THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CLIKC => Topic started by: JD on 25 Mar 2009, 13:50
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This (http://kotaku.com/5181300/onlive-makes-pc-upgrades-extinct-lets-you-play-crysis-on-your-tv)
and this (http://kotaku.com/5181625/see-onlive-in-action)
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[keanu]Whao...[/keanu]
If that works, it could be the best thing to happen to gaming in years. Possibly ever. Being the kind of person who isn't hugely into PC gaming due entirely to the annoyance and expense of regular upgrades, this makes me all kinds of excited.
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yeah, same here.
but i kinda get the feeling that this might end up being one of those good ideas that still ends up flopping, for whatever reason. i dunno though, that's just a mild hunch and not really based on anything.
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Whoa. Who-ho-ho-ho-hoa. Does that mean that, in the future, you may not need hardware beyond what is necessary to project it on your screen? That is awesome. If Steam incorporated this too, they'll probably be set for life, as well as all of their members who can stop spending loads of cash on hardware upgrades. But wait, what does this mean to the producers? Will NVidia's sales plummet because OnLive is the only one buying their products?
The only problem I can think of is the internet connection. You'd basically be trading hardware reliability for internet connection reliability, but with internet connection failure the loss is much greater. Hmm...
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I really do think the issue is going to be hardware manufacturer's being very unhappy with the situation. I mean, as much as i hate the upgrade cycle on PCs, it fuels a lot of progress in the hardware.
At best, I see this being a more modernized version of Gametap being like, mostly 2 or 3 years behind. Certainly not a bad thing, but there's no way in hell publishers and console giants would allow their newer titles get on this service until sales started dipping.
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I actually had this idea about a year ago. Interesting to see it come to fruition.
The truth is, you can build a whole PC into a card that'll fit into a PCI-E slot on a fuckhuge server. That's what my dad did, except they were Supercomputers. (okay so he helped write the software to make the things, but w/e.) I bet you could even set up certain games to run off multiple cardPCs or run off newer ones, depending on the hardware needed.
if it were a simple game, you could probably even have hundreds of people running off 1 card.
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This is an amazing idea. I am really excited about this. Though I do wish Microsoft and Sony would jump on board. I mean they loose money on selling the hardware, why not let someone else bear the brunt of that cost.
Sadly I just imagine that MS/Sony will try to create competing services rather than banding together.
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It would require a ridiculous internet connection, taking out possible sales to a pretty good sized chunk of the country. No way they'd be willing to lose customers who don't have the proper location for internet.
Besides, competition is usually a very good thing.
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Not when competition has the purchasing power and sway to buy up devs and publishers. And as it said, there is very little upstream for the average user. Pirate Bay hurts the internet more than this ever would
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In order to get a good connection you'd probably have to be within 1,000 miles of the nearest datacenter, and I'm not sure how much capital OnLive can raise to set up enough of those. It'll almost certainly be a luxury available only to urban gamers at least in the beginning of the service.
Giantbomb claims 80ms latency (http://www.giantbomb.com/news/what-if-your-game-console-was-just-a-video-stream/1016/?linktags=home,home-news) on the service. 60hz (the typical monitor update rate) is 60 refreshes per second. That's why over 60fps on is meaningless. That's 1 update every 17ms. So I think you'd want to get it down to below 30ms -- 15ms ideally. 80ms in multiplayer online game is pretty damn nice all things considered. But in that case your graphics update at a rate of 0ms (instantly) due to the bulk of the lifting being done on the client side, so only the computations from other players are slightly delayed. In this case it'd be everything delayed. So basically, this has the potential to be terrible.
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Not when competition has the purchasing power and sway to buy up devs and publishers. And as it said, there is very little upstream for the average user. Pirate Bay hurts the internet more than this ever would
Once again, you have the problem of not having a system to sell it on, and devs would require quite a lot of money for licensing in order to make back money on their ridiculously high cost games. The monthly sub would be silly as fuck for this service.
Also, I'm not sure how this could hurt the internet at all.
Also also, everything KvP said.
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Only 720p and it's gonna eat up all your bandwidth... Nothanks.
It could be an awesome idea but it seems like it would be laggy and shit, even when playing online with other people there is latency issues, but if it is all server side the streaming to the client could be a big problem, I am wondering if they have a protocol devised to use for this and not make it shit, I hope it is good but dunno how awesome it can be :|
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Lag is an obvious issue but the guy in the interview looked insanely confident. I am so optimistic about this.
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I call bullshit. Beyond fiberwire, what kind of connection can support streaming 720p without even a hint of lag?
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Umm cable TV doesnt lag and its streamed to your TV. Seriously people, you will be happier if you arent so pessimistic.
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Umm cable TV doesnt lag and its streamed to your TV. Seriously people, you will be happier if you arent so pessimistic.
That's because cable TV is a very simple format with little necessary decoding to make the picture appear. (Old fashioned analog TVs aren't particularly complicated, especially compared to a computer network.)
You aren't interacting with the content streaming to your TV; at most all you do is change channels and that's done client-side (similar to current client/server multiplayer games). It doesn't make any practical difference if the show you watch lags half a second behind what the headend is receiving. Would you play a game with a 500ms ping? (Don't just list games like Virtual Chess and online poker; games like that are so simple it would be impractical to run on this system because any computer made in the last decade can run them.)
I've got 1.5 meg DSL, and 720p video can't stream in real time without compressing the living hell out of it. So I can see a lot of users squinting to play games that look like YouTube videos.
EDIT: And depending on what hardware you're running on, you might need at least an entry level GPU anyway to decode the video in real time. The netbook crowd (obviously one of the big markets they're aiming for), if they want to run at native screen resolution, might be out of luck with their 1.3-1.6 ghz processors and the old GMA 950.
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Umm cable TV doesnt lag and its streamed to your TV. Seriously people, you will be happier if you arent so pessimistic.
Cable TV doesn't require input. Of course there is no lag. And even then there is noticeable trails and stutter because of the low framerate, in many cases.
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Trust me, I'd love for this to work: it sounds innovative and enough of a gimmick to lure more gamers to the PC market. Unfortunately, I just don't see that being the case. Quality of service, and ping to the servers are both huge boundaries to overcome. Even a 30ms gap is enough to make the controls feel sluggish and out-of-sync, especially with another 30ms delay on the return signal.
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Eurogamer breaks down the problems (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article?page=1)
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I've been listening to all kinds of debate about this, but basically, regardless of its potential pros and cons I'm not going to believe this technology is real until I can buy it in a store. It certainly sounds viable, but I'm getting a serious whiff of Phantom 2.0 from the pie-in-the-sky future that people are talking about with regards to this.
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The bad thing about this is that it will prevent piracy. Don't get me wrong, this is good for the business. But steam has just figured out that cutting prices increases profit, so you actually get sales every week and low price games. If I go to a shop, I have to pay fucking tons of money to get a new game. With steam having to compete with the free piracy, the only choice they have is to cut prices. Without piracy, the companies have no reason to cut the prices. And then we are back to the stage where indie games are the only thing I really can afford.
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Man I will pay through the nose just so that someone else has to deal with all the shitty drm that's stopping me from playing the games I buy.
Though, knowing australia and it's approach to communications infrastructure, onlive, once someone gets it delivering on it's promises will take at least ten more years to be available here so piracy will still be the easiest option.
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It's not really pessimistic to be sceptical about this, it's just realistic. Honestly, if you know your computer and networking history the underlying concept isn't that terribly mindblowing. It's the idea that they think they can do it with current tech at the level of quality they're pushing that is.
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In order to get a good connection you'd probably have to be within 1,000 miles of the nearest datacenter, and I'm not sure how much capital OnLive can raise to set up enough of those. It'll almost certainly be a luxury available only to urban gamers at least in the beginning of the service.
The United States covers approximately 3.79 million square miles. A circle of radius 1000 miles covers an area of 3.14 million square miles. Keep in mind that over half the land area of the US is very sparsely populated, and the contiguous US covers only 3.1 million square miles.
Assuming this 1000 miles figure is true, then accounting for the vagaries of geography, you'd only need two to cover the continental US and two more for Alaska and Hawaii.
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My friend and I have been discussing this, and we think the biggest obstacle for OnLive will be the ISPs. The vast majority of broadband subscribers are simply not capable of 5 Mbps down that OnLive requires for full quality. True, many ISPs advertise higher speeds, but the realities of networks mean that you will rarely get even 75% of the advertised speed at best, and much less sustained. Also, keep in mind that the most popular broadband technology, cable HSI, depends on all of its subscribers using only a fraction of their bandwidth cap at any given time.
But then again, who knows what the broadband market and tech will look like in a couple of years?
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It is straight out of GDC. They haven't even gone into beta. I'm willing to bet the technology will improve by the time we get our hands on it.
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if it works, great, though i don't see it being to reliable, when it comes to server-side things in mmos, they just don't seem to run smoothly, and considering the entire game would be run server-side, i don't see it being smooth at all.
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I'm sure Gamestop isn't happy about this.
Also, OnLive basically gives game publishers all the control over how you play your games and what you do with them.
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I am actually way more interested in Goo and Steam's DRM solution. I'm too proud of having built my machine to start playing games like this.
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The vast majority of broadband subscribers are simply not capable of 5 Mbps down that OnLive requires for full quality. True, many ISPs advertise higher speeds, but the realities of networks mean that you will rarely get even 75% of the advertised speed at best, and much less sustained.
The announcer basically said that. He claimed that you could get full quality with what the companies sold as 5 MB connections, which according to him is more like 4-4.5
But prices have been dropping. My connection has an actual speed of 10 MB/sec, and we pay $50 a month. It's not that long ago we had to pay almost $40 for 1.5 MB/sec. In two years most not poor people will afford an actual speed of 5 MB with ease.
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Assuming your in the right area, yes. You also have to keep in mind things like Quality of Service levels, Jitter and the like. Most ISPs I've had to deal with are loathe to even admit these settings even exist to most of their customers and are a serious pain in the ass to deal with when that kind of issue arises.
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The vast majority of broadband subscribers are simply not capable of 5 Mbps down that OnLive requires for full quality. True, many ISPs advertise higher speeds, but the realities of networks mean that you will rarely get even 75% of the advertised speed at best, and much less sustained.
The announcer basically said that. He claimed that you could get full quality with what the companies sold as 5 MB connections, which according to him is more like 4-4.5
But prices have been dropping. My connection has an actual speed of 10 MB/sec, and we pay $50 a month. It's not that long ago we had to pay almost $40 for 1.5 MB/sec. In two years most not poor people will afford an actual speed of 5 MB with ease.
Ok, so bandwidth may not be an issue. I still have lag issues playing low bandwidth online games such as Halo Wars with a friend who lives less than a mile away and is on the same ISP. We both have 8 Mb down and 2 Mb up connections. This is assuming that our service is even up at the time. I'm not sure how enjoyable it'll be to play an FPS on a console up to 1000 miles away on such a connection.
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Ok, the beta testing is go. You can sign up here (http://www.onlive.com/beta_program.html)
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Apparently they got it to work on 2 I-Phones? woah
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I was looking into this last week. Sadly the beta test is USA only. But apparently they are go for winter '09 and havent revised the release date to my knowledge.
Still, super excited about this. This could change the face of gaming to come in a mostly positive way. Some people will bitch about DRM issues and the fact you dont own the games etc. Me personally am 100% for this.
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I can't believe they're still trying to progress with this.
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It is because they are people of science.
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Anyone who has used anything like RDP or VNC into a machine that is just across the room from you will know that this is a bullshit idea. If desktop screens lag noticeably over a LAN then you're not gonna be able to play games over any kind of internet connection.
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As an aside, I am really fucking sick of people trying to put everything into the cloud. It is good for some things, not all.
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Objection! (http://kotaku.com/5194510/onlive-founder-defends-game-changing-service-it-will-work)
o/
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As if the creator of the service is going to say anything different.
Look, if it works then that's great. It'll be one more way for people to be able to game. I just have grave doubts about something that relies upon such an unreliable medium as home internet connections.
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Also, something I think Tommy said a while ago about motion-based controllers also applies here. I see the majority of consumers as people who expect things to work well all the time. If people start experiencing lag or being unable to play games when their internet is out/playing up then they're not going to bother with it and the platform will die.
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If it's going to work, South Korea will be a good test bed, since they have the infrastructure that might be able to support it.
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The lag is the least of the problems with this idea, and the lag is a pretty big problem.
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Well really I imagine input lag to be the biggest prob and that one being largely a nuisance. Id suffer some input lag for this to work.
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Why? I mean, why would you suffer anything at all for this to work? Is it so important? Where's the imperative?
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Being broke.
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o i c
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I'm trying to get my head around how expensive this'll be for the consumer. I can't see how it could possibly cost less than a home PC, really.
All that seems to be happening is that 'your' computer is being shifted a sizeable distance away from you. The same technology is going to be needed to play the games, and then on top of that you need a fast and reliable internet connection.
And then there are the people who will have to be employed around the clock to maintain the computers which actually run the games. And these can't be simple PCs - they're going to need to be capable of streaming games to hundreds of people simultaneously so they're bound to crash frequently and they'll need to be specially designed and constructed for their unique function, meaning they'll be expensive and hard to maintain/repair.
And they will still need to be updated as frequently as a home PC - except they'll need to be updated more frequently than the average PC user does - they'll need to keep up with the demands of hardcore gamers who won't settle for anything less than the very best and more importantly are probably going to be the bulk of people paying for the service. I find it hard to believe the average consumer is going to find a monthly fee just to play any games at all a desirable option.
So, yeah, I don't see how this could be a 'cheap' alternative. It seems like a pretty darned expensive route to take, really.
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Not to mention the licensing that wil be required to allow the games on the service in the first place.
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Well simply put, it will be run on supercomputers with unique infrastructure designed to handle emulation of many many PC games at once. The only playerside requirement is a PC capable of decoding the encoded video on the fly and highspeed network connection.
The service itself is run by some pretty smart guys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive#Executive_team). And they know people wont pay more than $40/mo for something like this. It will probably be in the $30 range I would imagine.
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If anyone can do anything like this, it's that group of people. Especially the guy that figured out QuickTime and WebTV, since that's technology that's fairly similar to this.
I don't know what all the hating is about. If they can pull something like this off, that's great for the gamers.
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I can't see it affecting my game playing/buying/owning habits
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Here is a thoroughly unsurprising writeup at Ars: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/01/onlive-demoed-lag-graphics-are-a-problem.ars (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/01/onlive-demoed-lag-graphics-are-a-problem.ars)
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I can't see it affecting my game playing/buying/owning habits
Same here. I can upgrade my own computer, and as it currently stands I don't actually need to spend money all that often just to enjoy PC gaming. If you absolutely MUST play something like Crysis when it first hits at high quality, yes, you will be spending an absolute shit ton of money. But that's late '90s 3dfx thinking, when it comes right down to it. Games like Crysis are a dying breed-- the GPU tech demo masquerading as the new standard has given way to the multi-platform release that caters to the lowest common hardware denominator. In my experience, people use that thing as a benchmarking tool in between rounds of TF2 and Modern Warfare 2. If you are willing to stay a half-step behind the latest console generation at launch day and avoid "enthusiast only" GPUs, the price of pc gaming lowers considerably. You may still spend more than with a console, but that's actually not such a bad trade when you consider just how much more flexible a PC is in general. And if such a service costs $30 a month or so, well, that's a problem for me, since I typically go two or three years between PC upgrades, and I usually spend less than $200 on the retrofit. This really hits me as something that's only of use to the highly casual PC user, the sort of person who owns a couple of consoles and has a laptop as opposed to a desktop. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and I bet it's actually a pretty damn big market-- but it's still not one that I personally fit into.
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Alright, I'm necroing this thread because I actually managed to get into the year beta and I thought I'd post my initial thoughts. Haven't messed around with it all that much just yet, but I will continue checking things out over the week.
So far the service actually works much better than I expected. command input lag is quite noticeable, and in a twitchy game I can see it absolutely murdering people, but in the games I've tested it with it works for the most part.
The graphics settings for games are pretty decent, not quite to the levels you could get with your own PC, but quite playable. The color seems just ever so slightly off to me on everything I've played. It feels slightly washed out if that makes any sense. Colors just don't seem as vibrant as they're supposed to be. I'm not sure if that's an actual issue or if I just have a terrible eye for color though.
Pricing is a goddamn crime on the service though. As we all know you have to subscribe to Onlive normally. In the beta it's a free year and if you get in you have the option of getting a second year for $4.95/month, not sure what the final sub pricing will be. The games are outrageously priced.
The pricing models I've seen thus far are FreePlay, you can play the game for as long as it's on the service, and then Rental, which is 3 - 5 days. Splinter Cell only has FreePlay and it is the full $60.
FUCK
THAT
SHIT
So yeah, this is only a beta, so there's not a massive number of people fucking with the servers just yet, but it's working out much much better than I had anticipated, but unless the pricing is made more reasonable, it's utter bullshit.
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Pricing is a goddamn crime on the service though. As we all know you have to subscribe to Onlive normally. In the beta it's a free year and if you get in you have the option of getting a second year for $4.95/month, not sure what the final sub pricing will be. The games are outrageously priced.
The pricing models I've seen thus far are FreePlay, you can play the game for as long as it's on the service, and then Rental, which is 3 - 5 days. Splinter Cell only has FreePlay and it the full $60.
FUCK
THAT
SHIT
BUAH HA HA HA HA HA. THAT's what they're trying to charge for this? I don't think they've quite caught on to what was supposed to be the main motivation to going to such a radically different system (IE, lowering costs). Yeah, we'll see if they improve once they're out of beta, but right now OnLive is just a laugh.
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I thought the lower cost is more of a "you don't have to have a super good pc to run games" thing. Like, that you could run it on anything that can play back the video stream for it, which isn't very taxing compared to running the games locally.
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Yeah, it definitely doesn't undermine the whole point. This is more like paying the subscription to Netflix, then paying full price for a full season of a show and being told that the studio can pull it whenever they wish.
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So now Onlive is basically Steam (http://kotaku.com/5655455/onlive-monthly-subscription-fees-are-dead)