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The future of gaming????
xbellx777
Member Posts: 716
from ign.com
Before I dive into what OnLive is and how it works, let me start by saying that you should read every word of this article as this service has the potential to completely change the way games are played. If it works and gets proper support from both publishers and gamers, you may never need a high-end PC to play the latest games, or perhaps even ever buy a console again. That is not an exaggeration.
Just announced at this year's GDC, OnLive is an on-demand gaming service. It's essentially the gaming version of cloud computing - everything is computed, rendered and housed online. In its simplest description, your controller inputs are uploaded, a high-end server takes your inputs and plays the game, and then a video stream of the output is sent back to your computer. Think of it as something like Youtube or Hulu for games.
The service works with pretty much any Windows or Mac machine as a small browser plug-in. Optionally, you will also be able to purchase a small device, called the OnLive MicroConsole, that you can hook directly into your TV via HDMI, though if your computer supports video output to your TV, you can just do it that way instead. Of course, you can also just play on your computer's display if you don't want to pipe it out to your living room set.. . . .
article by: Chris Roper
you can read more here:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/965/965535p1.html
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Well what do you guys think?? personally i think that this could be a new revolution for videogames. post what you think
Comments
Nope..it is "an exaggeration" if the concept were to be based on current technologies.Like everything else that sounds good on paper,we'll have to wait and see until it gets implemented.Operative terms being bandwidth and latency as ultimately the major obstacles to figure.
It's not that I don't believe in the hardware aspect but that's just 1 part of the equation.And even with raw power computing abilities becomes possible,it's hard to imagine clusters of machines being able to handle 1000s of real time commands in 1 go without hiccups at all...and we're talking about per seconds basis here...
I think its DVD gaming repackaged. When was that, the mid '90s? That those came out in competition with the original Playstation.
And, there is no way the Internet could handle that much video signal traffic. So whats the original offering on resolution. Couldn't be very high with streaming HD video not managing real time downloads on most connections.
Seems very logical, seeing how much has changed over the last 5/10/15/20 years it is NOT far fetch and seems very realistic.
The speed of the net is increased so it is possible. However it seems still not like a great idea since however fast connection you got, your harddrive is a lot faster.
As I see it, you need to send as little information as possibly in a MMO at least. That will hold the latency down to minimum.
I do however se the possibility of solo games that are way more advanced verions of the java/browser games that are already out there. And a game which you can P2P by actual hours (non MMO).
It is almost impossible to foretell the future without mumbling like Nostradamus and while this is possibly I see it unlikely, unless you could send stuff by the net at the same speed as using a harddrive at that is very far into the future.
I don't think what you post is the future of gaming. What I see is a evolution of online games going form the current design to more complex designs where massive worlds are created and reside on supercomputers with realistic scenes that require highend computers and you the player log in to the game with a client that gets the data for your area of the world that you are in. As you explore the world the server sends you small chunks and more of the data which slowly build a complete world on the client side. This is the goal I am trying to develop myself. You get a small client but the requirements is 100 gig of drive space which you will eventually use once you explore the entire world. If you never get to areas then you will not get the data.
I really think this will change everything... at least in Europe and East Asia where the broadband capabilities are measured in 100+Mbit/s at least in my town in Sweden we can choose from 7 ISPs all offering 100Mbit/s for less than 30$ a month. I know USA and Australia is lagging behind quite a bit but I think OnLive really should focus on Europe(at least scandinavia), Japan and Korea
This could be the next big thing people, remember this day because this could be the first day in the future of gaming!!
However fast sending data from a remote computer a thousand miles away is, sending it between your memory, processor, and video card that are inches away from each other is much, much faster, both in terms of latency and in terms of bandwidth. I don't see any plausible way that that could change in the future, either. Latency from a computer thousands of miles away is restricted by the speed of light, and it will be very hard to get around that physics limitation.
It'll be a good 10-15 years before this is anything more than an interesting concept. It won't replace locally run games until it can deliver the video stream in HD with no noticable lag in the controls. That will require more than a 100Mbps connection.
It might work as a service entirely seperate from regular gaming for certain types of games like casual puzzle games and the like.
perhaps I'm mistaken. We talking about something like Gametap?
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
Whoops. I was so enamored of replying to this that I did it twice
What they're talking about doing is putting everything on the server machines (the cloud) and sending a video stream to your device of whatever should be displayed. So long as your device has the bandwidth to accept a video stream of sufficient quality, you'd be able to run any application on the server machines, and you'd be able to use as much of the server infrastructure as you wanted to pay for.
This would permit you to play a low resolution version of Crysis on your iPhone. You could run a high resolution version on your netbook. But in both cases, that's only true if you have sufficient bandwidth to receive the video stream. More practically, you'd have the issue of controlling Crysis with the buttons on your iPhone.
This would permit homes with a solid network connection, a television and a keyboard and mouse to run any application they wanted. I assume they've chosen video as the thin client media because it is something that everyone is already striving to implement on their devices.
Thin clients have been around forever, and they have lots of appeal for certain uses.
One thing that this would solve would be players hacking their client. The client would only be used for video display, so you couldn't even mess with the rendering to see things that you shouldn't. Certainly no game data would be sent to your machine, so there would be no hacking of that either.
The implication that the implementers are pushing is that once everything is at a central location, that central location can be upgraded with new hardware, new software and anything else they care to pursue - all you ever see is the video stream, and you don't care how that gets generated. Imagine if you never had to administer your computer again. You just access the central servers that have lots of computing power and disk space and you remotely operate applications, all the while watching the rendered video of the applications that you're using.
Again, you could run your applications on any device that had the bandwidth and the ability to display video.
The downsides that I see, apart from the technical challenges, are:
1. People would no longer have physical control of their data. Who do you really trust with important data?
2. Once this model became mainstream, running software would require that you find a cloud provider. You would no longer have the option of running software on your own computer because the only devices that anyone would buy anymore would be simple video display devices. It would probably start to produce all sorts of ugly tie-ins and package deals that you really don't want.
3. If they have an outage, it'll have quite an impact. The positive side of that might be that software might have to be built to higher standards.
As you can see, I figure that this is something that extends far beyond gaming. The model can be applied to any application. If these server clusters begin to standardize, software developers would no longer develop for PCs, but rather for clouds that have tens of thousands of processors and petabytes of storage. It would be a very different world for developers.
For all I know, the next thing would be that individuals would start building their own clouds the way that they build their own supercomputers today.
Try looking at it "outside the box" as you asume we still need a processor and or videocard, as I said outside the box, there could come a time that we do not need to have these things like a processor or video card, just a display + keyboard/joystick.
Also the talk about latency and bandwith is so inside the box, you don't think bandwidth will change? there is already talk about getting towards the 1G bits per second Study calls for 1 Gbps Internet nationwide by 2015 document > Capturing the promise of broadband
Major appeal for the game developers, software pirating would go extinkt. My guess is that this is the MAIN reason why they would strive for this model.
Some people think all computing will be done this way in the future. But a home PC will always be better, much better.
Back when computing was all text, you could log into a mainframe, and not need a real home PC. But geeks like to have their own computer, build it, maintain it, some even make their own operating system, which then become a major open source OS.
So as long as there are geeks in this world there will be home computers. People build their own multi touch screens, water cooled cased, projectors. Geeks like computers and they like them in their own home.
I didn't need to have my own web server in my kitchen, but I'm a geek and I wanted one.
This “we don't even need our own computers any more” goes against what being a geek is all about. The whole thing just makes me sick.
I don't want my computer sitting on the Internet in some shared easy to hack space.
And I don't want it small and on my wrist.
I want it huge, filling up an entire basement, I want server racks, projectors, huge screens not small ones, multi touch tables, smart refrigerators and so on you get the idea.
Ask yoursef this.
What is the one thing limiting the internet today? The answer is the internet is pigbacking on other media. Your high speed cable is sharing the pipeline of information with your television. Your DSL is sharing with the phones.
Whats happening this year that could very well open the internet up and increase the speed in the US? Digital television. Suddenly we get a range of VHF and UHF frequencies with nothing on them smart money would be betting on certain ISP's buying these frequencies and suddenly the internet is on a bandwidth all of it's own.
Something worth thinking about and something that could go a long way towards what they are talking about here.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.
Hmm, I just posted about OnLIVE because I didn't notice this thread... since the title was so nondescript... whoops. Ah well either way I think it's very ambitious and looks pretty interesting. Something to keep an eye on for sure.
BOYCOTTING EA / ORIGIN going forward.
I can see it at someplace like Dave and Busters, you know a place that serves food and drink and has an arcade.
I agree.
I think the time where this idea could work successfully will come, but I don't think it's as close as some are saying, like by the end of this year. I would say, take your time developing it and getting all the kinks worked out, and maybe shoot for a full release within the next 5 years.
Just MHO
You have it exactly backwards. Right now, video information only has to be sent between various components of your computer that are inches away. Sending information inches can theoretically be very, very fast, and in practice, often is. If the processing is done thousands of miles away, then it has to be sent thousands of miles before it can display on your screen. That can take a while.
This isn't a bandwidth issue. Having bandwidth of 1 gigabit per second wouldn't solve it. Nor would one terabit per second, or one yottabit per second, for that matter.
To make the analogy more understandable, suppose that you need to deliver a piece of paper somewhere. If it starts on the opposite side of the room, it's very quick to get up, pick up the piece of paper, and take it to where you want it to go. If the piece of paper starts out a thousand miles away, it will take a lot longer. Having enough space to hold the piece of paper isn't the only issue. If you want to transport it a thousand miles in a double trailer or a 747 or a supertanker, it still takes a long time to go a thousand miles.
There is a hard physics limitation here that is the nature of the universe. You cannot send data faster than the speed of light. Even if you can reach the speed of light for the entire trip and go in a straight line (current methods are far shy of this on both counts), if you have to send data 3000 miles each way, that's a little over 32 ms. The latency from that alone is about equivalent to getting 15 frames per second using the current methods of a local video card, which is quite bad. Since you won't have infinite frame rate, it will be comparable to having an even worse frame rate than that.
In order to get around this, you'll have to make it so that data only has to go very short distances. A game won't be able to get away with having central servers in one location or even a few locations. You'll have to have servers rendering the video in thousands of locations scattered all over the place--and still have to accept that the game will be all but unplayable in some palces in the world.