Check out this article..http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/is-onlive-the-future-of-pc-gaming-/1403041

Computer too crappy to run Oblivion?
Computer too crappy to run the Morrowind Graphics Extender?
Not anymore, if OnLive.com really is the future of gaming.

For those of you who didnt read, you pay a monthly subscription to onlive, you pay for a game, then you play it. It doesnt matter what computer you have because the game is played on their servers and streamed back to your screen, making your monitor the only relevant thing you own. So literally all of us, so long as we had both the subscription money and the money to purchase the game could play something like TES 5 when it came out on highest settings. Whether you play on a $300 laptop or $1800 desktop.

How do you guys think this could effect modding? Is modding even possible through this ya think? Do you think its possible that OnLive will allow you to even access mods? The reason these are importan questions is because you never actually download the games, they just get streamed to you. Well, lemme know whatcha think!!

I don't see how you could mod games that you are playing with OnLive, as they are not on your hard-drive.

I got a powerful hatred against the monthly fee concept.
I would prefer paying a 1800$ desktop one time than paying a monthly fee till the end of time. It's a good thing I like playing rather old games and thus don't require such a beast of a PC, but the idea remain the same.

And there's a good chance customization/modding would be unavailable or very ackward with such a system.

I think the only time I would use such a service would be if I wanted to play a game that I couldn't run well on my own PC, or perhaps to try out a game before I buy it.

Unless they have some sort of system set up for games that can be modded and modders then I surely wouldn't be playing such games through this service regardless.

EDIT: Oh yes and I too hate the idea of paying to play a game that I own. Which is why I absolutely refuse to play P2P MMO's.

They have been trying to sell this for the past two years and it's been going absolutely nowhere. Not to burst any bubbles, but I don't want anyone get their hopes up. It seems like an okay service; the prices are kind of high, but there's just no drive.

I think it's just a matter of time before fully hosted computing services take off. Maybe not individually hosted games but a hosted PC that you can use the same as a desktop.

All you'd need is some input devices, a screen of some sort, a net connection and a box to connect them all too, basically the ye olde dumb terminal. Access your PC from anywhere you can setup those things. Make things nice and simple for the everyday user.

Virtual desktops already exist and have for ages (eg citrix) but individual virtual machines are generally only setup within a firm on LANs not over the net, yet. I know from my experience there's some real benefits with VMs - High availability, easily expandable and redundancy in the hardware etc etc. Virtual servers for company IT infrastructure have become the norm in the last few years.

I think it'll take a while to get the necessary high speed connections to the home and the necessary grunt, especially for graphics, for it to become generally accepted in the public but it's not to far away.

Could also mean other interesting things... I might actually be fun to share your setup with people. As long as you trust them enough to connect to your machine and play with your characters


-kwm


edit - not saying it's for everyone, I'll probably stick with my own hardware for quite a while.

I think that this kind of computing will find a home in some capacity, but it won't completely replace the current method of computing. As the net infrastructure improves, so too will fully hosted computing, but there are still some things consumers want that just isn't really possible with hosted systems, (ie: mods, customization, full control over your own system.)

While the server side may be failsafe, the consumer connection to the network definitely isn't. DSL/cable uptime isn't at 99%, local switches don't have the capacity for streaming video to every node, and time to repair for consumers can be several days. A few seconds of WiFi dropout can drop your connection to the server and lose important actions; someone runs unshielded equipment in your area and your computer is unusable for a while. Business telecoms charges are a lot higher because of the guaranteed service, which they don't seem to be able to deliver to residential areas. It's going to be a while yet, until telecoms invest in more infrastructure upgrades for reliability and low latency/jitter. A very long while.

GPU and CPU manufacturers would need go banqrupt first to let OnLive "live"

Like Hrnchamd mentioned, for everyone getting all excited, let's dissect this sentence:

Have you ever used remote desktoping, VNC or a similar solution? More importantly, have you ever measured the response times? And have you ever run it over a long-distance internet connection?

Now, the last time I used this, logging into my home server using a hard-wired 100mbit connection (roughly 10x the top speed of cable internet) that only went through a switch on the way, I got something like 5-10 FPS in 16-bit, with compression and a few other optimizations (VNC, Ubuntu to 7). The systems in question were 2 GHz and 3.4 GHz and had hundred megabit LAN ports. I used about 3 feet of CAT5 cable.
I've also used and seen quite a few internet surveillance systems, most of which use black-and-white or low-color images and send 4-8 a second. Even at that rate, they still lag.

The implications for that mean that going over the internet (which tends more toward 5-8mbits, on a good day I can get ~14) you'll be lucky to get more than 10 FPS in low color. Unless they can set up a super-optimized system with VPN tunnels and a custom server/client streaming method, it's going to be slow.

The real killer? Input. Even over a close-range remote desktop, there's an input lag. When we combine the 1/10-1/2 second video lag from streaming with the returning 1/10 second input lag, it may be up to a second from the time the enemy should have appeared to the time you swing. As anyone who has ever played a shooter knows, you can be good-n-dead in that second. Even in Morrowind, at low level with a Golden Saint running towards you, that second is the difference between turning and making it 10 feet or being cut down where you stand.

No matter how they do this, it's gonna lag like a [censored], and that's gonna be a game-killer.

Now for the technical side, they'll need, oh... a computer for each player. If this ever picked up, server-farms wouldn't be cutting it anymore. Servers aren't designed to do the kind of rapid graphics computing and AI processing, they're data storage and retrieval systems. They'll need, at the very least, a number of quad-core quad-processor servers with multiple Tesla cores in each to be able to even start to handle any kind of load. If they want to serve new games, even things like FEAR2 or Red Faction Guerrilla, they may need dedicated systems for each subscriber. Imagine how the prices will go up when they realize that.

The bottom line is you're much, much better of playing the $1800 for a solid gaming desktop and using it at home with no lag than you'll ever be spending a few hundred a month to pay someone else to buy it for you.

I think that cloud computing is cool in a technical sense, and for some applications I see where it could make sense.

Not in gaming, though. The article claims that if you aren't so "tuned in" you may not even notice the input/relay lag, but I don't buy it. I think that on the whole gaming this way would be low-resolution, slow, and dissatisfying. Moreover, the subscription needed to even buy games through it is a major turn off.

Nonetheless, the underlying concept is still interesting to me each time I hear about this. Maybe some day there will be fast enough infrastructure to truly replace the need for a gaming desktop. Just not yet.


Edit: Not to mention, as others have, the control issues. A lot of people (myself included) like to own copies of the games we play, not have access to them through a service that may or may not die and take your games with it. Not to mention that modding games through such a service isn't going to happen.

I think it's a good idea that's not going to go anywhere until the issues raised in this thread have been addressed.

Forgive me for being simple, but wouldn't that pretty much be like playing a game through your TV? If you have a good sound system and monitor hooked up, you'd have a nice experience . . . of what is fed *to* you. The second part is the problem. Half-duplex is one thing, as in old time radio comms when everyone used words like 'Over' to indicate they were done talking. It's quick *enough*. Full-duplex is a completely different thing. Info going both ways at the same time . . . you have lag. Unless everyone on the system is on fiber from the back of the monitor to the server, there will be lag.

Sure, I'd love to sit in front of a big HD flat-screen with home theater sound, but click a button . . . wait for a response . . . click a button . . . wait for a response . . . doesn't sound like a lot of fun. It will be at least 25 years before the average person has fiber and until then, you'll have all sorts of wired/wireless interfaces introducing multiple sources of lag.

A lot of people will notice. Now, don't get me wrong, cloud computing is great, but it's better for servers. Gaming has entirely different stress points, bottlenecks, and uses a lot of things servers don't rely on (graphics cards and drivers, etc).


That's exactly the point. If you were to take your cable TV, you have a cable line dedicated to having simple (non-interactive) video pushed down it from the company to you. That's what the line does (or a good chunk of it) and it's good at it. The internet isn't like that, it doesn't have a known amount of data flowing in one direction and isn't optimized for that sort of thing. Any kind of high-end streaming will choke it. With some people now playing at 1080i60, that's over 124416000 pixels per second flowing into their computer.

Now, I just did the math (twice) and the results took my by surprise a little. This is proof of why this won't work: 1080i30 (1920x1080 resolution at 30HZ (interlaced), using 3 channels (RGB) and 1 byte per channel (24bpp, for 16.7 million colors, what your monitor is probably running now)) has to transfer 177.978515625 megaBYTES of data per second from their server to your screen. That's 1.4 gigabits of data ever second, and that's only the video. Now, your average computer comes with a 1 gigabit LAN port and your average home cable internet connection in the US is 16 megabits, or 0.015 gigabits. Comcast's small business package, for example, gives you a single 100 megabit connection. So you'd need 15 dedicated small business subscriptions running into the same PC for the video to run smoothly.

Yeah, um, they're aren't that stupid. OnLive has low latency MPEG encoder cards to output at 2-5 Mbit/s. If you tried to send raw video over to residential nodes, you'd get cut off within hours, and an angry phonecall. Still, you're not going to get amazing quality 720p at 5 Mbit/s.

There are reviews up for the OnLive and they havent been very positive, which is pretty much what i expected from the begining tbh.

I thought of this idea five years ago.

Glad to see someone else brought it to fruition, but unfortunately it applies the downside to playing off a console - no mods.

So instead of the angry phonecalls, you get crap quality? I'm not sure the best resolution you can get with a 5 Mbit MPEG stream, but even compressed, I know it's not great. If they compress it, that's more work on your end and needs at least a mid-range computer to run. Actually, their whole deal about it not mattering on your end is bs from the start, cause it very much depends on your connection and your system's ability to process video. Really low-end systems couldn't run this, and systems that could might be able to run the game at higher quality.

And you can pump a lot of data through residential nodes before they complain, actually. I burn around 50 gigs a week (~10 down, 30+ up), which isn't nearly as much as that, but still not an embarrassing sum and Comcast hasn't said anything.

Even still (thanks for ruining all my wonderful math, by the way <_< ), that means their systems have to do even more work, which means they'll be slower and/or more expensive (I'm gonna vote and here).

Well then..I guess I got caught up in the idea it tries to market than if it is actually playable. Vurt do you have a link to the reviews?

http://gizmodo.com/5567770/onlive-streaming-game-service-tested-at-home-finally

that one isnt that negative really.. the problem isnt that it isnt playable (if you have a good internet connection) but the pricing is stupid, $180 a year + you have to pay for the games, too. Way too expencsve.

No, actually it's a fantastic idea and the technology exists to make it work; it's just that they've overblown the capabilities of the average user's connection. I'm not referring to what plugs into their machine, but every connection between the user and the server. There are too many different ways to connect in use right now. Think of all the different wired connections (coax, cat5, fiber, dial-up), now add in all the wireless options (IR, bluetooth, satellite), plus required repeaters, multiplexers and demultiplexers and you begin to see how they've misrepresented it.

Now, if you had such a server at your house and had a direct connection to it, then you might have something.

Personally, this would svck for me since I have two computers: an ancient laptop I use for Internet and a better laptop I use for gaming/graphics work that never, ever, ever touches the Internet.

Well, this could make anti-aliasing obsolete.

If they've thought it out as well as that review Vurt linked to sounds, then it's a feasible project. Even still, playing these games will be like watching an iPod movie in iTunes. I suppose if you're desperate, it gives you a way out. They've got a list of nice games, too.

Of course, at $5-15 a month, plus games, it's not exactly a great trade. You need a good, solid internet connection (which will run $75 a month, minimum) plus subscription. So what you'd spend for a year of OnLive and internet, you could use to buy a pretty nice system. If you already have internet, it's not so big a deal. If you have a Mac... well, you could have just bought a computer with that money instead of needing this on top.

In fact, I say this will be the Mac of internet services.
Sounds great, aimed at the underdog, looks shiny but ends up being terribly expensive, prone to not working, doesn't do much, and one day, somebody will realize it's all stolen open source. :laugh:

PK, you cannot "steal" open source. Unless you mean taking it and using it without giving proper credit. Then I could see how you could steal open source. Still, this idea wasn't thought out very well and I doubt it'll go anywhere.

Actually you can. If you take a GPL program, adapt the code slightly and sell it as your own program, it's then stolen open source. Credit doesn't matter in the least, you could give the authors full credit, but if you're selling a GPL program, that's theft. FFmpeg has had a history of tracking down and prosecuting violators for such things. There are quite a few cases were violating the license terms becomes theft (most licenses, like the GPL, retract any permission you may have had to distribute or even use the software if you violate even a single term). Even using the code or adapting it in violation of the license is theft, whether you sell it or not.