News OnLive will work, says founder

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/04/02/onlive-will-work-says-founder/1

He's biased, obviously, but the founder of OnLive is steadfast in his belief and assures cynics that OnLine will work.

 

It might very well work, but it's going to need ideal conditions to do so, and my internet connection, even at 24mb/s is not going to be able to support what they are promising.

 

I think it was mentioned somewhere that for SD resolution a 1.5mbps connection was required, and for HD resolutions, a 5mmbps connection was required!

I think the system will work just fine at the start, the problem I see is them sustaining the performance after 6 months when more and more people sign up. If the system fails or 'lags' at the early stage at all that could be the breaking for them.

I love the principle of the system though, rest in peace £450 8800GTX card, hopefully I won't need to buy another like you again for high spec PC gaming (Well, once its rolled out in the UK)

 

I think an important factor that OnLive must mention when they say "it works, we've used it fine" is what country this was in and what time of day.

In the UK especially, our upload rates are - and always have been - completely crippled. I'd like to see/hear someone test this service in a busy town, at peak time, 3 miles from the nearest exchange, on a BT line broadband package (BT themselves or wholesale) and then see what the latency is like.

Last time I checked my broadband speed, it came out as 7Mbit download, but ~570Kbps upload... and I live about 1 mile from the exchange...

 

Like everything else: "seeing is believing", in this case Playing it is believing it will work...

 

OnLive will work if ISPs ditch fair usage policy.

otherwise it will work for first few month, and then won't work during peak hours

 

The fact that big publishers are behind it surely isn't the dealbreaker that they claim? For the publishers, they have nothing to lose by providing their support and products. If it doesn't pay off or work as intended, they will continue to distribute their games as they always have. If it does, they get a new and potentially lucrative business model for games distribution.

To be honest, the issues raised by the Eurogamer article are valid. To be honest, I can't help but feel skeptical...not only because I spent just over a grand on a new PC 5 months ago, but because it does seem to good to be true. There are too many things that have to be correct for this to fully work- latency issues being the foremost...

But as the Eurogamer article does conclude, I hope I am proved wrong. Only mass real world tests will see...

 

Upload speed shouldn't matter (much) since your only sending the same data you would need in any online game.

 

At least they finally clariffied the lag: 35-40 Ms between user input and screen update. For a strategy, RPG or even RTS, I can't see this being a problem, but twitch gaming genres (FPS, Racers, Platformers etc.) are going to be awful to play. You run to a ledge and press jump, and your charachter hapilly flies off the edge, and then proceeds to attempt to jump half a second later. It's a massive delay in real terms.

 

Crisys on eee pc? NO WAY! ;-)

 

Well, of course the publishers are going to be supportive of this. After all, they would love nothing more than for you to keep paying for their games rather than buying a copy and being able to play it for as long as you want.

 

OnLive is going to revolutionize Gaming. Watch their hour long video from GDC, it answers most of the questions that are posed. Most people dont understand what OnLive is doing.

 

I think they(OnLive) don't understand that they doing either =)

 

The biggest hurdle that they'll have to overcome is hardware support on their side of things. They can't magically run any game at a given resolution with any less hardware than anybody else can, so assuming they're using the same games we buy off the shelves, they'll need the equivalent of one fully-fledged PC per subscriber. I just don't see how they'll manage to keep up with that once they get any real kind of subscription base.

 

No, they won't. They need one PC per concurrent player. I game for about 2 hours a week, so they only need a PC for me 1.2% of the time. For the other 98.8% of the time, the PC can be assigned to other subscribers. Say a decent gaming PC costs £500, they could charge me £1 per month and have their money back in under half a year. Obviously they have to pay for bandwidth, maintenance, a building etc. but the whole point is that you spread the cost across many subscribers.

 

they say : data centre no further than 1,000 miles . Yeah right 1000 miles is around 5ms of lag in one(!) direction @ a speed of light (!) in a perfect situation with no network-hardware lags , and thous are far from zero too. Only a signal lag would be up to 10ms + network hardware lag + internet lag + video encoding lag + video decoding lag + rendering takes time too , so OnLive would be more like OnLAG LOL

 

Even twitch gamers anticipate lag, I find that it takes a little while to fine tune and sync your actions (so to speak) with a servers lag. But when you do...... it's KILLING SPREE!! HOLY ****!!

 

Even if this does work as advertised can you think of the cost of hardware/power!

They recon they can get 10 players per server. Steam have 1.7million concurrent players online at peak. so if onlive get that many players thats means 170,000 high end servers minimum!

 

Actually, you're sending much less than you would need for most normal online games - all you are sending is input data from your control devices, which will be trivial (on the order of a few tens of kb/s at the most) - think about it, even if it sampled control inputs 50 times a second and sent 1kb (far more than is really likely to be needed) for every sample, that's only 50 kb/s.

 

er...40ms is less than a 20th of a second, not half a second mate! 40ms will be fine. I just find it hard to believe that 40ms will be achievable with anything less than perfect network conditions (i.e. whenever it is running "in the wild" rather than on a LAN in their labs).