Be Excellent To Each Other

I know. Further into the review there are some times with downscaling. I reckon that little doodad is about twice as fast as my 2.5Ghz quad core machine here; to put it another way, they make the Macbook Air a viable H264 encoding platform. Very impressive.

We're talking about different things now..

This been posted?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article

That's the third posting of it, yes, Lave

BBC article where Perlman answers the critics.



I've only quoted some bits, click through for the rest.

It makes it sound like there might be a custom chip installed in the client PC/Mac to make the service work -- maybe a USB fob or something? It does the decoding and costs "less than $20" apparently.

That's a good way for them to raise day-one revenue, as long as they can still sell the service.

Beeb are going with the "onlive to kill consoles" story again

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8556874.stm



June for the US no dates for Europe or anywhere else

Given it's impossible to play your (locally stored and generated) copy of Bad Company 2 due to lack of server capacity, imagine how great it'll be if the single player version is denied to you too because of no servers! Or indeed, if your singleplayer experience lags!

(errr, it might be a bit like Ass Crud 2 on PC, I guess)

LewieP will go mental when he finds out you need a constant internet connection for that.

Unless they can get it to work, of course. This is, without a doubt, the most exciting thing to happen to gaming in a long time. They just need to pull it off.

Mods! Want to bang the onLive stuff into the onLive thread now it has an actual launch date?

A 250mph car that with a clean burning engine that runs by sucking nasty nasty CO2 out of the air would be the most exciting thing to happen to motoring, but it's not likely they'd be able to pull it off.

That's lovely, and has nothing to do with anything else. You forget that onLive already exists and is working well. The question is whether it'll keep working with a fucktonne of people playing on it.

If OnLive was in a pub it'd be Hitler.

playin gamez on remote servers will make teh inputz lag crap like on xbox or sumthin else shit LOLOLOL!!1!1!

Seriously though, how much of a bottleneck is that likely to be? I think I read somewhere that the average ping times in the UK are around 50ms (& around 20ms with interleaving off). Is that (plus however long it takes a machine to do what you tell it) a long enough period to have a noticeable effect on the game?

This was discussed a bit back on page 4. I was of the general opinion that it was doable, if the claims about the server hardware are true, and internet willing.

Right now? Loads, probably enough that the service can't work. But in five years when most of us have fibre to the home? Very little, probably enough that the service can work. Note that all the company's press releases are very long-term orientated. What we are seeing now isn't so much of a genuine service as a public beta.

GTA's input lag is 166ms, which bothers me. My TV is noted for having slow response times when not in Game Mode; I have to lag my amp by 110ms to match it, but I don't notice the effect on games.

Note that Online would (one would hope) invest in distinctly non-average datacentres, so ping times would be below the averages.

Note really the same thing: LINK

Iiiinteresting.So BT have some confidence in it, at least.

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/featu ... tern-time/
It's going live in a few hours!


Borderlands on an iPad. Impressive tech demo, although controller issues makes the iPad about the least interesting device of this I think.

That looked rather impressive, although it would be sensible to move the "virtual controlpad" to the bottom of the screen. Damned smooth, though.

I have to say that there must be something wrong with it, though, otherwise MS, Sony etc would be rushing to release their own equivalent service. If it works like they say, this could kill off all other forms of gaming before the end of this generation.

Is it me or did one step take forever?

Even if they've sorted out the video encoding, even if they've sorted out any latency issues how on Earth are they going to sort out the scalability issues?

It might be do-able, but I just can't see how it's going to be affordable.

A in-home hands-on, from Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5567770/onlive-strea ... me-finally

He says there isn't bad lag during play but calls out the crunchy over-compressed visuals. However, a few posts down the comments thread, someone posts a pic of ACII which looks much better.

Interesting times.

That looks utterly fucking horrible, why would any gamer voluntarily pay to subject themselves to video quality like that?

It'll also saturate just about any ADSL connection, meaning an awful net experience for anyone on the same connection and/or dropouts in the game itself.

I find it hard to believe there won't be horrible lag once the servers get loaded too.

Not convinced at all.

If you're an actual gamer rather than a graphics whore, this service is a godsend. All the other things are conjuncture (apart from the ADSL line being used heavily, but, you know, so?).

I don't think those things are exclusive at all. I like games and I like pretty games, so I'd sooner not play them through something which occasionally makes them look like an especially low bitrate Freeview channel.

They're not exclusive, but when one option costs $50 (or whatever new games cost in the USA) + a high-end PC and the other costs $3 + a device connected to the Internet, it's probably worth thinking about.
The latency and frame rate are far more important on the "being able to play the game" front than the visuals (because, as they're demonstrating, you can scale the graphics back), and it would appear they've got them right.
It's also important to note that they've only been live to the public for a week or so, so things will probably get better.

Saying that, chappie on the review does have a shit-hot connection, faster than most people in the UK are going to have. As I doubt they'll be able to do much with the amount of data they need at OnLive, we pretty much need Broadband to get faster.

[edit]Mind you, it'd be fucking perfect for my office PC. Hmm...

Yeah, I've got no problem with it in principle but it is going to need much better broadband to take off, but I'm not sure how long that'll be. Even when 60% of the country have fibre I'm still not sure a gaming platform which completely excludes the remaining 40% is going to be viable.

Shaping I would have thought. You use that service for long enough in the UK your bandwidth goes through the roof and even on an unmetered service your ISP may well get huffy.

I think that's more of a problem for them to deal with, like when iPlayer came out.

The creaking Broadband infrastructure in the UK could be an entirely new thread

Maybe so, but how many offices are going to tolerate a single PC chewing through that much of the company bandwidth during the working day? If you're the boss then fair enough, but for 99% of office employees it'd be a massive no-no.

Whatever hardware they've got at the backend, and however solid your internet connection is, I refuse to believe this is going to deliver anything like a cohesive single player gaming experience - in terms of both latency and image fidelity, as well as fairly frequent stutters.

A 720p game at 30FPS (let alone 60FPS) into this little bandwidth simply does not go - as we can see in those screenshots, and that's with pretty much perfect conditions on an uber internet connections and empty servers.

For home users I predict a total flop - it'd need 100meg fibre to every home, infinitely more benevolent ISPs than we have now, and gamers both console and PC based alike to all suddenly declare 'I don't mind that my games look like shit!'

Where it might find a niche is hotels and suchlike, where people who want some 'emergency gaming' will be prepared to put up with the compromises.

I have a number of 720p H.264 rips of TV shows. They are usually around 1.1-1.2 Gb and look very good to the eye. That's a bitrate of 430Kbps or a little under 4Mbit/sec. Or you could look at it this way; my domestic ADSL has, when there are good peers, grabbed them from BitTorrent at greater-than-realtime.

AT&T and BT are launch partners for OnLive.

You're not really comparing apples with apples there, as those shows will have been compressed with multi-pass encoders that can basically take all the time in the world to get it looking as good as possible, they know what frames came before, what frames are coming in the future, and how best to transition between them with the highest image quality and lowest amount of bytes used.

On top of that, your average TV show or film doesn't 'move about' half as much as your average game does - for every action or 'lots of stuff moving about' sequence there are going to be extended periods where the image on screen doesn't change that much, which massively reduces the overall data required. Games just don't have that, or at least, they definitely don't have it in the busy bits, which is where framerate and latency need to be as high and low respectively as possible.

We're talking about real-time encoding of an entirely unpredictable player-controlled experience, that has to take its input from a remote source (the player), work out how that affects the game, encode the result, spit it back down a residential ADSL connection to the player, and then rinse wash repeat, for minutes if not hours at a time. Which planet is this supposed to be happening on?

I'm just not buying it, the backend server hardware requirements for anything like a properly scaled-up user experience boggle the mind quite frankly, and that's before you start to consider the raw consistent bandwidth requirements with minimal lag.

At least with a 'normal' game lag can be compensated for with the game effectively filling in the blanks as far as it can, since your local hardware is drawing the frames itself, but when the entire game experience is being piped down your internet connection? No way, ain't gonna happen.

I'll eat my hat if this comes to pass in any kind of mass-market sense. Then I'll buy you a hat, and I'll eat that one too.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365398,00.asp

And yet it is working, right now, for normal people on normal Internet connections. Must be vodoo, huh?

Not exactly exhaustive though is it? He played one ancient game that 'sort of seemed OK'.

Don't get me wrong, in some regards I actually quite like the idea of this service, and as I've already said, I can see a decent niche market for it where people are away from home, with a modestly specced 'device' (as it's not PC specific), and wanting to play some of their favourite games.

(In the same way we'll watch a film on a hotel telly and forgo our usual 40-inch 5:1 experience because we understand the constraints of the situation, I can see the same applying to games.)

Gaming isn't really that expensive these days.

Consoles are cheap brand new, let alone second hand, PC gamers are arguably by default the elitist nerds, and decent screens of 22 inches and higher are inexpensive - OnLive claim 1280x720 resolution (with unspecified crunching of detail), which was the default resolution of most screens about six or seven years ago.

I do think there is a market for this service, but people sat in their own homes simply isn't it.

Hmm. Dubious. For a start, the system is hardly being stressed right now.
Secondly, it's useless to me if you can't use it over a wireless connection, and I imagine I'm not alone.
Thirdly, " I can't say that it exactly mimicked the experience of playing it locally on my older single-core desktop" So an old game wasn't able to match how an old computer used to be able to run it. Not exactly Crysis. Indeed, if my memories of FEAR2 are correct, that's quite worrying.

But from a personal point of view, I don't like it. I, along with many others, like being able to code stuffs for rather well equipped 3d cards and computers. I'd imagine this service wouldn't cater for that. Given the advances made recently in the distribution of independent titles through steam and similar, this seems like a step backwards from what I've read. And that's before considering the effects on price that a drop in demand would cause for capable computers.

Mine will

/opens ports
/fires up Eve

It seems that Onlive service might actually work...death knell for consoles as we know them etc etc blah blah...

http://www.slate.com/id/2257825/

This, of course, doesn't effect their chances of making it or going under one whit.

Exactly. No matter how much grunt your game needs to run, their encoding is likely to punt exactly the same bandwidth stream out to the user.

Yes, which is why I specified it as a personal point of view.


But would I get access to that as a developer? Colour me doubtful.

--

I have noticed that it claims it needs a 5 megabit connection, which is pretty much what I get here, according to speedtest.
More interestingly, it's significantly above the average of what people on my ISP (BT, so hardly a small time ISP) get. Not only that, it would get through the allowed bandwidth very quickly, something that already happens if I'm not careful, and ends up being very costly. Spending a long time playing the xbox doesn't net me an accidental £150 internet bill.

It's clearly not something that sustainable under current residential metred internet connections. But that's why the fact that BT and AT&T are launch partners is interesting. What's the betting that you sign up to a monthly tariff, giving you unlimited data for OnLive only via BT? Extremely high, I'd suspect.

Note that as BT are hosting the service (in Cardiff, no less, for their closed beta), it doesn't use any bandwidth external to their network; it's therefore vastly cheaper for them to run this service. I would suggest they would not include OnLive traffic in their traffic caps. Caps on ADSL are designed to reduce the traffic between the ISP's network and the world, which costs money from their peering partners. Traffic within the ISP's network is generally a lot easier to come by.

Not even OnLive themselves are claiming they can reach more than a fairly small amount of the population at launch, but fast forward three years and consider how that picture will change in a world where fibre-to-the-kerb becomes prominent. Also consider the costs to their business (mostly hosting) scale with the customer base, so it's not like it harms their profitability to only be able to reach 10% of gamers initially. I suspect they have a 3-5 year business plan that aims to establish a solid revenue stream now and build the service out as broadband infrastructure improves.

BT have said this is what will happen. The deal BT have with OnLive is that they will be the only ISP that can bundle OnLive charges in with your ADSL sub. Other UK ISPs will be able to offer the service, though.

The UK is at an advantage here, because a lot of our internet traffic goes though BT anyway[1], so they are an ideal place to put OnLive servers.

[1] even many LLU firms use Openreach backhaul, albeit under a different commercial arrangement than a normal ADSL customer.


Many people keep saying it won't work, both in this thread and across the Internet. No-one seems to have a good reason why though.

No-one has yet provided any compelling evidence that this will work, either.

Get past all the "cloud" bullshit and it all boils down to how quickly and cheaply OnLive can add capacity to the service. Building a data centre isn't cheap or quick. Co-location might be an option, but co-locating in a centre that has a backbone connection to the internet isn't cheap or easy. Adding hardware to existing centres isn't going to be cheap or easy either - this is not a case of adding a few cheap load-balanced Blades and ever increasing NAS, but installing a massive amount of FPU performance.

It doesn't scale. A couple of hundred/maybe thousand beta users doesn't prove the system. Get a million on there. Ten million. Get every PC, 360, Wii, iPlatform... let's get them all on OnLive and let's see how it copes. It won't. Not least because OnLive won't be able to cope with those numbers, but also because the existing infrastructure won't cope with it either.

I like the idea of OnLive, but it's years ahead of its time. This is a project looking for a buyer and nothing more; they may find one, but I doubt the technology will be used for gaming.

I guess it's mostly just an intuitive reaction. I accept that it will work in ideal circumstances but I can't help feeling that where there are any problems at all the experience would be so degraded as to be thoroughly unpleasant. When it works it's great but the relatively small amounts of data needed to make current online multiplayer function seem to have a hard enough time getting where they need to be at times due to god knows what various transient network problems. So it really beggars belief that in the real world any time soon that this is going to be consistent enough to provide a satisfying experience.

My prediction, there'll be another generation of consoles after this one and this service won't even get near to troubling them, after that who knows. But that's between 5 and 10 years away and we'll all be fitting our moon-houses with holo-suites by then.

From Kotaku :

OnLive's Lag Tested With SCIENCE <Gaywood not included>

http://kotaku.com/5581982/onlives-lag-t ... th-science

Not sure how they ever thought they were going to get 35ms. My latency to my ISP's DNS servers is higher than that.

They've perhaps been misquoted. If the original statement was "35-80ms for our bit, excluding your ISP's connection bit", it would be roughly inline with the Kotaku numbers.

Full analysis on Eurogamer now.

Just working my way through it but first bit which piqued my attention;



Crikey.

So in summary we can pay through the nose for laggy games that look like this, whilst destroying our internet connection for anyone else who wants to use it at the same time.

Wow! Where the fuck do I sign up?

So I'd get about 8 hours assuming gamings all I do. (it's not)

I think I had that much yesterday.