I came over an interesting article about a new "concept" for gaming was introduced. Birefly, the idea is that you no longer have to download/install/keep updated/patch/whatever the games - it is all played through an online service. This removes the need for powerful desktop computers, and you will no longer be platform dependent (mac/PC, console or whatever).
Of course many question arise, such as latency, bandwidth requirements etc etc. Have only read briefly the Norwegian article, so all I can say for now is that is at least is an interesting thought.
Norwegian article at Dagbladet: http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/03/25/kultur/spill/pc-spill/onlive/gdc_09/5456208/
English article at CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10202688-235.html
Very Interesting I bet it would cost a bomb though and I can't see 5mb connection being nearly enough.
If the articles information from onlive are correct, you would lave less lag then with ordinary online games, due to new algoritms decreasing transfered data..
Ofc a service like this requires a certain amount of bandwith to play nice high resolution games..
I was looking at Onlives site and other sites, and currently online US based servers are made for the beta testing phase starting this summer..
No matter how great their algorithm is, the distance would cause a significant delay, and their preliminary tests are made of a 50km distance, which in internet world is tiny, so you would actually need several servers located in every country to minimize the delay..
But maybe they actually created a algorithm thats awsome enough to cope with long distances
Quote from: Zootoxin;270021Very Interesting I bet it would cost a bomb though and I can't see 5mb connection being nearly enough.
Acording to their site, Quality is dependant on bandwith, and a 5Mb connection should sufficient for SD quality..
But then again its yet too see..
Ctrl-Alt-Del also picked up the news about OnLive - http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20090327 - although with a slightly different perspective on the challenges/uses it will bring :flirty:
Quote from: Bob;270018I came over an interesting article about a new "concept" for gaming was introduced. Birefly, the idea is that you no longer have to download/install/keep updated/patch/whatever the games - it is all played through an online service. This removes the need for powerful desktop computers, and you will no longer be platform dependent (mac/PC, console or whatever).
Isn't this what QuakeLive is all about? Play it from any computer with a browser installed?
...and just like steam it depends on your internet connection and their servers which means wqhen there are probs outwith your control you cannot play games - when will they learn?
There is a tenuous parallel to some financial developments. Proximity hosting has had a bit of a bubble.
One of the key ideas of trading platforms is that you get your trade on before the competition, so the quicker you confirm it, the better your financial advantage.
It used to be about lots of terminals, a fast line and a centralised server feeding the back end Reuters/Bloomberg networks etc. The proximity hosting model puts the server on site at the exchange, allowing milliseconds advantage of getting the transaction confirmed.
I said it was tenuous.
I dno't see a problem with the concept. Nobody would have different versions, everyone will have the same performance etc etc.
Downsides: I can't always buffer a youtube video without it pausing in the middle, how the hell is a continuous stream of gaming going to work?
HD tv needs 5MBit bandwidth and thats for 1080 I assume. Computer monitors go higher than this so will need more bandwidth, I can very quickly see them having issues, or limiting the quality to a lower resolution, which would ruin most of the point.
If it's a subscription service (like a TV package, where you pay monthly) I can't see a pricing model that would cover their costs without mass uptake, and I can't see that without a infrastructure in place. It's a sort of chicken and egg situation. Very hard to get off the ground with the amount of hardware they'll need.
Quote from: T-Bag;270639I dno't see a problem with the concept. Nobody would have different versions, everyone will have the same performance etc etc.
Downsides: I can't always buffer a youtube video without it pausing in the middle, how the hell is a continuous stream of gaming going to work?
HD tv needs 5MBit bandwidth and thats for 1080 I assume. Computer monitors go higher than this so will need more bandwidth, I can very quickly see them having issues, or limiting the quality to a lower resolution, which would ruin most of the point.
If it's a subscription service (like a TV package, where you pay monthly) I can't see a pricing model that would cover their costs without mass uptake, and I can't see that without a infrastructure in place. It's a sort of chicken and egg situation. Very hard to get off the ground with the amount of hardware they'll need.
their HD version isnt 1080, but 720..
Eurogamer has a not so nice article up about the onlive service..
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article
Quote from: no peanuts;270633Isn't this what QuakeLive is all about? Play it from any computer with a browser installed?
QuakeLive still runs the game client-side. Sure, it streams the maps, models, textures etc on the fly, but the actual game engine (primarily graphics) processing is still done on your machine. That requires far less bandwidth that streaming a video of the data, because a texture or a model wireframe or whatever can be sent once and used over and over, instead of having to constantly stream it every frame it is seen for. The thing is PCs are so powerful these days that what used to require a top end CPU and an expensive graphics card can now be done on any modern PC by CPU grunt alone, which is how QuakeLive works.
The idea behind this new system is that the engine processing is actually done server side, with effectively a video of what you expect to see on the monitor streamed from the server to you and your keypresses/mouse moves sent back. So if you had a fast enough connection you could play Crysis (to pull the current 'Oh gawd look at it's required specs!' game) at full res on a 24" monitor or whatever with all the bells and whistles turned right up, on a really low end PC (supposedly). Basically all the PC has to be capable of is decoding the video stream on the fly.
That being said, my mate's MythTV box is an Intel Core 2 Duo system, a 2.6gig one IIRC, and that can decode a video stream real time at 720p, but give it a 1080p one and it stutters like hell trying to uncompress and render on the fly. *Some* of that is still due to the video compression/decompression algorithms available for Linux being decidedly crap, but even on Windows you're gonna need a pretty hefty system to decode high-resolution video, and they're taking about a 5Mb stream for standard def! My home ADSL is only 4Mb. So lets see, buy a good gaming rig and run games locally at high res and don't need a net connection, or use this service and play games at old pre-HD TV res with stuttering and if my net connection goes down i'm stuffed.
I know which i'd go with.