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WoW On an iPad Via Gaikai
Gametap writes "If cloud gaming works for enough genres, it can't help but find popularity. Even just a game like WoW might be enough to make it happen, and Gaikai's Dave Perry posted a picture of doing just that on an iPad. So is it the future or not? Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform? Will it change the mobile, PC, console, and TV world as we know it? Lots of questions, lots of skepticism, lots of players and money being invested — but one thing is for sure: it will be very interesting to see how this evolves."
Is ever the problem with such systems, the only two mmog I have ever been able to play reasonably well with just touch pad is EVE-Online and City of Heroes/Villains (and that in a limited capacity, requiring a lot of macros).
Without commenting on the whole "which MMOG is bigger/better" thing, I would hazard to guess that for this to work, the games would HAVE to be built for it.
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I can't even get a good framerate with Quake 3 on my netbook. Gaming requires powerful video hardware which requires bigger power supplies than tiny mobile devices can deliver; at least, that's the explanation I accepted.
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
"Famed developer David Perry has posted an image on his blog of an employee playing the PC-only MMO World of Warcraft on the Apple iPad."
..it runs on both PC and Mac.
Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform?
It depends on your definition of "Good gaming platform".
From the top of my head, I could certainly play Go, Civ, Galciv, BB, and just about anything that's turn based.
I wouldn't try playing anything with direct action, to avoid the frustration of high ping and lag spikes.
If it sounds like hot air, and feels like hot air, it is definitely hot air. Lot of people are looking to iPad not as next gen tech, but as repeat of iPhone app gold rush. Therefore lot of hype, promises and noise too. Most people who have bought iPad for now are techies and geeks. I really doubt common crowd will buy into it.
Duh, of course, I keep my chance to be very wrong about this :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Wouldn't any Tablet PC with a Windows OS installed on it just run WoW for years already? Am I missing something here?
Anymore that you could take random car parts and weld them together and drive your kids to school in it.
Does no one else get offended at the suggestion of real-time cloud gaming due to obvious latency issues? It's bad enough having my network ping at 100ms, I don't need it to take 100ms for a screen refresh. Or is there something about the implementation I'm missing?
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
So we have a picture, and we can see that it works. Heck it may even be playable to some extent but that is hardly the point. We're at a stage where gamers will spend $100+ on a cabled mouse and buy the most perfect friction free mousepad they can find to go with it to reduce lag in their gameplay. Here we have exactly the opposite. The game may have been "pictured" but did the guy manage to get anywhere in a team raid?
If I (or other more-than-casual WoW players) can't use the UI enhancements which improve on the basics Blizzard provide, it'll never take off with any more than the casual player. However, the casual player won't pay a second subscription to a gaming site, just to play when away from home...
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Seriously.
Yes, you're missing a mouse. Applications (games specifically) need to be modified to make use of accelerometer and touch input to be useful on a tablet device. The better games exploit this by adding gestures and multi-touch input to enhance game interaction. You can see this for yourself: there's a 1:28 demo of the iPad version of N.O.V.A where they show all this stuff off.
FTA: "Famed developer David Perry has posted an image on his blog of an employee playing the PC-only MMO World of Warcraft on the Apple iPad."
Huhwha?
I had WoW playable on my T-Mobile G1 (an Android phone) via VNC over a year ago. With the added bonus of a hardware keyboard for text input..
That a more modern device with a better processor and bigger screen can also do something like this isn't a surprise at all.
For me the form factor of the iPad precludes its use for serious online interactive gaming. It's a sleek elegant device with diabolical gaming inputs. Why bother?
Now, getting WoW to run natively on my n900.. that's a fun and worthy achievement. It still wont be a viable replacement for a 1920x1200 screen with full sized keyboard attached.
this is old news
But surely the title should be: Fully Featured MacOS Computer Runs Game That Already Runs on MacOS Computers
No, wait, I have a better one: Expensive Fully Featured MacOS Computer Runs Game That Already Runs on Any Cheap-Ass Commodity Windows Computer
A little verbose, but I think accuracy is important in journalism.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
A screenshot does not mean the game was being played on the ipad.
A screenshot means only that it was running, and in particular that they only showed the login screen was telling.
Here is WoW running on an ipod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_PhqNgTKqI, so even the fact it's running under this engine is utterly not "news".
A few points:
- notice that the ipod is running something under 1 frame per second. Perhaps 0.25 fps. That's...suboptimal. I don't care to look up the specs, but I don't know that the ipad has THAT much more of a CPU than the ipod, certainly not if you consider how many more pixels have to be pushed through its system for every frame of action. (And WoW is itself NOT graphically cutting-edge, further it is notoriously processor-hungry meaning even on high-powered machines with cutting-edge graphics its performance is capped more by the cumulative load on the cpu than anything else.)
- note that the ipod example is choking on simply load screens and sitting in the most abandoned, empty, low-demand (systemwise) city in the game.
- the background music for the video seems to be "I can't escape this hell, I can't escape this nightmare" which might be an apropos if ironic comment on the "ipad is god's gift to computing" that Jobs & Co seem to be promulgating.
-Styopa
"Famed developer David Perry has posted an image on his blog of an employee playing the PC-only MMO World of Warcraft on the Apple iPad." It's not PC-only. That's where I stopped reading.
I can't see how this streaming service could be practical for any game with action in it.
Anyone remember playing the original Quake online (not Quake World)? It didn't have motion prediction so before your player reacted to controls it needed a complete server round trip. That means there would be lag between when you pressed a key and your player react.
All network games these days move your player in real time then compensate on the server, but if the server is handling the display this becomes impossible. Sure internet connections have got much faster since then but extra delay would be introduced with the video encoding / decoding.
We put up with network lag back in the day but I can't imagine anyone putting up with it these days. It's a nice idea but I wouldn't put much hope in it catching on.
That's a great idea and all, until you run into the problem of latency and the fact that to play WoW even slightly competently you need to perform actions in a split second (easy with a keyboard, not with a touch screen). High latency gaming AND low response time from the user? Yeah I won't be grouping with anyone using an iPad...
From http://www.gaikai.com/streaming-worlds/:
"All you need is a broadband internet connection, a web browser, and the latest Adobe Flash player (which you almost certainly already have)."
The whole I'm a PC I'm a Mac thing is BS. My understanding of the term PC is Personal Computer. That definition should be OS agnostic.
Interesting thought: If PC's are 'personal computers', would that make Macs, 'Impersonal computers'?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
TFA describes WoW as "PC-only". I think he might have meant "PC hardware-only", since the game's been available for Macintosh since launch.
"Will it change the mobile, PC, console, and TV world as we know it?" No it wont, because most gamers don't like playing slowly responsive and shitty looking games, with cloud gaming comes control delay as well as video compression, anyone who really wants to game will buy a real system.
But latency will be major problem.
Currently on a PC client, the video you see is produced live as your client recieve the (minimal) data from the server.
With such a system, there's additional latency steps introduced by the need to compress, send and decompress the video stream over the network. This might work perfectly OK for games which aren't that much time-critical (some strategy, specially turn-based) but will have a catastrophic impact on anything with fast paced action (no FPS, nor MMORPG with real-time combat)
There are also technical limitations :
- a full screen video stream is going to be quite a lot of data compared to the rather simplistic "position updates", etc. that current client receive from server. So such a solutions will require quite a lot of bandwith at the user-level (cue in "bit-torrent is chocking the network" excuses for ISP over-selling their bandwidth), and a tremendous bandwith at the server level (it's not IP-TV where all clients receive the same picture of the same TV channel. Every single player has a different display and thus require its private video stream. Something non optimisable by multi-cast).
- speaking of the server, it will require tremendous processing power : it will have to generate the graphical output not for 1 player, but for every player connected to it. And will need to be able to compress it efficiently in real-time. The costs are going to be high : a company would have to provide as much hardware as there are simultaneous players logged-in. Imagine something like having to buy one full graphic card and one encore-accelerator for everyone playing WoW on the iPad at the same time.
Well, yes. There's Moore Law and the unstoppable progress of networking and processing power. But this progression works the same for almost all player. And thus the smartphones & PDAs will get faster too. And I suspect that the day the successor of Nvidia Tegra will have enough omph to play recent video games is much closer that the day a server cluster will have the processing power to generate and encode thousands of different video streams simultaneously at a reasonable price.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
How on earth did this get onto slashdot? You might be able to play WoW on an iPad one day? This isn't journalism. This is rubbish.
You're missing the point that when a company builds "the next big thing", you start BEFORE technology has caught up. (Is this not obvious to anyone but me???). Obviously latency is an issue, as is the delivery speed. 15 years ago I was using a 56k baud modem. Times change,. Technology improves. You build the system in parallel with tech improvements so that when they ARE fast enough, you're ready for market. Otherwise it's a made dash to get to market before all the other competitors finally clue in.
haha, I share some more ipad games go to this "Featured Free iPad Games" and "10 Best iPad Games We Can't Wait to Play" http://www.ifunia.com/ipad-column/index.html
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