The cloud... lol as someone who works in IT I laugh at ANYONE who thinks "the cloud" is a good idea.
Cloud computing is OK at best for small businesses that don't have the money or knowledge for a professional IT staff and servers/storage needs, sure. They are also small enough to hopefully go unnoticed by hackers and unimportant enough to where their downtime doesn't have any real effect on anything but their own small little worlds.
But serious business will always be locally managed, local hardware.
Just like serious gaming will always be done on serious, gamer-owned hardware.
OnLive definitely makes some tradeoffs. The image is actually 480i widescreen. This is basically the reason they can get away with what they do. The images lose fidelity over their local installed cousins, but the games are completely playable. The only time I noticed any over significant frame loss was while Playing Pure. Incidentally, the quality of that youtube video is about the same as the image quality on OnLive.
I can't help but think that streaming would work beautifully with retro games. Doom, Quake, Warcraft 2, just about any SNES or Sega Genesis game, all ran at 320X240 or lower resolution. With a broadband connection, streaming those games would be nothing. You could probably even go as high as 800X600 and stream Quake 3 real-time. The tech is not as far behind as you think it is.
to be honest, i cant remember the last time i played anything at 480i. i think it was PS2? playing FF7? sure i can see playing FF7 over cloud. but seriously? something around the resolution of a PSP is what you want to pay for?
I dont think i'd enjoy playing 480i @ 12 frames per second enough to want to pay for it on a monthly basis
like i said. the possibility of cloud computing is still on the "proof of concept" phase. not "deployment" phase.
Ok so I've been dying to try this. Just installed it and had a play around on some games...
My connection is 16MB with O2 Broadband. They don't distribute my package anymore since ISPs in the UK thought it would be a great idea to standardise monthly caps and offer unlimited at a high price. Lucky for me that I dont pay much and am truley Unlimited then!
So I believe my connection meets the minimum spec. I can pretty much stream 1080p/720p vids on youtube and other HD sites which are worth a damn.
Playing On Live, the first thing I noticed was the massive drop in visual quality and the occasional streaming artifacts. I tested this by playing Warhammer40k Space Marine, which I have for PC. I thought, ok this was acceptable. However once the action actually started and I move my camera around vigorously, On Live shows its weakness.
Given that games by nature involve a lot of sh1t going on, on your screen this does not bode well. For brief periods it certainly didn't feel like 720p streaming. I've watched live streams of 720p. This was just 720p but at a low bitrate.
TLDR, Unless On Live moves to 1080p with a high enough bit rate...I won't be a paying customer. You just lose so much visual fidelity it seems worthless to spend money on it.
As it stands, its a brilliant medium to demo games on and watch friends play. But thats where it stops.
Also the limitations of online gameplay are an issue they need to address. Playing on a subset of servers isn't ideal. I want to play with the community at large, not a subset of 'On Live' gamers.
Currently waiting for the MMO industry to put out something good.
Right now, ISPs are based on a business model of, lots of people can have a fast connection if they don't use it very much. To make up some numbers, maybe an ISP with 1 Gbps of bandwidth to the Internet proper can have 5000 customers and promise them all 10 Mbps of bandwidth each. It works if nearly all of their connections are nearly idle (e.g., web browsing or online gaming, let alone actually idle) most of the time. But it would completely fall apart if they all tried to use all of that bandwidth at once, which is what OnLive would push them toward.
Do you see ISPs moving away from that model? I don't unless they're forced to by consumer demand. And you'd better believe that if the ISP has to have 10 Gbps of bandwidth to the Internet proper rather than 1 Gbps for the same 5000 customers at the same nominal 10 Mbps each, then prices are going way, way up.
i know:) i used to work at an ISP:) back in the day when T1 is still considered a big pipe and internet backbone's were only built on OC48's and OC192's:D the point was that until fiber crosses that last mile, bandwidth is still limited by copper and cloud gaming wouldn't be desirable. from an engineering point of view. copper can only carry about a T3 bandwidth(about 45mbps full duplex) over the "last mile" which means it'd perform about as well as video over USB:D CAN it work? sure. with compression and low resolution. but do you actually WANT to play on something like that? not really....
who knows. maybe for these kids who grew up with a PSP in their mouth low res gaming can work... but seriously, paying for something like that?:D not out of my pocket:D
When spectating others...I'd actually say it maintains a respectable level of visual quality. But for some reason when I'm playing I can visually see the quality drop.
Oh well, I'm going to Eurogamer on Friday. Hopefully I can talk with some people there about it. . I hope what that guy on the first page said is true about the quality improving after thursday...
Currently waiting for the MMO industry to put out something good.
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Bren
hehehe he's the kind of "dying breed" that helped build the cloud environment:D it's funny that people keep spitting out catch phrases like "cloud computing" and have absolutly no idea how the technology works and the problems clouds have:D you might want to take a few years and learn about computers and how it works before TRYING to insult someone who actually knows how the technology works:D
I have a BS(4 year degree) in Information Technology... How's your education? I know full well how Cloud Computing works. Do you?
Bren
So do I...and I've worked in the software industry for 27 years.
Now, OnLive will deliver a better experience than having a game not playable at all for people with ancient computers like the original poster. But look who that means their customers are: people who can't pay for computer stuff. Almost axiomatically, OnLive's customer base is restricted to people who can't afford a computer with modern integrated graphics, or an older gaming system that is at least competitive with modern integrated graphics. Think there's a lot of money to be made off of such people? I don't.
Economics of scale.
Poor people have less money as individuals, but there are more of them. They can't afford to shell out for a shiney new console or mid range computer, but they CAN shell out seven bucks every couple of weeks to play a few games now and then. The movie rental business remains around primarily due to this fact. That's why at some places you can rent movies for $1 for a whole week. Netflix give you unlimited streaming movies and mail rentals for $8 a month. These people can't afford to buy a new movie for between $10 and $25, but they're more than willing to spend that same amount of money on a grocery bag full of movies to watch all week. The same thing applies here.
The "you plebs are too poor to be here" bullshit is just elitish posturing.
I'm not saying everyone needs a $2000 gaming system. Or even a $1000 gaming system. Or even a five year old computer that was a $1000 gaming system when new.
I said integrated graphics. No discrete video card. The low end. The cheapest type of graphics that you can get apart from "doesn't turn on". Integrated graphics that you can get in something like this:
That's $500. And if you were to buy it and stick it on a shelf for five years and not use it until five years from now, then even at the end of five years, your then five-year-old $500-when-new laptop would still get you a better gaming experience running games locally than using OnLive on it will be able to offer five years from today. OnLive wouldn't even be kind of competitive with it, except in a relative handful of games that don't allow you to turn settings down far enough to run on not that great of systems.
Sure, OnLive makes sense for you today. But someday, you're going to replace that old computer. You'll have to, as if nothing else, it will die outright. And if you buy a sensible replacement for it, even on a tight budget, then OnLive won't make a bit of sense on your new computer. In fact, it won't make a bit of sense for you ever again for the entire rest of your life after that purchase.
And that's as compared to the integrated graphics that you can get today. AMD will launch better integrated graphics next year. And then better yet the year after that. And you can see where this is going. Maybe someday Intel will even launch integrated graphics that actually work right. Intel promises that Ivy Bridge will do that. Of course, they promised the same about Sandy Bridge, and Clarkdale, and...
In the year 2020, how many people will have a working computer, with a performance level low enough that it wouldn't be able to keep up with today's integrated graphics, but that they want to play games on anyway? Not 2020's best integrated graphics. Today's. That will be OnLive's target market. Do you really think there's a lot of money to be made off of that? Really?
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Bren
Bren,
That's not accurate at all. As someone that is in charge of Network Operations for an SaaS vendor, I can tell you that dedicated hardware is not going away any time soon. Cloud is one of the big marketing buzzwords among technology vendors right now, but 70 percent of what they are selling is pure hype.
Don't get me wrong, Cloud is a great solution for applications with certain types of issues....namely Apps that get alot of spike traffic....because of Clouds rapid scalability (it's main benefit) it's great for those sort of apps and it means they run much more economicaly. However for anything that is particularly performance sensitive, Cloud is a flat out loser to good old fashioned iron....even more so when you start to look at purpose built hardware, like some of the stuff coming out of SUN/Oracle these days. That's just the way it is....the layers of indirection involved with Cloud simply eat up cycles and time compared to something that sits inside a single box.....even worse if you are passing it over a geographic distance and multiples hops....as latency issues start to creep in.
Players like Microsoft want to push Cloud not so much for technical reasons but for financial ones. They want to be "service providers" so that they can charge you a continual fee in order to use your software/applications rather then sell you something once and have you determine when it's worthwhile to invest in upgrading your applications.
There are certainly cases where the SaaS makes sense and where Cloud based technology makes sense as well but it's not for everything.
In terms of single player games......I definately wouldn't want to dependant on an outside service provider, an internet connection .....and the quality of that connction for the games that I actually like.... that's a bad deal for the gamer. Although it may be usefull if you like to TRY alot of different games (and the Demo's are not available/sufficient)....for the ones you actualy like and intend to play of a regular basis...there is no substitute for having the disks.
I find it ironic that with every new day there will be more and more applications moved to streaming, be it movies with Netflix and Hulu and soon Microsoft Office will be online. Now gaming is getting in on this even more now.
But, we now have to deal with cable and dsl companies capping our internet usage. I call shananigans.
Now, OnLive will deliver a better experience than having a game not playable at all for people with ancient computers like the original poster. But look who that means their customers are: people who can't pay for computer stuff. Almost axiomatically, OnLive's customer base is restricted to people who can't afford a computer with modern integrated graphics, or an older gaming system that is at least competitive with modern integrated graphics. Think there's a lot of money to be made off of such people? I don't.
Economics of scale.
Poor people have less money as individuals, but there are more of them. They can't afford to shell out for a shiney new console or mid range computer, but they CAN shell out seven bucks every couple of weeks to play a few games now and then. The movie rental business remains around primarily due to this fact. That's why at some places you can rent movies for $1 for a whole week. Netflix give you unlimited streaming movies and mail rentals for $8 a month. These people can't afford to buy a new movie for between $10 and $25, but they're more than willing to spend that same amount of money on a grocery bag full of movies to watch all week. The same thing applies here.
The "you plebs are too poor to be here" bullshit is just elitish posturing.
I'm not saying everyone needs a $2000 gaming system. Or even a $1000 gaming system. Or even a five year old computer that was a $1000 gaming system when new.
I said integrated graphics. No discrete video card. The low end. The cheapest type of graphics that you can get apart from "doesn't turn on". Integrated graphics that you can get in something like this:
That's $500. And if you were to buy it and stick it on a shelf for five years and not use it until five years from now, then even at the end of five years, your then five-year-old $500-when-new laptop would still get you a better gaming experience running games locally than using OnLive on it will be able to offer five years from today. OnLive wouldn't even be kind of competitive with it, except in a relative handful of games that don't allow you to turn settings down far enough to run on not that great of systems.
Sure, OnLive makes sense for you today. But someday, you're going to replace that old computer. You'll have to, as if nothing else, it will die outright. And if you buy a sensible replacement for it, even on a tight budget, then OnLive won't make a bit of sense on your new computer. In fact, it won't make a bit of sense for you ever again for the entire rest of your life after that purchase.
And that's as compared to the integrated graphics that you can get today. AMD will launch better integrated graphics next year. And then better yet the year after that. And you can see where this is going. Maybe someday Intel will even launch integrated graphics that actually work right. Intel promises that Ivy Bridge will do that. Of course, they promised the same about Sandy Bridge, and Clarkdale, and...
In the year 2020, how many people will have a working computer, with a performance level low enough that it wouldn't be able to keep up with today's integrated graphics, but that they want to play games on anyway? Not 2020's best integrated graphics. Today's. That will be OnLive's target market. Do you really think there's a lot of money to be made off of that? Really?
Dude, you are a dying breed. All media is moving to a cloud environment... gaming included. On-live is pioneering the future whether you personally like it or not. Look at the facts. Everything is moving toward cloud computing. Windows 8 and the next generation of the Mac OS will have cloud computing intergrated into the OS itself. Google and Rim are working toward the same goal with their OS's. Right now we are seeing a revolution in how we as consumers will consume our media. Pretty soon everything will be cloud based and very little will be stored locally. This is the trend the industry is taking. On-live just got the idea before a lot of others caught on. If you think otherwise the very near future is going to run you over like a frieght train.
Bren
Bren,
That's not accurate at all. As someone that is in charge of Network Operations for an SaaS vendor, I can tell you that dedicated hardware is not going away any time soon. Cloud is one of the big marketing buzzwords among technology vendors right now, but 70 percent of what they are selling is pure hype.
Don't get me wrong, Cloud is a great solution for applications with certain types of issues....namely Apps that get alot of spike traffic....because of Clouds rapid scalability (it's main benefit) it's great for those sort of apps and it means they run much more economicaly. However for anything that is particularly performance sensitive, Cloud is a flat out loser to good old fashioned iron....even more so when you start to look at purpose built hardware, like some of the stuff coming out of SUN/Oracle these days. That's just the way it is....the layers of indirection involved with Cloud simply eat up cycles and time compared to something that sits inside a single box.....even worse if you are passing it over a geographic distance and multiples hops....as latency issues start to creep in.
Players like Microsoft want to push Cloud not so much for technical reasons but for financial ones. They want to be "service providers" so that they can charge you a continual fee in order to use your software/applications rather then sell you something once and have you determine when it's worthwhile to invest in upgrading your applications.
There are certainly cases where the SaaS makes sense and where Cloud based technology makes sense as well but it's not for everything.
In terms of single player games......I definately wouldn't want to dependant on an outside service provider, an internet connection .....and the quality of that connction for the games that I actually like.... that's a bad deal for the gamer. Although it may be usefull if you like to TRY alot of different games (and the Demo's are not available/sufficient)....for the ones you actualy like and intend to play of a regular basis...there is no substitute for having the disks.
When spectating others...I'd actually say it maintains a respectable level of visual quality. But for some reason when I'm playing I can visually see the quality drop.
I don't know how their compression algorithms work, but there's an obvious reason why that could happen. If you're watching someone else's screen, you don't need to see it in real time. If there's a one second delay, it doesn't matter to you. Everything looks just as smooth, but you just see it one second later.
That means that they can do some tricks to improve the compression. One is to compress across time. Two consecutive frames tend to look pretty similar, so if you compress them together, you can do better than if you have to compress each frame separately and send it separately.
Another is to buffer the stream. If they try to send everything a second ahead of time, and then your Internet connection freezes for half a second, it can keep playing video that it already downloaded before the connection hiccup, so it keeps looking smooth. After your connection is working right again, it can go back to downloading as fast as it can, to try to get back to a full second ahead.
Neither of those are possible when you're playing the game. If you render three frames and compress them together across time, then once you get them for someone playing the game, you wouldn't want to display them one at a time. You'd display the most recent, and discard the others. So you can't compress across time at all, and that means that the compression is worse.
Furthermore, you can't buffer the video, either. You need to see what is happening as soon as possible. If there's a one second delay between when things happen in the game world and when they appear on your screen, then that's completely unplayable for most games.
Seriously, a rig that would run Crysis at those settings would cost several thousand dollars. The monitor alone would probably cost as much as my last laptop.
Ummmm.....no.
For $800 I can and recently DID build a system that will crush any game you throw at it.
People claiming that this cloud computing thing is going to change GAMING are delusional. Nvidia and ATI are not going to be closing up shop any time soon. SSD drives are not going to become obsolete just as they are gaining a foothold.
Cloud computing will be handy for movies and music, document sharing, etc. But for PC GAMING, the future still lies in hardware and purchased software.
PC hardware is getting cheaper than ever, and you don't need bleeding edge hardware to max out the newest games.
Now, Onlive is probably a great thing for people with old hardware, or a netbook or something. Hell, if they made a version that would run PC games on Android / iphones, they could rake in the cash.
It IS a good idea, but it will never replace a real gaming rig.
Please. Give us the parts list.
Then again, it wouldn't do any good. You see the highest monitor resolution I was able to find was 1080p. The most expensive monitor on Newegg doesn't even have the resolution that he's banging on about. Of course, I may be reading it wrong and he's talking about THREE monitors at the same time. In which case, my point is still valid since he/she will have sank at least $600 into the display alone.
And I realize that you can make a decent PC for around $500 and a really awesome tower for $800+, but the guy I was responding to wants the bleeding edge and that cost serious bank.
And for the majority of gamers, cloud computing WILL be the future. There will still be some companies, mostly indies, making download only games that you have to install, but the bulk of gaming will be streamed in the future.
Why would I pour money into a huge tower that causes my block to brown out every time I turn it on when I could just pay $7 bucks and play a game from a similar system streamed to my netbook or iPad? The price of game hardware remains roughly the same, but the cost of gaming actually goes down. Cloud computing is just one more milestone on that road.
Did you read anything I posted at all? Really?
I had these monitors before I got my current tower, end of. It's a one off expense that I do not need to pay for again for the forseeable future.
My PC is not 'bleeding edge' - I just chose the right balance of parts to get exactly what I wanted.
You know what.. I just went on to overclockers.co.uk and built a PC, including monitors, and it was under £1500 (after VAT) and would perform better than my current PC does. It had the three monitors, a GTX580. A current gen sandforce 120GB SSD and 2TB HDD, A I5-2500K and 16GB RAM. I didn't even cheap out on the motherboard/case/psu....
Online is WORSE than steam simply because you do NOT have access to the game physically or otherwise. ONLIVE will most likely be good for future console users. However, PC gamers will NEVER allow their ENTIRE game to be on a SERVER with video feed being sent back.
PC users use a PC because they DEMAND control over the software they're using. I can decompile ANY non-heavily encrypted games that I play and mod the crap out of them, or fix bugs that lazy devs never decided to fix (DeadIsland case & point). I can't do that with ONLIVE or consoles.
ONLIVE will NEVER take hold on the PC market, except maybe to help kids with shitty PC's to play games they couldn't normally touch.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity: Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
I love Onlive , my wife and i and both kids play on it , dont have any net problems the ocasional little bit of lag is no big deal , hell it even looked fine on the laptop with wireless net , and its only like a 6meg connection. My kids old pc's love it , and hell even my wife and i do on our basicly top of the line pc's i can play any game on it at full and i wouldnt buy a game i want to mod on it , but having 60+ games instantly for 10$ on anything cant be beat hands down end of story .
It is imo FAR better than Steam , never download a game , instant play , not as many games but meh they are getting new games all the time , ofcourse it will be huge on the pc market , stupid to think it wouldnt , tons of people with below average pc's who cant normaly play these games will eat it up and do , the whole " no controll over the games" doesnt mean shit to people who just want to play , which is most everyone .
Personally I found the service to be okay, I have a beast internet service though. In my case I've seen how it works on this service and my last, there's a huge difference between using it with a standard connection and a more powerful one.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
human cant perceive anything lower then 85 ms so any saying otherwise doesnt know what he is experiencing.
it was tested by scientific way smarter then the average university .if you are at 85 ms dont sweat it you didnt miss anything from 5 ms to 85
80 ms sec is what
.080 s diff.you tell me you can percieve that?mm!i hope i am wrong in my mat conversion! of ms vs s
Okay I'm sorry then I must be superhuman since I can easily perceive the 0.1s input lag on my 47" LCD in non-gaming mode.
0.1s is 100ms.
Anything less than 85ms can't be percieved is what he said.
So you're saying that the 15 ms is what makes the difference between not perceivable and distincively perceivable?
What's being said is this... Since everything above that was said seems pretty inaccurate. Here's the best way to inform you of ms and latency delay and how it works.
1000ms = 1 second of delay. Hence There are 1000miliseconds in 1 second.
so 500ms = .5 (half a second of delay)
5000ms = 5 seconds of delay.
easy ways to test this is in a FPS game, the time when you press your mouse button to fire one shot in reference to the time it takes effect on the screen/audio.
anything closer to 50ms is hardly noticeable but it still is detected because its not instantaneous in online gaming. Anything above that closer to 100ms and higher is defintely noticeable and you just have to compensate for that by firing sooner, etc.
If you play the game in offline mode/singleplayer if it has one, you can see all shots fire as you press the fire button.
You don't start to notice major latency issues until you connection reaches 100ms+ there is when you can start telling something is awry. Below 100ms is idea for FPS games online.
Online is WORSE than steam simply because you do NOT have access to the game physically or otherwise. ONLIVE will most likely be good for future console users. However, PC gamers will NEVER allow their ENTIRE game to be on a SERVER with video feed being sent back.
PC users use a PC because they DEMAND control over the software they're using. I can decompile ANY non-heavily encrypted games that I play and mod the crap out of them, or fix bugs that lazy devs never decided to fix (DeadIsland case & point). I can't do that with ONLIVE or consoles.
ONLIVE will NEVER take hold on the PC market, except maybe to help kids with shitty PC's to play games they couldn't normally touch.
On Live might be the wave of the future to completely annihilate cheating...
Apparently users can't be trusted to play fair in multiplayer environments and honestly this sounds like the best way to combat that.
I would only be for this if theres a way to make sure the latency between your PC and the OnLive servers and then from OnLive to the Multiplayer environment won't be an issue with the latency problem. Otherwise for multiplayer it can be pretty game breaking issue; which is probably the reason why the majority of their games are single player and do not have any competitive multiplayer aspects since there will be noticeable latency problems.
While I am not a subscriber or user of OnLive, I can see how this technology could be huge. As long as you have a very fast internet connection (either a high speed cable or FiOS connection), you don't need to worry so much about upgrading your gaming rig, or purchasing the newest console.
It is a genuine innovation in the gaming market. I think as the average internet connection speed increases and becomes more affordable, services such as OnLive will start gaining more momentum.
Sounds like OnLive is just catering to the lowest common denominator of computer user, and delivering a lowest common denominator experience. Thanks, but I'd prefer to fill my hard drive and get the best bang for my buck running things locally.
And as for PCs not being able to rent games, this is not something that has ever concerned me before and I don't see it starting now. I've never been all that interested in playing games that you can beat over the period of a weekend rental anyways. The ADD console influence has been reducing game longevity for years now, but I still stick to the ones that will give me more of a traditonal 30-40 hours of game time, not 10 or 15 (or even 5) -- unless it's a sweet indie title selling for roughly the price of my morning coffee, on Steam.
It is imo FAR better than Steam , never download a game , instant play
All right, so I'll concede that OnLive will be pretty good for the "play each game for half an hour and quit" crowd, at least if they don't mind having a markedly worse gaming experience for that half hour, in exchange for not having to install the game. I think those people are nuts, but there seem to be a decent number of them.
"On Live might be the wave of the future to completely annihilate cheating..."
And how is OnLive going to fight macros? Any cheating that can be done in online games that couldn't be done with OnLive is merely a result of bad security practices on the game designer's part.
"I think as the average internet connection speed increases and becomes more affordable, services such as OnLive will start gaining more momentum."
To the contrary, it will go in the other direction. The improvements in local rendering will be faster than the improvements in OnLive streaming. All that needs to happen is for people to get graphics at least as good as today's integrated graphics. Five years from now, that will be nearly ubiquitous, and then OnLive's argument will have to be, yes, gameplay is much worse than rendering it locally, but we've found these other advantages.
If someone would have asked me if something like On-Live or any live streaming applications over the Internet was possible as little as 5 years ago I would have sounded a lot like you are now. I would have told them, "Impossible, not for at least another 15-20 years!". A lot has changed and the technology behind these types of services has advanced dramatically in the last 5 years. If these advancements continue at the same rate all of your arguments will be nullified in the very near future.
Bren
"the tech" hasn't cought up as much as you'd think. there is only so much you can do with compression. when you play on the cloud, you are essentially getting a HD stream of the images processed by the cloud. that amount of bandwidth is neither cheap nor avaliable to the consumers yet.
even something as simple as watching a HD movie stream from home still require some kind of buffering.... buffering CAN'T happen when you are talking about gaming... gaming requires instantaneous rendering of images according to YOUR actions on the controls... sure you can "stream" a turn based game like chess or civ5, but you arent going to stream something as complicated as FPS or RTS at any resonable framerate. the "last mile" of internet is still copper. you can only push copper so far just like you can only push compression so far before your "netbook" cant even handle the rendering of images from a compressed source...
will cloud gaming work? eventually. when fiber makes its way to homes. but that "last mile" is way too expensive for any cable/telco to undertake for any large scale deployment. that is an ECONOMIC limitation NOT a technological limitation. eventually, when we all get a gig pipe coming to the house, i'll give this cloud gaming another look, but as far as today? i'll just remind you that even HDMI 1.0 spec calls for 4.9Gbit/S bandwidth...
Well, not too sure where you're streaming your movies from but I've never had buffering issues when I stream and I'm only running 7mbs down. Nextflix, hulu, crunchyroll all at the max settings with never a hiccup and thats with MULTIPLE steams going (2 pc's streaming and two rokus) and no issues here. Frankly I see services like onLive not really as coming soon or barely usuable but already here and only getting better as time goes by.
Its funny how people are so quick to point out how fast hardware tech is improving but for some reason all OTHER tech in the whole freaking world just happens to be stuck in time not improving at all.
Well, not too sure where you're streaming your movies from but I've never had buffering issues when I stream and I'm only running 7mbs down. Nextflix, hulu, crunchyroll all at the max settings with never a hiccup and thats with MULTIPLE steams going (2 pc's streaming and two rokus) and no issues here. Frankly I see services like onLive not really as coming soon or barely usuable but already here and only getting better as time goes by.
Its funny how people are so quick to point out how fast hardware tech is improving but for some reason all OTHER tech in the whole freaking world just happens to be stuck in time not improving at all.
if you are happy with PSP quality/resolutions, more power to you:) i'm spoiled when it comes to my games:) as for the "OTHER tech", I KNOW how much it cost for the deployment of that tech and NO company will be pushing that tech out in large scale ANYTIME soon...
if you enjoy onlive, go for it. it's not a technological decision it's a subjective decision. it's just not something I would choose to recommend to anyone i know:D
Well, not too sure where you're streaming your movies from but I've never had buffering issues when I stream and I'm only running 7mbs down. Nextflix, hulu, crunchyroll all at the max settings with never a hiccup and thats with MULTIPLE steams going (2 pc's streaming and two rokus) and no issues here. Frankly I see services like onLive not really as coming soon or barely usuable but already here and only getting better as time goes by.
Its funny how people are so quick to point out how fast hardware tech is improving but for some reason all OTHER tech in the whole freaking world just happens to be stuck in time not improving at all.
But that's just the point. You can buffer movies, so that if you have a hiccup in your connection, it just plays from the buffer for a bit and you probably never notice. Only a systematically slow connection for an extended period of time can disrupt the movie.
For games, you can't do that. You can't download the state of the game 30 seconds ahead of time because it isn't known what it will be. A slight hiccup in your connection means that gameplay comes to a screeching halt if you're using OnLive.
I'm getting the feeling that the guys happy with OnLive are the same guys who are happy with playing their 720p (if you're lucky) console game on their LCD TV with 40ms input lag because of the TV is not set up for playing games. Guess it's what you're used to.
PC gamer enthusiasts are not happy with compressed video graphics with 50+ ms of input lag. They never will. They demand crystal-sharp 1080p (or higher) image on their 120Hz LED monitor, practically zero input lag and 60+ FPS.
Comments
The cloud... lol as someone who works in IT I laugh at ANYONE who thinks "the cloud" is a good idea.
Cloud computing is OK at best for small businesses that don't have the money or knowledge for a professional IT staff and servers/storage needs, sure. They are also small enough to hopefully go unnoticed by hackers and unimportant enough to where their downtime doesn't have any real effect on anything but their own small little worlds.
But serious business will always be locally managed, local hardware.
Just like serious gaming will always be done on serious, gamer-owned hardware.
to be honest, i cant remember the last time i played anything at 480i. i think it was PS2? playing FF7? sure i can see playing FF7 over cloud. but seriously? something around the resolution of a PSP is what you want to pay for?
I dont think i'd enjoy playing 480i @ 12 frames per second enough to want to pay for it on a monthly basis
like i said. the possibility of cloud computing is still on the "proof of concept" phase. not "deployment" phase.
Ok so I've been dying to try this. Just installed it and had a play around on some games...
My connection is 16MB with O2 Broadband. They don't distribute my package anymore since ISPs in the UK thought it would be a great idea to standardise monthly caps and offer unlimited at a high price. Lucky for me that I dont pay much and am truley Unlimited then!
So I believe my connection meets the minimum spec. I can pretty much stream 1080p/720p vids on youtube and other HD sites which are worth a damn.
Playing On Live, the first thing I noticed was the massive drop in visual quality and the occasional streaming artifacts. I tested this by playing Warhammer40k Space Marine, which I have for PC. I thought, ok this was acceptable. However once the action actually started and I move my camera around vigorously, On Live shows its weakness.
Given that games by nature involve a lot of sh1t going on, on your screen this does not bode well. For brief periods it certainly didn't feel like 720p streaming. I've watched live streams of 720p. This was just 720p but at a low bitrate.
TLDR, Unless On Live moves to 1080p with a high enough bit rate...I won't be a paying customer. You just lose so much visual fidelity it seems worthless to spend money on it.
As it stands, its a brilliant medium to demo games on and watch friends play. But thats where it stops.
Also the limitations of online gameplay are an issue they need to address. Playing on a subset of servers isn't ideal. I want to play with the community at large, not a subset of 'On Live' gamers.
i know:) i used to work at an ISP:) back in the day when T1 is still considered a big pipe and internet backbone's were only built on OC48's and OC192's:D the point was that until fiber crosses that last mile, bandwidth is still limited by copper and cloud gaming wouldn't be desirable. from an engineering point of view. copper can only carry about a T3 bandwidth(about 45mbps full duplex) over the "last mile" which means it'd perform about as well as video over USB:D CAN it work? sure. with compression and low resolution. but do you actually WANT to play on something like that? not really....
who knows. maybe for these kids who grew up with a PSP in their mouth low res gaming can work... but seriously, paying for something like that?:D not out of my pocket:D
One key thing I've noticed.
When spectating others...I'd actually say it maintains a respectable level of visual quality. But for some reason when I'm playing I can visually see the quality drop.
Oh well, I'm going to Eurogamer on Friday. Hopefully I can talk with some people there about it.
. I hope what that guy on the first page said is true about the quality improving after thursday...
So do I...and I've worked in the software industry for 27 years.
cloud = someone else's computer
Any questions?
Bren,
That's not accurate at all. As someone that is in charge of Network Operations for an SaaS vendor, I can tell you that dedicated hardware is not going away any time soon. Cloud is one of the big marketing buzzwords among technology vendors right now, but 70 percent of what they are selling is pure hype.
Don't get me wrong, Cloud is a great solution for applications with certain types of issues....namely Apps that get alot of spike traffic....because of Clouds rapid scalability (it's main benefit) it's great for those sort of apps and it means they run much more economicaly. However for anything that is particularly performance sensitive, Cloud is a flat out loser to good old fashioned iron....even more so when you start to look at purpose built hardware, like some of the stuff coming out of SUN/Oracle these days. That's just the way it is....the layers of indirection involved with Cloud simply eat up cycles and time compared to something that sits inside a single box.....even worse if you are passing it over a geographic distance and multiples hops....as latency issues start to creep in.
Players like Microsoft want to push Cloud not so much for technical reasons but for financial ones. They want to be "service providers" so that they can charge you a continual fee in order to use your software/applications rather then sell you something once and have you determine when it's worthwhile to invest in upgrading your applications.
There are certainly cases where the SaaS makes sense and where Cloud based technology makes sense as well but it's not for everything.
In terms of single player games......I definately wouldn't want to dependant on an outside service provider, an internet connection .....and the quality of that connction for the games that I actually like.... that's a bad deal for the gamer. Although it may be usefull if you like to TRY alot of different games (and the Demo's are not available/sufficient)....for the ones you actualy like and intend to play of a regular basis...there is no substitute for having the disks.
I find it ironic that with every new day there will be more and more applications moved to streaming, be it movies with Netflix and Hulu and soon Microsoft Office will be online. Now gaming is getting in on this even more now.
But, we now have to deal with cable and dsl companies capping our internet usage. I call shananigans.
My personal favorite:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmXJSeMaoTY&feature=related
I don't know how their compression algorithms work, but there's an obvious reason why that could happen. If you're watching someone else's screen, you don't need to see it in real time. If there's a one second delay, it doesn't matter to you. Everything looks just as smooth, but you just see it one second later.
That means that they can do some tricks to improve the compression. One is to compress across time. Two consecutive frames tend to look pretty similar, so if you compress them together, you can do better than if you have to compress each frame separately and send it separately.
Another is to buffer the stream. If they try to send everything a second ahead of time, and then your Internet connection freezes for half a second, it can keep playing video that it already downloaded before the connection hiccup, so it keeps looking smooth. After your connection is working right again, it can go back to downloading as fast as it can, to try to get back to a full second ahead.
Neither of those are possible when you're playing the game. If you render three frames and compress them together across time, then once you get them for someone playing the game, you wouldn't want to display them one at a time. You'd display the most recent, and discard the others. So you can't compress across time at all, and that means that the compression is worse.
Furthermore, you can't buffer the video, either. You need to see what is happening as soon as possible. If there's a one second delay between when things happen in the game world and when they appear on your screen, then that's completely unplayable for most games.
Did you read anything I posted at all? Really?
I had these monitors before I got my current tower, end of. It's a one off expense that I do not need to pay for again for the forseeable future.
My PC is not 'bleeding edge' - I just chose the right balance of parts to get exactly what I wanted.
You know what.. I just went on to overclockers.co.uk and built a PC, including monitors, and it was under £1500 (after VAT) and would perform better than my current PC does. It had the three monitors, a GTX580. A current gen sandforce 120GB SSD and 2TB HDD, A I5-2500K and 16GB RAM. I didn't even cheap out on the motherboard/case/psu....
Online is WORSE than steam simply because you do NOT have access to the game physically or otherwise. ONLIVE will most likely be good for future console users. However, PC gamers will NEVER allow their ENTIRE game to be on a SERVER with video feed being sent back.
PC users use a PC because they DEMAND control over the software they're using. I can decompile ANY non-heavily encrypted games that I play and mod the crap out of them, or fix bugs that lazy devs never decided to fix (DeadIsland case & point). I can't do that with ONLIVE or consoles.
ONLIVE will NEVER take hold on the PC market, except maybe to help kids with shitty PC's to play games they couldn't normally touch.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
I love Onlive , my wife and i and both kids play on it , dont have any net problems the ocasional little bit of lag is no big deal , hell it even looked fine on the laptop with wireless net , and its only like a 6meg connection. My kids old pc's love it , and hell even my wife and i do on our basicly top of the line pc's i can play any game on it at full and i wouldnt buy a game i want to mod on it , but having 60+ games instantly for 10$ on anything cant be beat hands down end of story .
It is imo FAR better than Steam , never download a game , instant play , not as many games but meh they are getting new games all the time , ofcourse it will be huge on the pc market , stupid to think it wouldnt , tons of people with below average pc's who cant normaly play these games will eat it up and do , the whole " no controll over the games" doesnt mean shit to people who just want to play , which is most everyone .
Personally I found the service to be okay, I have a beast internet service though. In my case I've seen how it works on this service and my last, there's a huge difference between using it with a standard connection and a more powerful one.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
What's being said is this... Since everything above that was said seems pretty inaccurate. Here's the best way to inform you of ms and latency delay and how it works.
1000ms = 1 second of delay. Hence There are 1000miliseconds in 1 second.
so 500ms = .5 (half a second of delay)
5000ms = 5 seconds of delay.
easy ways to test this is in a FPS game, the time when you press your mouse button to fire one shot in reference to the time it takes effect on the screen/audio.
anything closer to 50ms is hardly noticeable but it still is detected because its not instantaneous in online gaming. Anything above that closer to 100ms and higher is defintely noticeable and you just have to compensate for that by firing sooner, etc.
If you play the game in offline mode/singleplayer if it has one, you can see all shots fire as you press the fire button.
You don't start to notice major latency issues until you connection reaches 100ms+ there is when you can start telling something is awry. Below 100ms is idea for FPS games online.
There are 1000ms in 1s, not 100
On Live might be the wave of the future to completely annihilate cheating...
Apparently users can't be trusted to play fair in multiplayer environments and honestly this sounds like the best way to combat that.
I would only be for this if theres a way to make sure the latency between your PC and the OnLive servers and then from OnLive to the Multiplayer environment won't be an issue with the latency problem. Otherwise for multiplayer it can be pretty game breaking issue; which is probably the reason why the majority of their games are single player and do not have any competitive multiplayer aspects since there will be noticeable latency problems.
Unless you live within about 100 miles of one of their servers or pay $100 a month for your internet...Onlive is simply terrible.
While I am not a subscriber or user of OnLive, I can see how this technology could be huge. As long as you have a very fast internet connection (either a high speed cable or FiOS connection), you don't need to worry so much about upgrading your gaming rig, or purchasing the newest console.
It is a genuine innovation in the gaming market. I think as the average internet connection speed increases and becomes more affordable, services such as OnLive will start gaining more momentum.
Sounds like OnLive is just catering to the lowest common denominator of computer user, and delivering a lowest common denominator experience. Thanks, but I'd prefer to fill my hard drive and get the best bang for my buck running things locally.
And as for PCs not being able to rent games, this is not something that has ever concerned me before and I don't see it starting now. I've never been all that interested in playing games that you can beat over the period of a weekend rental anyways. The ADD console influence has been reducing game longevity for years now, but I still stick to the ones that will give me more of a traditonal 30-40 hours of game time, not 10 or 15 (or even 5) -- unless it's a sweet indie title selling for roughly the price of my morning coffee, on Steam.
All right, so I'll concede that OnLive will be pretty good for the "play each game for half an hour and quit" crowd, at least if they don't mind having a markedly worse gaming experience for that half hour, in exchange for not having to install the game. I think those people are nuts, but there seem to be a decent number of them.
"On Live might be the wave of the future to completely annihilate cheating..."
And how is OnLive going to fight macros? Any cheating that can be done in online games that couldn't be done with OnLive is merely a result of bad security practices on the game designer's part.
"I think as the average internet connection speed increases and becomes more affordable, services such as OnLive will start gaining more momentum."
To the contrary, it will go in the other direction. The improvements in local rendering will be faster than the improvements in OnLive streaming. All that needs to happen is for people to get graphics at least as good as today's integrated graphics. Five years from now, that will be nearly ubiquitous, and then OnLive's argument will have to be, yes, gameplay is much worse than rendering it locally, but we've found these other advantages.
Well, not too sure where you're streaming your movies from but I've never had buffering issues when I stream and I'm only running 7mbs down. Nextflix, hulu, crunchyroll all at the max settings with never a hiccup and thats with MULTIPLE steams going (2 pc's streaming and two rokus) and no issues here. Frankly I see services like onLive not really as coming soon or barely usuable but already here and only getting better as time goes by.
Its funny how people are so quick to point out how fast hardware tech is improving but for some reason all OTHER tech in the whole freaking world just happens to be stuck in time not improving at all.
if you are happy with PSP quality/resolutions, more power to you:) i'm spoiled when it comes to my games:) as for the "OTHER tech", I KNOW how much it cost for the deployment of that tech and NO company will be pushing that tech out in large scale ANYTIME soon...
if you enjoy onlive, go for it. it's not a technological decision it's a subjective decision. it's just not something I would choose to recommend to anyone i know:D
But that's just the point. You can buffer movies, so that if you have a hiccup in your connection, it just plays from the buffer for a bit and you probably never notice. Only a systematically slow connection for an extended period of time can disrupt the movie.
For games, you can't do that. You can't download the state of the game 30 seconds ahead of time because it isn't known what it will be. A slight hiccup in your connection means that gameplay comes to a screeching halt if you're using OnLive.
I'm getting the feeling that the guys happy with OnLive are the same guys who are happy with playing their 720p (if you're lucky) console game on their LCD TV with 40ms input lag because of the TV is not set up for playing games. Guess it's what you're used to.
PC gamer enthusiasts are not happy with compressed video graphics with 50+ ms of input lag. They never will. They demand crystal-sharp 1080p (or higher) image on their 120Hz LED monitor, practically zero input lag and 60+ FPS.
Good luck doing that with a service like OnLive.