Why Project Flare Might Just End the Console War

An anonymous reader writes "Project Flare, the new server side gaming technology from Square Enix, turned heads when it was announced last week. The first tech demos do little more than show the vast number of calculations it can handle with hundreds of boxes tumbling down in Deus Ex, but the potential is there to do much more than just picture-in-picture feeds in MMOs. As a new article points out, what's most interesting is the potential to use the technology for games that use more than one system — OnLive may have used this tech before, but only to play games you can buy on discs in the shops anyway, but the future is in games that need the equivalent of dozens of PS4s or Xbox Ones to power them. Ubisoft has already partnered with Square on the project."

Comments

IMO, it is not going to work

[faragon]

Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine there'd be some scalability advantages for specific use-cases (re-use of assets, models, animations and the game world across multiple instances of the game), so MMOs could generally benefit from this approach because many users share the same content at the same time, while it would be close to useless for single-player games where basically every player has different content on-screen and in-game than every other player.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[drinkypoo]

Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.

One example is to provide functionality which cannot be provided by the console machines themselves. For example, games for the Xbox 180 are going to have the option to use Azure to run game servers. One of the major frustrations of console gaming today is that one of the game consoles has to play server.

From the summary, though, the idea is to provide games more powerful than what your console can actually run. With a large enough playerbase it might actually be feasible. It costs a lot of CPU to perform a lot of physics calculations, but if you only have to perform them once for a whole bunch of players' updates because they're all looking at the same thing, then you're going to save some cycles there.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[mwvdlee]

It's basically a way to keep the price of consoles at a point where people will still buy them, while being able to offer the level of processing power that would be too expensive. I'm sure the monthly subscriptions will cover cost of datacenters and power consumption.
I don't know if it's vendor lock-in, but atleast this is a way to offer paying customers a better experience than pirates instead of the other way around with current DRM.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Its very simple - power savings, and cheaper thin consoles for end users. Why spend $500 on PS4 at home when you can get a cheap client for under $100 and a $10/month subscription to such a cloud service, that would essentially be video-on-demand with input/output capability? This would not work too well for multiplayer because of the latency between user-server-user, but would be great for single player.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[abies]

Are reallly contemporary FPS games calculating physics separately on each machine? Given that physic calcs tend to be non exact and a bit of chaos theory you could end up in really different worlds very soon.
If we are just talking about moving 'server' from one of player consoles to the dedicated datacenter (like most 'normal' games do it), then it hardly looks to be exciting?

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[drinkypoo]

Are reallly contemporary FPS games calculating physics separately on each machine?

The answer is sort of and also sometimes. I can't actually speak to FPS specifically, but in GTAV the game clearly does independent physics calculations when it thinks you're far away from other players. You can tell because things get squirrely when you catch up to a lagged player, or when a lagged player catches up to you. The game doesn't bother to synchronize events which it decides can't affect other players.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Moryath]

Works great till you realize the USA is currently worse than a third-world country in terms of broadband penetration and up/down speeds...

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[WaffleMonster]

It's basically a way to keep the price of consoles at a point where people will still buy them, while being able to offer the level of processing power that would be too expensive.

Current consoles are well beyond the point of diminishing returns with regards to graphics power while cost of replicating existing capabilities keep getting cheaper year after year.

I don't know if it's vendor lock-in, but atleast this is a way to offer paying customers a better experience than pirates instead of the other way around with current DRM.

On what planet does high latency translate into a better experience?

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[epyT-R]

The physics stuff is done on the server. The non interactive animations are done clientside. However, the clients have code to anticipate the server's next state, 'correcting' itself when the prediction fails to match. This results in smoother animation and reduced apparent lag.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[epyT-R]

so then it's the cost of the console+per publisher subscriptions+console vendor subscription+internet subscription...

Yuck..

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

That's even a fail point. Physics are regularly parallel computation, much better fit to a GPU than a brute force computer farm.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, with a proper understanding in place, you can have the NSA supply the power free of charge in return for access to the client hardware (mic, cam, email, banking details).

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[epyT-R]

1. The AV quality would be inferior in framerate and image quality, as would the gameplay, even in single player. The lag would be atrocious.
2. There's the xbl/psn subscription, then there's the game publisher subscription that pays for their banks of servers, then there's the $60 game price on top of that.

It's not really that great a deal for the consumer, but it does give the publishers total control over your access to the game you purchased.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[SuricouRaven]

Write a mod for ut2k4 and you'll soon start seeing how it works. The local game runs a simulation, but subject to correction by the server. Extrapolating events until the packets catch up. Really latency-sensitive things like sniping are handled locally. This can lead to some very strange things happening at times:

1. Run past a window.
2. Clear the window.
3. Your movement is passed to the server, and then to another player.
4. Other player snipes you.
5. Snipe victory is reported back to the server, then to you.
6. Half a second after passing the window, you drop dead. Headshot. Even though from your perspective, you were in a place you should have been out of sight. Serves you right for running past a sniper-visible window.

Generally the game is good enough that almost all of this is transparent though. Only the exceptionally observent notice it. Still rather strange to code for, as everything you write is actually being executed three times in parallel (On the server, on the client, and on everyone else's client), and you need to make sure that all three executions eventually give the same result, even if not at quite the same moment.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[WaffleMonster]

Its very simple - power savings, and cheaper thin consoles for end users.

What power savings? Power is being consumed somewhere else where as a customer YOU are paying for that too. Lets not forget about additional power requirements required to push insane number of real-time bits for trivial reasons over the Internet.

This would not work too well for multiplayer because of the latency between user-server-user, but would be great for single player.

Since everyone would experience input latency and there is no network latency for the multi-player link latency would be about the same persistent problem whether it were single or multiplayer game. The only lag assuming lack of operator incompetence would be in the form of input delay with very limited opportunities to compensate with prediction algorithms. Nobody who plays on anything approaching a competitive basis would touch this thing.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[im_thatoneguy]

Because consoles aren't something most people use 24/7. I probably use my 360 about 2-3 hours per week. It's not at all challenging to see the opportunity for increased efficiency. Why should everyone have a full powered machine that only is used 2-3% of the time. 2-3% usage is the perfect situation for usage based rentals.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[WaffleMonster]

Because consoles aren't something most people use 24/7. I probably use my 360 about 2-3 hours per week. It's not at all challenging to see the opportunity for increased efficiency. Why should everyone have a full powered machine that only is used 2-3% of the time. 2-3% usage is the perfect situation for usage based rentals.

Good luck improving on the power button.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically you do it locally and correct your guess with the server's correct result later on. You can't depend on the server to do all calculations for you because of the high latency.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[The MAZZTer]

AFAIK with server<-&grclient you have all clients doing physics calculations BUT they are only used for prediction; the server updates the final position and orientation using its own physical calculations (but since the clients are predicting it can do it with a low-resolution in terms of time).

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[rsilvergun]

Don't forget the ISPs have more or less killed net neutrality and will soon be charging $$$ for bandwidth on the lines run with your tax dollars.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[0123456]

Good luck improving on the power button.

With my old PC, 'powered off' still took about 7W from the wall. Unplugging was certainly an improvement.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[aaaaaaargh!]

It's basically a way to keep the price of consoles at a point where people will still lease them, while being able to offer the level of processing power that would be too expensive.

Fixed that for you. This has nothing to do with buying anything, it's a temporary lease and the servers will be shut off sooner than later.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[abies]

Thanks for clarification. But this only proves that whatever they are planning doesn't help with this - if they are already going to transfer something from the server, then they can transfer real stuff.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is the 2-3 hours per week you use your console is likely to be the same 2-3 hours that many, many other people use their console. If you could have one single data center streaming video to every client in the world this would not be an issue -- different timezones would go a long way towards assuring a certain average number of active users at any given time. However, latency makes that impossible. Consequently you need to have a data center for each region (for some relatively small definition of region), which puts you right back into the problem of having most of the users in a certain region having the same (or similar) timezone and thus the same (or similar) prime-time.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[clockwise_music]

Works great till you realize the USA is currently worse than a third-world country in terms of broadband penetration and up/down speeds...

Sorry, have you been to any third world countries? In many you're lucky if you can get dial-up speeds, yet alone a constant connection.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Somebody Is Using My]

For example, games for the Xbox 180 are going to have the option to use Azure to run game servers.

Although apparently, this is not without its down side:

Xbox One's Cloud Servers May Have to Reboot and Update Mid-Session, Says Microsoft

While there may be some advantage for XBox-exclusive games, I can't see this taking off in general. It adds yet another layer of complexity, and can't be used in multi-platform games (and given the current market, many games require a multiple
platform release to be profitable). Not to mention one of the strengths of a console platform is its consistency; developers didn't have to worry about different hardware and software configurations affecting their game; the evolving and frequently updated servers mentioned in the article seems the antithesis of this concept.

Re: IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

That *was* the point.

Have you shared a dial up connection over a cafe wifi ?

Been somewhere with a choice between 3G and quotas or dial up ?

America !

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[khchung]

Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.

How about 100% cheat prevention? When all the computing is done centrally, how could you possibly cheat in the game anymore?

Plus, it totally eliminated the lag factor in FPS, as only the central server do the processing and rendering. Rubberbanding and blinking/shifting enemies will be eliminated.

The only lag now comes between your end to the server, which, while non-zero, is at least consistent from game to game.

With only 1 copy of the world, then the number of players will only be limited by the number of CPU doing rendering from the POV of each player, and that is probably easier to scale as the rendering process is read-only. So you can have MASSIVE number of players in the same game, imagine hundreds of player all in the same battlefield, and that limit can be increased by a server upgrade instead of waiting 5 years for another console generation.

Aren't these reasons good ones?

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[wwalker]

Sniper rifle should be the *least* latency-sensitive weapon. In real life, no sniper can hit a running target at any reasonable distance (unless they are running directly towards, or away). More so if the target is passing by a window and is only visible for a fraction of a second, which makes any sort of leading practically impossible.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Smauler]

Why spend $500 on PS4 at home when you can get a cheap client for under $100 and a $10/month subscription to such a cloud service

Because if those were the two options when I bought my PS3, the first would have cost me $500 by now, and the second would have cost me $940 by now.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[gl4ss]

well then the question is why didn't you subscribe to onlive?

it's not like this is a new idea in any way.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Dodgy G33za]

Unless they have an aimbot

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Dahamma]

You could say the same thing about MANY consumer "cloud" services, and that app model seems to be doing fine...

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[drinkypoo]

That's even a fail point. Physics are regularly parallel computation, much better fit to a GPU than a brute force computer farm.

So you'd put some GPUs in your farm. This is rocket surgery?

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[cgenman]

For network gaming, physics engines get rewritten with deterministic results. This can include very base-level things like re-writing platform code, as the platforms handle floating point calculations differently.

It takes a lot to get your physics simulation to be deterministic, but every game out there with multiplayer has to do it. Really, it's the player inputs that cause problems.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[denmarkw00t]

Sure, but you also get a lot of good hits out of knowing where doorways and passages behind walls are: I've sniped a number of people behind walls because I knew, at spawn, there would be a high chance of *somebody* being behind it - given the narrow passageway and the odd curiosity of players going "should I step out there...," the chances for a hit on that wall are insanely high. If you train on a frequented path in an FPS, other than Battlefield which is HUGE, and shoot one round every 5 seconds after spawn, you'll probably hit something. Probably. IRL? You generally don't "know the map" IRL, so the odds drop a lot.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[FatLittleMonkey]

Not necessarily. While twitchy, immediate reaction needs to happen at a low latency, any broader environmental modelling, lighting and background rendering can absorb greater latency without harming the game-play. So the regional server farm can push off the heavier load of the latency-tolerant processing to more distant servers that aren't being utilised fully. You might see three layers to the game, the press-a-control-something-happens layer on the console, the things-reacting-immediately layer at the regional server, and everything else (including pre-rendering feeding the other two layers) happening wherever there's a spare cycle on the grid.

Or you can just charge more for peak play.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

>How about 100% cheat prevention? When all the computing is done centrally, how could you possibly cheat in the game anymore?
Most games have all, or nearly all, of the processing happening on the server as it is. Doesn't stop cheaters. Sure, they can't exactly just memory edit the amount of gold/points/health/whatever they have anymore, but there are an infinite number of other ways to cheat. Think about botters; that doesn't rely on client-side processing. Aimbots in FPS games do not need to rely on client-side processing (from the game, anyways) either; they will detect enemies and simulate mouse movement to auto-aim.

>Plus, it totally eliminated the lag factor in FPS, as only the central server do the processing and rendering. Rubberbanding and blinking/shifting enemies will be eliminated.
No it doesn't. In fact, it's going to make it worse. It might *look* different, but the actual effect will be more detrimental to your gameplay. If you have issues with lag with a very, very low amount of information being transferred (ie. position updates), then what the fuck makes you think upping it to uncompressed 1080p video streaming is going to improve it? Instead, it'll be like trying to watch a Youtube video that is constantly trying to buffer. Even if, and I stress "if," it were to stream halfway decently for you, you are still going to be feeling the effects of the lag. Everything will feel sluggish and the controls will always seem to trigger actions that happen much later than when you pressed the button.

>With only 1 copy of the world, then the number of players will only be limited by the number of CPU doing rendering from the POV of each player, and that is probably easier to scale as the rendering process is read-only. So you can have MASSIVE number of players in the same game, imagine hundreds of player all in the same battlefield, and that limit can be increased by a server upgrade instead of waiting 5 years for another console generation.
This can already be done and it does not need that the video output be rendered on the server which requires even more massive servers.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[LordWabbit2]

Oh please! Come to South Africa and experience third world bandwidth! Just because you are lagging behind other first world countries does not mean you are lagging behind third world countries.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[TheLink]

Everyone suffers from input latency anyway. The difference is with local side rendering the game clients can just draw what they think would happen ASAP without waiting for the server. This hides the latency a fair bit. The server just says some time later "Nope, sorry you're dead" or "No, you are actually in this position" or "It happened about the way you thought it would".

With the rendering done server side, to hide some latency issues the servers could render and stream spherical/360 video - e.g. you turn and the "client" can show that view of the video immediately, rather than ping time later. But positional movement and other stuff will still lag by ping time. This is a showstopper for "twitch" games but not others.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the sniper rifle in UT2k4 is a gun that basically shoots a bolt of lightning. Leading not required.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[sjwt]

Yes, you poor americans with your unlimited bandwidth, and horrible pings for cable @ 50ms..

Move to another continent and discover what its like to be laughed at for local servers, leaving you with a base ping of 200+, and paying $100 a month For ADSL2 with a 200gig limit.. Square Enix would have to be investing in Data Centers all over the place, and somehow find about 100Trillion to raise the worlds data access to above an average of under 20k.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[sjwt]

LOL! Thats getting this super awesome other world experience the GP is wishing for.

Re: IMO, it is not going to work

[sjwt]

Yes, America.. The selfentitlment that they should be getting a T5 connection to every coffee shop for free internet access...

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[wonkey_monkey]

Woah... dude... what if, like, that's why we have relativity. The computers running the universe are on Comcast.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[wonkey_monkey]

Also, I've got some fucking Jaffa Cakes in my coat pocket.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention the rotting elephant in the room is the ISPs are all going with worse data caps and as Onlive found out one huge Internet bill because you ran over your cap and that is a customer you'll never get back and this doesn't even take into account latency.

So there really is no upshot for the user and the cons outweigh the pros..yeah..good luck with that.

Re: IMO, it is not going to work

[loufoque]

South Africa isn't a third world country.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Zebedeu]

What power savings? Power is being consumed somewhere else where as a customer YOU are paying for that too. Lets not forget about additional power requirements required to push insane number of real-time bits for trivial reasons over the Internet.

By polling all processing power in the same place you can optimize a number of things compared to distributed clients:
- It's more efficient to cool a huge data centre than a number of small consoles which have other design constraints such as low price, low noise and small footprint;
- You can build the data centre where energy is cheaper;
- You can more easily upgrade the server hardware when newer, more efficient technology appears;
- As someone else noted, you'll have many clients requesting the same calculations (say, in multiplayer games), which only need to be done once by the server.

Hopefully those combined savings put together can offset the extra power requirements for all the added bandwidth being generated.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[khchung]

>How about 100% cheat prevention? When all the computing is done centrally, how could you possibly cheat in the game anymore?
Most games have all, or nearly all, of the processing happening on the server as it is. Doesn't stop cheaters. Sure, they can't exactly just memory edit the amount of gold/points/health/whatever they have anymore, but there are an infinite number of other ways to cheat. Think about botters; that doesn't rely on client-side processing. Aimbots in FPS games do not need to rely on client-side processing (from the game, anyways) either; they will detect enemies and simulate mouse movement to auto-aim.

Think again. When all processing is done in the server and only the screen is sent to the client, wall hack becomes impossible. Aimbot? Your aimbot better be able to identify an opponent's head from the displayed graphics. Not the say that's as difficult as in doing so in real video footage, but it raised the bar so high, that anyone able to pull that off would be quite an expert in pattern and facial recognition, and not just a matter of finding the coordinate for the opponent's location in the data stream.

>Plus, it totally eliminated the lag factor in FPS, as only the central server do the processing and rendering. Rubberbanding and blinking/shifting enemies will be eliminated.
No it doesn't. In fact, it's going to make it worse. It might *look* different, but the actual effect will be more detrimental to your gameplay. If you have issues with lag with a very, very low amount of information being transferred (ie. position updates), then what the fuck makes you think upping it to uncompressed 1080p video streaming is going to improve it? Instead, it'll be like trying to watch a Youtube video that is constantly trying to buffer. Even if, and I stress "if," it were to stream halfway decently for you, you are still going to be feeling the effects of the lag. Everything will feel sluggish and the controls will always seem to trigger actions that happen much later than when you pressed the button.

You assumed current technology for streaming video is the only solution. But given that the server had all the original 3D information to generate the video frame to begin with, many other techniques becomes available. E.g. Regardless of resolution, the server can just send the polygons need to be drawn to the client side for a frame, and then the changes for the next frame, etc. Which would reduce the data size tremendously. Instead of 1920x1080x24 bits = ~6MB a frame, the position of 10 thousand vertices will only take ~40KB assuming 4 bytes each. Textures can be stored locally, then the 100KB from the server could give enough information to the client to render the image.

As for the control latency, it is there in current FPS anyway, it's just a matter of how well the game masks it. Actually, it is worse in the current FPS, as my movement really have to make it, not only the first hop to the server, but make one more hop to my opponent's machine for me to avoid getting hit from his POV.

If you played FPS then you will know about turning a corner to hide, only 2 seconds later to have the game tell you that you actually got hit and killed before you turned that corner, because your opponent lagged so badly he didn't get the data of your movement until after he already shot you.

>With only 1 copy of the world, then the number of players will only be limited by the number of CPU doing rendering from the POV of each player, and that is probably easier to scale as the rendering process is read-only. So you can have MASSIVE number of players in the same game, imagine hundreds of player all in the same battlefield, and that limit can be increased by a server upgrade instead of waiting 5 years for another console generation.
This can already be done and it does not need that the video output be rendered on the server which requires even more massive servers.

This can already be done?? Which FPS running on console give you games with 100+ players in it?

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[interkin3tic]

Sure, but there are still going to be benefits to this. A lot of people do have broadband (be that broadband in the true sense or broadband as defined by ISPs.) If you don't have broadband, you likely aren't playing games online anyway. And I'd rather have one less bottleneck. If it's just my connection limiting game performance rather than my console, that's at least one less barrier to more advanced games.

(That said, I'm not going to be buying a console anytime soon, do not have broadband, and don't have time to be playing console games anyway.)

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[zippthorne]

but.. is it the same 2-3%? It only works if everyone is using a different 2-3% slice...

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Talderas]

MAG for the PS3 supports 256 players in a single match.

BF3, at least for the PC, was experimented with and could easily support up to 256 players. The thing is that BF3 made the decision to limit it to 64 players max as going much above that wasn't desired or improve the experience.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Control-Z]

Same sort of thing happens in Planetside 2. Granted the servers have hundreds or thousands of simultaneous players but it's annoying going behind cover and then getting shot. It's not the norm though.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense.

Why do you think Ubisoft is jumping on it? EA will be quick to follow (if they aren't already involved).

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

All they really have to do is not offer any titles via any other platform. Then they can charge whatever they want for as poor a service as they want to offer. It's all about finding ways to prevent people from actually having and/or using what they buy in the name of profits.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anubis IV]

I've heard your line repeated before around here, and it's time it was finally put to rest, since it grossly overstates the problem and muddles any attempts at rational discourse. Going by your own metrics for judging success, how many actual third-world countries do you see above the US in these lists?

Table of broadband penetration rates by country (sort the table by %)
Mean upload speed rankings by country
Mean download speed rankings by country

By my count, there are none that are ahead across those rankings.

Unless you're sticking to the original definition of "third-world country" (i.e. one that was neither associated with NATO and its allies nor the Soviet bloc and its allies), rather than the modern meaning of the term, I don't think it's fair to generalize in such a way as you have. Admittedly, there are a few developing nations ahead of the US on some of those lists, but they appear to have done so by sacrificing one metric for the benefit of the others (e.g. Senegal is ranked #10 globally for upload speed and #14 for download speed, putting it ahead of nearly all of the developed Western world, but its low single-digit penetration rate ranks in the 100s and indicates that only the elite of society are benefitting from those speeds). At least in my glancing over the lists, no developing nations stood out to me as being ahead in terms of both speed and penetration rate, though I'll admit I may have missed them.

Could the US use improvements in this area? Absolutely, and I want to be clear on that point. But what I consistently notice is that people, particularly those who have either never left the US to experience other parts of the world, or else those from smaller countries who have never traveled across a single country as large as the US, have no appreciation for just how difficult of a problem the US faces as compared to many other developed nations, simply due to its massive size. When you compare the US against countries like Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, and Russia, which face similar (though clearly not identical) issues of scale, you find that the US is generally either comparable or ahead for most of those metrics (insert the requisite asterisk here with a note about how Macau, Hong Kong, etc. are not indicative of mainland China as a whole).

Again, improvements are still needed in these areas, but it's hard to have a rational discussion when you have one side overstating the situation to such an extreme. The fact is, the US' system is roughly comparable or ahead of countries that face comparable issues of scale. Which isn't to say that we should pat each other on the back, congratulate ourselves for a job well done, and think that everything's rosy. Rather, it's merely to say that things are probably about where they should be expected to be and that they're actually pretty decent when compared to most of the world, but that we clearly need to keep working at making it better, since there's lots of room for improvement.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Ravaldy]

I can see how you would think that going thin client would consume more power but this theory has been tested before and favours the thin client.

Link to one of many studies: http://preilly.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/virtualization-thin-clients-and-energy-consumption/

I can't find a link to this white paper I remember seeing. It showed the power bill before. For an organization that had 200 employees, all server hardware was in house and the power bill saving was roughly 20%. This bill included more than just computers so this suggest the saving was more than 20%.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Ravaldy]

Yes but you would have a modern box all the time. You would not have to shell another $500 + accessories to stay updated.

The solution they are offering is to provide top notch gaming at low cost. Currently the consoles are good but they fade in comparison to the PC gaming experience.

FYI, I'm not in favour of one or another BUT this approach does solve the H/W limitation issue as long as the latency doesn't become a major negative factor.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your aimbot better be able to identify an opponent's head from the displayed graphics... anyone able to pull that off would be quite an expert in pattern and facial recognition"
I've worked on a number of bots for dozens of games, a few wallhacks and aimbots for FPSs, and numerous other cheats. I can tell you for a fact that this has already been done. In fact, I've even wrote up a simple bot to do it and I'm not an expert in pattern or facial recognition. It's all about finding ways around problems. Admittedly, these types of systems are not nearly as quick or accurate as the "normal" method.

Next, you suggest having the server instead send a list of vertices to the client for actual rendering to cut down on bandwidth. While I agree that would be better than sending over the full video, there's still an issue here. Currently, games send over the bare minimum updates for objects such as players. Again, I reiterate that if a user experiences lag with the bare minimum positional updates, how exactly is increasing the bandwidth required going to alleviate that issue? It won't. It'll make it worse. The difference being that instead of maybe a player rubberbanding a bit and being able to use dead-reckoning to smooth things out, you instead get the full screen completely frozen.

As for turning a corner and being shot anyways, yes. I'm well aware of it. There's two issues here.
1) The game is poorly made and allows client-side hit detection. This is bad. Any FPS that allows this needs to get it's shit together. This has been abused since FPSs first went online. Not even just while lagging, but having an "aimbot" that doesn't need to aim at all: instead just spam the server with the "I just killed a guy with a headshot" packet and take out everyone on the whole map all at the same time. If you ever tried to play SOCOM on the Playstation 2, you're more than familiar with this.
So why is this done? Well, either do to laziness (or not knowing any better), or because it allows for some lag tolerance. If the game is player-hosted (as in no central server, any player can operate as a host), this is common as if a player wanted to cheat, they could just host the game themselves and cheat away. Alternatively, it makes the game playable for people that do have slight lag or occasional jitter. Imagine never being able to hit anyone because you're always a fraction of a second behind (and imagine it hard, because this is exactly what you're hoping for).

2) Again, if you're lagging, you're lagging. Increasing the amount of traffic you need to send for every update will NOT fix this. Not only will you definitely always be playing with outdated information, but this system also completely breaks dead-reckoning. In the example you gave of turning a corner but being shot anyways, you still have that exact problem. Only, instead of you lagging only slightly and thinking you just made it to that corner, everything your character sees is back in time and you were shot before you made it that far. You wouldn't even know if you walked far enough to be able to turn that corner.

"Which FPS running on console give you games with 100+ players in it?"
I am not a console gamer, nor do I play many FPS games anymore. There has been a few, though, but they've mostly been failed experiments. Turns out, throwing even more douchebags into a room together doesn't improve a game for some reason. Things quickly become chaotic and uninteresting as the gameplay becomes even less focused on skill but rather on numbers. How about MMOs? They handle millions of players and do so with current technology. I do know that there are a number of MMO FPSs in development, but these don't interest me so I have not been keeping up on them.

Still, the challenges of handling many players in an FPS do not require that each player has their video rendered on the server and sent over. It becomes an issue of handling the physics for thousands of objects at the same time on the server. I was speaking with one of the developers of America's A

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how your qualification on spawn camping in real life is that "You generally don't 'know the map' IRL" not, you know, the fact that I'm not going to respawn when I die :).

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Your statement is flawed, you need to replace "ISPs" with "incumbent telecoms". While all the owners of the existing links (the incumbent telecoms) are ISPs at this point, not all ISPs are incumbent telecoms that are trying to charge outrageous prices for ridiculous service.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the ISPs have more or less killed net neutrality and will soon be charging $$$ for bandwidth on the lines run with your tax dollars.

This.

If groups like the RIAA or MPAA had their way, all internet access (world-wide) would be metered and a percentage of the cost would be taken to "cover" their losses :p

As stupid as that might sound to most people here, there is a real chance of that happening in the future... And if it does, then Cloud Game better be CHEAP or it'll not have a chance with the "hardcore" gamers - streaming HD screens is way more bandwidth consuming then sending movement/action/event information back and forth.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[Reapy]

Square cares a lot about japan though, everyone walking around with portal devices up the wazoo. Imagine you could get your 'core gamer' games to penetrate the mobile space, tech like this would do it.

Re: IMO, it is not going to work

[Uberbah]

Depends on how much melanin you have.

PCs win again

[Anonymous Coward]

>but the future is in games that need the equivalent of dozens of PS4s or Xbox Ones to power them
Or, you know, just a decent PC.
The fact that the new consoles utilize processors suited for low-profile notebooks is a joke

Re:PCs win again

[Dadoo]

The fact that the new consoles utilize processors suited for low-profile notebooks is a joke

Shhhhh! Weaker consoles are easier to emulate on PCs.

Console DRM?

[Hsien-Ko]

Imagine your game not starting because the 'physics' servers are down or you can't connect to them.....

Re:Console DRM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not much of a problem when you're dealing with an MMO-type game that requires you to be online anyway. Not more of a problem than the game-server being down, anyway.

Re:Console DRM?

[PhrostyMcByte]

No need to imagine. It's already happened plenty.

Re:Console DRM?

[Baloroth]

In theory, a properly designed system would have a local physics engine that takes over when the remote engine is unavailable, albeit at reduced fidelity.

Of course, that's not how it will end up working, especially with Ubisoft involved. The real goal here is more control disguised as improvements.

Re:Console DRM?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Not much of a problem when you're dealing with an MMO-type game that requires you to be online anyway. Not more of a problem than the game-server being down, anyway.

The bigger problem will be getting game developers to take on the challenge (and risk, if it means that they can only sell their game to people who are paying extra for Xbox Live Platinum Cloud Physics Foundation Edition Home Ultimate) of creating a type of game that, like the MMO, is only possible in the context of this remote capability, rather than having the remote capability be an obvious cash grab/lockin attempt. Think of how much people liked the 'online' features of SimCity's recent reboot... It was obvious to all that it's value was close to zero to them, and its costs were substantially greater, and lo, great was their wrath.

In the hypothetical case of the game that could only be realized with 'Flare', people will grumble; but put up with it. If it's transparent to all that you need a monthly subscription and a fast broadband connection just so that the "generic glass fragments flying outward" effect that the art guy spent all day tweaking to look exactly like it does in the movies can be removed and replaced by a realtime finite element analysis of the window and computational fluid dynamics simulations of the trajectories taken by each glass fragment (totally different on the maps with higher atmospheric pressure, worth it!) in real time? That's a tech demo, not a feature.

Re:Console DRM?

[bondsbw]

Not everything that requires the Internet is DRM.

And frankly, even if DRM was the primary intent, it's one of the less annoying DRMs since 1) online multiplayer, by definition, requires the Internet, and 2) economics:

Let's take the Xbox One. Microsoft claims to be adding 3 more Xbox One units for each one sold in the cloud, but really that's based on an average or maximum use situation. In reality they will have 300,000 cloud machines powering the number of users that might be gaming at any one time. Compare that to the cost of quadrupling the power of the Xbox One in the 80M consumer machines that will be sold over the next several years. And that doesn't even touch on the cost efficiency of heavily optimized power and cooling conditions in a server farm.

Of course, the cloud will be working on the latency-agnostic calculations, things like AI and up-front scene lighting calculations and of course simply serving multiplayer games and anything that needs to be calculated the same for all players. But that frees up your local system resources for those things that can't be offloaded to the cloud.

I'll take a bit of DRM for that.

Re:Console DRM?

[im_thatoneguy]

Imagine your house is on fire. It would be hard to play games in that situation as well.

Re:Console DRM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine your house is on fire. It would be hard to play games in that situation as well.

I see they hired the mafia to handle difficult sales.

Re:Console DRM?

[khchung]

Imagine your game not starting because the 'physics' servers are down or you can't connect to them.....

And how is that different from how I cannot play multiplayer BF3 on PS3 when EA's or Sony's servers are down?

Some games are intended to be multiplayer only, you can't play them when the server is down anyway.

Re:Console DRM?

[RedHackTea]

Can someone mod this up? Haha.

Please insert coin to play

[Anonymous Coward]

The equivalent of dozens of PS4s are not cheap for a datacenter to buy and operate. If this happens expect to pay for your games per the hour. No more buy a console + game and then play hours per day for several months or even years on Xbox live or elsewhere.
Then it will be totally metered access. I can see why Square would like it but I can't really see the benefit for gamers.

Re:Please insert coin to play

[im_thatoneguy]

Netflix has datacenter charger but they still have a flat rate. The Xbox One has free datacenter hours. The reason is that most consoles sit idle 90% of the time. If I can buy 1 console and sell it for half the price of the console permanently to 10 people and they only use it 10% of the time then I can most likely make a profit.

Re:Please insert coin to play

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There might be some feature (I can't think of a killer app offhand; but I'm not excluding the possibility) that would make it worth it, because it simply couldn't be done otherwise (everybody knows that MMORPGs are priced and on a lease in a way that single player or party-level multiplayer RPGs aren't; but you can't really get the 'MMO' in 'MMORPG' any other way, and people seem willing to trade that off); but this will be a hard sell indeed if it mostly just gets used for tech demos and incremental increases in ambient prettiness.

Even on the PC side, which tends to be a bit more willing to spend cash on hardware, the number of gamers who actually own screaming top-of-range systems is pretty small compared to the number of people who buy something good enough and call it a day. Consoles appear to be much more cost sensitive. And, while already having somebody on the hook for XBL or whatever makes billing easier, it doesn't necessarily give you much headroom to increase the price to pay for those extra server resources.

Especially given how good developers have gotten at cheating and fudging on computationally-intractable physics and graphics problems (and, as in the tragic case of more than a few games' 'ragdoll' body-physics systems, how unnatural attempts at 'real' physics can look, with twitch glitches, clipping and contorting, etc. compared to a totally faked; but artfully canned, animation) any use of this system is going to have to be rather creative to be more than incrementally better than far less computationally (and financially, if the game sells a reasonable number of units) expensive faking.

Right...

[Pinhedd]

OnLive was such a bastion of success wasn't it?

Re:Right...

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yes. I thought everybody knew that OnLive was an angular structure projecting outward from the curtain wall of an artillery fortification of success.

Re:Right...

[naff89]

2. a well-fortified position; a stronghold or citadel
3. (figuratively) a person, or thing, who strongly defends some principle

Re:Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you really shit the bed on that one.

Re:Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

This. OnLive made me laugh when I first saw them demo at GDC. But everyone was like "No, this is the future". Now that genre of tech has found a niche transmitting gameplay videos globally for PS4 - A REALLY REALLY VITAL FEATURE OF THAT PLATFORM. But "cloud gaming" is already dead.

I actually had a job in the cloud gaming industry at one point. Guess what, the economics of the industry mean you have to ram at least 5 people onto each server. The more the better. There is no viable economic model around deploying £2K of hardware per player. Multiple PS4-level machines my arse. The only way to get this to work financially is to have a global system so players go offline in one continent and come online in another, but the speed of light fucks that idea. So you're stuck with hardware that's redundant for 16 hours a day and over-subscribed the other 8. Even if only 10% of your subscribers even use the system, you've still got to generate £200 per person every couple years, while also paying the power company and the actual content owners - who are, let's not forget, used to selling at premium price points with 25% revenue share.

And that's only about a quarter of the actual technical and business reasons why this model doesn't work.

Re:Right...

[aiadot]

When it comes to gaming, technology is hardly the only variable in the success of a product. Without a large game library and preferably some exclusive content alongside significant marketing, there is no way OnLive could even compete. I'm not dismissing the technical problems of OnLive but, that from being the whole story.

Another problem is that they're the first (AFAIK) to offer a streaming gaming platform. Hardly ever pioneering business are successful, in particular when it comes to consumer electronics.

Re:Right...

[Zero__Kelvin]

So you are saying that Onlive was a defender of success ? ;-)

In the immortal words of Sgt. Hulka, "lighten up Francis".

Re:Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

OnLive was such a bastion of success wasn't it?

Please consider "paragon" in place of "bastion".

Re:Right...

[kumanopuusan]

Have you ever seen the inside of a book?

Onlive - take two

[WaffleMonster]

This reminds me of a certain coffee stand I drive by each day on my way to work.

Every few months it closes down, sold to a new owner who improves it and re-opens only to close down a few months later.

In the last few years I can count on one hand times drive thru was something other than completely empty.

Sometimes people just can't take a hint.

Re:Onlive - take two

[Zero__Kelvin]

That's weird. You would like that things would have changed with all the advances in coffee since 2005!

Re:Onlive - take two

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever owns the land is making money though.

Re:Onlive - take two

[GauteL]

Every few months it closes down, sold to a new owner who improves it and re-opens only to close down a few months later.

They are probably just bankruptcy jockeys, using "new owners" to purchase out the assets of the old company while shedding debt to gullible investors. The new store can then skim off the income and close again in a few months time, finding more gullible investors to put money into it.

Re:Onlive - take two

[Anonymous Coward]

Not investors. Money-launderers of drug money is the obvious explanation.

Great, Square ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The company that last released a good game 16 years ago. I can barely contain my excitement.

Re:Great, Square ...

[Yosho]

Thanks for being one of the people who didn't buy NieR, thus encouraging Square to stop producing games with complex characters and deep narratives.

Re:Great, Square ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I don't pay much attention to video game hype any more. You might forgive me for thinking that after 13 years of junk, it was no longer worth checking any of Square's new releases. The Metacritic and Gameranking scores (67%-69%) suggest that the title you recommend isn't all that special.

Re:Great, Square ...

[Yosho]

The Metacritic and Gameranking scores (67%-69%) suggest that the title you recommend isn't all that special.

Are we talking about the same Metacritic and Gameranking that gave Final Fantasy XIII an 83 and 84%, respectively? I'm not sure how much you should trust them if you think Square's games have been terrible for the last 16 years.

No thanks

[epyT-R]

There's a reason I've cut cable tv from my life. Being remote controlled and the only game in town, it's become overpriced, ad-laden, and content thin. If that's where gaming is going I will have to cut that too. The prospect of overpaying to 'stream' a laggy, ad-filled game experience with overly-constrained lossy-compressed AV doesn't sound inviting either. I LIKE the idea of having power under the hood locally, so to speak, just like I want server binaries for games to run my own servers and mod tools to make my own mods/maps. This way the game stays alive as long as there are interested players and doesn't die the moment it stops making money for its creators. To top it off, the current 'cloud' model for a lot of software now charges the 'owner-controlled boxed software' prices of the 90s for what amounts to a rent-a-go arcade level of service. What a rip-off.

The more computing looks like ibm's wet dream of 'service', the less interesting and more oppressive it gets. No thanks.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange that you'd mention that... I was just bitching to friends that the world's most popular console video game is now advertising to me between screens.

Obvious: latency

[De Lemming]

Even with modern broadband, latency is still an issue for these kinds of applications. In the article are some examples of currently used server side gaming enhancements, like "Forza 5 will even use cloud computing to monitor the way you drive, and alter virtual drivers’ AI (artificial intelligence) accordingly." That has no need for low latency. But if you want the environment to immediately react to players actions, there need to be low latency. And you can't remove the distance (and related network infrastructure) between the player and the data center.

Re:Obvious: latency

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Surely colo security won't suspect a thing if I bolt rack ears onto my sleeping bag (It's, an, um, nearline hot-spare storage appliance...) and scrawl "Coolant" in sharpie on my 2 liter of Mt. Dew?

Re:Obvious: latency

[PhrostyMcByte]

For a full rendered-in-the-cloud game, there are tricks you can do to minimize the impact of input latency. They are basically the same tricks that you use in today's multiplayer games. For small camera movements the game can just immediately warp the image client-side. To improve quality of the warp, some basic geometry could be sent in line with the video. For games with a HUD, it can be rendered client-side (think "pushlatency" in Quake-based FPSes).

These of course only help to hide latency, not actually remove any of it, so it wouldn't help for a racing game or FPS that depends on fast, precise reaction times.

Re:Obvious: latency

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The other issue with latency is that 'gaming' is something with pretty spiky demand over time. Evenings and weekends? The system will be hammered. During school hours and the workday? Demand minimal and largely impecunious. Holidays and vacation periods? Almost certain to be a peak large enough to provide lots of angry ranting customers (and at a time when lots and lots of other people are putzing around online, reading people's angry opinions and possibly making shopping decisions. Enjoy!).

Unless they can find some off-peak customer who will buy whatever computational capability they are selling (and this could get tricky, since Nvidia and friends tend to price hardware and enable/disable capabilities specifically to discourage cost insensitive 'pro' users from buying cheapy gamer gear rather than expensive workstation gear, so 'Flare' might have some trouble finding a crossover market), they'll be idling a hell of a lot of expensive chips, that aren't getting any better with age, for most of the day, then running into capacity crunches at peak times. That will be miserable.

Re:Obvious: latency

[Anonymous Coward]

For a full rendered-in-the-cloud game, there are tricks you can do to minimize the impact of input latency. They are basically the same tricks that you use in today's multiplayer games. For small camera movements the game can just immediately warp the image client-side. To improve quality of the warp, some basic geometry could be sent in line with the video. For games with a HUD, it can be rendered client-side (think "pushlatency" in Quake-based FPSes).

These of course only help to hide latency, not actually remove any of it, so it wouldn't help for a racing game or FPS that depends on fast, precise reaction times.

If i recall right quake1 had originally a problem with network play that it didn't include any kind of client side prediction thus creating horrible input lag for higher latencies. This was remedied later with quake world client which introduced client which was able to predict things up to a certain point to make things look more responsive than they really were. While causing some artifacts along the way it made network play over higher latencies way better experience.

However the prediction really relied on the client side computing of graphics to be able to work properly in the first place. I don't know if there is anything to be done to make situation better if the client has to deal with video footage only.

Not to mention if there are ways to emulate prediction with video footage it must be lightweight and fast enough to be any use for fast paced gaming.

Re:Obvious: latency

[Coppit]

Full disclosure: I work for NVIDIA on cloud gaming.

I was as skeptical as you about the latency. In this interview. Phil Eisler talks about 200ms of XBox + TV latency that people live with every day. (See page 2) If that's our target, then that's pretty doable, since with strategically located data centers you can get the network latency down to 20-30 ms.

In the work we're doing, we're actually focusing more on hitching in the game than latency, since the latency isn't as big a deal if you're say in the Bay Area where one of our test clouds is. Heck, I played Trine2 from the east coast and it was very playable. I wouldn't play BF4 across the country, of course. :)

There are plenty of other risks with the idea, but I wouldn't put latency at the top of the list.

Re:Obvious: latency

[viperidaenz]

20-30ms.... on a home broadband connection, anywhere in the world?
Light only travels 185miles per millisecond.

Re:Obvious: latency

[Anonymous Coward]

20-30ms.... on a home broadband connection, anywhere in the world? Light only travels 185miles per millisecond.

If that's our target, then that's pretty doable, since with strategically located data centers you can get the network latency down to 20-30 ms.

*emphasis mine*
I routinely get 30ms pings on TF servers, although the important difference there is that they are run privately.

Re:Obvious: latency

[Nivag064]

Light only travels about 300 km per millisecond.

which is about a nanosecond per foot
(while I prefer metric measurements,
this a kind of cool non-metric factoid!)

so if you see someone 10 metres away,
the light took 10 nanoseconds to reach your eyes
(and a 100 or more milliseconds for your brain to process!)

Re:Obvious: latency

[Nivag064]

argh!
second to last line should read
"the light took 33 nanoseconds to reach your eyes"

Re:Obvious: latency

[Anonymous Coward]

What's that in furlongs per fortnight?

Re:Obvious: latency

[viperidaenz]

and 29 milliseconds for the sound of them making a typo on slashdot to reach you.

Re:Obvious: latency

[Coditor]

Having worked on an MMO with customers all over the world latency is a huge problem. We had a hard enough time getting people to properly run around without all sorts of predictions on the client side often leading to seemingly irrational behavior. I shoot you then you shoot me but I die and you don't. This sort of thing would only work if the servers were everywhere and you only communicated with them nearby.

Re:Obvious: latency

[Smauler]

I used to get single digit latency sometimes on my old ISDN line, with Quake. Most of the servers I went to were sub 20 ms. Unfortunately, every broadband supplier I've used since then has been a lot worse than this... currently the best I see is about 50 :P.

does xbox one kinda do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't MS provision the equivalent of 3 xbox ones for any xbox one that comes online?

i remember reading MS did this so the developers didn't feel like that had limited horsepower.

Re:does xbox one kinda do this?

[drinkmoreyuengling]

Xbox One will be doing exactly this and will sue Square Enix out of existence for it.

Microsoft just debunked this for FPS games

[PhrostyMcByte]

Some people kept saying "It's not that bad right now, it'll work eventually!", but Microsoft just (accidentally) tested OnLive's idea for low-latency games by introducing some small input lag into Windows 8.1. Guess what? FPS gamers noticed.

Other game types which don't need super low latency, I'm sure, will eventually get here if only because game companies are still annoyingly DRM-focused and this will make piracy impossible.

Re:Microsoft just debunked this for FPS games

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair: in the case you're citing, the events are DISCARDED instead of being processed a few milliseconds later.

Latency: click ............. eventual reaction
Discarded: click ............ (nothing to see here)

Re:Microsoft just debunked this for FPS games

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how input lag is relevant. Just because everything can't be offloaded doesn't mean some parts can't be. It's not like anyone is seriously proposing the equivalent of playing FPS games over VNC.

LATENCY !! LOST PACKETS !! NAGEL !!

[Anonymous Coward]

And you care about LCD response ?? HA-HA !! I laugh in your face (marketiers !!)

FLy by night away from here !!

PC + TV

[tepples]

Except as I understand it, most people don't already have a second gaming PC in the same room as the big screen TV. They'd have to either buy another desktop PC to put by the TV or play on a laptop, and as I understand it, PS4 and Xbox One are comparable to a gaming laptop.

Re:PC + TV

[Rakhar]

Why would you need a second PC? There are plenty of ways to use your television to display without putting your PC right next to it. I have a 25 ft HDMI cable, with my computer desk in the back of the living room. The cable sits coiled by the TV when I'm not using it.

Also, if you DO get a 2nd computer for that function, it doesn't have to be a massive gaming powerhouse. You can hook up a cheap laptop and push video from your main PC to it.

Exceed your cap

[tepples]

Why spend $500 on PS4 at home when you can get a cheap client for under $100 and a $10/month subscription to such a cloud service, that would essentially be video-on-demand with input/output capability?

Monthly transfer overages. Satellite latency if you happen to live out of range of cable or fiber.

This would not work too well for multiplayer because of the latency between user-server-user, but would be great for single player.

Actually, so long as all the players' cloud sessions are running on servers in the same rack as the multiplayer game server, multiplayer would be just as good as single player.

Re:Exceed your cap

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, so long as all the players' cloud sessions are running on servers in the same rack as the multiplayer game server, multiplayer would be just as good as single player.

That's ... Not how the Internet works at all.

If you're in Assendofnowhereville, and I'm in Stuckinthecrotchoftheworld... There's every possibility that my traffic is going through a router that's decided to shit itself and drop packets, whereas your traffic is taking an entirely different, problem free route.

Re:Exceed your cap

[tepples]

If your traffic to a single-player streaming server crosses an unreliable router, your traffic to a multiplayer streaming server in the same datacenter would probably cross the same unreliable router. My point was that the streaming servers involved in a particular game are going to be on the same LAN as the game server. So if your single-player is good, your multiplayer is good, and if your single-player is bad, your multiplayer is bad.

Re:Exceed your cap

[Anonymous Coward]

If your traffic to a single-player streaming server crosses an unreliable router, your traffic to a multiplayer streaming server in the same datacenter would probably cross the same unreliable router.

Yes your traffic may but the difference between single player and multiplayer is that in single player it is just your connection that matters, in multiplayer the connections of multiple people matter.

Re:Exceed your cap

[tepples]

Think of it this way: In an MMO, does the connection of every other user on the server matter to your own experience? From the perspective of the streaming servers, it's a LAN game.

Turn-based

[tepples]

On what planet does high latency translate into a better experience?

On fictional planets in essentially turn-based games, like what Square Enix has been putting out since Dragon Quest/Warrior and Final Fantasy in the NES days. The latency doesn't have to be any better than, for example, the ATB recharge time in FFVII.

Seems pretty iffy.

[Jartan]

Basically instead of streaming the game they're talking about offloading the peak cases.

The boxes example would of been fine as a precomputed animation. I'm guessing if the player interrupts the process real-time it becomes screwed up due to latency.

No matter what the use cases are going to be somewhat limited. Calling it a game changer at this point is just silly.

My project has 37 pieces of flare...

[technosaurus]

But its OK if yours just has the minimum.

download caps and lag kill this idea

[Joe_Dragon]

download caps and lag kill this idea.

Problems

[ArcadeMan]

There's a few problems with that idea:
1. monthly caps from ISPs
2. latency
3. bandwidth

MMO group micromanagement

[Rakhar]

Given how ridiculously elitist people already get when playing MMOs, that picture-in-picture demo horrifies me. I'm sure it could be useful in some games, but please keep that as far from MMOs as possible.

I have one word for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Simcity

Engineer: We need to optimize the physics engine.

[technosaurus]

Management: But you said it was working.
Engineer: It is ... at 3 FPS on a standard PC.
Management: Perfect, we can sell it by the hour until then.
Engineer: You're kidding right?
Management: No, seriously, BTW your new project starts tomorrow.
Engineer: but....

So in the future...

[Torp]

All games will disappear when the publisher pulls the plug on the server, not only the ones from EA.

Some advantages

[Okian Warrior]

Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.

The power cost is passed down to the consumer, so it's not really an issue. If the customer/market will bear the monthly costs, then there are other advantages.

1) The game doesn't have to deal with OS differences. The engine can be built for 1 OS in 1 language, and connect to simple video frame renders on the client system. No more "not available for Mac" or "Mac/OS, not Linux".

2) The game cannot be easily pirated or hacked, since the software resides on the server.

3) The game doesn't have to deal with slow, out-of-date, or sub-optimal systems.

4) The game doesn't have to deal with systems that have foreign applications installed. No driver incompatibilities, for instance.

5) The system avoids some latency issues.

6) The system can dynamically allocate CPU effort as needed. Rather than require the client to have enough power for the most complicated scenario.

7) The players don't have to manage bug fixes, downloadable content, or upgrades. Apply the upgrade to the system, and all users are running the most recent version, automatically.

I wouldn't want centralized software for local single-use (such as text editing), but for some applications it makes sense.

The Example

[ledow]

The example video is, well, just pathetic.

Seriously, my PC could handle that now. It's hardly a "demanding" case. Especially with boxes, which are quite easily to simulate physically.

Hell, the nVidia and GPU demos that I've seen do the equivalent with thousands of boxes - maybe not as pretty but they are unoptimised demos.

Just because your console is crap doesn't mean that farming it out as a thin-client will work - somewhere there still has to be the horsepower to do the job, and thus we're still paying for it.

Stop this junk where you want to find a reason to run the game off of the home console (and thus control piracy). Farming out data / video is a TERRIBLE idea. OnLive went bust trying to prove it. And yet every year, GPU's get cheaper and do more.

If you want to have a "killer" feature in the next-gen consoles, it's not thousands-of-boxes. It's going to be freedom (e.g. SetamBoxes, etc.).

uh... no need

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern day computers can easily do this sort of stuff. Every single physics library, be it 2d or 3d has some sort of pile o boxes demo. Most of these can run similar numbers of boxes with ease on only a single thread, and the multithreaded and gpu enhanced ones can do thousands of boxes.
I don't see any application that could work well on this, as most of them can already be done on the local box itself, or the network latency would make it not pleasing.

GeForce GRID

[mkaushik]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this more generic solution that's already in production:

NVIDIA's GeForce Grid

Re:GeForce GRID

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what I was thinking. Good point. I'm not so sure about the production part. I've yet to see this service for purchase.

Thin Clients again, this time for gaming...

[David_Hart]

Larry Ellison was famous for being a huge backer of thin client computing in the enterprise. Of course, it failed for a large number of reasons such as mobile computing, the need to be able to work on documents locally, user experience, etc. If the enterprise environment wasn't conducive to thin client computing (i.e. low latency, guaranteed bandwidth, etc.), why would anyone think that a thin client gaming environment that relies on the Internet would be a good idea?

Re:Thin Clients again, this time for gaming...

[0123456]

Yes, but... Vendor Lock-In.

It's where every tech company is trying to go now the big profits from incremental improvements in old products have vanished.

Past users had a choice between thin clients and PCs which would run anything. Future users will only be able to buy computers locked down with Windows Boot and App Stores.

Re:Happy Sunday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I look this stupid when I post trolls about Scientology?

I guess this is a good reason to stop.

Bad name

[clickclickdrone]

Did they not know there was an 80s failed console called the flare? Didn't even get to market, sort of granddad to the Atari Jaguar.

Wouldn't that tie up your main PC?

[tepples]

I have a 25 ft HDMI cable, with my computer desk in the back of the living room.

I've gathered from previous discussions on Slashdot that a lot of people have the computer desk in a separate room and are unwilling to cut holes in walls or permanently move the computer desk into the TV room. Instead, they are content to limit themselves to those games available for major consoles.

You can hook up a cheap laptop and push video from your main PC to it.

In other words, something like the dumb terminal mode of the NVIDIA Shield and the low-end SteamOS devices. But wouldn't that tie up the main PC so that another member of the household can't use it? A console doesn't tie up the main PC.

Re:Wouldn't that tie up your main PC?

[0123456]

But wouldn't that tie up the main PC so that another member of the household can't use it?

I've rarely seen a game use more than 20% CPU on my PC. So there's plenty left for someone else to use it while streaming game video to a TV.

Re:Wouldn't that tie up your main PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gathered from previous discussions on Slashdot that a lot of people have the computer desk in a separate room and are unwilling to cut holes in walls or permanently move the computer desk into the TV room. Instead, they are content to limit themselves to those games available for major consoles.

So instead of buying a console they can buy a pc, or stream it to some kind of thin client (laptop, whatever) or temporarily move their pc.

But wouldn't that tie up the main PC so that another member of the household can't use it? A console doesn't tie up the main PC.

Probably not. But if it did then buy a dedicated pc just like you would a console. Honestly if your that unwilling to do any of the suggested options then you obviously dont want to play and are just looking for excuses for ways that the proposed solutions dont meet your needs, nobody who actually wants to play is going to go through making that many excuses.

Re:Wouldn't that tie up your main PC?

[captjc]

For the price of a game console, you could always just buy a 30" TV / Monitor. I would rather look at a 30" screen at desk length than a 50" screen from across the room. Put some money into a good executive-style office chair and who needs the living room?

Re:Wouldn't that tie up your main PC?

[tepples]

Put some money into a good executive-style office chair and who needs the living room?

You'd need multiple office chairs for co-op. And you'd still tie up the PC so that a member of the household not currently participating in the game wouldn't be able to do homework or Facebook.

Re:Wouldn't that tie up your main PC?

[captjc]

If you want local multiplayer, get a Wii. Most multiplayer these days is over the internet. As for tying up the PC, who doesn't have their own PC these days? Between laptops and tablets, that is practically a non-issue.

Re:Wouldn't that tie up your main PC?

[tepples]

If you want local multiplayer, get a Wii.

And get limited by what Nintendo allows onto its platform.

As for tying up the PC, who doesn't have their own PC these days?

A lot of times, mom, dad, and two kids will have fewer than four computers. Besides, one needs not only his own PC but also a gaming video card (or Flare/OnLive and a really fast Internet connection) and a separate license for the software per player.

One user session at a time

[tepples]

But wouldn't the user sitting at the computer see either game video or "This computer is in use and has been locked" while the game is running? I wasn't aware that popular home PC operating systems could run two user sessions at once.

Re:One user session at a time

[0123456]

But wouldn't the user sitting at the computer see either game video or "This computer is in use and has been locked" while the game is running? I wasn't aware that popular home PC operating systems could run two user sessions at once.

There's nothing stopping you from running a service on the system that renders games to offscreen memory rather than the screen. Nvidia's new software, I believe, can then use H.264 support in the GPU to compress it to stream across the local LAN?

Dearth of games in certain genres

[tepples]

Honestly if your that unwilling to do any of the suggested options then you obviously dont want to play and are just looking for excuses for ways that the proposed solutions dont meet your needs

I agree with you; I'm just trying to find the best way to explain it others. For example, one excuse I see often against buying a second PC instead of a console is that far fewer PC games support couch multiplayer than console games, as Aqualung812 pointed out.

Free as in freedom

[SuperByelich]

This is the kind of rot that is destroying the gaming industry, we need more freedom, and cloud-based games takes freedom away and gives more power to the big corporations. Support more free games and independent games. Tell this sort of thing to shove it.

That's all bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Look they tryed the same gambit with Simcity. The ultimate truth is, why would they spend so much money for those calculation, for the development cost , for the maintenance, when so far absolutely no game whatsoever would need such a heavy CPU requirement ? One word : simcity. The only reason is to prop up a BULLSHIT "we are doing server side calculation" in all single player game to have more DRM control over games. The truth is, there is no way whatsoever that 1000's (or millions) of player with their own GPU and CPU would be short on CPU whereas a single cluster would offer more CPU than the whole and be able to calculate everything, *AND* transmit everything in real time enough (or with error correction mode).

nothing new...

[SuperDre]

the article seems to indicate project flare is something new, but it isn't, it's just Another streaming gaming service, just like OnLive ans gaikai already were, and there already were some other services like that (but not so advanced)..

Not gonna fly

[Chas]

First off: Square Enix? YAY! Now they can put up a countdown clock for how long until they (or someone breaking into their systems, or both) misappropriate your financial information to make unauthorized purchases on your account.

Second off: Ubisoft? The "We're stupid enough to think DRM actually works, so fuck you, all you customers are really criminals!" company?

Third off: The latencies involved simply preclude certain types of games (like FPS).

Fourth off: It's still going to be in the shit-tastic console format?

PASS!

Re:SCREW THIS PRISON PLANET!

[Anonymous Coward]

All work and no play makes AC a dull boy.

"Web" != "Internet"

[Wootery]

The author of TFA clearly doesn't understand what 'the web' actually means. Four times the word 'web' is used, and in each instance, they should have used 'Internet'.

Today's web-technologies do not address the needs of cloud gaming.

Who pays

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive heard of this kind of thing being talked of, but has anyone yet made it work (as in profitable)?

A centralized server cluster runs the game, does the client graphics and pipes a compressed video feed to the players.

How much will player be charged?

How do they handle the 'rush' periods when use is maximized (graphics processing AND network?) and a lack of server capacity (specialized graphics so cant be ordinary server farm resource) will make the game operate sucky when there are the maximum number of people to see it be sucky ??

You can load level multiple games (some more heavily used than others) and spread heavy time slot usage a bit.

Will the high performance required by newest games continually make this a poor solution ?? (Too costly, mediocre quality games only ??)

Size is an irrelevant argument for many of us.

[zooblethorpe]

Could the US use improvements in this area? Absolutely, and I want to be clear on that point. But what I consistently notice is that people, particularly those who have either never left the US to experience other parts of the world, or else those from smaller countries who have never traveled across a single country as large as the US, have no appreciation for just how difficult of a problem the US faces as compared to many other developed nations, simply due to its massive size.

It would be one thing if the argument were solely that people living in Story, Indiana or Nothing, Arizona couldn't get broadband speeds.

While that is an issue, it's not what causes much of the complaint about the state of internet services in the US.

I live in Seattle, within the city limits. I can't get better than 4.5mbps down on a good day, and certainly not in the evening when everyone's watching Netflix, short of ponying up for a business line to the tune of substantially more expense. Five years ago, I lived within spitting distance of the Google campus, and couldn't get better than 1.5mbps down. These are major cities, densely populated, with all the infrastructure right there.

By comparison, when I left Japan in 2005, my bare-bones residential service -- the cheapest, slowest, least-of-everything-and-still-be-online package gave me 18 mbps for around $30 a month. And it was scheduled for an upgrade, at no cost to the subscriber, to 24 mbps two months later.

The key difference? Competition. For all the malarkey about free markets and rainbows, the US market sucks for internet services. A handful of companies have effective geographic monopolies (or at least very small cartels), giving them leverage to jack prices and keep services at the bare minimum. In Japan, the kind of lockdowns that are the status quo in the US aren't possible due to an effective regulatory regime, necessitating that companies actually compete for consumers' business on the basis of service and price. The differences are amazing. Or depressing, depending on where you live.