Slashdot Mirror
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.
...
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.
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.
I heard rumors that macs are Personal Computers.
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/
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.
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.
Wrong, Steve said it was a electronic appliance. Any rumour that it is a full fledge computer with software lock is wrong.
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
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.
Yes. PC only. Because you can only play it on a personal computer running Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, GNU/Linux, and maybe various BSDs.
But you cannot play it on a Sony PS3, Microsoft XBox360 or Nintento Wii.
"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.
Good job of missing the forest for the trees. The point isn't that WoW is PC-only, it's that there isn't an iPad client. It could have been WoW, it could have been Halo, the point is that you can play it on a different platform than the designers intended.
Of course, the article's author also confuses the readership by saying, "Cloud gaming service Gaikai gets world-conquering MMO running on Apple’s tablet Mac". Judging from the comments over there, almost everyone thinks that having a Mac version of a games means that it runs on the iPad out-of-the-box. What planet have those guys been living on? Only one person points out that a Mac can be considered a type of PC, since it can run Windows as well as MacOS. Hell, back before IBM successfully usurped the term, "PC" mean any brand of personal computer.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
That distinction was stupid but understandable in the PowerPC times. Now that Macs only run on x86 it doesn't make sense.
Dilbert RSS feed
Oh, the days of Apples and IBM-compatibles..
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
That is not WOW running on an iPhone, it's someone remoting into a PC running WoW.
WoW does not run on the iPhone. If it was, you wouldn't be able to zoom the UI; It would be running at the native resolution (and horribly blocky). This is a VNC connection to another computer running WoW.
Hell, you can see the tessellation when he scrolls around the login screen. You get that from breaking down the screen into quarters and transporting these sections separately to reduce apparent lag (compared to rendering the whole scene at once, as running WoW directly on the iPhone would do).
In short, FAKE.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Hmm, I DNRTFA, but a an underpowered device like that should still be able to get a decent framerate using TigerVNC or similar to screenscrape off of a real gaming PC (at least at low resolutions).
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.
Calling the iPad a Mac is really insulting to anyone who has ever loved using a Macintosh.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wrong, Steve said it was a electronic appliance. Any rumour that it is a full fledge computer with software lock is wrong.
I think you're talking about the iPad, not "macs" which would be Apple's product line of, you know, full-fledged computers ranging from the compact Mac Mini to the workstation-class Mac Pro, all running their own UNIX operating system known as Mac OS X.
Also, there is no "software lock" on OS X, you can install any software you want, they even include a ton of open source software and their full development tools (XCode) with the operating system and if you're not happy with that and want something a bit geekier you can always install macports or some other package management software.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
He never moves the character around, all he does is show the interface and type some text. You aren't playing the game if you cannot move your character.
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.
Maybe it is - I don't think they specifically refer to what the "other" OS is (although it's pretty clearly meant to be Windows), but maybe it's the equivalent of "I'm a car", "I'm a Ferrari" - indicating that they realise of course that the Ferrari is also a car, but it's of a higher pedigree than average, in which case there's nothing wrong with their usage of the term (although their interpretation is open to debate).
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...
How is that any different from the article? The guy isn't running WoW on the iPad, he's running a client which remotes into "the cloud", where a PC somewhere is running WoW. The point still stands that this has already been done so is not really news.
employee playing the PC-only MMO World of Warcraft
. I didn't really mean to focus on the Ads, which are just a common example. I assume the whole PC == windows PC thing started with some marketing campaign or product decades ago, but the order of the assoication appears to be the reverse of the usual, eg Hoover == vacuum cleaner, and don't make much sense to me.
WoW has gotten significantly greedier in this regard over the past few years. I remember when it first came out, my returns home I would be forced to play on a 900 mhz pentium 3 machine with onboard video. It wasn't pretty, Ironforge was a mess, but it ran. I would have thought an iPad would have a little more horsepower.
No smoking sigs indoors.
I might buy an ipad if there was a WoW client for it. problem would be screen resolution though.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Indeed. And whilst there's an argument for using "PC" to refer specifically to the x86 hardware platform, this no longer applies to Macs either. From a hardware point of view, Apple ship Apple PCs. They run a different OS, but that's no more relevant that someone shipping Linux PCs - they're still PCs, as you say.
The irony is that back when Macs weren't PCs in this sense of the word, Apple insisted they were (in order to advertise false claims like "first 64 bit PC", because they handpicked an arbitrary definition that included Macs, but not other non-x86 PCs that were 64 bit before them). And since they switched to releasing PCs, they claimed they weren't PCs, so they could falsely advertise a sense of "oh, but we're still different and unique, honest!".
A Mac is still a "personal computer" they just picked the wrong overloaded jargon. They meant personal computer, they said PC, which typically means any non-mac and even more specifically usually means "Wintel computer"
The only way to parse "PC-Only" in the original context (without stipulating that TFA's author is a flaming moron) is that it means "Real PCs, not tablet devices". In other words, "this plays on computers, but not tablets".
Which is not entirely true; a full Windows tablet would probably run WoW. (A OS X tablet too, but those don't exist. Not in any meaningful sense. The iPad may be OS X under its bondage-and-domination wrappings, but unless you jailbreak and install full OS capabilities like application-level multitasking, it really isn't OS X.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
A Mac is still a "personal computer" they just picked the wrong overloaded jargon. They meant personal computer, they said PC, which typically means any non-mac and even more specifically usually means "Wintel computer"
No, they chose correctly. PC means Personal Computer. Macs _are_ PCs. Gasp!
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.
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 ]
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
1024x768 ought to be enough for anyone!
I drank what? -- Socrates
it should be, but it won't happen until asshats stop artificially limiting what os can run on what hardware.
...