OnLive, the new kid on the block

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qexGObP ... r_embedded

Rent PC games for a couple of days for 4-5$
or buy the full steam, ala steam.

Spectate anyone on ANY game while they play.
You play on the cloud (streaming the game) wich means you can play crysis on a pentium 3 as long as you're on cable / fiber.

community profiles etc...

Retail store Killer? I think so. It smokes direct to drive too and even steam on some features.

i remember reading about this in GI a long time ago. it basically works like SQL server does. meaning you wont run the actual game on your PC just a thin client version. your input data gets sent to the server and results as passed back to you. i think this will be the future of online gaming once fibre optic cable is the most common form of data transfer.

{EE}chEmicalbuRn wrote:i remember reading about this in GI a long time ago. it basically works like SQL server does. meaning you wont run the actual game on your PC just a thin client version. your input data gets sent to the server and results as passed back to you. i think this will be the future of online gaming once fibre optic cable is the most common form of data transfer.

+1000000

Pretty useless for online FPS gaming I think. We already have ping/lag to the gameserver but with onlive we have input lag the time it takes for our inputs to get to the cloud and then update the movements and send the video back to us.

keefy wrote:Pretty useless for online FPS gaming I think. We already have ping/lag to the gameserver but with onlive we have input lag the time it takes for our inputs to get to the cloud and then update the movements and send the video back to us.

once fibre optic cable is the most common form of data transfer.

there's also Gaikai

Sign-Up for beta wooohoo

http://www.gaikai.com/

keefy wrote:Pretty useless for online FPS gaming I think. We already have ping/lag to the gameserver but with onlive we have input lag the time it takes for our inputs to get to the cloud and then update the movements and send the video back to us.

well in theory its supposed to reduce lag time because not as much data is being sent(because the game is not running on your machine). this will also help reduce the cost the end user has to spend on PC hardware.....i would imagine there are few hardware manufactures and retailers that might not be in favor of this system, just a guess tho. so really a person with a shit box Dell machine and a kick ass web connection would have an advantage over real PC gamers that take pride in their custom built machines. it might help prevent hacking tho if all the .cfg files arent accessable because they arent local any more.

It still takes the same amount of time to get to your computer no matter how small the download is, you cannot magically change the speed of electical impulses (or light when using fibre) because there is less data being transfered, Ping/latency is determined by distance mostly.

..or light when using fiber? no i'm good with the speed of light thx

keefy wrote:It still takes the same amount of time to get to your computer no matter how small the download is, you cannot magically change the speed of electical impulses (or light when using fibre) because there is less data being transfered, Ping/latency is determined by distance mostly.

true, BUT, think of it this way. data traveling over the net is sent/received in packets that are sectioned off. the packet cant be fully processed until the check bit is received. if you are trying to get from point a to point b and you are in the back seat of a car, you're going to get there faster than if you were in the back seat of a really long train, regardless of fact the vehicals can travel the same speed. if every person in the vehical has to be processed b4 any one person can leave the station, which is going to get you out faster? im not defending this system, just commenting on how i think it works. i have worked with SQL server a lot and i can deffinetly tell you from experience, user applications run faster than if they were running 100% client side. what sucks about this system is user can kiss the old fashion LAN parties good bye. you will need a full external connection all the time

A computer even a slow one processes packet in a couple ms ping is in the area of 10-100 ms. You have an order of magnitude difference. Most game developers have realized there is more of an advantage to loading more tasks on the clients for the quality of games and less on the server not the other way around which is what onlive seeks to do. The time it takes for information to be processed on any modern game is the round trip ping from the server to you and back. That cannot change with onlive except now you throw out all the client prediction and processing that makes modern games fast and responsive and you replace it with a display lag that will be = to the time for a round trip.

It is possible they have some sort of client prediction but somehow i doubt they have that going on because it would require some sort of custom server solution that does the prediction and sends you extra frames or a very large frame.

Also like any system that is shared when they start building momentum they will start over working their servers and the quality of servers will degrade. In the end we all end up being forced to play shitty games which they do not run servers for unless the game has more than x player or do not have a server near you.

The whole point of this service just like consoles is to artificially subsidize the price of gaming then screw you over the course of time you use it. People pay more for consoles then they do for computers, more for peripherals, more for games, and receive a much lower quality product in return.

However one statement is probable correct this is the future because most people have proven in product cycle after product cycle that the most important thing to humans is not quality or anything else but simply entry price. And so everyone must be screwed over by this mentality.

The only thing that is interesting is some types of cheating will become useless but then again usually when that happens they claim people cannot cheat and then dont bother implementing any anticheat and cheating becomes easier.