i want 1920x1200 resolution and i also want 16xCSQAA in every game if i have to pay for the broadbands, don't think this will take off until 50Mbps broadbands are common and cheap. speaking of input lag, it's unbearable. eg, i find it annoying that in Sins, even when connected to the LAN server via 100Mbps RJ45, still get a small lag when clicking to build stuff. so it's almost impossible to eliminate input lag in this cloud-computing idea. great news for netbook users and console players. but useless for us PC gamers, those who enjoy graphics, AA and micro-shuttering as much as gameplay. also, what about server load? wouldn't 6pm to 9pm be fully loaded? wouldn't that introduce low frame rates?
Pretty much the same view for me, i'm holding back judgement until i can actually see it working... but i just can't see how they're going to get around the internet lag no matter how good the software is :/ Bandwidth-wise it makes me think of the differences between VNC / citrix and remote desktop / remote X-server connections: the former essentially sends raw compressed screen data over the network and is quite BW intensive, while the latter ones are more 'rendering on the remote system' way of doing things. I may be proved wrong, but it still seems a bit too good to be true IMHO, one of those 'good idea but not really workable in real life' kind of things
I guess that this is a new technology and should be seen as that, not merely an extension of already available stuff. If they've been working on it for 7 years and claim that it introduces only 1ms of extra latency, let's hold them to it. But hold off from the snap judgements!
huh I wonder what the delay would be between saying pressing a button and then the action happening, I mean it has to be encoded and streamed right? or is it sorta doing something to FRAPS when you record videos, either way this sound potentially promising but at the same time a killer for the rest of the market.
Being cynical, you have to ask why a similar service is not available or being trailed in Japan. They have had affordable & ultra-fast 100mb connections for a few years, love games and are a wealthy nation. A far better testing environment than the US and its largely stone-age internet speeds, yes Atlantic brothers, the UK also knows your pain.
Latency is the make or break issue on this thing, especially considering twitch shooters like Crysis or FEAR. On my cable modem, to the ISP's network it's a minium 10-20ms. Going outside their network, is around 30ms at the best case. So assuming best case of 30ms latency times for the network connection, and even ignoring any processing times, display times, etc, 30ms latency is roughly what you see at around a 30fps framerate. So bestcase, under ideal (and likely unrealistic) circumstances, you get the responsiveness of a game running at 30fps. Which isn't that bad, and is certainly palatable for many people. But if you slip up to 40ms, that gives you the response time of 25fps which starts to dip into dangerous territory. At 50ms, you have the equivalent of 20fps which falls into the range of noticable and often unplayable, especially for a more twitchy game. If the game was designed for this, you could add in client side prediction (like online games do), to make the game appear more responsive, but that defeats the whole purpose as it's all about everything on the server and no game code on the client. In some ways, the infamous Phantom was a more likely proposition then this service. That being said, the proof is in the pudding and so we have to wait and see.
if you guys in US want to try this out, there's a beta signup http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/5432/1/
I couldn't be more sceptical about anything else but I'd love to be proven wrong. [Same as most people here I guess]
This has been playing on my mind all day, so I went and got a bit geeky: I figured they'll have good servers, with all the money they've put in and the support from major software companies. If I ping google.co.uk I get a response time of about 35ms, so that seemed like a good starting point. I do doubt their codec can really do it in 1ms, so for the purpose of my experiment I've assumed 5ms to encode on their almighty cloud of servers, and 20ms to decode locally. This means a total round trip latency of 60ms. BEHOLD: OnLive v0.00001 alpha! This is a little script I whipped up to demonstrate what key board latency feels like, you can choose the latency at the top (default 60ms) and move the black square with the arrow keys. I find 60ms is just on the limit of ok, anything above would be unplayable. But of course if their codec really is as good as they say then we could see 40ms (maybe 30ms with amazing servers) which would be fine. Latency and frame rates are two entirely different things, if the video was streamed at 60fps on a horrible connection (200ms) the video would still display at 60fps, just each frame will appear 200ms after it was sent.
Shuriken that is an excellent demonstration, now we just need to wait until people start reporting back what video and sound quality is like and some accurate figures on how much bandwidth it rapes at 720p.
Cheers although sometimes I do worry I don't use my time wisely I think it will do a lot better in the US as our connections are all so limited, streaming that much data would cause the old "fair use policy" to be called in to play a lot If the video from GDC was as real as they claim (streaming live over a broadband connection from a server 50 miles away) then I think it will be amazing.
Thanks, although I couldn't live with 100ms, it feels really laggy to me (and I'm not any kind of hardcore gamer) feels too much like its moving on key-up instead of key-down
I want nothing to do with this! To much to talk about but in no way will I support this. Doomed to fail I believe.
I signed up for the beta. If I get in, I'll let you know how it goes. +1 to the awesome psy track that plays on the homepage.
jeez... I could just see lag on this thing being an absolute killer. I'm not talking about any sort of lag on the server side, as that can be taken care of with more hardware. The lag through the "cloud" though could be pretty horrible. You might get some great periods where lag is 20-30ms, but what about when the action heats up and all of the sudden your ping times hit 100ms+? At that point its like playing through molasses. I'm not a fan of this idea simply because it takes all control away from the consumer. We don't need another method of content control, especially one as serious as this.
I'm tempted to apply for the web developer job they've got going, it'd be quite a move from England's westcountry to California, but I'm getting more and more sick of this country by the day anyway...
Bouncing about the internet today, overall concensus is starting to show that this may be some sort of viral ad / vapour-ware thing similar to the phantom console... I'm starting to believe them to be honest
