OnLive Begins Beta Testing

Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, has announced that beta testing is now underway for the cloud gaming service that aims to take the processing burden for cutting-edge games off a player's computer and use remote servers instead. Reaction to this service and competitor GaiKai has been interest tempered with skepticism, but users can now sign up to test it themselves and see if the reality matches the hype. There will be hardware and connectivity restrictions to start: "When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we'll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration."

Comments

world ?

[Spaham]

somehow they assume that the whole world lives in the United States...

Re:world ?

[Tom]

It's a minor error. The average american knows very well that there's "stuff" outside the USA. It's just that the stuff doesn't matter, so it occasionally gets forgotten.

Re:world ?

[Desler]

Because there are no services outside the US that ever only restrict their services to their own country. No, never it's only Americans that do that.

Re:world ?

[RemoWilliams84]

They should, however, be picking beta testers at the edge of that distance, on streets with lots of contention, with crappy PCs, with ropey old DSL modems, etc., so that they can iron out problems.

You also don't start your beta test with those crappy situations, especially when it is a completely new service. That's why you often start with an alpha or a small closed beta.

It's much easier to find the problems when you start with a small set of potential problems and work your way down to those users running a 28k modem on windows 95.

Why?

[ledow]

I get 25ms latency in an ideal online gaming situation (i.e. it takes 25ms for my input to reach the server and the server information to reach me) with a good, nearby server (same country). That's at rates like 4-5 kbps using retranmission, UDP, etc. to keep losses to a minimum. I'm not affected by peak periods because I have a very good ISP.

How is anything which requires significantly more data going to work anywhere near those latencies? First, my router can kill a gaming session if someone opens a couple of webpages - people's connections will have to be *dead* to allow multi-Mbps connections anywhere near reliably. Then you have that data having to be received and processed at both ends - not a big task for the consumer but acting on Mbps takes much longer than acting on Kbps no matter what you do. Then you have the lack of ANY sort of "predictive" technology - even Doom, Quake etc. knew to do input smoothing and not send every input event and have the client/server compensate by basically guessing if the connection lagged for a few ms - that's not possible here.

Then you have that the BBC iPlayer streams can effectively kill a business-broadband connection on their own without proper QoS and they are talking significantly more bandwidth, and some of it in the other direction too. So even in the *ideal* situation, with an *ideal* ISP it'll be *worse* than an average game of Counterstrike to play. Translate that to what most people who would be interested in this service have (noisy wireless, crappy broadband, slow ISP connection, etc.) and it just makes for a disaster.

I'd love it to succeed. I'd also love it to have beta testing somewhere other than the US - but I have to admit my main factor in taking up the beta program would only be to see just how bad it is.

Re:Stupid idea

[RalphSleigh]

There is much that can be done with a clever client to hide and compensate for latency, see:

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensating_Methods_in_Client/Server_In-game_Protocol_Design_and_Optimization