I'm sorry, but nobody here has any reflexes fast enough to make anything less than 50ms perceptible. Or even 80.
I'm all for calling out people that have ridiculous and unverifiable standards, like the audiophiles that think they can detect MP3s compressed at a high bitrate.
However, that isn't the case here. A 50 ms lag can add substantially to the difficulty of a game. It's not purely reflexes; it's the timing of those reflexes. Let me put it this way... a thrown baseball travels a substantial distance in 50ms, and yet a human can still catch one. Precision of well under 50ms is necessary for that feat; a 10ms lag would probably make it impossible.
Plus... OnLive's lag will be substantially higher than 50ms.
It needs to be relative, as anyone having played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on the Wii will know.
I disagree with this; I think the preference for relative motion is mostly just due to familiarity. The Wiimote doesn't really have enough precision to compete with a mouse for a FPS, although it's much better than any gamepad... but that's just an engineering issue. I've found the wiimote, or other objective pointing devices (like a graphics tablet) to be better for some games... shooting, real-time sims, etc.
PS: They're aiming at iPhones, not your $10,000 nitrogen-cooled neon-lit gaming rig.
An attempt at rewriting reality. They were aiming at providing cutting-edge, high-requirement, high-definition action games to people with low-spec pcs. That's obviously ridiculous.
Setting their targets lower, to iPhones and such devices, may be a simple recognition on their part of the laws of physics. Good for them; they've gone from a service that's ludicrous to one that's simply niche. That's a new development, though. Streaming 480 x 320 video, or whatever they're doing, is far more feasible than the HD they originally claimed.
Yeah. Even it if was possible, which I doubt, it would still be a BAD THING (TM). It nullifies the only real advantage PCs have over consoles (modability and independent games), you lose the concept of owning a game... the graphics will have to be severely degraded, so you'll be getting an experience that will be worse than console graphics... it will only work for people that have a fast broadband connection, 99% of whom have fast computers and so wouldn't need OnLive anyway...
Now, if they had pitched it from the start as a "Play PC games in crappy resolution on an iPhone while traveling", it would still be pretty unappealing, but at least it would make SOME sense.
The 100,000 people in the current OnLive beta would love to disagree with your assessment of "like playing on a machine getting 5-10 frames a second" but they are under NDA.
You thought that was a reasonable thing to say? That people that can't describe their experience are clamoring to say I'm wrong about their experience, if only they could?
Please describe how OnLive is possible. Technically, specifically. Include typical ping rate, input responsiveness, and HD video bandwidth requirements. I've never seen anybody do that.
Wait; I think I missed your sarcasm, grandparent post. Sorry. I've engaged in conversation with people in less technically savvy forums that think OnLive is possible, and so your comment wooshed right past me.
Remote desktops seem to be the only real application for this; I doubt most fast paced games will work, until we've totally replaced the internet infrastructure. Strategy games and so on might work; but OnLive is trying to pitch high-spec fast-paced games, like Crysis.
I really can't see any way this is possible for action games. I've seen lots of people asserting it is, but never any sort of explanation that describes how they've circumvented all the obvious obstacles. (I believe the iPhone in the video runs at 480x320? Far from their HD gaming claims.)
Game engines have latency in them... OnLive runs those engines at faster than realtime, so when the packet from your controller gets to the engine 300ms later than it normally would the engine has plenty of time to do its thing.
That's nuts. They can't run the engine out in advance of your input... unless they're rewriting core functionality of the engines, adding prediction like online FPS have. And... they aren't doing that.
If you have a ping of 100ms, you will press a key; 100ms later the onlive server will know you started turning. It generates, renders, and COMPRESSES a frame; sends it back to you. 200-250ms have elapsed. It will be like playing on a machine getting 5-10 frames a second.
Having significant whitespace formatting is enough of a problem in my eyes to keep me away from the language. It seems like an absolutely ludicrous design decision. That is obviously a personal preference, since many excellent programmers don't mind it... but it's a personal preference that I have NO desire to overcome.
Or emphasis. It obviously loses its purpose if a whole post is in caps, but the OCCASIONAL capitalization for emphasis is a perfectly valid practice, especially in plain text where bold and italics are not available. That's not the case in slashdot, but is in many internet forums.
PUt a free copy of gamemaker on his pc. He can create a simple game with drag and drop; add a few lines of code to make it better. Eventually he can write whole games in nothing but code.
It doesn't matter that it's not based on a standard programming language. What matters is that he can see instant results, and program stuff that he likes. Learning any particular language's syntax is irrelevant, all that matters at this point is getting him to understand concepts without losing interest.
I don't actually have a problem with any country using machine gun turrets and ditches filled with flaming oil in order to keep people from sneaking in. It's an appropriate function of government. The problem is only when they try to keep their own citizens IN.
It's no worse than killing thousands slowly, and certainly much better than killing hundreds of thousands, or millions. Given that lots of people needed to be, and were going to be, killed, the nuclear option was no worse than any other. Better that we firebomb them for weeks prior to a land invasion?
No one can make me like a nation that murders with pleasure (and lots do... even their own citizens!)
That's nuts. Nations murdering for pleasure? For profit and resources, perhaps... or even out of hate. But pleasure? That's very rare.
Wait, so you're saying full C compiler implementation is approximately equivalent to a BASIC interpreter? I implemented more features than BASIC supports, and in compiler form rather than the much easier interpreter form. The only difference in BG's favor is a.) he did his in assembly, whereas I did mine in C, and b.) he did it before I was born.
No, they aren't approximately equal; the basic interpreter was a much greater accomplishment. Writing an 8kb interpreter (full operating system, really) in assembly in 1980 is a MUCH greater accomplishment then writing a sizeable subset of a C compiler with modern languages and tools.
Because it prematurely introduces children to sex (they are very curious) and that is not good.
Why? A kid in nature would have been exposed to it (at LEAST by seeing animals) from as early as they could remember. I do think sex is probably better as a private matter, a more effective bonding mechanism... but there's no reason the concept of sex should be hidden from a child of any age.
OK, one more time "Companies don't set prices, their customers do!" (assuming a rational free market)
Rather, the customer and the company have equal weight in setting prices. In the big picture, there's no real difference between the two. It's an exchange of services, both sides have preferences and bounds, and the dealing proceeds if the price is mutually satisfactory.
If it has a 1 in 250,000 chance of killing 'millions' (say, 3 million), the average price of not intercepting/deflecting it is 12 deaths. It's probably not worth hundreds of millions of dollars to try to prevent that.
If this was a planet killer, though, I think the 1 in 250,000 isn't good enough odds; we'd have to weigh it against the entire future of everything on earth, including the potential galaxy-spanning empire that humans may someday evolve into.
Finally, your oft-stated argument that "better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer" is specious. The ten guilty men will almost certainly victimize other innocents, which is why we incarcerate them in the first place. An argument of "better that a guilty man go free than an innocent man suffer" would carry more water.
Ten free guilty men probably will cause more damage, and yet it's STILL TRUE that it would be better than jailing an innocent man. That's because it's not a purely pragmatic matter; it shows the special status that we accord the life of a man. It's like going to war over one hostage; you can use a simplistically pragmatic argument that it doesn't make sense, but with deeper thought, it does, and may be worth it. It may be demanded.
There's an old road outside of my town that had the pleasant name "Dead Indian Road". Of course, as the twentieth century flew by, this increasingly offended certain people; however other people became correspondingly more insistent that the name be kept for historical reasons.
The poor county supervisors (feeling the rock and the hardplace) decided to rename it "Dead Indian Memorial Road". A reasonable solution, I guess, although it didn't really make anybody happy.
And they'll need to balance that cost with the cost of having employees that learn to hate and distrust their management. They'll probably ignore that factor, and "save money" until they go out of business.
Ok, that's a little extreme over pizza, but it's a sign of an overly controlling and sick corporate culture; one that's forgotten their employees are people.
Yeah, and I think C (and all its derivatives) went the wrong route. The single "=" should have been comparison, and something else (like ":=") should have been assignment. I think that's logically cleaner, and gets along nicer with mathematics.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but nobody here has any reflexes fast enough to make anything less than 50ms perceptible. Or even 80.
I'm all for calling out people that have ridiculous and unverifiable standards, like the audiophiles that think they can detect MP3s compressed at a high bitrate.
However, that isn't the case here. A 50 ms lag can add substantially to the difficulty of a game. It's not purely reflexes; it's the timing of those reflexes. Let me put it this way... a thrown baseball travels a substantial distance in 50ms, and yet a human can still catch one. Precision of well under 50ms is necessary for that feat; a 10ms lag would probably make it impossible.
Plus... OnLive's lag will be substantially higher than 50ms.
It needs to be relative, as anyone having played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on the Wii will know.
I disagree with this; I think the preference for relative motion is mostly just due to familiarity. The Wiimote doesn't really have enough precision to compete with a mouse for a FPS, although it's much better than any gamepad... but that's just an engineering issue. I've found the wiimote, or other objective pointing devices (like a graphics tablet) to be better for some games... shooting, real-time sims, etc.
PS: They're aiming at iPhones, not your $10,000 nitrogen-cooled neon-lit gaming rig.
An attempt at rewriting reality. They were aiming at providing cutting-edge, high-requirement, high-definition action games to people with low-spec pcs. That's obviously ridiculous.
Setting their targets lower, to iPhones and such devices, may be a simple recognition on their part of the laws of physics. Good for them; they've gone from a service that's ludicrous to one that's simply niche. That's a new development, though. Streaming 480 x 320 video, or whatever they're doing, is far more feasible than the HD they originally claimed.
China, probably; perhaps Russia.
And salt, not ginger.
Yeah. Even it if was possible, which I doubt, it would still be a BAD THING (TM). It nullifies the only real advantage PCs have over consoles (modability and independent games), you lose the concept of owning a game... the graphics will have to be severely degraded, so you'll be getting an experience that will be worse than console graphics... it will only work for people that have a fast broadband connection, 99% of whom have fast computers and so wouldn't need OnLive anyway...
Now, if they had pitched it from the start as a "Play PC games in crappy resolution on an iPhone while traveling", it would still be pretty unappealing, but at least it would make SOME sense.
The 100,000 people in the current OnLive beta would love to disagree with your assessment of "like playing on a machine getting 5-10 frames a second" but they are under NDA.
You thought that was a reasonable thing to say? That people that can't describe their experience are clamoring to say I'm wrong about their experience, if only they could?
Please describe how OnLive is possible. Technically, specifically. Include typical ping rate, input responsiveness, and HD video bandwidth requirements. I've never seen anybody do that.
Wait; I think I missed your sarcasm, grandparent post. Sorry. I've engaged in conversation with people in less technically savvy forums that think OnLive is possible, and so your comment wooshed right past me.
Remote desktops seem to be the only real application for this; I doubt most fast paced games will work, until we've totally replaced the internet infrastructure. Strategy games and so on might work; but OnLive is trying to pitch high-spec fast-paced games, like Crysis.
I really can't see any way this is possible for action games. I've seen lots of people asserting it is, but never any sort of explanation that describes how they've circumvented all the obvious obstacles. (I believe the iPhone in the video runs at 480x320? Far from their HD gaming claims.)
Game engines have latency in them... OnLive runs those engines at faster than realtime, so when the packet from your controller gets to the engine 300ms later than it normally would the engine has plenty of time to do its thing.
That's nuts. They can't run the engine out in advance of your input... unless they're rewriting core functionality of the engines, adding prediction like online FPS have. And... they aren't doing that.
If you have a ping of 100ms, you will press a key; 100ms later the onlive server will know you started turning. It generates, renders, and COMPRESSES a frame; sends it back to you. 200-250ms have elapsed. It will be like playing on a machine getting 5-10 frames a second.
Having significant whitespace formatting is enough of a problem in my eyes to keep me away from the language. It seems like an absolutely ludicrous design decision. That is obviously a personal preference, since many excellent programmers don't mind it... but it's a personal preference that I have NO desire to overcome.
All caps is considered 'shouting', by the way.
Or emphasis. It obviously loses its purpose if a whole post is in caps, but the OCCASIONAL capitalization for emphasis is a perfectly valid practice, especially in plain text where bold and italics are not available. That's not the case in slashdot, but is in many internet forums.
PUt a free copy of gamemaker on his pc. He can create a simple game with drag and drop; add a few lines of code to make it better. Eventually he can write whole games in nothing but code.
It doesn't matter that it's not based on a standard programming language. What matters is that he can see instant results, and program stuff that he likes. Learning any particular language's syntax is irrelevant, all that matters at this point is getting him to understand concepts without losing interest.
I don't actually have a problem with any country using machine gun turrets and ditches filled with flaming oil in order to keep people from sneaking in. It's an appropriate function of government. The problem is only when they try to keep their own citizens IN.
(killing thousands in seconds is not ok, mmkay?)
It's no worse than killing thousands slowly, and certainly much better than killing hundreds of thousands, or millions. Given that lots of people needed to be, and were going to be, killed, the nuclear option was no worse than any other. Better that we firebomb them for weeks prior to a land invasion?
No one can make me like a nation that murders with pleasure (and lots do... even their own citizens!)
That's nuts. Nations murdering for pleasure? For profit and resources, perhaps... or even out of hate. But pleasure? That's very rare.
Airliners dropping from the sky isn't much of an improvement.
It's a massive improvement.
Wait, so you're saying full C compiler implementation is approximately equivalent to a BASIC interpreter? I implemented more features than BASIC supports, and in compiler form rather than the much easier interpreter form. The only difference in BG's favor is a.) he did his in assembly, whereas I did mine in C, and b.) he did it before I was born.
No, they aren't approximately equal; the basic interpreter was a much greater accomplishment. Writing an 8kb interpreter (full operating system, really) in assembly in 1980 is a MUCH greater accomplishment then writing a sizeable subset of a C compiler with modern languages and tools.
Because it prematurely introduces children to sex (they are very curious) and that is not good.
Why? A kid in nature would have been exposed to it (at LEAST by seeing animals) from as early as they could remember. I do think sex is probably better as a private matter, a more effective bonding mechanism... but there's no reason the concept of sex should be hidden from a child of any age.
That was a damn fine rant, and I'm tempted to save it. Too long for a sig, unfortunately.
OK, one more time "Companies don't set prices, their customers do!" (assuming a rational free market)
Rather, the customer and the company have equal weight in setting prices. In the big picture, there's no real difference between the two. It's an exchange of services, both sides have preferences and bounds, and the dealing proceeds if the price is mutually satisfactory.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Seriously? You like not having codified free speech protections? My mind boggles at you.
If it has a 1 in 250,000 chance of killing 'millions' (say, 3 million), the average price of not intercepting/deflecting it is 12 deaths. It's probably not worth hundreds of millions of dollars to try to prevent that.
If this was a planet killer, though, I think the 1 in 250,000 isn't good enough odds; we'd have to weigh it against the entire future of everything on earth, including the potential galaxy-spanning empire that humans may someday evolve into.
Finally, your oft-stated argument that "better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer" is specious. The ten guilty men will almost certainly victimize other innocents, which is why we incarcerate them in the first place. An argument of "better that a guilty man go free than an innocent man suffer" would carry more water.
Ten free guilty men probably will cause more damage, and yet it's STILL TRUE that it would be better than jailing an innocent man. That's because it's not a purely pragmatic matter; it shows the special status that we accord the life of a man. It's like going to war over one hostage; you can use a simplistically pragmatic argument that it doesn't make sense, but with deeper thought, it does, and may be worth it. It may be demanded.
There's an old road outside of my town that had the pleasant name "Dead Indian Road". Of course, as the twentieth century flew by, this increasingly offended certain people; however other people became correspondingly more insistent that the name be kept for historical reasons.
The poor county supervisors (feeling the rock and the hardplace) decided to rename it "Dead Indian Memorial Road". A reasonable solution, I guess, although it didn't really make anybody happy.
And they'll need to balance that cost with the cost of having employees that learn to hate and distrust their management. They'll probably ignore that factor, and "save money" until they go out of business.
Ok, that's a little extreme over pizza, but it's a sign of an overly controlling and sick corporate culture; one that's forgotten their employees are people.
Yeah, and I think C (and all its derivatives) went the wrong route. The single "=" should have been comparison, and something else (like ":=") should have been assignment. I think that's logically cleaner, and gets along nicer with mathematics.