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OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval
Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."
The guy logged in using credentials 'borrowed' from an authorised beta tester, from more than twice the recommended distance from the server, acknowledged multiple high latency (due to distance) notifications, and the best he could do is damn the service with faint praise.
Read: "excitement (from clueless arts majors masquerading as tech journalists) and hilarity (from anyone with even a remote shred of knowledge of the technologies involved)".
Look, this tech may - may - be workable for SimWarConquer, but for anything that's reaction based? No. Not going to happen. There is no technobabble solution to latency, and anyone who tells you otherwise wants your credit card number.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
There was even more latency than you expected, you insensitive clod!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The major problem isn't overall latency, it's little spikes of latency on an otherwise good line. A moment of 100ms lag on an otherwise good line doesn't matter for online games because of client prediction and at worst it's a tiny moment where the controls don't seem responsive. It's not a problem for normal video because they can buffer 250ms or 500ms or 1000ms of video without any problem. But on this they can't do any significant buffering or the latency will be too much to play.And even 100ms of sudden latency will cause the picture to lag or freeze or jump. It might only happen occasionally but I suspect people won't put up with it. And they can't do anything about it either, even if your ISP is only 10% loaded on its lines and routers, there will be times when all that 10% send packets at the same moment and they get queued in a router somewhere, just for a tiny time but tiny little amounts of jitter like this are normal and expected and to be honest I think will be the downfall of this project because there is no real way to deal with them. But I guess we'll see :)
There are still large areas of North America stuck with either stone-age Dial-Up (in 20-freakin'-10) or slow expensive satellite. Like mine (I cry myself to sleep over my 1200ms latency) This is absolutely a no-go there. Obviously.
Now, in better places, I'm sort of out of the loop. Whenever I've spent time in cities, either visiting my brother in Ottawa or living in London (Ontario, not the good one) for a few months at a time, it's been my experience that even connections that are supposed to get up to 1MB/sec would be lucky to get that in practice, especially at peak times. Furthermore, the sheer amount of lagspikes, connection hiccups, or general time when the interrnet craps out for no apparent reason makes it seem like you'd be dealing with one frustration after another. The number of times I see people get DC'd on World of Warcraft seems to back up my theory that staying connected, and maintaining a constant connection at 5KB/s or so (for WoW) is difficult enough, doing the same for a (whopping?) 1/MB/s while keeping latency under 100ms would be hellish.
So is my experience with the Internet indicative of the general population, or have I just had the misfortune of having terrible service? Can people really keep 1MB/s sustained, without lag hiccups, DCs, lost packets, etc, while keeping under 100ms?
Actually...it's doable technically with only a very, very small number of subscribers.
Latency and bandwidth will kill the whole thing.
You have to use peak values per customer in your figuring for it to even remotely work the way they portrayed this.
Given this:
1.5Mbits/s for the feed per user for SD experience with OnLive.
You can serve roughly as an absolute maximum :
30 users on a T3.
103 users on an OC-3.
404 users on an OC-12.
1658 users on an OC-48.
You can expect about $250-500k/mo recurring costs on that OC-48. As another observation, you will likely need to serve 2/3rds to 3/4ths of those numbers to keep the latency usable because as you fill the pipe to capacity, traffic will be subject to the congestion algorithms in the routers and machines at both ends of the pipe. Now, some will state that they'll place the stuff at the ISP's end of things... Then the ISP gets the joy of this same level of connectivity- and they're bitching about "freeloaders" and "bandwidth problems" right now.
OnLive is snake oil trying to be sold to the game industry as a solution to their "control" problem. It's an alternate DRM play. And it can NEVER work in our lifetime. You can't field enough bandwidth cheaply enough to accomplish it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If say the speed-limit on a motorway was 70mph, and there was no congestion on the road; why would adding in extra lanes to the motorway increase how fast I get to my destination?
You get the car analogy wrong. A packet of 100 bytes is not similar to a single car. It consists of 800 cars (bits). So if you increase the number of lanes more cars can travel. Each car travels still the same speed (of light) but by allowing more cars at the same time, the delivery (packet) distributed over 800 cars gets delivered faster.
The time a packet takes to get transmitted is roughly: packetsize/bandbidth.
Say you have a 10mbps line and a 1000bytes packet. This will take 8000 bit / 10.000.0000 bit / s = 0,00008 s or 0,8ms (one way). So the latency through the line will be roughly 1,6ms. If you got to 100mbps ethenet or even gigabit ethernet, the time will go down by factor 10 each step.
But there are some side effects: Sometimes packets are packed into larger packets to fill the line better. This will increase the latency. When the speed of the line is high, the time the OS needs to send/receive the packets gets more influence on the latency. Also the latency may occur in your providers network because he overbvooks the service (selling access for more cars than the lanes allow and therfor creating congestion).
To see wether your line is the chokepoint use Traceroute to see where the latency happens. If the latency already occurs close to you, a faster line may improve the latency. Also look for features from your provider as "fastpath".
CU, Martin
P.S. This is a very short overview of the topic. A complete coverage would come as a book. BTW the books have already been written: Richard W. Stevens: TCP/IP Illustrated.
1. All game publishers will be paid for every hour of game played. This increases their income,
This will decrease their income. One of the great things about gaming is the entertainment hours/dollar value. I can spend $50 on a game, and get hundreds of hours of entertainment out of it. Unless we're looking at less than $.25/hr it's simply not price competitive with local gaming.
2. Instead of there being 3 console platforms + PC, there will be just one platform : the PCs in the cloud gaming data centers.
And what incentive do the console makers have to just go away?
3. The overall costs of gaming will be lower.
Gaming is cheap as shit anyway. And when has renting ever been cheaper than owning?
I'll stop here. It's not going to happen. There's always going to be a market for local games.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Because guess what? In the real world, people live all over. Onlive isn't going to be able to say "Just move closer to one of our data centers," at least not if they want to pitch themselves as the "cheaper than buying a graphics card" option. Sounds to me like they've been controlling who gets in to the beta to try and create an overly rosy impression. This guy was a more realistic test, a person who doesn't happen to be near their few locations.
That's just the reality of this. If it is to work well I can't only work well for a few people in a few locations.
Imagine a movie-listings website for the greater New York City area. Now imagine some from Wyoming complaining that the theater in Cheyenne isn't listed on that site. The response that person would get is the same that your objection gets:
If you don't live with our covered-area, feel free to use another service. We have plenty of customers within our area and we have decided not to cover yours.
Not every business on the planet expects to serve every customer one the planet, and yet somehow they can still turn profits.
Makes it not so attractive as they hyped it to be, especially against powerful $100 graphics cards (the low-mid range of graphics is great these days) and $200 game consoles.
I think one of us has missed something. Either you're right, and OnLive expects this to kill all other gaming everywhere, or I'm right in that this is a supplemental service to gaming that adds a remote component for those customers that want it and can access it.
Trust? In what way, beyond what you would give *any* online merchant to whom you provide your credit card info?
It's like with honest politician: I trust them to stay bought....
Something i value with my games is to take an old savegame and try something new. If i don't "own" the game but just purchased a service, the game or the savegame may disappear.
If e.g. Amazon takes my money and won't deliver my copy of Mass Effect 2, i have a good chance to get my money back. But if i purchase OnLive to play Mass Effect 2 and they remove the game from their list, my "invested" time and some of my money is gone. If this happens 1-2 years after the purchase, there is nothing i can do that will have any effect.
Someone taking my credit card credentials and using them fraudulently is a known process i know how to handle.
CU, Martin