Onlive


lulzfish said:
I think there's going to be horrible latency issues almost any way they try this.
I don't think that there will be. I'm positive on that score.

QUOTE
Crysis is probably not going to happen. Not in a fun way.


It'll only be fun if you're of the "seriously into pain masochist" sort... ;)
 
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I've merged the Onlive thread from the Pandora section into this one. There is really no need for two separate threads about a service which isn't available yet.

As much as I'd love to see this on the Pandora, and as much as the Pandora would almost definitely be capable of running it, the chance that the Onlive people will make a special Pandora client is pretty slim. The chance that we'll be able to get it running without their help is less than slim. We will certainly be looking into the possibility in the future, but since neither their service or our hardware are even released yet, now is not the time to get excited.
 
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I'd love to see the hardware at their end. It must be some incredibly powerful kit.

I guess they will have something like 10:1 users/host machines and hope everyone does not play at once. Used to work well with dial up ISPs.

I can see this working REALLY well with action games in the UK on Virgins network, but not so much over the old BT one.

On the flip side it would work well for RPGs/non action games on almost any connection.

Didn't Virgin or one of the cable companies try this once before in the UK years ago?
 
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My mouth was wide open throughout that video. WOW
I really hope this gets the attention it deserves (probably will, with all those publishers backing it).

Edit: I wonder when it'll come to the UK,
It's coming to the UK, right??
 
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'pandora' said:
Edit: I wonder when it'll come to the UK,
It's coming to the UK, right??
Who knows? Right now they have 2 server farms, one on each side of the US. They are in the process of adding a 3rd in the midwest. It seems distance from the server drastically effects playability.

They said they tested it out in Australia (connected to the US server) just for shits and giggles and although it was marginally playable, it was too far laggy to be any fun.
 
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I wonder, how will they render their games? A new type of server with hardware graphics accelteration? I don't think anything like that exists... Or are they doing everything in Software? That would be madness.
 
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'Fishbong' said:
I wonder, how will they render their games? A new type of server with hardware graphics accelteration? I don't think anything like that exists... Or are they doing everything in Software? That would be madness.
I think it is unlikely that they are using server hardware. Stacks of cheap SLI mobos with 2 GTX260s apiece makes much more sense. You can build systems like that for less than real servers, and the performance will be more than adequate. It's the software and infrastructure that is the hard part, but based on their demos, it looks like they've got that taken care of.
 
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Server farms? All sounds a bit sci-fi to me :).

Based on what you said, I'm guessing it'll come here once proven in the US market.
A while then.
 
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'Svartalf' said:
Actually, if the figures they quote for needed bandwidth are correct, they may have the hardware down, but not the infrastructure. For that matter, I doubt very, very seriously that anyone could.

For example, if the 1.5 Mbits is for-real for the low-def play rate, this translates into needing an OC12 to service 430 or so clients correctly and reliably. You do the math there... ;)
Bandwidth is bandwidth. If you have the money, you can get as much as you want. There are plenty of farms that will rent you floor space by the half-acre and as much bandwidth as you can pay for. Something like this would need at least one 10gig Ethernet service. It's not a cheap setup, but these guys obviously have some decent startup capital, and it is not that expensive if you're in the right location.
 
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'Chip' said:
Bandwidth is bandwidth. If you have the money, you can get as much as you want. There are plenty of farms that will rent you floor space by the half-acre and as much bandwidth as you can pay for. Something like this would need at least one 10gig Ethernet service. It's not a cheap setup, but these guys obviously have some decent startup capital, and it is not that expensive if you're in the right location.
10 Gig will only buy you 4000 total continuous users, based on the figures they gave for bandwidth needs- and that's the low-def figure. You get roughly 430 users on an OC12 at low-def, 80-ish in "high-def". Most Tier-1 co-lo facilities have a couple of OC-12's coming into the facility. Using the figures I gave you for the number of users, that's largely jamming the pipe with their traffic.

Bandwith isn't QUITE what you think it is. I deal in that space, day-in, day-out as part of my day job (I am one of the platform software engineers for Tektronix Comms Group- they do packet monitoring and test for the telecoms... ;) ). Anything past an OC3 gets expensive quick.

Moreover, while you glibly state that you can buy it if you've got the money- heh... Ever priced an OC12? ;)

Unless they're as well heeled as one of my former employers was (95 Million US) they'll go down in flames trying to keep up with this. And if they don't get huge honking chunks of revenue quickly they'll flame out just as quickly as epicRealm did back in 2001 (Go look it up... :D). That kind of bandwidth in a way that's commercially viable in usable numbers has a high burn rate. epicRealm had a 2-3 million a month burn rate on just server access.

And this is on their end. Unless you've got 3-5 Mbits of low latency (i.e. DSL where you're not sharing the ATM backhaul or something like a Business grade fiber to the premises setup) the latency will be pure evil to most people. The high-def, contrary to what people think here and elsewhere, will need something like the 20Mbit symmetric business line I've got to be remotely reliable.

This is snake oil to sell "anti-piracy" to the publishers. Seriously. It doesn't work the way they claim it will, because it doesn't scale nicely like they claim it does.
 
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[quote name='Svartalf' date='Mar 26 2009, 02:04 PM' post='713086']
[quote name='Chip' date='Mar 26 2009, 02:13 AM']This is snake oil to sell "anti-piracy" to the publishers.
[/quote]

You are correct sir and thank you! :D
Personally I want to own my games and do whatever I want with them.

Regards

André
 
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http://www.onlive.com

Game over to Microsoft, PS3, Nintendo.

To get up to speed with what im talking about please read this article.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/23/steve-pe...rld-upside-down

If you think about the next generations of home consoles, Microsoft have been making there new xbox 720, Playstation with their PS4 and Wii2, they could be a chance that they too were looking into this technology, but OnLive will seem to be there first for the nockout. Im just glad that it doesn't effect Handheld market just yet..

Your thoughts please?

(sorry for the reposting this topic, and non-linking links.
 
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CODE
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=47216
 
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Already been discussed.
OnLive is going to use some ActiveX thingy, suffice to say it will be at worst impossible and at best a BITCH to port.

Also, I don't think it will work well. I want something like StreamMyGame, that's local.

And if this did somehow become immensely popular, it would only help Microsoft [Every PC game is like a giant advertisement for Windows] and not really affect Nintendo or Sony, who will still have many exclusive games.
 
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Hardly. While I love the technology behind OnLive. I'm not going to ever use it. What I love about PC Gaming is having this fat money eating piece of hardware to tinker with and bench.

On the console side of things, if you really think they're going to start moving out of the USA for OnLive, you're greatly mistaken. They're not going to migrate out for a few years now. Even then the service will be minimal. It just costs so much bloody money.
 
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Woah! should have looked. sorry!


Im not saying porting the bugger, im just saying that its bad news for consoles!
 
My thoughts are... this will never work without serious traffic shaping on the part of ISPs, and cooperation with every ISP in North America.

The servers have to be close or the ping will make it unacceptable.

I have 3mbit DSL. That probably gives me ~480p video. If the nearest server was in Seattle, I'd have about 80 ping from distance or other factors. Now toss in another 10-20 miliseconds for processing the input, rendering a frame, encoding that frame.

100 miliseconds input delay is quite a bit. Most games have no input delay. I imagine these games will be playable, but the difference will be very noticeable.
 
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besides, as if this would ever seriously work
who has a good enough internet connection to stream that kind of data reliably? on the internet connections here in belgium, you'd hit your bandwith limit after a day of using the service ^^
not to mention i can't imagine much places where the internet is stable enough 24/7 to stream that kind of data without too much latency
and then we don't mention the isp's complaining about a sudden huge surge in bandwith usage, causing their network to become unreliable, or making them take action, making the system laggy or not working ^^

yeah, this seems like a gooood idea :D
 
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