OnLive One Step Closer

hysma writes "It looks like OnLive, the remote gaming system that streams HD video over the Internet, is one step closer to becoming reality, according to an article on DSL Reports in response to a lengthy video presentation by founder & CEO Steve Perlman at Columbia University. Perlman demonstrated the UI, spectating, using the service on an iPhone, and other features."

Comments

I'll believe it when I see it

[BoberFett]

Until round trips between the server and client are guaranteed to be under 50ms, the lag will feel unbearable. If someone is playing a racing game and has to deal with a second between the time they begin turning and the time they actually see it turn this service will be dead before it begins.

Latency sensitive people

[xororand]

I also strongly doubt that any kind of game on this platform can be enjoyed by people who are sensitive to input latency. For example my old high quality PVA TFT panel used an overdrive circuit to reduce ghosting. The overdrive logic in TFT panels usually buffers about 1 or 2 full frames to analyze and optimize the pixel voltages which leads to about 20-50ms input latency. I for one already notice it when I just work to the point where it annoys me when the desktop or terminal sessions somehow always feel sluggish, let alone fast 3D games.

I can't imagine that the complete round-trip time for sending my input over the internet, waiting for a frame to be rendered and encoded remotely, sent back over the internet, decoded and displayed locally would be less than 20ms and then you'd still have the latency of your display. It might be bearable with a very fast internet connection and a CRT display which has 0ms input latency.

Maybe others aren't that sensitive to latency and can enjoy at least slower games like turn-based strategy with this service. Good for them.

Re:Latency sensitive people

[xororand]

Edit: For those who doubt that you can notice such small delays, try this:
- Connect an electronic instrument to your computer and artificially delay the audio by 30 ms.
- Try to play accurately
- ???
- No profit.

Re:Latency sensitive people

[Toonol]

Game engines have latency in them... OnLive runs those engines at faster than realtime, so when the packet from your controller gets to the engine 300ms later than it normally would the engine has plenty of time to do its thing.

That's nuts. They can't run the engine out in advance of your input... unless they're rewriting core functionality of the engines, adding prediction like online FPS have. And... they aren't doing that.

If you have a ping of 100ms, you will press a key; 100ms later the onlive server will know you started turning. It generates, renders, and COMPRESSES a frame; sends it back to you. 200-250ms have elapsed. It will be like playing on a machine getting 5-10 frames a second.

Re:Latency sensitive people

[bertok]

It seems to me that round trips on the order of 50 to 100+ms are more likely, and delays of that nature are highly, highly noticeable in twitch FPSes - especially when it comes to things like changing the view direction. Pretty much all multiplayer FPSes don't wait for a server round-trip for changing the view direction. In that situation twitch FPSes will suck.

Other kinds of games may work better.

You hit the nail on the head right there, the view direction.

Most games do all sorts of predictive wizardry to make the shooting work over internet latencies, but every game allows the view direction to occur completely locally, because even a slight lag makes the player feel like a drunkard. Many games also allow the local client to compute some of the 'game mechanics' locally, and then 'verify' the results with the server later.

It's really only the mouse

[jonaskoelker]

the richer control setup of keyboard and mouse.

It's really only the mouse---you can make a perfectly fun FPS that's playable with the buttons on, say, a wiimote plus nunchuk (one stick for moving, 8 buttons in B/C/Z/d-pad/A).

What's really missing is the fine-grained relative motion of the mouse.

It needs to be fine-grained; anyone who has tried to aim with a joystick will understand why.

It needs to be relative, as anyone having played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on the Wii will know.

Roughly speaking, you point at an absolute point on the monitor plane; your character yaws and pitches gradually to aim at that point, the speed being monotonously increasing in the distance between your current aim point and the target aim point.

What are the implications? Either you point at where you want to shoot and it takes a while to aim there, or you point way past where you want to shoot and you get to where you want to go really fast but move away again really fast.

What you really want to do is overshoot by infinity (or $BIGNUM), then aim at the target point when your character points exactly at it: then you get to your target fast and stay there. This is virtually impossible, and trying to do it is unpleasant.

That's why you need a mouse for FPSs; you can make games that only take 8 buttons, so I don't buy the "you need a keyboard". Maybe specific FPSs require keyboards, and maybe there's really no way to design around that without making the game a different game---I'll buy that. But really it's the mouse.

Is this a giant scam?

[syncrotic]

I still maintain that this simply can't work, and that it's an absolutely braindead money pit of an idea if it's not a total scam.

Idea: let's take the most latency sensitive, computationally demanding, and visually intensive thing you can do with a modern computer and try to apply the thin client model to it.

A single instance of the application in question will demand the full resources of the most powerful PC you can throw at it, but we'll just wave our hands and mutter something about virtualization to convince stupid investors that we have magic at our disposal. Because they are morons and because we put on a good show, they'll believe that you can somehow run many instances of a game on the equivalent of a single PC. We'll also be encoding 720p video in realtime at a quality / bandwidth ratio that no codec today can deliver; this will presumably happen on the same computing hardware that's already running multiple instances of cutting edge 3D games.

Finally, we'll throw in some shit about the iphone, because people can't stop fellating apple lately.

Anyone who believes this is technically feasible, much less economically viable, is fucking *retarded*.

So, their business model...

[Xugumad]

Is to rent console time over the Internet, to people with enough money to have a PC that will run this stuff, and a fast Internet connection... ...or an iPhone, a platform known for its cost-effective pricing model... ...but don't want to buy their own console, because it would clearly be too expensive?

Of course, people don't want to all play computer games at the same time, so I can see they'll be balancing load throughout the day... erm... or not (and certainly, they're not going to be running connections internationally with latency that's anything less than abominable for this).

In summary: WTF?