OnLive

[Fletcher]

http://www.onlive.com/index.html

http://kotaku.com/5181300/onlive-makes-pc-...ysis-on-your-tv

Apparently there is a company out there that has figured out a possibly revolutionary way of how we game. Streaming. Yes, streaming. All you need is money and a broadband connection with a PC or Mac I think. This system lets you stream full games onto your PC, all the processing is handled server side. No high power needed, no mega video card, no mega processor or RAM. Just a decent broadband speed.

What happens is you buy a micro-computer that is the size of your hand, hook it up and your away. Its essentially just a video decoder with a mini-modem I think.

I am very skeptical about this technology, but I am very hopeful. If this works, and apparently many big video game companies do, this could very well spell a new era in gaming. It could save us a crap load of money, since we no longer need to upgrade.

But I see many downsides if it is successful.

Intel and AMD business usually needs gamers for its markets.
Video game stores may feel the competition since there would be fewer game and console sales.
The Internet in itself could need a bandwidth shakeup for the new demand.

I want this to work, but I'm pretty skeptical, lag-less gaming? Apparently they've tested it within the USA and on average made it so efficient its near 1 ms ping. That's pretty bad-ass tell you the truth if it is legit.

Here is the quoted article from the second link above:

You may never buy a new video card ever again. Actually, the only PC gaming hardware you might ever need will cost you less than a Wii, should OnLive's potential live up to its promise.

OnLive is a new video games on demand service that may just change the way you play PC games. The brainchild of Rearden Studios founder Steve Perlman, formerly of Atari, Apple, WebTV and more, and Mike McGarvey, formerly of Eidos, the technology looks to revolutionize the way computer games are brought home. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on the latest video game hardware that will make games like Crysis playable at nearly maxed settings, let OnLive's servers handle the processing. All that's required is a low cost "micro console" or a low end PC and a broadband internet connection.

Yes, even your sub $500 netbook or MacBook can play processor intensive, GPU demanding PC games. In fact, that's the whole point. How does it work?

The concept is simple. Your controller input isn't going from your hand to the controller to the machine in front of you, it's going from your hand to the controller through the internet to OnLive's machines then back again as streamed video. Whether you're using a USB gamepad, Bluetooth wireless controller, or tried and true keyboard and mouse, the processing and output happens on OnLive's side, then is fed back to your terminal, with the game "perceptually" played locally.

In other words, it's cloud computed gaming.

Using patented video compression in tandem with algorithms that compensate for lag, jitter and packet loss, OnLive delivers video at up to 720p resolution at frame rates up to 60 frames per second. Of course, the quality of the video feed relies on your connection.

For standard definition television quality, a broadband connection of at least 1.5 megabits per second is required. For HDTV resolution, a connection of at least 5 mbps is needed.

What about lag, you say? OnLive's technology "incubator" Rearden Studios claims that its servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond. Its patented video compression technique is also advertised as blazing fast, with video compression taking about one millisecond to process.

That speedy delivery of video game content means more than just video games on demand, it means no install times. It also means cross-platform compatibility, the ability to try demos instantly, and an opportunity to rent or play games almost instantaneously.

It also means real-time streaming of video feeds from players far and wide playing their own games at home via OnLive which could ultimately mean broadcast style feeds to observers. Up to a million, according to OnLive reps.

The best part? It already has serious buy-in from major publishers, including EA, THQ, Codemasters, Ubisoft, Atari, Warner Bros., Take-Two, and Epic Games. Oh, and 2D Boy.

The appeal on the publisher side is that it essentially means less opportunity for profit-whittling piracy. There's little modification on the developer side to make a game run with OnLive. There's even an SDK available. On the consumer side, the prospect of no cheatingor at least heavily reduced cheatingis also desirable.

OnLive is showing 16 of the games planned for the service this week at GDC, some of them playable on low-spec machines, the kind of Dell your grandmother might buy.

Of course, they'll also be playable on OnLive's micro console, a simple, low-cost device that's about the size of your hand. It's simple techthere's not even a GPU in the device. It simply acts as a video decoding control hub, with two USB inputs and support for four Bluetooth devices, and outputs audio and video via optical and HDMI connections. The micro console is expected to be priced competitively, "significantly less" than any current generation console on the market and potentially "free" with an OnLive service contract.

Plans for a monthly subscription are in the works, said to be priced on par with Xbox Live fees, offering the same community and multiplayer features popularized by Microsoft's gaming service. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the unified OnLive community is the option to save and upload Brag Clips, a 15 second replay of, well, whatever just happened in-game.

We too were a little suspicious of OnLive's capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service today and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work. Obviously, it was in a controlled environment with only a few hundred internal beta testers populating the system. But it worked.

Will it work in the wild? It might. OnLive is currently beta testing internally, with an external beta planned for Summer and a launch later this year. Expected to be deployed by launch will be five server centers hosting the latest and greatest gamesOnLive isn't aiming to be GameTap, with no immediate plans to host archival PC games. Server clusters will be located in Santa Clara, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere, hoping to offer OnLive subscribers within 1,000 miles a seemingly lag-free experience.

We'll be testing the service later this week, letting you know what we thought.

Please work!! And be available abroad!!!

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"Oh chuffing blimey, another day, another person being whiney!"
Fletcher's Feedback and Stories Thread

[Jamez]

http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?sh...3&hl=onlive

My opinions have been said by others in that thread already, the latency will be a huge problem. Since YouTube vids can take a while to buffer sometimes, imagine what a fullscreen high-res stream would be like? Headshots? No, you're buffering for the next few minutes.

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Andrew Skye
Starflier thrill-seeker

Evangeline Knight
Seasoned fighter pilot

Shinji Takeda
Renzu Corp ex-COO

[Fletcher]

http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?sh...3&hl=onlive

My opinions have been said by others in that thread already, the latency will be a huge problem. Since YouTube vids can take a while to buffer sometimes, imagine what a fullscreen high-res stream would be like? Headshots? No, you're buffering for the next few minutes.

Apparently they've patented and patent pending a new compression method to sort of solve this. Still a 1.5Mbps requirement no matter what.

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"Oh chuffing blimey, another day, another person being whiney!"
Fletcher's Feedback and Stories Thread

[JakeSG]

Bandwidth whorage + Huge costs are going to limit its use incredibly.

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For the Core.

[Magoo!]

It'll work.

Being the new guys on the block, they can't afford it not to. Besides people, why the deuce is everybody always so skeptical? Every time, EVERY time I think positively about something, it works out fine. Perhaps others should try it as well.

[Blodo]

One thing for sure, this is a sure fire way to kill piracy. Aside from that, the internet connections we use generally aren't nearly as spacious and infallible as to allow us gaming like that I'd say... unless of course you give an arm and a leg for one. I have a "guaranteed" 10 mbit connection that hardly ever reaches its max capacity.

Not to mention what they will try to do with this new technology is to scrape more and more money off the customers. Because then you don't "buy" the game, you rent it. And as always with things you rent, the price depends on how long you plan to rent it. One of the major reasons I never got into MMORPGs is because I dislike the concept of being forced to pay other fees in addition to the purchase one to be able to keep gaming, and I need to worry about my subscription after I drop the game for a prolonged period of time. And with this kind of server-centralised gaming, they will be going through games very fast likely... so I'll rather stick to old fashioned gaming. I prefer having something on a CD anyways.

[Thexare]

What Blodo said.

If I'm going to pay for a game, I'm going to own the game. I'm not going to do anything that relies on a server staying up forever. I still play Super Mario World on my SNES - it's been over fifteen years since that came out. Would the servers for these games stay up that long? Incredibly unlikely.

[Camtheman Of Freelancer4Ever]

This is all great and all, but what if you just want to play normally, will that be phased out?
I have a high-end custom computer, its not a brand name... So...:(

[Black_Neo]

if this company works out

I hope I dont have to pay a lot a month to play this

then again it has more bigger issues than just latency

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[JakeSG]

Well, unless the Australian ISP's work out some kind of deal, I don't see it being much use. We'll cut through our caps ridiculously fast, I imagine.

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For the Core.