Slashdot Mirror
New Service Aims To Replace Consoles With Cloud Gaming
ThinSkin writes "Imagine playing bleeding-edge games, yet never again upgrading your hardware. That's the ambitious goal of OnLive's Internet delivered gaming service. Using cloud computing, OnLive's goal is to 'make all modern games playable on any system,' thanks in large part to OnLive's remote servers that do all the heavy lifting. With a fast enough Internet connection, gamers can effectively stream and play games using a PC, Mac, or a 'MicroConsole,' 'a dedicated gaming client provided by OnLive that includes a game controller.' Without ever having to worry about costly hardware upgrades or the cost of a next-gen console, gamers can expect to fork over about $50 yearly just for the service. If this thing takes off, this can spell trouble for gaming consoles down the road, especially if already-established services like Steam and Impulse join the fray."
Except that is not what it says... It says the server will do the lifting to a thin client. The server is not just streaming binaries to be rendered on the client, the server is receiving input from and return video to be displayed on the client.
I think Amazon sells crowbars to remove your foot from your mouth.
You seem to be assuming that this service will stream VIDEO to your unit, but with TFA not being too clear on the subject, my guess is that they will stream just 'polygons' to their 'netconsole', which then displays them as video frames. The bandwith needed should be far smaller.
The biggest difference with mmorpgs is that mmorpg servers send program data to the client, who then does most of the calculations -the hard work- and displays the results.
Also, many slashdotters seem to assume that mmorpgs require a huge bandwith. I think that's wrong. As a well known example WoW was quite playable using a 512 Kb DSL connection.
As other posters have said before, the biggest problem with On-Live's approach is the lag, which is inherent to the Internets, and will continue so for the foreseeable future. Most mmorpg clients use lots of code and processing power just to minimize the effects of lag in the gameplay, with mixed fortunes (Go to Dalaran and ask anyone :)
However, even a fiber optics line I'd have my doubts.
Doing some quick calculations:
The highest number I've gotten for Blu-Ray maximum bandwidth is 54 megabits per second. I've seen torrents much smaller that still looked good.
Assuming uncapped, that's actually doable. Fiber is typically 100 mbits per second, and I'm sure some places offer gigabit.
However, encoding time is on the order of hours or days, and is certainly not live. So the real problem is latency -- take 50 ms from your LCD monitor, plus whatever a wireless controller ads, plus the latency between you and their servers, plus the lag for them to render, capture, and encode, then decode back at the client... that's easily getting up to 200 ms, which I'd consider unplayable.
Also, unless the $50/year includes games, it makes little economic sense, either. These systems are designed to last some four years or so. A Wii can be had for $160, according to a quick Google; this would be $200. A Wii can work when your Internet is down, or when your internet is not fiber. And a Wii actually has games already -- not as many as its competitors, but some.
Where I could see this working is in a LAN environment
Not really. LANs are typically 100 mbits, or if you're willing to spend money on a good switch, gigabit. Same situation as fiber.
The only advantage of a LAN is, with a good switch, you aren't using everyone else's bandwidth, but if you're proposing this:
make some kind of "xbox360server" to host all the games as basically virtual machines across a lan,
That's still likely to be a single port, which means now everyone on the LAN is limited to a combined 100 mbits for their video. It means the concept of a LAN party just got very, very impractical.
And WTF would be the point, if it's a console anyway? In what way is that "xbox360server" better than a real Xbox 360?
As for their "no piracy" claim, as a consumer, that doesn't make me want to sign up for the service. That makes me want to go far away, into the open arms of indie developers, who typically ship with reduced or no DRM.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You seem to be assuming that this service will stream VIDEO to your unit, but with TFA not being too clear on the subject
Actually, the article is quite clear:
The secret sauce to making OnLive work is its proprietary, on-the-fly video compression capability. As you're playing the game, the outgoing frame buffers are compressed as a video stream and sent to your local client. Perlman estimates that servers need to be within 1,000 miles of a client, at a maximum, to maintain latencies low enough to ensure playability. User data, such as inputs and commands, will be sent back over the Internet, but those usually consist of fairly small data packets.
Of course, a broadband connection is required. For standard definition (480p) resolutions, users will need a minimum of 1.5 megabits/sec. A 5 megabits/sec connection will support high definition (720P or 1080i) connections. Initially, the service won't support 1080p or higher resolutions, but that may come later.