Predictive Modeling To Increase Responsivity of Streamed Games

jones_supa (887896) writes Streaming game services always bump up against a hard latency limit based on the total round-trip time it takes to send user input to a remote server and receive a frame of game data from that server. To alleviate the situation, Microsoft Research has been developing a system called DeLorean (whitepaper) using predictive modeling to improve the experienced responsiveness of a game. By analyzing previous inputs in a Markov chain, DeLorean tries to predict the most likely choices for the user's next input and then generates speculative frames that fit those inputs and sends them back to the user. The caveat is that sending those extra predictive frames and information does add a bandwidth overhead of anywhere from 1.5 to 4 times that of a normal streaming game client. During testing the benefits were apparent, though. Even when the actual round-trip time between input and server response was 256 ms, double-blind testers reported both the gameplay responsiveness and graphical quality of the DeLorean system were comparable to a locally played version of the game.

Comments

I thought it was bad

[mjwx]

I thought Bioshock was bad when they made a game that you literally could not lose at. It was impossible to die or fail.

Now they want to make games essentially play themselves. What happens when the player produces input the software does not expect? can it backtrack, will it backtrack or just keep going with what it thinks the player should be doing.

The really sad part is I can see this succeeding. Few gamers want to play games any more, they just want instant gratification trophies. There's more focus in achievement trophies in modern games (especially AAA games) than there is on actual gameplay.