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OnLive's Epic Plan For a New Type of Video Game
An anonymous reader writes "OnLive's had a tough twelve months any way you look at it, but as a new profile of the cloud game streaming service points out, throughout it all, service never dropped, and the number of platforms it's on keeps growing. Up next is the tiny Ouya console, but in a wide-ranging interview, OnLive's general manager talks up plans to bring MMOs to the service, and even a whole new type of video game, one that will run on many servers, not just one PC: 'Look at how CGI has changed cinema over the last few years — you can do CGI essentially realtime. It could completely change what a video game looks like. That leads us to new technologies. Then game designers say, "What could I really do with a computing platform that is so powerful but also available across so many devices?" You're no longer constrained by computing power — that has tremendous opportunity.'"
Yeah, OnLive isn't constrained by computing power, but they're still constrained by bandwidth.
Is there a big enough market for their service in the few areas that are able to use their service?
Learn something new.
Why would I want a cloud game streaming service?
But very hard to pull off. Kind of sounds like an idealistic future of computing paradigm theory that I hear bandied about from time to time.
The GAMING SINGULARITY... tada... bump, psh...
That's funny, I read the title as "OnLive's Epic Plan For a New Way To Screw Its Employees"
This is defiantly going to be Epic. Probably not in the way they are thinking though. We're in the middle of the Next Great Video game crash, and all we're missing is an Epic Fail like ET. Someone, unexpected, needs to roll snake eyes already.
Who cares if a game looks like a CGI movie if the latency is over a few hundred milliseconds. These guys consistently miss the entire point. This kind of platform will always be useless for first-person shooters and any kind of action simulator like space and racing games.
MMOs could work, yes, but I still don't see the advantage. There is just no way to ever solve the latency problem. Yeah, yeah, I know, there are tons of people screaming that the latency is not a big deal, but you know what? They're wrong. They clearly haven't played space sims and racing games with low latency, which are actually good!
"you can do CGI essentially realtime".
Statements like this does not exactly convince me their platform has a future. Anyone thinking movie CGI can soon be done realtime are plain kidding themselves.
Who would write a game that only works on one platform? A proprietary software as a service like platform that they don't have control over? OnLive will have to make their own game, its too much a risk for anyone else. Good luck getting investors for that after that whole rename to dump the old stock business.
It's too bad Onlive will be the "prodigy" of online gaming services. By that I mean, early to the party, home in bed before it gets started.
The delta between quality of graphics, render times and bandwidth to send completed frames is getting smaller ever day. I just don't think it's where it need to be for anything beyond local broadcast.
What we will see is road gaming using a user's local console first. Cloud needs to be everywhere before we can outsource the frame generation to a laggy internet-shared based service. For Chrissakes, youtube can't even deliver me a super bowl commercial without buffering on my 30Mbit connection.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
It's funny to hear this guy talk about computing being unconstrained, but neglect to mention that's the least of their problems. What about financial contraints? They can't even afford to cut paychecks to their employees, so they had to let them all go, but they want to build a real time CG system with unlimited compute power? And they are going to pay for that how?
They should bring their services to developing countries where it makes more sense (consoles are very expensive).
It could also help improving the internet infrastructure there.
I never purchased anything from onlive because the pricing wasn't competitive with steam/amazon/greenmangaming/etc.
I would have expected the pricing to be even cheaper because I don't have a copy of the files locally in case they go belly up.
I must confess, I still don't get OnLive. Sure, you can have powerful hardware rendering immaculate frames, but then you have to use lossy compression to get those frames to the screen, so you probably end up with inferior visual quality (and a subpar framerate.) Not to mention the latency concerns others have mentioned here-- OnLive might be fine for a single-player game, where there's only one round-trip, but a multiplayer game? Not a chance.
Let's play something like Super Mario Bros! That was so much fun! Much more fun than playing Onquack Lifailure.
Haha, did you see what I did there?
Just in case you didn't pick up on the joke, I changed "OnLive" to resemble Barack Obama's name. I am the funniest person. Mod me up for telling a funny, bitches.
imagine toy story where you control an incidental character like Rex and follow the story from Rex's perspective then jump to slinky etc etc. the interactivity would be increased as you could effectively become the director/editor of any CGI film you're watching
Mid-range hardware is insanely cheap these days and will play all but the most high end games. Even tablets and smartphones can handle some pretty intense gfx. The next gen of consoles looks like it won't even be trying to push the envelope on performance because it is already good enough. My gaming rig is about 4+ years old and I'm pretty happy with it. Why exactly would I want to push rendering into "the cloud"?
If they can produce a kick-ass game that cranks everything to 11 with no lag, it might generate some interest. Which publisher is going to push out something like that for a service that seems to be tanking?
The interesting part of this, to me, is the potential to have both a larger and more intricate physics simulation. Essentially you would be distributing the physics across many processors, then player interactions would be fed into that. Thus there would be a single physics simulation occurring for everyone, instead of the more typical method where each client is performing its own simulation on local objects and simply reporting back to the server the raw position of various affected entities.
Whether the actual rendering also takes place at the server level or not doesn't matter - the position of the objects would managed by the servers. This would allow vastly more realistic scenarios, especially for MMOs. You could get into things like erosion, plant growth, branches falling off of trees, etc. IMO, visually games are pretty good, and the problem is now the kinematics, nuances and ambiance of the virtual world itself, and not just the more superficial eye-candy (pixels).
Better known as 318230.
of course that would post likely bring half the Internet to its knees but hey a guy can dream.
(challenge for an animator create a tummy rub animation that can be used with the WereHouse Dire Wolf)
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I think this is a smart move by OnLive.
My experience with the service showed the technology worked, but the pricing model sucked. There was no way I was going to pay almost full price for a game I don't actually own. It would be like Netflix asking $19.99 for every movie you wanted to stream. A monthly fee for all you can eat would have been much better. Of course OnLive was at the mercy of the game publishers who, I'm guessing, didn't make a Netflix-like business model possible.
If OnLive can get games produced directly for their service they'll have more control over the pricing model. MMO games are a good choice because their players are already accustomed to paying a monthly charge. WoW is popular, in part, because it sacrifices high-end graphics so it can run on low-end hardware that your average casual gamer has. Imagine a MMO with Crysis level graphics that can run on a netbook. That's an advantage game developers might be interested in. Another advantage for developers is near zero effort spent on anti-cheat mechanisms. There are no local files to hack, and the network stream is just a video feed and input controls.
It could also translate into much better AI. For MMO AI is very important.
To me this is like the worst case scenario. Bad enough that OnLive might make an otherwise good looking game look and play like shit, but now they're going the rest of the mile and saying that games should be changed and designed for the service.
No, OnLive, go fuck yourself. Your idea will never work technically or logistically and you need to hurry up and die.
Schnapple
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A realtime raytracer written in JS would be better, one would guess, than the realtime raytracer that you yourself have written, or indeed than any of the raytracers written by the commenters on this thread, by virtue of it being written at all in anything; had you or they ever written a realtime raytracer, you could be excused for thinking that the fact that the others did not reflects poorly on them. As it does.
Amazing native image is useless when streamed with compression to 60% of the quality.
With NVIDIA entering this market, how relevant is OnLive?
you can do CGI essentially realtime
So, wth have video games been doing thus far?
Being able to buy a game on physical media, insert it in my game PC which is not connected to the Internet, and play it is my only unchangable criteria for whether or not I buy a game.
Anybody else sick of 'CGI' having totally unrealistic inertia and gravity models, rendering (no pun intended) all the hard work useless, since it's always obvious that the CGI isn't real? Just watch Gollum in Lord of the Rings jump off anything, or just his general movement, or the recent Planet of the Apes movie, or ANY movie that uses CGI - why did the company (or companies) that wrote the programs for this, deliberately set up the inertia and gravity models incorrectly? It's not as if it's difficult to do - the basic equations of motion will always give realistic results, so what did they do to change them, and why on earth would anybody do that?
Stationery, modern CGI looks incredible, but as soon as it moves, you know it isn't real. Why does nobody on these teams do something about this, when they put in so much hard work on the models themselves?
Yea that`s what I am talking about. High quality games based on browsers. I bet they can easily do it.
But that would require quite good processors.
Now *that's* revolutionary!
The only reason I would go for this over the game running on my local machine is that it could make it much more difficult to cheat in multiplayer games.
Lie 'aimbots' that read the games state, and fake input to automatically shoot opponents; 'warping', where fake movement commands are sent to the server; 'wallhacking' where obstacles are rendered transparent, etc.
Some automation would still be possible, with image recognition and virtual input device drivers, but at least the bots couldn't do anything the players couldn't, and simply changing the textures/model occasionally would screw with that.
Even locked down platforms like XBox 360 and PS3 have hackers cheating on them from what I hear; you just can't trust the client end.
I live in the middle of nowhere Okanogan county Washington. Even this far out, i have access to a 10 meg connection. My computer recently just died but I don't worry about gaming, why? Because my useless little single core netbook can run onlive perfectly. The latency is observable only if you're paying attention. When I focus on the game, I completely lose any sense of my actions not being performed 'on time.'
The video compression can suck sometimes because I don't get to see the true beauty of the games the artists worked so hard to make and that's lamentable for sure.
But my netbook with a usb mouse and keyboard and HDMI out is the perfect gaming computer now. I have high hopes for the technology.
It's better than the original because I sell it over the internet.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
OnLive's had a tough twelve months any way you look at it, but as a new profile of the cloud game streaming service points out, throughout it all, service never dropped, and the number of platforms it's on keeps growing. Up next is the tiny Ouya console, but in a wide-ranging interview, OnLive's general manager talks up plans to bring MMOs to the service, and even a whole new type of video game, one that will run on many servers, not just one PC. http://mastlists.com/