Onlive

killkrazy · March 2009

<div class="IPBDescription">Holy crapamoly.</div><a href="http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47080.html" target="_blank">http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47080.html</a>
^^

I heard a while ago, somewhere, about streaming games across the internet, but this service looks like it took the concept and totally ran with it.
Basically if you haven't watched the video, the whole idea is to take your fast internet and connect to a powerful high-end PC somewhere and stream the video-game across the internet.

You will click a button on your controller, and it'll send a very small packet of info to the computer which will then process and send back the next frame or few based on your input.

<b><span style="color:#FF0000">I suggest watching the video,</span></b> I am very excited about the prospect of this service, a few things that stand out for me:

<span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><b>Spectating - </b></span>
any number (1million+) of people can spectate any game they want, even if they DO NOT HAVE the game they are spectating.

<span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><b>Beta Testing -</b></span>
(might be in the second video) but developers can stream beta and invite anyone or everyone and then they can spectate you like a live user-test.

<b><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%">Platform independancy -</span></b>
speaks for itself, even works on a mac with intel processor

--

I know a lot of people will be skeptical about this, especially the hardcore fanboys, but for me... a futurist, this is a very exciting idea indeed, and even could see NS2 running on PC, Mac, TV

locallyunscene · March 2009

The fundamental problem with this is latency. Until we get a "new faster internet" by an order of magnitude, doubling the latency for multiplayer FPS's is not practically feasible. I could see this working for single player and other types of games, but even then it runs the risk of ruining the feel of the game by making it "unresponsive". Maybe this is the future, but right now beefier clients are much more efficient and reliable.

killkrazy · March 2009

Not sure if you watched the whole video, but he states that with some jiggery-pokery-hocus-pocus they have all-but eliminated lag, and the only restriction bandwidth poses is the resolution of the game.
So it sounds like there's a finite amount of bandwidth used for the game's instructions, and then the left-over bandwidth is used to determine the resolution (size of the frames sent to client).

It's difficult to get your head around, but the way online games would be computed would be fundamentally different, I assume, otherwise you'd need 1 suped-up computer for every client, which is unfeasible.

--

As for latency, it's entirely possible with a good provider to have latency of <100ms to the US from UK nowadays, and to other UK servers I've seen pings of <5ms, doubling that kind of latency doesn't seem like a big deal to me, if that's even how the system works.
if you've ever played halo you'll know its completely possible to have a fun game with people lagging up to 400ms.

locallyunscene · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(killkrazy @ Mar 24 2009, 09:53 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703369"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>jiggery-pokery-hocus-pocus</div>
I guess I will have to watch the video, but TBH that doesn't sound promising.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(killkrazy @ Mar 24 2009, 09:53 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703369"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>As for latency, it's entirely possible with a good provider to have latency of <100ms to the US from UK nowadays, and to other UK servers I've seen pings of <5ms, doubling that kind of latency doesn't seem like a big deal to me, if that's even how the system works.</div>
I've seen it barely better than 100ms(like around 95ms). If the server's right next to you it could work, but 50ms is much more common than 5ms these days. And unless they're hosting the server too(which means you're much more locked in and limited than even no longer owning a copy of the game you're playing) at anything over 50(50ms from you to service, 5ms processing time 50ms to server) you're approaching the less playable range.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(killkrazy @ Mar 24 2009, 09:53 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703369"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>if you've ever played halo you'll know its completely possible to have a fun game with people lagging up to 400ms.</div>
That seems like an extraordinary claim to me. I played the original Halo on PC Demo and it worked okay but lags of 250+ tended to get the "reset effect" too often where your character would move back to where it was a moment ago making the game very jumpy.

Radix · March 2009

Cool.

killkrazy · March 2009

Hehe, well playing halo3 it's very special if you are not shooting at people in the future, and console gamers have a much higher resilience to latency than us PC'ers.

The reason I think I'm so excited is that I've found PC gaming on the decline in the last while, and the games I would want to play seem more enticing on a console where you can sit with your buddies and enjoy the games socially. It could be that I'm finally growing up :>

I'm an optimist as well as a futurist, and I am hopeful they do this thing right, and make it so I can take that little box and a couple of controllers round to any of my mate's houses who have a HDTV and a sweet internet connection (10-50mbs is perfectly normal in the south where I live right now, who knows by Xmas / Spring'10) and just start playing.

It's still a way off, 3/4 of the year away, plus any setbacks or delays, but I can't wait!

Bacillus · March 2009

I doubt it's going to be the best solution for FPS gaming, not at least for some time, but other implementations look interesting.

Max · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(killkrazy @ Mar 24 2009, 06:53 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703369"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>As for latency, it's entirely possible with a good provider to have latency of <100ms to the US from UK nowadays, and to other UK servers I've seen pings of <5ms, doubling that kind of latency doesn't seem like a big deal to me, if that's even how the system works.
if you've ever played halo you'll know its completely possible to have a fun game with people lagging up to 400ms.</div>
You can't really compare those numbers with this type of system. When you play a FPS and have 400ms of lag, you don't necessarily feel any lag because of all the clever stuff the engine is doing to compensate for it; primarily predicting your movement and responding to it before it even contacts the server.

With an On Live type of system -- where your input isn't even recognized for 400 ms -- it's more like playing a game at 2.5 frames per second. That said, presumably with this system they've somehow accomplished very low latency so you don't have 400 ms of lag before your get a response.

I really hope this takes off, it sounds great for gamers and game developers.

Jiriki · March 2009

When I was talking to some people about anti-cheating methods for competitive leagues, I knew that the problem of anti-cheating is that client-side security is flawed in principle. The ideal solution would be a streamed game. User sends the (mouse/keyboard) input and server returns the output (video). On-the-fly image processing aside, its quite impossible to cheat in streamed game, but given that high-end competitive games are the target area for anti-cheating systems, the obvious latency problems dimnish the advantage. Maybe some day this will be practically possible when most people are running a gigabit internet connection - not to mention the fixing the damn routers all over the world. Hey, maybe in the far future we'll have quantum computers which will permit over-the-lightspeed data transfer, allowing streamed games and finally Worldwide league games with low latency!

killkrazy · March 2009

You DO know how fast light travels, right?
299 million metres/second

And that electrons move (well, don't really move) through wire almost instataneously.

The amount of data that can be sent at the same time (bandwidth) doesn't solely determine latency unfortunately <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" />

Zek · March 2009

First of all they claim to have all but eliminated lag in compressing the video, they can't erase latency from the internet obviously. If you lag then the game will be highly unresponsive.

If they can keep pings below 20ms then the input delay will be negligible. But the service will be completely dependent on maintaining those low pings. Which means they'll have to have a lot of servers all over the place so every customer can have a nearby access point, and only people with good broadband need apply. It's theoretically possible but it's a tall order. It's going to take a lot of infrastructure improvement before it can really hit the mainstream.

daidalos · March 2009

So what about Linux, eh?
First he mentioned the PC and in the end it boils down to Vista and XP.
I cannot understand that ignorance atm.

Besides that, how's going to pay for all of that?
I don't know if I understood this system correctly, but to me it looks like as if they want to provide a service that can let thousands or millions of people play the latest high-end games. For that they would need a similar amount of gaming systems, huge "pc farms" and gigantic connections to the Internet.

I don't know, looks pretty impossible to me.

[edit]
Okay, I just read that by system he means actual hardware.
I don't think it will work out as planned anyway.

Warmonger · March 2009

This sounds way too unrealistic to me - smells just like that Phantom vaporware a few years back.

If they're requiring a subscriber to have a minimum of a 5 megabit connection for "HD" (1280x720 @ 60 FPS) gameplay then think of the amount of bandwidth they would need to pump data to all those subscribers. Then on top of that they would need a pretty high-end PC for each subscriber that's playing. Using Steam as a template let's assume that they had roughly half the concurrent users that Steam does - Steam had 1.7 million (1,783,043) concurrent people playing at the same time during it's peak today. Now imagine if OnLive only had 1 million users at its peak. They would need 1 million PC's (what they're calling servers) and 5 Mb of bandwidth for each player. I'm not buying it... Even without bringing lag into the equation I don't think they could afford the infrastructure required.

badtrip · March 2009

Here At Onlive we bring the latency and monthly costs of multiplayer to singleplayer. sorry I just like to own my games. Steam is my limit.

spellman23 · March 2009

So yeah, this is the secret project all my friends who graduated last year are working on and getting paid huge amounts of cash for it too.

Well, we'll have to see how it turns out, no? They're making some big claims. If they're right, this could potentially really change up the market. Not to mention make DRM fans really happy.

killkrazy · March 2009

Warmonger, the fact that having a server center somewhere with 1 server per customer is a ridiculous proposition tells me that that isn't how it works

Eddie · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Warmonger @ Mar 25 2009, 02:12 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703489"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>This sounds way too unrealistic to me - smells just like that Phantom vaporware a few years back.

If they're requiring a subscriber to have a minimum of a 5 megabit connection for "HD" (1280x720 @ 60 FPS) gameplay then think of the amount of bandwidth they would need to pump data to all those subscribers. Then on top of that they would need a pretty high-end PC for each subscriber that's playing. Using Steam as a template let's assume that they had roughly half the concurrent users that Steam does - Steam had 1.7 million (1,783,043) concurrent people playing at the same time during it's peak today. Now imagine if OnLive only had 1 million users at its peak. They would need 1 million PC's (what they're calling servers) and 5 Mb of bandwidth for each player. I'm not buying it... Even without bringing lag into the equation I don't think they could afford the infrastructure required.</div>

I agree that this sounds a bit ridiculous... but do you honestly believe that the "7 years" he said they spent developing this technology was all spent on how to just stream a game from a server across long distances??? I don't think they would have 1 server/high-end PC running per person with an OnLive box... I think the 7 years technology they were talking about was how to take one game installation on a TANK server, that, using streamed data from different OnLive boxes, could theoretically "run" more then one game at a time using that single game installation. I don't mean straight up running 5 different processes for 5 different games, but just one massive process designed to respond to a virtually infinite amount of game situations, therefor giving the impression of running multiple games.
...OK, so obviously I don't know what I'm talking about, but it was fun to rant.

PseudoKnight · March 2009

I can't see this service being cheap, so while I believe the ease-of-use claims, I don't believe it will be cheaper than a personal dedicated gaming machine.

The input latency, even minimized as it is, will not be a fun thing in fast action FPS games like NS. I'm highly sensitive to input latency.

This will also have serious consequences for the mod community.

moultano · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Max @ Mar 24 2009, 03:29 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703404"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>That said, presumably with this system they've somehow accomplished very low latency so you don't have 400 ms of lag before your get a response.</div>
I can't think of any way they'd make that feel acceptably responsive with a thin client unless they are co-locating their machines with your ISP.

sherpa · March 2009

Bah we're all talking about the company needing to make a stable, low latency server but what about the clients? I'm sure I speak for others too when I say what about when a member of family facebooks, myspaces or the dreaded youtubing of high bandwidth videos? Onlive might be able to receive, process and send low-latency info buy my PC sure as hell won't be able to. Spikes in latency are bad enough for current multiplayer games and from the sounds of it it'll make onlive even worse? Also, my connection is happy to give me low pings for games but can almost never stream a video properly- we don't all have stable high bandwidth connections.

<a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article" target="_blank">http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-...ly-work-article</a>

PseudoKnight · March 2009

... a ton of testing and highly specialized equipment.

This still seems highly sensitive. A lost packet in normal multiplayer games can be interpolated. This will just lose the frame altogether. They say they've tested it with multiple people using onLive on the same network, but I'm skeptical of performance when the router is being used by multiple computers.

It'll use up a lot of bandwidth, too.

Still, it's cool to see exactly what your friend is doing at the moment. I think this will find a solid niche market, but I definitely do not see this taking over.

Warmonger · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Eddie @ Mar 25 2009, 06:04 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703507"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I agree that this sounds a bit ridiculous... but do you honestly believe that the "7 years" he said they spent developing this technology was all spent on how to just stream a game from a server across long distances??? I don't think they would have 1 server/high-end PC running per person with an OnLive box... I think the 7 years technology they were talking about was how to take one game installation on a TANK server, that, using streamed data from different OnLive boxes, could theoretically "run" more then one game at a time using that single game installation. I don't mean straight up running 5 different processes for 5 different games, but just one massive process designed to respond to a virtually infinite amount of game situations, therefor giving the impression of running multiple games.
...OK, so obviously I don't know what I'm talking about, but it was fun to rant.</div>
Well, the problem with the scenario of a "TANK" server is that at some point it has to output some video, compress it, and then send it out. IMO it's highly unlikely that they would be using software rendering as that would make it even slower - after all, that's why games use GPU's. I don't know of any server that can handle the workload of multiple (current generation) games and output to multiple video cards.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(killkrazy @ Mar 25 2009, 06:01 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703506"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>Warmonger, the fact that having a server center somewhere with 1 server per customer is a ridiculous proposition tells me that that isn't how it works</div>
But that's what he alluded to in the video. And how else could it be done? The game logic has to be run and the video needs to be output and compressed. Basically it's nothing more than the same idea of Remote Connect for the PSP/PS3.

Eddie · March 2009

I agree, the video stream has to be processed somewhere...the only way any company would do this is if they knew for sure that each user would, in the long run, pay off their hardware expenses through game purchases/subscriptions. Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me...
EPIC APRIL FOOLS! YOU GOT US OnLive HAHAHAHA GOOD ONE

Italianmagic · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Eddie @ Mar 26 2009, 07:52 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703592"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>I agree, the video stream has to be processed somewhere...the only way any company would do this is if they knew for sure that each user would, in the long run, pay off their hardware expenses through game purchases/subscriptions. Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me...
EPIC APRIL FOOLS! YOU GOT US OnLive HAHAHAHA GOOD ONE</div>

Eddie, I'm sorry to inform you, it's not yet April... So really, the jokes on you!

haymo · March 2009

There is no way this would have no lag. BS.

Italianmagic · March 2009

Problem solved...

Record countless sessions of gameplay and randomly choose one. just stream the video in hopes that they make similar moves...

Eddie · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Italianmagic @ Mar 26 2009, 07:12 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703594"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>Eddie, I'm sorry to inform you, it's not yet April... So really, the jokes on you!</div>

Oh wow... you're right Italianmagic. Thanks for pointing that out.

PseudoKnight · March 2009

Hands-on impressions that offered some criticism of video quality and input latency in fast-paced games:
<a href="http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1090" target="_blank">http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1090</a>

puzl · March 2009

Sherpa has hit the nail on the head I think.

To be clear, this is possible on a well designed network with absurdly low latencies and a properly tiered network. The problem is that isps depend on being able to over-provision and this leads to varying contention levels throughout the day. Right now if your network congestion is causing a bad gameplay experience you can quit out of cod4 or w/e and play something offline. With onlive, if you have times of the day with poor network performance you're screwed. The only way this will work properly is with guaranteed QOS 24x7 and that is going to be very expensive as you currently typically pay for about 1/20th of the network that you use.

Jiriki · March 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(killkrazy @ Mar 25 2009, 01:38 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1703421"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>You DO know how fast light travels, right?
299 million metres/second

And that electrons move (well, don't really move) through wire almost instataneously.

The amount of data that can be sent at the same time (bandwidth) doesn't solely determine latency unfortunately <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" /></div>
Firstly most of the lag issues are not related to propagation delay but related to bad routing and processing delays between two destinations.

I know how fast electricity / light can transfer information and that current physics laws prohibit anything moving over the speed of light but quantum computers are not about electrons. I remember reading an article about quantum experiment transfering information instantly to another quantum - over the speed of light. I might remember wrong though but usually I check twice what I read. I still doubt long-distance over-the-speed-of-light data transfer will be possible, but who knows - quantum physics are still a deep black hole for science. In any case, the store and forward that happens at routers slows remarkably the transfer, if router's processing time could be decreased with quantum computers in future, pings below 60-50ms between US and EU might be possible.

Basically average distance between US and EU is about 6000-9000k, which means about 40ms of round-trip delay (ping) by minimum.

dnleech · March 2009

One word, virtualization. They will have extremely high end blade servers in rack after rack in a building that sits on a fibre line. Three server farms, east, central, west. Each server will have a blazing fast quad-core processor creating a virtual session of whatever type of console you can imagine and will dedicate processing power for each session for each user. So short answer, no there is not one piece of hardware per user (ridiculous thought). EDIT: I just wanted to point out that the above paragraph is speculation. It is only my assessment (probably inaccurate <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />).

In terms of the video compression, they apparently have worked years on devloping an algorithm that can compress and decompress 3d rendered video at an extremely high rate of speed. There are probably dedicated servers in the server farms with specially designed architecture dedicated to receiving video signals from the game rendering servers, decompressing the video and then dropping it on fibre which makes its way to your house and then is decompressed on your end by either the small unit they provide for TVs or your PC/laptop.

Multiplayer is a non issue. The data being sent back and forth for network code is traveling feet, not miles and on a local network with gobs and gobs of bandwidth. Again, what you see on your PC or TV is the rendered video feed.

Maximum resolution at the moment which requires a middle to top tier internet connection is 720p. That is 1280 x 720. That is comparable to a 4:3 format of 1024 x 768. That is on the very low end of what you expect out of a next gen gaming console or a low end PC (depending on specific hardware configs). So that is pretty bad imo, but still amazing technology if they can actually pull it off on a large scale.

I can understand the 3rd party support that will fly in for these guys, but they demoed only PC games. Are "first-party" titles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo really going to find their way onto this service? They have these titles to push their consoles, but I think Nintendo is currently the only manufacturer to actually turn a profit on a sale of one (Microsoft may be now, not sure on that one but definitely not until recently).

Anyways, long ass post and sorry for that, but there are so many questions to be asked. I seriously doubt moderate to hardcore PC gamers are going to scrap their rigs and play at the equivalent of 1024 x 768. I know half the fun of PC gaming is building and owning a machine that you can physically touch, but then again times are changing. I can see this really picking up steam with the console crowd, but how much is it all going to cost per month??? If it's $20, then in a year you've already spent the money for a Wii and almost the amount for a 360. Not to mention it looked like you had to buy or rent the games according to the video?? And of course to even play at their max offered resolution you need a HDTV and a broadband connection that doesn't suck. What about comcast and charter users ni apartment complexes that have bandwidth caps and crap? Aaaah, too many questions but seriously a troubling and amazing thing all wrapped into one.

Onlive

Comments