THE END OF CONSOLES

AND GAMING PCS

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/25/video-onlive-streaming-game-demonstrated/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7962180.stm

Too good to be true?

'a montly fee'

monthly even. ew

As opposed to all the money one currently spends on hardware?

once they've tested it to thousands/millions of users all playing their games at once, then we'll see.

would this also affect piracy?

xp, i mean depends on what that fee is doesn't it.

but yeah, it does sound too good to be true.

(and had to double check the date for a moment, do they do april fools jokes early?)

I don't think it matters too much whether this is really going to work well in the next 12 months - the point is that in the next 10 years it definitely will. And I think long term, monthly fees will be replaced by pay-per-play setups.

Also, I think it's less likely to replace consoles (which are already pretty cheap, and which offer a fair amount of additional functionality on top of gaming) than gaming PCs. But maybe in the end they'll all vanish. If OnLive reckon they can already make a tiny box which would make this work on TVs, then the obvious next step would be for that little box to be integrated into the TV in the first place.

chances are this beta version will only be available to US connections won't it.

s'funny was only talking to a colleague a month or so ago about how everything including gaming will be thin client and streamed, i guess this is just obvious prediction stuff, but didn't see it happening so soon.

If it works, and the price is right, i'm quite excited.

there are major bandwidth issues to solve before shit like this and internet video can reach ubiquity - im sure itll all get worked out but the process could def get bumpy

^^ a lot of that comes down to politics: we could have much faster broadband speeds and more widespread subscriptions in this country if the regulatory environment were different

^ time bomb

the issue here is where the isps access the internet backbone - the fact is isps dont have nearly the capacity to service the already existing broadband they offer - they rely on the fact that most people dont use most of their bandwidth most of the time - however if everyone was watchin movies and playin games and talkin voip all the time ud have an insane bottleneck - while some of that can maybe be laid at the feet of shitty government its mainly just a emerging technology issue

this idea brings out all my cranky get off my lawn cane shaking oldmanishness.

in the future you guys will all be playing your magical telepathic video games while Morbs and I send each other sadface emoticons by telegram

YAY!

lol

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2009/20090325.jpg

Also, Tycho-dude is skeptical: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/3/25/

just fyi this is a retarded pipe dream like efficient mass transit or webtv

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article

OnLive overlord Steve Perlmen has said that the latency introduced by the encoder is 1ms. Think about that; he's saying that the OnLive encoder runs at 1000fps. It's one of the most astonishing claims I've ever heard. It's like Ford saying that the new Fiesta's cruising speed is in excess of the speed of sound.

haa

I cant see how saying the latency introduced is 1ms means "runs at 1000FPS)

Oh I read the article again I see what he's saying about the encoder.

But it works in the test labs, so something is going on.

waht is hdtv framerate? that's gotta involve super fast encoding surely.

and how come tv bandwidth is so huge, why don't we all get our internet through the tv?

In the US at least, lots of people now get their TV through their cable tv lines rather than through their phone lines.

I could see this working (better) if it were sold by say a cable company with big shiny new pipes trying to get people to upgrade to some super bandwidth plan. On my crappy DSL connection I have a really hard time seeing how this could work for anything bigger than Bejeweled. Though maybe that's enough for lots of potential subscribers.

One other thing occurs to me, if I were coding this software: it's true that gaming is real-time, but there aren't that many ways to interact with the environment. I wonder if you could speed things by pre-rendering lots of potential actions the player could do, and then serving these ahead of time. In other words the software could anticipate future real-time events on the player's end, and serve those before she carries those out.

er I should have said "get their INTERNET" through their cable tv lines, duh.

One other thing occurs to me, if I were coding this software: it's true that gaming is real-time, but there aren't that many ways to interact with the environment. I wonder if you could speed things by pre-rendering lots of potential actions the player could do, and then serving these ahead of time. In other words the software could anticipate future real-time events on the player's end, and serve those before she carries those out

Well this is how most games used to be programmed, before physics became a big part of the game environments.

Also it's all about the viewpoint, no way you could pre-render every scene from every location and every angle.

and take for instance something like gta4, where bodies operate on the ragdoll model. it's all calculated at runtime, you can't pre process all those colliding bodies motions.

Yeah, I guess the programmer in me says, "can't? Why not?" But I haven't coded anything like this, so I'll take your word for it. But if I were involved, this is what I'd be thinking about, rather than trying to up bandwidth, because that's out of your hands as a game company.

well tbh I agree, it would mean a backstep/rethink on how game engines could be made to make the most out of bandwidth. That's down to the clever developers to sort out.

You know when you view a replay of one of your races in, say, Gran Turismo or Project Gotham? You're not watching a pre-rendered view of your race. You're actually watching the race re-run all over again, calculated and rendered in real time, using only the data saved from your controller. Doing it any other way would just be implausibly hard.

yes, I remember on Destruction Derby (can't remember which platform), where the replay sometimes missed a step and then everything would go off on a tangent showing me my game entirely differently.

i can't even begin to take this seriously until they can reproduce the effect somewhere other than a trade show; this reeks of vaporware.

i've heard that YOU reek of vaporware - t/f?

sadly true; i use a phantom crystal instead of old spice

This will be useless in countries like the UK and especially Australia until we sort out our dire bandwidth issues.

Many australians still can't even *get* any kind of broadband (cable, DSL) and have to stick to flaky 3g wireless and sometimes even dialup. Yes, still.

And while the govt and Telstra and singtel and everyone else squabble over who's ever going to roll out this stupid "national broadband network" it wont get better - heck by the time they sort it out it'll be last years tech anyway.

Also: however if everyone was watchin movies and playin games and talkin voip all the time ud have an insane bottleneck - while some of that can maybe be laid at the feet of shitty government its mainly just a emerging technology issue
is OTM. Pretty much all ISPs rely on the ratio of newb grannies and moms : leeching gamers well favouring the grannies only checking their email.
The minute you tell every idiot they can watch TV and movies and play games and vidconf their nephew the whole thing will fall in a heap.

Its an interesting time to be working in telecoms/ISP land I tells ya.

I got an invite to join onlive for the first year for free.
do i give them my credit card # y or n?

forks - I think it's worth trying out (for free)... the main problem with it is that you don't really buy games, but rent them for as long as you're subscribed (or till onlive loses the license for the games), and the cost of the games is at least as much as if you were actually buying them. Since everything in the service is streaming, the quality depends on the quality of your internet as well, some have reported lag. If you have a good computer, the graphics won't match what your computer could output, but if you have a really crappy computer they will obviously look better than your computer could do. Some of the cool things about the service are that you can try out any game on it for half an hour (I think), and you can also watch anybody else playing any game pretty much instantly - the interface looks cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlMXMh5XoUU

do it forks, give us field reports

This launched in the UK btw, and new signups get to buy their first game for £1 as long as you get in before Sunday.

just tried it, lots of trials and demos available.

Was okay, I tried it on my shitty laptop which won't run 3d games of any kind and Borderlands and Mafia II performed hmm well at least playbable. A bit of stuttering but it might have been my wireless connection. I'll try again on a cable connect set up later.

Like Mafia II, loved the atmosphere of the game set in snowy nyc 1940's

and yes rucks of games for a quid

so it says i'm on a 'free membership' account. is there a paid one? what's the difference?

i know, i'm an idiot.

so it's £7 a month on a normal account, to actually play the games fully. Hmm, i'm not sure i can justify it - I feel I can get games for that price most of the time or at least noth that much more and I can play them in better quality on my high end pc.

This would have been ideal for my laptop, but alas one more monthly bill I just can't be doing with.

Yeah, I can't see me making any serious use of this, but as a "demo the first 30 minutes of pretty much anything without having to faff around with a download" tool it could be handy. Depends whether their release schedule keeps up with everyone else though.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-sony-gaikai

Kind of a big deal.

Possibly.

So this died then.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report

Lots of talk about the asshole CEO but I'm sure the technology problems were its downfall. Streaming games is doubtless the future - but not the present.