There was an interesting article about this - that basically stated the reason for Stadia is not game streaming as much as it making videos of gameplay and seamlessly putting them on YouTube.
So its more of content creation than just pure gameplay as they want to compete with Twitch who owns the live streaming space, but afterwards the videos end up on YouTube.
I think that makes a lot more sense - as YouTube streaming will be built in.
I read that article too, however I also read an interview where they said that googles games will be exclusive to the service.
so Stadia is showing latency near Xbox One X levels and people are saying it does not work on here? You guys should work for Digital Foundry then. They need your wisdom lol
Google Stadia: 166ms
Google Project Stream: 179ms
PC @ 30fps: 112ms
PC @ 60fps: 79ms
Xbox One X: 145ms
In a year or two it should be even better. Once it goes below 100 it is good enough for even the skeptics.
Thousand of us have already used this service for months now. It works. Deal with it.
Of course it works - other game streaming services worked too, I dont think the argument is that it wont work.
The issue is will it survive long term - or die on the vine like many google projects.
The other issue is obviously not all games stream equally well - some are a lot more latency sensitive and input lag sensitive than others.
Bottom line is - this will be good enough for some, but is no substitute for a good gaming PC, especially if you are an FPS player
Latency is latency. And as you say experiences will vary a lot.
Network latency will exist though whether you have a PC or - maybe in a few years time a TV that is better than the fastest PC you can buy now. Today though - as Microsoft said - the best experience will be had with an attached device (they were talking consoles but the comment is applicable).
How are Google going to make this pay though. I am sure they have "goal": all they to do is simply dethrone Steam, Sony, Microsoft and Amazon (or take a big enough slice of their pies) and they will make a fortune. Pulling off even a fraction of that though ...... how much are they prepared to spend trying?
Input latency and display latency are much more disruptive than network latency. Depending on the nature of the game, you can sometimes cover up network latency such that even a few hundred ms doesn't particularly matter. Some games can't do that; DMKano's example of a twitchy first person shooter doesn't let you. But PVE makes possible some tricks that you can't do in PVP.
But even if you want to regard all forms of latency as equivalent, then this will still only make it worse. That's just the triangle inequality.
In the context of the posts above mind I was talking about network latency - comments about where people live etc. And as you say whether or not you can cover this up depends on the game.
Your other comments highlight that Google seems to be suggesting that no "minimum spec" is needed. Put me firmly in the sceptical column. It will, to use your words: make things worse - depending on the game of course. I wonder whether Google will (eventually) come out with some guidance. Simple browser games - not much needed; more complex games - x, y, x etc.
Or maybe this is targeted at the same set of people that other sorts of thin clients are: people who are screw-ups and can't get a computer to work right. And will promptly break it if someone else sets up the computer properly for them. This will genuinely make it a lot easier for such people to have a computer that "works" (or is easily fixed) for games.
Or do you think that game consoles already have that crowd covered?
Stadia is geared towards accessibility. You can play it from a browser, like Project Stream. You can play it anywhere you have a connection, granted the connection works well.
The cost to buy in is less.. it's a virtual console. You could spend hundreds upon hundreds or you can use pretty much any current PC with a strong enough connection.
I get you're a big hardware guy, but the implications of a system like this can't be lost on you.
Even those with the best hardware, and the most amazing software, still have problems from time to time with game compatibility. If there is a system that can optimize games to work, on any hardware, reliably, even with some, yet minimal latency, that's a big deal.
The major indicator of whether or not it will take off, isn't in the way the game plays, because project stream worked well when I used it. It's going to be what the support looks like, and how games are acquired and played.
Stadia isn't going to magically fix compatibility issues. Other than by supporting fixed other platforms (theoretically possible but unlikely to happen with game consoles; more likely with Android), it's as likely to make compatibility issues worse as better. Tricks that you could use to work around problems on your own computer won't be available on someone else's.
Guys, they don't care about your latency, or opinions on their game studios.
Google Cloud Platform, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure. Talk about those.
Open up your search engine and look up Web Assembly and Unreal Engine tech demo.
Look up what Parsec was doing years ago, and imagine that on gamma rays + CDNs and all the caching, microservice, technology that has come about since.
My money is on the corporations who literally took their hardware and technology and rammed them up our collective bottoms. They're all marching together on this direction.
Don't talk about OnLive, don't talk about pressing jump in a video game and it showing half a second later.
Most of y'all have 144hz 4K HDR OLED TVs and don't even know what content is being served by any of the providers.
A handful of giant data centers is the wrong model entirely if you want game streaming to work other than for the handful of people who happen to live very near you. OnLive had 5 data centers in the US. Microsoft Azure has 11. Yes, Microsoft's are much bigger than OnLive's ever were. But that doesn't matter. The difference between 5 locations and 11 is what matters. Make it 500 and you have a chance at keeping latency manageable for more than a handful of people.
ISPs have that kind of infrastructure. The big cloud providers don't.
You're still talking about optimal game streaming performance and ignoring what the big picture is; decoupling business logic, processors, and GPU from consumer facing hardware. It's not just about games.
It's not just a "handful" of data centers, it's HaaS centers, it's CDNs, it's the telecom alliances
Are you registering how much MONEY is going to be shift back to cable companies, game hardware, display, IoT, and smartphone manufacturers and other infrastructures with the HaaS philosophy?
There is no "this is dead in the water because Fortnite" scenario. It's the beginning of the general market HaaS transition. It's the compression and machine learning arms races that are about to rev up (again).
Lastly if the conversation is going to be fussing about input lag, Microsoft is claiming all they'll potentially need is 5mbps bandwidth and they can get 10ms latency. So there's that.
I'm not picking winners, what I'm saying is there isn't going to be any "losers" per say. This ain't an OnLive situation. It's a "do you guys not have phones?" scenario.
At the least everyone on this forum should be rejoicing because the whole [Insert Desired PC Game]: Mobile thing just got kicked square in the cojones.
Just because they build something doesn't mean that anyone has to buy it. And it especially doesn't mean that other developers can't ignore the project and do something else.
Do you think that Nvidia and AMD are going to stop making consumer GPUs? Do you think that Steam is going to preemptively give up and shut down because Google decided to throw a ton of money at some goofy project?
Do you think AMD and nVidia are going to turn down opportunity to get a piece of Hardware as a Service money from consumers who don't have video cards built into their Tablets, Phones, Hotel Room TVs, etc? The same consumers who have 4K 144hz HDR/Oled panels in their homes and when the majority of the content served it is still 1080p (or less) and 30-60fps?
It isn't just Google, it's Microsoft... and others. Get a clue man. It's called "as a Service" for a reason.
Well of course AMD and Nvidia will sell GPUs to whoever is willing to buy them, outside of a handful of exceptions such as embargoes. My point is that just because game streaming services show up isn't going to make the old ways of playing games vanish. Game streaming is going to have to compete with rendering the game locally, and it's mostly going to lose that competition.
There was an interesting article about this - that basically stated the reason for Stadia is not game streaming as much as it making videos of gameplay and seamlessly putting them on YouTube.
So its more of content creation than just pure gameplay as they want to compete with Twitch who owns the live streaming space, but afterwards the videos end up on YouTube.
I think that makes a lot more sense - as YouTube streaming will be built in.
It's unlikely that that's the main reason or even a significant reason for Stadia. If getting a cut of the Twitch market is the goal, then this is a creatively idiotic way to go about it. Bandwidth requirements are a major problem, and needing to stream the game in real time makes that bandwidth problem massively worse than when you're not latency sensitive, as is the case with Twitch.
Input latency and display latency are much more disruptive than network latency. Depending on the nature of the game, you can sometimes cover up network latency such that even a few hundred ms doesn't particularly matter. Some games can't do that; DMKano's example of a twitchy first person shooter doesn't let you. But PVE makes possible some tricks that you can't do in PVP.
But even if you want to regard all forms of latency as equivalent, then this will still only make it worse. That's just the triangle inequality.
In the context of the posts above mind I was talking about network latency - comments about where people live etc. And as you say whether or not you can cover this up depends on the game.
Your other comments highlight that Google seems to be suggesting that no "minimum spec" is needed. Put me firmly in the sceptical column. It will, to use your words: make things worse - depending on the game of course. I wonder whether Google will (eventually) come out with some guidance. Simple browser games - not much needed; more complex games - x, y, x etc.
Well of course there's going to be some degree of minimum specs needed. For starters, you'll need a lot of bandwidth, and also a device that can handle that much bandwidth. Decompression will take some unknown amount of processing power. Denser compression algorithms commonly take more processing power than weaker ones, so there are trade-offs there, too.
While this will open up new possibilities, I think that it's going to run into the same roadblock that OnLive did: the things that you've made possible are predominantly things that people don't actually want to do.
While cell phones have far less processing power than high end gaming desktops, that's not the factor limiting what games can do. If you could do something at all 15 years ago, then you've got the processing power to do it on a cell phone. But today's mobile games mostly don't look at all like the AAA games of 15 years ago. The reason that mobile gamers who don't have a PC aren't playing WoW or League of Legends isn't that they can't because they don't have a PC. It's that they don't want to. Make it so that they can play the game on their phones and they still won't want to.
Nor do I think that there will fill a lot of demand for hard-core gamers playing demanding games on a tablet from their couch. If that's what you want, then Steam Link will let you do it today, and a lot better than Stadia. Streaming a game over a LAN rather than over the Internet doesn't completely fix the latency and bandwidth issues, but it does make them far more manageable, and makes it easy to give you a massively better experience than Stadia will.
This could make it possible to continue playing such games after you leave your house, and without having to drag around a bulky gaming laptop. I don't believe that that's a very big market, either, largely because it could already have been done for many games years ago by running the game locally on a cell phone or tablet, and for the most part, no one bothered. Maybe some people will use it heavily for this; I just don't think there will be very many of them.
Or maybe this is targeted at the same set of people that other sorts of thin clients are: people who are screw-ups and can't get a computer to work right. And will promptly break it if someone else sets up the computer properly for them. This will genuinely make it a lot easier for such people to have a computer that "works" (or is easily fixed) for games.
Or do you think that game consoles already have that crowd covered?
Stadia is geared towards accessibility. You can play it from a browser, like Project Stream. You can play it anywhere you have a connection, granted the connection works well.
The cost to buy in is less.. it's a virtual console. You could spend hundreds upon hundreds or you can use pretty much any current PC with a strong enough connection.
I get you're a big hardware guy, but the implications of a system like this can't be lost on you.
Even those with the best hardware, and the most amazing software, still have problems from time to time with game compatibility. If there is a system that can optimize games to work, on any hardware, reliably, even with some, yet minimal latency, that's a big deal.
The major indicator of whether or not it will take off, isn't in the way the game plays, because project stream worked well when I used it. It's going to be what the support looks like, and how games are acquired and played.
Stadia isn't going to magically fix compatibility issues. Other than by supporting fixed other platforms (theoretically possible but unlikely to happen with game consoles; more likely with Android), it's as likely to make compatibility issues worse as better. Tricks that you could use to work around problems on your own computer won't be available on someone else's.
I think it could, depending on what games they offer. Currently they only have 2 games confirmed to launch in their roster, and it's highly unlikely they would place a game on the list that doesn't run properly, or well.
Essentially, google could emulate the most stable situations, and they are even in a much better situation to receive support from developers before games even launch than we are as consumers.
The Division 2 is a great example of this. Lots of people are currently having crashing issues, despite many attempts to work around them, that included all of the general fixes that most people attempt. I personally, have never experienced those issues, neither have several of my friends, but those that do have them can't simply point to a single issue causing them.
With a dedicated platform, you forego these kinds of issues generally. PS4 and XBOX don't have them, and a service isn't just one particular instance of a game on untested, unknown hardware.
It's the general consensus that, when you play a console game, it just works. Similar in form and function to a game on a service like this. The vast majority of compatibility issues are not the end users problem.
so Stadia is showing latency near Xbox One X levels and people are saying it does not work on here? You guys should work for Digital Foundry then. They need your wisdom lol
Google Stadia: 166ms
Google Project Stream: 179ms
PC @ 30fps: 112ms
PC @ 60fps: 79ms
Xbox One X: 145ms
In a year or two it should be even better. Once it goes below 100 it is good enough for even the skeptics.
Thousand of us have already used this service for months now. It works. Deal with it.
Of course it works - other game streaming services worked too, I dont think the argument is that it wont work.
The issue is will it survive long term - or die on the vine like many google projects.
The other issue is obviously not all games stream equally well - some are a lot more latency sensitive and input lag sensitive than others.
Bottom line is - this will be good enough for some, but is no substitute for a good gaming PC, especially if you are an FPS player
The argument HAS been made that it wont or does not work.
This is an aimed tech for console not PC players. For now.
The argument isn't so much that it won't work at all as that it's a really inefficient way to do things. Both game streaming and local rendering have a cost/quality curve, where you can get better quality at the expense of more cost. Local rendering has a much better cost/quality curve and likely always will.
That means that at a given cost, you can get better results with local rendering than game streaming. Or equivalently, a given level of quality can be done more cheaply with local rendering than game streaming.
Convenience trumps efficiency every time. It doesn’t have to be perfect it just has to be good enough and extremely convenient. Wireless charging is horribly inefficient, but has convenience over plugging in a much, much more efficient wire.
im so hoping this will not suces and if it suces it will kill the gameing no more free development of games all on one platform all will need to obey som restrictions imagin games that will be political corect be the actual owner of main server and that you got no control over the game you own like steam now but ivem more you cant iven dowlaod it and play offline all content controled and menaged be who big brather this just 1984 Bad dream
I dont think this is an aim to replace local gaming PCs nor will it. There is a larger gaming market to tap into and that is one of a potential player not having to buy a box to play a game. This is going to be fine for that purpose. I played Assassins Creed for months and had a great time. Through my browser. Very positive move for the industry and the reason why everyone is throwing so much money at it. The delivery system has always been a hurdle and this helps lessen it. Fast internet will be a factor for sure. As will your distance to a google server but for what they aim to do it is going to be fine.
This is where I disagree with you a bit. While I agree that this may be the short term vision, in the long game I totally see this supplanting and replacing gaming PCs. Google, and everyone who isn't Microsoft has a lot to gain by breaking free from the Windows chokehold. Google, I have no doubt, would love to take the home "desktop" and device market over with Chromebooks and Android. This is the sort of tech that could break the back of Windows in the home market.
I think envy and jealousy will motivate infrastructure upgrades like it did with cable in the seventies and eighties. A lot of places didn't have cable back then and people were jealous of having cable service. It's now nearly ubiquitous. Building out fiber is a no brainer. People who don't have speedy and quality internet will want it badly enough to make it happen. People want it now, just not badly enough to do anything about it.
Fiber is also short term and will only be relevant for ISP infrastructure.
Wireless to all user connections is the future. 5G and beyond will enable 10Gb/s wireless connections with sub 5ms latency.
This might take another 50 years but it is inevitable.
Physical connections like fiber and wires will be looked upon In the future the way we look at analog phones today
Yeah, eventually physical lines will be the antiquated way, but then we still have copper lines delivering internet and people complaining about tiny bandwidth so go figure.
We have both in our house. The wired line is fiber 1000/250 and the wireless is Verizon 4G with "unlimited" data. So when wired goes down we turn on local hotspot/tethering and keep going. Wireless is a lot laggier than wired so it's not perfect and the fiber is so much faster we all use wifi at home instead of 4G.
For the next couple of decades I think we'll continue to lay wired infrastructure until wireless just becomes easier and cheaper. There are frequency and bandwidth congestion issues to sort out with that tech too.
Wired connections aren't going away. Even wireless is almost entirely wired. The move from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G has been one of having wires cover more of your connection, not less. You're not going to have 5G cells that cover a 10 mile radius the way that you sometimes did with 2G. The key key way to increase aggregate bandwidth is having the wireless hop at the end go from the last several miles to the last mile to the last thousand feet to the last few hundred feet.
Semantics. It doesn’t matter what is primarily used only what the end user interacts with.
Or maybe this is targeted at the same set of people that other sorts of thin clients are: people who are screw-ups and can't get a computer to work right. And will promptly break it if someone else sets up the computer properly for them. This will genuinely make it a lot easier for such people to have a computer that "works" (or is easily fixed) for games.
Or do you think that game consoles already have that crowd covered?
Way to go calling people screw ups, mr high and mighty. You don’t really deserve a conversation with that attitude.
Its about convenience. I’ll never play a game on a phone, but someone might. I would love to use my wife’s chrome book to play my games while on the road though. The battery life and portability trumps the hell out of my desktop replacement. If I can get the same experience no matter what device I have I’ll take it.
Like I said in previous posts, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough.
Or maybe this is targeted at the same set of people that other sorts of thin clients are: people who are screw-ups and can't get a computer to work right. And will promptly break it if someone else sets up the computer properly for them. This will genuinely make it a lot easier for such people to have a computer that "works" (or is easily fixed) for games.
Or do you think that game consoles already have that crowd covered?
Stadia is geared towards accessibility. You can play it from a browser, like Project Stream. You can play it anywhere you have a connection, granted the connection works well.
The cost to buy in is less.. it's a virtual console. You could spend hundreds upon hundreds or you can use pretty much any current PC with a strong enough connection.
I get you're a big hardware guy, but the implications of a system like this can't be lost on you.
Even those with the best hardware, and the most amazing software, still have problems from time to time with game compatibility. If there is a system that can optimize games to work, on any hardware, reliably, even with some, yet minimal latency, that's a big deal.
The major indicator of whether or not it will take off, isn't in the way the game plays, because project stream worked well when I used it. It's going to be what the support looks like, and how games are acquired and played.
Stadia isn't going to magically fix compatibility issues. Other than by supporting fixed other platforms (theoretically possible but unlikely to happen with game consoles; more likely with Android), it's as likely to make compatibility issues worse as better. Tricks that you could use to work around problems on your own computer won't be available on someone else's.
Consoles solve compatibility issues by making all systems the same. So yeah it kinda does lol.
There was an interesting article about this - that basically stated the reason for Stadia is not game streaming as much as it making videos of gameplay and seamlessly putting them on YouTube.
So its more of content creation than just pure gameplay as they want to compete with Twitch who owns the live streaming space, but afterwards the videos end up on YouTube.
I think that makes a lot more sense - as YouTube streaming will be built in.
It's unlikely that that's the main reason or even a significant reason for Stadia. If getting a cut of the Twitch market is the goal, then this is a creatively idiotic way to go about it. Bandwidth requirements are a major problem, and needing to stream the game in real time makes that bandwidth problem massively worse than when you're not latency sensitive, as is the case with Twitch.
I don’t think it was their main motivation either, but streaming from stadia will have zero impact on the player because it will stream from googles servers to YouTube. You won’t feel a thing.
Input latency and display latency are much more disruptive than network latency. Depending on the nature of the game, you can sometimes cover up network latency such that even a few hundred ms doesn't particularly matter. Some games can't do that; DMKano's example of a twitchy first person shooter doesn't let you. But PVE makes possible some tricks that you can't do in PVP.
But even if you want to regard all forms of latency as equivalent, then this will still only make it worse. That's just the triangle inequality.
In the context of the posts above mind I was talking about network latency - comments about where people live etc. And as you say whether or not you can cover this up depends on the game.
Your other comments highlight that Google seems to be suggesting that no "minimum spec" is needed. Put me firmly in the sceptical column. It will, to use your words: make things worse - depending on the game of course. I wonder whether Google will (eventually) come out with some guidance. Simple browser games - not much needed; more complex games - x, y, x etc.
Well of course there's going to be some degree of minimum specs needed. For starters, you'll need a lot of bandwidth, and also a device that can handle that much bandwidth. Decompression will take some unknown amount of processing power. Denser compression algorithms commonly take more processing power than weaker ones, so there are trade-offs there, too.
It’s doable on chrome books. I don’t think the minimum spec thing is much of a discussion.
There was an interesting article about this - that basically stated the reason for Stadia is not game streaming as much as it making videos of gameplay and seamlessly putting them on YouTube.
So its more of content creation than just pure gameplay as they want to compete with Twitch who owns the live streaming space, but afterwards the videos end up on YouTube.
I think that makes a lot more sense - as YouTube streaming will be built in.
I read that article too, however I also read an interview where they said that googles games will be exclusive to the service.
If they are only gonna have exclusive games, that will be a huge limiting factor.
I mean people want to play popular games like Apex Legends not some Google exclusives.
I don’t think they’ll be exclusives, but devs will have to adapt their game to run in it much like they do for other systems. How they sell it will be up to them. If you buy for PC can you play on console? The answer: it depends on the company.
There was an interesting article about this - that basically stated the reason for Stadia is not game streaming as much as it making videos of gameplay and seamlessly putting them on YouTube.
So its more of content creation than just pure gameplay as they want to compete with Twitch who owns the live streaming space, but afterwards the videos end up on YouTube.
I think that makes a lot more sense - as YouTube streaming will be built in.
Could be.
The big question for me is indeed how do Google expect to make money from this. And Youtube was something I added to my post above. (Also liked the suggestion that it pushed the Android platform as well).
Whether it works for person X - Google won't care. All they are bothered about is whether there is a big enough market of potentially satisfied customers somewhere in the world from whom they might be able to make money. The fact that person X has a pathetic connection and can only dream about cheap uncapped internet usage let alone fibre let alone let alone fibre-to-the-home matters not one iota to them. Just so long as there are enough in that big world out there.
Input latency and display latency are much more disruptive than network latency. Depending on the nature of the game, you can sometimes cover up network latency such that even a few hundred ms doesn't particularly matter. Some games can't do that; DMKano's example of a twitchy first person shooter doesn't let you. But PVE makes possible some tricks that you can't do in PVP.
But even if you want to regard all forms of latency as equivalent, then this will still only make it worse. That's just the triangle inequality.
In the context of the posts above mind I was talking about network latency - comments about where people live etc. And as you say whether or not you can cover this up depends on the game.
Your other comments highlight that Google seems to be suggesting that no "minimum spec" is needed. Put me firmly in the sceptical column. It will, to use your words: make things worse - depending on the game of course. I wonder whether Google will (eventually) come out with some guidance. Simple browser games - not much needed; more complex games - x, y, x etc.
Well of course there's going to be some degree of minimum specs needed. For starters, you'll need a lot of bandwidth, and also a device that can handle that much bandwidth. Decompression will take some unknown amount of processing power. Denser compression algorithms commonly take more processing power than weaker ones, so there are trade-offs there, too.
It’s doable on chrome books. I don’t think the minimum spec thing is much of a discussion.
It's possible that it's relying heavily on a video decode block. It's also possible that the decompression is heavily optimized for particular architectures. I certainly believe that it's doable on a modern Chromebook. I'd be much more skeptical of claims that a 20 year old PC could handle it, or an old CRT television.
I just want to see a proper mmorpg running on one of these streaming services.
Image WoW with no client download or patching of said client.
What I think makes a lot more sense is to let you start playing a game almost immediately without a download, and then if you decide the game, download it and run it locally. while being able to transfer your saved game (in whatever sense is relevant) so that you don't have to start over. If you play a game for 10 minutes and don't like it, then just drop it without trying to play it locally.
On another site, someone pointed out that judder is also going to be a huge problem. If your average ping time to Google's servers is 20 ms, but that's bouncing around a lot between 10 ms and 50 ms, then a lot of games will be an awful mess of things speeding up and slowing down erratically
Anything sensitive to timing like combos in Street Fighter may well be completely unplayable. If you enter a combo properly, but one key press being delayed a little more than another means that 10% of your combos aren't recognized as such on the server, you basically can't play the game.
Now, you could work around that in a sense by adding extra latency so that everything seems like consistent latency up to some maximum. For example, they could pad your latency such that it always acts like 100 ms ping exactly unless it spikes above that. That would mostly avoid the judder problem, but at the expense of making the latency problem far worse.
On another site, someone pointed out that judder is also going to be a huge problem. If your average ping time to Google's servers is 20 ms, but that's bouncing around a lot between 10 ms and 50 ms, then a lot of games will be an awful mess of things speeding up and slowing down erratically
Anything sensitive to timing like combos in Street Fighter may well be completely unplayable. If you enter a combo properly, but one key press being delayed a little more than another means that 10% of your combos aren't recognized as such on the server, you basically can't play the game.
Now, you could work around that in a sense by adding extra latency so that everything seems like consistent latency up to some maximum. For example, they could pad your latency such that it always acts like 100 ms ping exactly unless it spikes above that. That would mostly avoid the judder problem, but at the expense of making the latency problem far worse.
That should already be addressed considering multiplayer games and server side authority. Animations for example run at 60fps and servers/client comms is typically 15 and less so to ensure the proper animations start when they should you send 60 frames worth of commands every 15 with included time stamps and the receiving end handles it.
On another site, someone pointed out that judder is also going to be a huge problem. If your average ping time to Google's servers is 20 ms, but that's bouncing around a lot between 10 ms and 50 ms, then a lot of games will be an awful mess of things speeding up and slowing down erratically
Anything sensitive to timing like combos in Street Fighter may well be completely unplayable. If you enter a combo properly, but one key press being delayed a little more than another means that 10% of your combos aren't recognized as such on the server, you basically can't play the game.
Now, you could work around that in a sense by adding extra latency so that everything seems like consistent latency up to some maximum. For example, they could pad your latency such that it always acts like 100 ms ping exactly unless it spikes above that. That would mostly avoid the judder problem, but at the expense of making the latency problem far worse.
That should already be addressed considering multiplayer games and server side authority. Animations for example run at 60fps and servers/client comms is typically 15 and less so to ensure the proper animations start when they should you send 60 frames worth of commands every 15 with included time stamps and the receiving end handles it.
Erratic network latency doesn't cause judder in a traditional MMORPG. It can cause something to occasionally look like a lag spike, but that's about it. The problem is that, while there won't be any judder as the game is rendered on a remote server, there sure will be when it gets to you. You can't re-render the game locally at 60 frames per second because the whole point of this is that you're not rendering the game locally at all.
There's also minimal judder on input latency because a dedicated USB wire is pretty consistent. Windows polls USB devices every 8 ms by default, and some will reduce that further. Online games rarely have sensitive timing-based things at all, and to the extent that they do, there's likely to be more trusting the client on when it says a button was pressed than in other places in the game.
On another site, someone pointed out that judder is also going to be a huge problem. If your average ping time to Google's servers is 20 ms, but that's bouncing around a lot between 10 ms and 50 ms, then a lot of games will be an awful mess of things speeding up and slowing down erratically
Anything sensitive to timing like combos in Street Fighter may well be completely unplayable. If you enter a combo properly, but one key press being delayed a little more than another means that 10% of your combos aren't recognized as such on the server, you basically can't play the game.
Now, you could work around that in a sense by adding extra latency so that everything seems like consistent latency up to some maximum. For example, they could pad your latency such that it always acts like 100 ms ping exactly unless it spikes above that. That would mostly avoid the judder problem, but at the expense of making the latency problem far worse.
That should already be addressed considering multiplayer games and server side authority. Animations for example run at 60fps and servers/client comms is typically 15 and less so to ensure the proper animations start when they should you send 60 frames worth of commands every 15 with included time stamps and the receiving end handles it.
Erratic network latency doesn't cause judder in a traditional MMORPG. It can cause something to occasionally look like a lag spike, but that's about it. The problem is that, while there won't be any judder as the game is rendered on a remote server, there sure will be when it gets to you. You can't re-render the game locally at 60 frames per second because the whole point of this is that you're not rendering the game locally at all.
There's also minimal judder on input latency because a dedicated USB wire is pretty consistent. Windows polls USB devices every 8 ms by default, and some will reduce that further. Online games rarely have sensitive timing-based things at all, and to the extent that they do, there's likely to be more trusting the client on when it says a button was pressed than in other places in the game.
Queue up a series of commands and send it to the google servers. That's all that needs to happen. Then the server treats those as input in the game in the same order you sent them. Nothing will be missed.
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Your other comments highlight that Google seems to be suggesting that no "minimum spec" is needed. Put me firmly in the sceptical column. It will, to use your words: make things worse - depending on the game of course. I wonder whether Google will (eventually) come out with some guidance. Simple browser games - not much needed; more complex games - x, y, x etc.
Well of course AMD and Nvidia will sell GPUs to whoever is willing to buy them, outside of a handful of exceptions such as embargoes. My point is that just because game streaming services show up isn't going to make the old ways of playing games vanish. Game streaming is going to have to compete with rendering the game locally, and it's mostly going to lose that competition.
While cell phones have far less processing power than high end gaming desktops, that's not the factor limiting what games can do. If you could do something at all 15 years ago, then you've got the processing power to do it on a cell phone. But today's mobile games mostly don't look at all like the AAA games of 15 years ago. The reason that mobile gamers who don't have a PC aren't playing WoW or League of Legends isn't that they can't because they don't have a PC. It's that they don't want to. Make it so that they can play the game on their phones and they still won't want to.
Nor do I think that there will fill a lot of demand for hard-core gamers playing demanding games on a tablet from their couch. If that's what you want, then Steam Link will let you do it today, and a lot better than Stadia. Streaming a game over a LAN rather than over the Internet doesn't completely fix the latency and bandwidth issues, but it does make them far more manageable, and makes it easy to give you a massively better experience than Stadia will.
This could make it possible to continue playing such games after you leave your house, and without having to drag around a bulky gaming laptop. I don't believe that that's a very big market, either, largely because it could already have been done for many games years ago by running the game locally on a cell phone or tablet, and for the most part, no one bothered. Maybe some people will use it heavily for this; I just don't think there will be very many of them.
Essentially, google could emulate the most stable situations, and they are even in a much better situation to receive support from developers before games even launch than we are as consumers.
The Division 2 is a great example of this. Lots of people are currently having crashing issues, despite many attempts to work around them, that included all of the general fixes that most people attempt. I personally, have never experienced those issues, neither have several of my friends, but those that do have them can't simply point to a single issue causing them.
With a dedicated platform, you forego these kinds of issues generally. PS4 and XBOX don't have them, and a service isn't just one particular instance of a game on untested, unknown hardware.
It's the general consensus that, when you play a console game, it just works. Similar in form and function to a game on a service like this. The vast majority of compatibility issues are not the end users problem.
Its about convenience. I’ll never play a game on a phone, but someone might. I would love to use my wife’s chrome book to play my games while on the road though. The battery life and portability trumps the hell out of my desktop replacement. If I can get the same experience no matter what device I have I’ll take it.
Like I said in previous posts, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough.
The big question for me is indeed how do Google expect to make money from this. And Youtube was something I added to my post above. (Also liked the suggestion that it pushed the Android platform as well).
Whether it works for person X - Google won't care. All they are bothered about is whether there is a big enough market of potentially satisfied customers somewhere in the world from whom they might be able to make money. The fact that person X has a pathetic connection and can only dream about cheap uncapped internet usage let alone fibre let alone let alone fibre-to-the-home matters not one iota to them. Just so long as there are enough in that big world out there.
Anything sensitive to timing like combos in Street Fighter may well be completely unplayable. If you enter a combo properly, but one key press being delayed a little more than another means that 10% of your combos aren't recognized as such on the server, you basically can't play the game.
Now, you could work around that in a sense by adding extra latency so that everything seems like consistent latency up to some maximum. For example, they could pad your latency such that it always acts like 100 ms ping exactly unless it spikes above that. That would mostly avoid the judder problem, but at the expense of making the latency problem far worse.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There's also minimal judder on input latency because a dedicated USB wire is pretty consistent. Windows polls USB devices every 8 ms by default, and some will reduce that further. Online games rarely have sensitive timing-based things at all, and to the extent that they do, there's likely to be more trusting the client on when it says a button was pressed than in other places in the game.