or I'm right in that this is a supplemental service to gaming that adds a remote component for those customers that want it and can access it.
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I think no matter what we can all agree that OnLive is not for your serious - regular gamers because they already have the hardware, even if it is outdated, and are used to playing on their local system.
Since the system has flaws it will likely not persuade them to try the service.
However, those who do not game due to the entry cost of a console or PC might find the idea neat and it could catch on.
Turn some casual/non gamers into regular gamers only knowing what the gaming experience is like through OnLive.
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The guy logged in using credentials 'borrowed' from an authorised beta tester,....
I know most people take Beta/OpenBeta NDAs as just 'who cares' documents, but there is a reason they exist, and assuming they were signed and stuff, they are (IANAL) binding.
I'd be surprised if "PC Perspective" didn't get a C&D already..
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Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... (Score:4, Interesting)
But for serious gamers it is common knowledge that remote playing will not ever be as quick as a LAN frag fest.
Possibly true, but possibly also might not matter, if it's still quick enough. After all, playing on the internet isn't as quick as a "LAN frag fest", and yet the vast majority of gamers, even of twitch-heavy games, are playing on the internet, not on LANs.
Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... (Score:5, Informative)
". After all, playing on the internet isn't as quick as a "LAN frag fest", and yet the vast majority of gamers, even of twitch-heavy games, are playing on the internet, not on LANs."
With tons of client side prediction and faking trying very very hard to hide the client-server lag.
With OnLive, you can't do that - it just sends some inputs and gets some video back.
I mean, this could work under optimal, super fast network connections, but I'm pretty sure ensuring you have such a connection would be so expensive that this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist - it is always cheaper to spend the money on client side hardware instead. I'm sure stupid venture capitalists will keep pumping money into this with idiotic projections how bazillion people will pay X dollars per month or hour or whatever that will somehow cover those network infrastructure costs.
I doubt it will and few years from now OnLive goes bust taking a big pile of money with it, but hey, you never know... can't do impossible stuff without trying.
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Wrong. People with old hardware can reduce the quality to get good performance (I play Call of Duty 4 in 800x600, lowest quality), but there's no switch than can lower the RTT.
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But they can't make a living on "not any different than that". They have to justify their subscription fee by being much, much better than what the average gamer has in his box, which is already paid for and he doesn't have to pay monthly for. This is not gonna work.
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With tons of client side prediction
How well does client-side prediction work in an input-heavy game, like a fighting game, played between continents? You could be playing just fine, and then half a second later when the updates make it through, you're dead because your computer didn't predict that the other player would do a juggle-spike combo on you.
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OnLive have clearly said that they think the latency isn't too much for most people if it's lower than 80ms, they've made a big deal about how far you have to be from the server and a reviewer dislikes it because the latency is too high when he's using it in a way that OnLive said would make the latency too high? What a surprise!
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OnLive knows all this. They set themselves a target of 80ms round-trip latency.
To achieve this, they set certain geographical limits. This journalist broke those limits. The software warning him about high latency. He observed high latency.
Note that some games are perceived as OK despite up to 200ms round-trip latency. GTA IV on the Xbox was measured to have 133-200ms latency [eurogamer.net]. Nobody cared because it's not a twitch game.
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The game has to be specifically written to deal with it, but it can be done.
Just the same, I think that this service will be a monumental failure. I just dont see how they will recover the costs, because they can't make it too expensive or the end user can save money by buying a machine that doesnt require their service
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At the same time, we called anyone with a low latency connection an LBP and they often dominated the server.
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Low Bastard Ping? I think you mean LPB... :)
Ahh, I remember those days. I had a shirt with a network jack on it that said "LPB", and my DSL was the envy of my friends.
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Do you work for OnLive? Then how do you fail to acknowledge that for games that are highly dependent on reaction speed even a few millis of latency may add up to a laggy experience? The problem may be exacerbated by the reporter's distance from the server, sure. But for serious gamers it is common knowledge that remote playing will not ever be as quick as a LAN frag fest.
Sadly, I'm at work and can't dig up the YouTube link, but there was a talk/tech demo given at Columbia where they seemed very upfront about the technical challenges. In particular, it was stated that the time budget from "push button" to "see result on screen" was 80 ms, and was then broken down in to the various categories (so much time for local routing, so much time for video processing, etc). IIRC, the budget for data transport was 24 ms (which worked out to 1000 miles client to server).
Can't say whethe
Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even when it's a full product, you won't be allowed to sign up if you're not in a geographically suitable place.
It seems that the eventual plan is that it will dynamically assign your session to the closest datacentre. But for the timebeing, each Beta tester's ID is assigned a datacentre at registration time, and that's the one that ID will use every time.
It explains in the TFA that he borrowed the login credentials from a beta tester in another part of the country. Hence he wasn't using a nearby server, as he would have been if he was a real beta tester, or in future, a paying customer.
It's pretty amazing it worked as well as it did, considering all that.
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Have you noticed how people tend to cluster into populous areas?
My wild guess is they'll put the servers where the people are, rather than expect people to move.
Where what people are? (Score:2)
My wild guess is they'll put the servers where the people are
Not everybody lives in New York or Los Angeles. There are 200,000 people in Fort Wayne, Indiana, including myself. What are the odds that I'll get coverage?
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Less than 200 miles from Chicago. You'll be fine.
In fact you're already on their coverage maps. I'd be astonished if they didn't expand from the three datacentres used for the Beta.
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Then the product will have few customers because most people aren't willing to spend thousands of dollars/euros to move to "a geographically suitable place."
Umm... the nature of geographically suitable places is that they are also more populous ... providing for more customers...
There's a map for that (Score:2)
True, but if you make something available only in major cities, you'll end up with residents of minor cities whining that they can't get the service, and that it shouldn't be considered "in production" until it reaches 85 percent* of the population. The whining can be even more effective when performed by a competitor; Verizon's ads blasting AT&T for its spotty 3G coverage have done a good job of creating an impression that "there's a map for that".
* The U.S. DTV transition was originally supposed to
As expected (Score:2)
I think the results are as expected or even slightly better than expected (at least from my viewpoint). It shows that something like OnLive will be workable in the future with slightly faster interenet access.
My problems with OnLive are not related to the technical side. Even though i am mostly a casual gamer (at least since i gave up WoW) and i could profit from Pay-per-Hour, i am not sure i would like this. It would require a lot of trust from my side, OnLive has still to earn.
CU, Martin
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This is an issue with latency, not bandwidth; even if you had a dedicated 100Mb line but had 100 ping it would be unplayable.
I doubt future improvements will be able to speed up the hardware that process signals by a huge margin, and presumably they're not going to change the speed of light any time soon; the only real thing they can do is put the data centres closer to the end-user to improve performance.
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the only real thing they can do is put the data centres closer to the end-user to improve performance
They're doing that. But Perlman claims that they're also:
- Developing smarter routing algorithms
- Tuning at the IP packet level, to increase speed on domestic routers etc. (I guess this is largely about getting the MTU right, dynamically)
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Heh... That's a used car salesman's pitch of things.
"Smarter" routing algorithms have to be applied to each and every router in the mix that might see the traffic for that to work. Do you see the ISP's ripping every Cisco and Juniper out to accomodate them?
"Tuning" at the "IP packet level"? Perlman said this?
There's a magic size that will increase bandwidth to peak. Smaller stuff means you don't get as much through because of latencies, etc. Larger stuff,you end up getting more and more bandwidth wit
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Latency (for a not overbooked line) depends on bandwitdh and packet size. Same packetsize and ten times the bandwidth reduces the latency nearly by a factor of ten (on a single line).
Overall latency depends on the sum of all latencies for each lines on the way plus a bonus for each router. The bonus for the routers is not the issue. The number of hops can be influenced by a service provider like OnLive through Peering Agreements. Something OnLive cannot influence, is the last mile to the customer. Usually 3
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Latency (for a not overbooked line) depends on bandwitdh and packet size. Same packetsize and ten times the bandwidth reduces the latency nearly by a factor of ten (on a single line).
I'm confused as to how this statement holds up, currently I have a 16Mb or so line at home with pings of about say 100ms to a server. If I was to get an upgrade to a 50Mb line, this means my ping would go down to 32ms?
Surely latency is how long the signal takes to get to a server and back, how would allowing more signals to go back and forward help increase the speed that they get to the server and back?
Car analogy:
If say the speed-limit on a motorway was 70mph, and there was no congestion on the road; why
Re:As expected (Score:4, Informative)
If say the speed-limit on a motorway was 70mph, and there was no congestion on the road; why would adding in extra lanes to the motorway increase how fast I get to my destination?
You get the car analogy wrong. A packet of 100 bytes is not similar to a single car. It consists of 800 cars (bits). So if you increase the number of lanes more cars can travel. Each car travels still the same speed (of light) but by allowing more cars at the same time, the delivery (packet) distributed over 800 cars gets delivered faster.
The time a packet takes to get transmitted is roughly: packetsize/bandbidth.
Say you have a 10mbps line and a 1000bytes packet. This will take 8000 bit / 10.000.0000 bit / s = 0,00008 s or 0,8ms (one way). So the latency through the line will be roughly 1,6ms. If you got to 100mbps ethenet or even gigabit ethernet, the time will go down by factor 10 each step.
But there are some side effects: Sometimes packets are packed into larger packets to fill the line better. This will increase the latency. When the speed of the line is high, the time the OS needs to send/receive the packets gets more influence on the latency. Also the latency may occur in your providers network because he overbvooks the service (selling access for more cars than the lanes allow and therfor creating congestion).
To see wether your line is the chokepoint use Traceroute [wikipedia.org] to see where the latency happens. If the latency already occurs close to you, a faster line may improve the latency. Also look for features from your provider as "fastpath".
CU, Martin
P.S. This is a very short overview of the topic. A complete coverage would come as a book. BTW the books have already been written: Richard W. Stevens: TCP/IP Illustrated [kohala.com].
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Electrical signals don't travel at the speed of light. Ethernet is generally ~.5C. Not entirely sure what the speed for fiber is, but it is also a bit less than C. Just for giggles, I should point out that the sunlight that you see is also not reaching you traveling at C since C is defined as the speed of light in a vacuum. I'm aware that for all intents and purposes, it's easy enough to consider them all as traveling as C since the difference in time is so minute over terrestrial distances. It just get
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Quibbler :-) You wanted it....
For our example 0.5C is sufficently close to C to call it "speed of light" :-). As you point out, the "speed of light" is not the same as C. I can find materials where the speed of light is below 0.5C. So saying that the electric signal travels at the speed of light is correct since i didn't mention any matrial i would be measuring the speed of light in....
Point, game and match :-)
CU, Martin
P.S. I have references to materials reducing the speed of light to 17m/s (38mph for you
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P.S. I have references to materials reducing the speed of light to 17m/s (38mph for you imperial bastards) without significant absorption.
Why am I suddenly wearing a black helmet and breathing through a respirator?
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Why am I suddenly wearing a black helmet and breathing through a respirator?
If you're calculating in inches, pounds, gallons or miles: that's worse. I can forgive any honest villain, but not non-metric....
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So what you're saying is: The internet is not a dump truck?
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A packet of 100 bytes is not similar to a single car. It consists of 800 cars (bits). So if you increase the number of lanes more cars can travel. Each car travels still the same speed (of light) but by allowing more cars at the same time, the delivery (packet) distributed over 800 cars gets delivered faster.
Your reasoning doesn't make sense. First off, if latency were mainly dependent on the signal speed in the cables, they would be only a few milliseconds and would certainly be negligible for the last mile.
Second, internet communication is serial, not parallel so the car analogy makes no sense.
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> First off, if latency were mainly dependent on the signal speed in the cables, they would be only a few milliseconds and would certainly be negligible for the last mile.
Please note:
1. I never said that the signaling speed would affect latency.
2. I said the bandwidth affects the latency of the line involved.
3. My analogy was: If you assume the internet connection is a highway where cars travel at the same speed (hghway: 70mph, internet: signaling speed) than the bandwidth represents the number of lanes
Ping isn't a good test (Score:2)
What you have to remember about ping is it is more or less testing minimum time. The payload of an ICMP packet is very low. With video data like this, you have more payload. So you not only have to count the transit time from the datacenter, but also how long said amount of data will take to transfer at your line speed.
For example, say each video frame is roughly 50kbytes. If you had a line that was only 50kbps, well then it would take a full second for you to receive a frame, even if the latency on that li
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Satellite is a very special case. You cannot (as i did) speak of "the last mile" here.... It's more "the last 20.000+ miles" ;-). Even then the formula still holds up if you use sufficently large packets :-). The formula is valid if the packet size is larger than the storage capacity of the line (a 10mbps satellite link has a storage capacity of ~200KB, which is no reasonable packet size).
Without making a lecture, the last mile is usually one of the Latency Hogs for a lot of the users. By increasing the ban
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It's an issue of both.
With the ping being bad it sucks for the end user.
With the sheer amount of bandwidth needed, there's no way the feed-ends could keep up with more than a couple hundred to a couple thousand.
An OC-48's only able to really handle about 1200 or so realistically.
If you overbook the bandwidth or server resources, you will degrade things accordingly.
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It would require a lot of trust from my side, OnLive has still to earn
Trust? In what way, beyond what you would give *any* online merchant to whom you provide your credit card info?
Re:As expected (Score:4, Insightful)
Trust? In what way, beyond what you would give *any* online merchant to whom you provide your credit card info?
It's like with honest politician: I trust them to stay bought....
Something i value with my games is to take an old savegame and try something new. If i don't "own" the game but just purchased a service, the game or the savegame may disappear.
If e.g. Amazon takes my money and won't deliver my copy of Mass Effect 2, i have a good chance to get my money back. But if i purchase OnLive to play Mass Effect 2 and they remove the game from their list, my "invested" time and some of my money is gone. If this happens 1-2 years after the purchase, there is nothing i can do that will have any effect.
Someone taking my credit card credentials and using them fraudulently is a known process i know how to handle.
CU, Martin
Videos removed from YouTube already (Score:2, Interesting)
The menu video seems to be available, but the in game videos now give:
"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by OnLive, Inc..."
I just gotta saaaaaayy the waaaaayyy I feeeeeeel. (Score:2, Insightful)
What is it with all this 'cloud' stuff?
I've got half a terabyte of storage, a pretty good graphics card with shader support and a nippy CPU.
When there are raytracing cards with inbuilt physics, I'll enjoy a slightly more realistic gaming experience on my local machine, thanks.
Until then, I'll have to go with pretty realistic and the only significant cause of latency being my old neurons.
GOML.
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If you can't keep up with the upgrade cycle required to play the latest PC games, buy a console or play older games.
The problem with playing older games is that either the matchmaking servers end up switched off (e.g. DNAS Error -103 on PS2 games), or if not, the established players tend not to be friendly toward newbies (e.g. "gtfo n00b" on several classic first-person shooters).
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And the problem with consoles is that they're not as good as PCs. I've checked comparative screenshots and the PS3 can come close, but the XBox360 tends to look shoddy. PCs these days can pump out way more frames at higher resolutions than consoles (actually, I think they've always done that, but consoles are at least up at decent resolutions now), so I'd still rather have my PC.
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Only happened to me twice. You just choose I nice, friendly server and stick with it.
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Correction: for "excitement and controversy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Read: "excitement (from clueless arts majors masquerading as tech journalists) and hilarity (from anyone with even a remote shred of knowledge of the technologies involved)".
Look, this tech may - may - be workable for SimWarConquer, but for anything that's reaction based? No. Not going to happen. There is no technobabble solution to latency, and anyone who tells you otherwise wants your credit card number.
Re:Correction: for "excitement and controversy" (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet this review - from a sceptic - says it pretty much works. While it's in beta. From a location that would have been excluded from the beta if he'd gone through proper channels.
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Mmm. Two out of three games were reported as playable, with noticeable latency compared to a local version, one being "right on the edge" of playability. The best experience came from a game that's largely about learning the track, which makes it not a reaction game per se.
Notice that this was while playing over a wired-to-the-wall connected (who still uses those?) and with a low 85ms ping to the server.
I'm also assuming that there was a certain degree of tolerance for a novel experience. Once people
The ping should be noted (Score:2)
85ms is not a high ping at all. If Onlive considers that to be outside of their acceptable range, they've got a nasty surprise coming when they try to open it to the public. Lot of people going to have a ping of that or higher.
I've got a reasonable good connection here, business class 12/1.5 mbps cable. Represents a mid to high end home connection. Minimum latency on the connection is in the realm of 25ms. That is about what it takes to get out past the CMTS and so on. For good sites, I'm usually in the 40-
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However there are two types of latency OnLive is dealing with.
Lots more than two - of varying severity. And they all get summed.
- controller encoding button presses
- controller to client transmission
- client decodes controller protocol
- encode and transmit control signals to server
- decode controls and input to game
- processing performed by the game itself
- video encoding
- transmit video to client
- client decodes video
- client transmits video to TV
Perlman claims that OnLive examined every
I am indeed dissapoint, Slashdot. (Score:3, Funny)
First Post! (Score:4, Funny)
There was even more latency than you expected, you insensitive clod!
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Well, that's because you posted outside of Slashdot's acceptable distance radius and didn't connect to the proper data center.
"Burnout Paradise" is slow?! (Score:2)
I must admit, I've not actually played it, but if it's anything like the other Burnout games, millisecond reaction times are kind of important. It may be that he has having a hard time picking up on la instinctively because of the analogue controls but I doubt the reaction time increase would stand up in serious play.
VNC like remote desktop client (similar to OnLive) (Score:2)
While I've been mildly interested in OnLive, my biggest excitement over this was a confirmation that a streamed remote desktop session with real good responsiveness (say LAN) could be had soon. I even started poking around for similar systems that actually streamed the desktop in 2mbps or similar video stream with interactivity, but alas, it seems like no one is working on this issue.
So, I'm open to suggestions, is there any current existing remote desktop server/client system that actually streams the des
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I did this back in 1996. I was wardialing, and found somebody's open PcAnywhere connection. So I connected to it and attempted to play Solitaire over 33.6 dialup. Needless to say, it was a pain dragging those cards around.
concern about patches... hmpf (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently bought a PS3 with some games. When I started it I was welcomed with "You need to install the latest PS3 firmware now!". So I had to wait for it to install and reboot. Then I inserted a game and wanted to play, but I was welcomed with "Updates have been found for this game and need to be installed". Which is pretty much identical to the PC, but there you often have the option to install the patch.
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Also PC patching is becoming much easier in most cases. It is getting rather popular for games to have auto updaters, or a button you can click that will check and download what you need. Then of course if you buy a game from a digital service like Impulse or Steam, those will check automatically and keep your stuff up to date.
Really the patching thing is becoming largely a non-issue. I don't see no patches as a major selling point for this.
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80 KB/s (Score:2)
I told you so.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1492974&cid=30591584 [slashdot.org]
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=859 [pcper.com]
http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/859/bw.jpg [pcper.com]
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You told us there would be a 480ms round trip. That would make it unusable.
This guy found it was pretty much OK, despite being further than the servers than recommended.
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Thats your read?
Mine is 480ms is "pretty much OK" for a console driving game, but is horrible for a PC FPS.
The "Playing UT3 with OnLive" shows how it feels: moving like a drunk.
Anyway, probably lots of games are still fun with 480ms. So yes, as another game system, seems OnLive will work (for a subset of the gammers)
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I assure you I do not have any vested interest whatsoever.
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Guess I won't be using it... (Score:2)
... because I couldn't even stream the videos without jitter. :)
I just don't see this working (Score:5, Interesting)
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Mod parent up. I hadn't even thought of this, but he's right. The video will have occasional jerkiness not found in either remote noninteractive video or local gaming video and it's going to be very jarring.
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I too would expect this jerkiness, and it's surprising therefore that the review doesn't mention it.
Perlman goes on about "psycho-perceptual" techniques, and I wonder whether that's enough to deal with the situation.
For example, a really smart decoder could detect that the scene in general is panning, or zooming (e.g. a racing game, going in a straight line), or rotating, or some combination of these. Indeed the encoder could include hints in the stream. The game engine could even feed extra information to
1 MB/sec... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are still large areas of North America stuck with either stone-age Dial-Up (in 20-freakin'-10) or slow expensive satellite. Like mine (I cry myself to sleep over my 1200ms latency) This is absolutely a no-go there. Obviously.
Now, in better places, I'm sort of out of the loop. Whenever I've spent time in cities, either visiting my brother in Ottawa or living in London (Ontario, not the good one) for a few months at a time, it's been my experience that even connections that are supposed to get up to 1MB/sec would be lucky to get that in practice, especially at peak times. Furthermore, the sheer amount of lagspikes, connection hiccups, or general time when the interrnet craps out for no apparent reason makes it seem like you'd be dealing with one frustration after another. The number of times I see people get DC'd on World of Warcraft seems to back up my theory that staying connected, and maintaining a constant connection at 5KB/s or so (for WoW) is difficult enough, doing the same for a (whopping?) 1/MB/s while keeping latency under 100ms would be hellish.
So is my experience with the Internet indicative of the general population, or have I just had the misfortune of having terrible service? Can people really keep 1MB/s sustained, without lag hiccups, DCs, lost packets, etc, while keeping under 100ms?
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Well yes, some people can. However in general you need to live in an area with good access anyhow. Also, you are going to need to have a good deal better than what you want minimum. If you want to sustain 1mbps without a problem, you probalby need a 10mbps line. The more headroom you've got, the easier it is to maintain what you need.
That is not to say it is problem free, even good connections will drop sometimes or have problems. Also, of course, better connections tend to cost more money. Not a huge deal,
Until they overcome that little "physics" thing... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is an obvious pump and dump scheme, unless they have somehow unlocked technology previously unseen and unknown by mankind, and have done so for the purpose of playing video games.
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My assumption has always been that their business model would be to sell the kit to ISPS who would install the servers at local exchanges and charge for gaming as a premium service. That would seem to solve most of the problems. The physics only really becomes a problem when you assume central servers away from subscribers
How will they get user maps and mods on this? (Score:2)
How will they get user maps and mods on this?
if all gameing where to go this way that will kill that.
also how about free games / small game developers that may be shut out of this?
He says that this may be in cable boxes but with (Score:2)
He says that this may be in cable boxes some day but with with the VOD control lag that you see now days that may not work out that well and cable co's don't have a lot of bandwidth for this some don't even have room for all people who want to use VOD at some times.
caped / metered ISP's will kill this 1meg min is t (Score:2)
caped / metered ISP's will kill this 1meg /s min is to high for many caped plans. Even comcrap 250gb will limit this.
Doubters should watch the Columbia presentation (Score:3, Informative)
Doubters should really watch the Columbia University presentation. It's entertaining and very technical and will probably address your every concern. Too many genuine experts here don't know what they are talking about because they are ignorant of the way OnLive actually works. It's more clever than you probably think.
YouTube Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FtJzct8UK0 [youtube.com]
Original
http://tv.seas.columbia.edu/videos/545/60/79 [columbia.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
People that play graphically intensive games online [...] And most of these people will have higher-than-average spec computers anyway
It's not intended for the people you're talking about. Those people already have a means to play high-end games; and they're probably stuck in their ways too.
OnLive is for people who currently don't play those games, because of the cost/effort. People who are curious to try Crysis, but not curious enough to buy a gaming graphics card. The aim is to remove the barriers that say 'Casual gamers must tolerate low end graphics'.
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People who are curious to try Crysis, but not curious enough to buy a gaming graphics card. The aim is to remove the barriers that say 'Casual gamers must tolerate low end graphics'.
You can get very capable graphics cards for under $200 these days. How is that more expensive than this service will be?
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You can get very capable graphics cards for under $200 these days. How is that more expensive than this service will be?
We don't know how much OnLive will cost. I would hope it compares well with $200. Or at least, the $200 would be spread over time - and as irrational as that is, it works for many people.
Perlman has talked about a subscription fee. I feel this is a mistake. I think they shouldn't put people off with any sense of buying into a commitment. Charge per game, or per hour. You might end up spending $200. But you wouldn't commit to $200 at the start.
But $200 for a graphics card isn't the whole story. Before you bu
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure the graphical complexity of the game will have much bearing on bandwidth usage. I imagine that scenes from Quake III encoded to some video codec, would be about the same size as scenes from Crysis on Ultra encoded with the same codec, would be about the same size as scenes captured on an HD camcorder encoded with the same codec.
Crysis is *the* demo for this service. I've seen analysis that says they appear to be using a graphics level a notch down from 'Ultra' - but I suspect the motivation for
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Duuuuuh (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually...it's doable technically with only a very, very small number of subscribers.
Latency and bandwidth will kill the whole thing.
You have to use peak values per customer in your figuring for it to even remotely work the way they portrayed this.
Given this:
1.5Mbits/s for the feed per user for SD experience with OnLive.
You can serve roughly as an absolute maximum :
30 users on a T3.
103 users on an OC-3.
404 users on an OC-12.
1658 users on an OC-48.
You can expect about $250-500k/mo recurring costs on that OC-48. As another observation, you will likely need to serve 2/3rds to 3/4ths of those numbers to keep the latency usable because as you fill the pipe to capacity, traffic will be subject to the congestion algorithms in the routers and machines at both ends of the pipe. Now, some will state that they'll place the stuff at the ISP's end of things... Then the ISP gets the joy of this same level of connectivity- and they're bitching about "freeloaders" and "bandwidth problems" right now.
OnLive is snake oil trying to be sold to the game industry as a solution to their "control" problem. It's an alternate DRM play. And it can NEVER work in our lifetime. You can't field enough bandwidth cheaply enough to accomplish it.
Re: (Score:2)
I think this is a well thought out post in general. However:
1.5Mbits/s for the feed per user for SD experience with OnLive.
TFA measured ~750kbps for 720p.
Maybe your 1.5Mbps was from OnLive's announcement of the peak bandwidth required?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You say that, but I've been using a "remote generation of gaming images" system for years and there is basically no lag. Okay, the catalogue of games is a little limited, but the control and response is amazing. Distance? I'd say about three or four feet from the input and output devices to the box that generates my images. Definitely remote from the devices and definitely working over wires without latency issues.
So, it is already working, and I can't see why I'd wan
Re: (Score:2)
I'm so tired of people thinking it can be done - this thing has as much hype as the apple tablet, and neither of these have anything. Both are horrible deliveries and over promises, not that such a concept is foreign to apple. Onlive however is new, and has been doing this since day one. I pity anyone who's invested in onlive at this point.
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Personally, I'm tired of all the folks saying things can't be done. Ok, granted, it isn't going to work with what we have in place today. But what you are saying is the sorts of things people keep saying time and time again, only to be proven wrong. '640k is more then enough for any one' Remember that one from B Gates? How about 'I can foresee a maximum of three to four computers needed world wide' from the head of IBM. How about the ever popular 'Powered flight will never be possible' or 'Mankind can never
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Net neutrality is about treating packets fairly regardless of whose software is producing it. I don't see how blocking a major ISP from prioritising packets from one cloud game company while disadvantaging those of its competitors is a good thing?
QoS isn't anti-net neutrality it's just pr
Re: (Score:2)
Well, ok.
See, to make it work, it's gotta be prioritized like :
1. VoIP
2. cloud gaming
4. regular network gaming
5. Video chat
6. web pages, other small file size on demand content
7. steaming video
8. file sharing
And for your ISP to know what packet is what, it'll have to have agreements with the service providers for the services on this list so that it "knows" a packet sent to/from onlive's server block is probably cloud gaming, and a packet sent to/from google or facebook or yahoo is probably a web pag
Re: (Score:2)
I predict none of that will come to pass, because it will take at least ten years for the infrastructure build out to make it feasible. I could see the next generation MMOs doing something like this, however. It might actually save bandwidth, since you could scale up the number of objects without having to send deltas for every single one.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe. In my town, fiber to the curb is available, so the infrastructure's there. A LOT of the country can purchase 6mbps DSL, or cable service that is about that fast. The dsl DSLAMs could easily be upgraded to handle the kind of traffic that heavy use of cloud gaming would involve.
Not sure what you are saying about an MMO : even if the client is running on machines in a data center, each client session would need to know about all of the objects moving independently in the game space.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
1. All game publishers will be paid for every hour of game played. This increases their income,
This will decrease their income. One of the great things about gaming is the entertainment hours/dollar value. I can spend $50 on a game, and get hundreds of hours of entertainment out of it. Unless we're looking at less than $.25/hr it's simply not price competitive with local gaming.
2. Instead of there being 3 console platforms + PC, there will be just one platform : the PCs in the cloud gaming data centers.
And what incentive do the console makers have to just go away?
3. The overall costs of gaming will be lower.
Gaming is cheap as shit anyway. And when has renting ever been cheaper than owning?
I'll stop here. It's not going to happen. There's always going to be a market for local games.
Re: (Score:2)
First time I've seen such distinct bias in moderation (both promotion of posts and demotion)
Look out lads, metamoderatings gonna getcha!
Your UID is lower than mine, so you should have learned this by now, however: While there are no +1 Agree and -1 Disagree mod options, metamods use the options they do have in this way all the time. If you're shocked by this, you probably aren't going to be very happy posting here.
Your very best defense against this technique is to be cognisant of the opposing point of view and be tactful about it. Then the "-1 Disagree" crowd will mostly skip your post, wishing they could argue with you instead. But po