Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
That's funny, I read the title as "OnLive's Epic Plan For a New Way To Screw Its Employees"
Forget constrained by bandwidth, the real problem is latency. Unless they can put a data center in every city they plan to service they can basically forget about it.
I live in a major city and have a pretty fast connection, I tried OnLive a bit last year and felt the video stream was still way too compressed. Why have real-time rendering in a game if the stream of it is going to be filled with artifacts and a capped frame rate?
But if you're not constrained by computing power, you could do all of your 3D rendering using a real time ray-tracer written in Java Script!
Or you could just, you know, get the PC version of the game and install it on your laptop?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Guess: They have sold a lie to investors and are stuck in it.