OnLive - high-end PC gaming without the PC

[Wrestlevania]

Just revealed at GDC, OnLive, frankly, sounds stunning:

What's so revolutionary about the OnLive Game Service? As long as you have a decent broadband connection, you can play essentially any game, no matter how complex.

...

We witnessed Crysis (which is notorious for how it pushes PCs) being played on the server off a simple Macbook, and it was smooth and looked fantastic. The service uses video compression techniques (the first interactive video compression tech) to send the game information to your TV or PC/Mac and latency is low enough – just 1 millisecond – to support online multiplayer.

It's also going to ship as a standalone "setup box" type thing, smaller and cheaper than a Wii, which will also feature strong community aspects much like Xbox LIVE.

Sounds very intriguing to me, in that it's a) subscription-based and you can play high-fidelity games on basically any computer. Would see an end to the PC/Mac divide, which would be nice.

Not sure Nvidia, ATI and other high-end chip vendors are going to be quite so elated about it, however. That and the fact it's currently focussed on North America only at the moment, too.

[FoliorumViridum]

I think the concept is extremely exciting. As somebody who can only dream of playing Crysis on highest settings, I would certainly use a product like this if I was guaranteed a good experience. I have no desire to upgrade my PC every so often, for ridiculous amounts of money, just for a select game or two. Plus when it comes to PC hardware, my mind gets boggled.

I don't think something like this will really become a big contender for quite a while, but if they stick with it I can see it being the future. I have a 5mb connection, which in theory would get me HD gaming, so hurry up and get it in my house.

[elmuerte]

I don't believe a thing of it. A network latency of 1ms? yeah right.

[Wrestlevania]

I think they've perhaps missed a trick in not announcing - and showing - a working set-top incarnation, including firm price point and street date.

Regardless, this is potentially huge. PR guff (yes, 1ms is balls) aside, this could be absolutely massive -- especially if they licence their technology for inclusion in dedicated PC hardware (think Forceware as much as dedicated gaming card).

It's making my head hurt just thinking about the possibilities actually. Imagine if manufacturers started including them in TVs, and the OnLive service offering grew to include things like Netfilx and such...

[brkl]

Just sounds very implausible. I don't know how good those games will look after being compressed to shit.

[brkl]

Tiny, right? Apparently it's all made possible via proprietary compression algorithms that get latency down to around 80ms--which if you've played enough PC shooters in your time, you'll know that that's a pretty playable ping. But is it enough? Really, that's only one of the questions I'm left with after reading the article.

80ms is okayish for a ping... but horrendous for controller lag. You can't play a shooter and wait 80ms for the reticle to do what you want it to do.

[elmuerte]

If round trip response is 80ms it means that every aiming adjustment takes 80ms, and then 80ms to fire.

For normal online games it takes 0ms for aiming adjustments, and 80ms to fire.

(note: I ignored input lag/display lag and local FPS just for convenience, they shouldn't influence the overall picture)

[gdf]

Sounds pretty shit and unworkable to me.

Anyone else smell some Phantom around here?

[Nachimir]

Hmm, I could see it working with a predictive renderer, much like some netcode will reposition multiplayer opponents based on probabilities - the inaccuracy is often small enough that it won't be noticed. I can't see a predictive renderer working on a thin client though.

This would certainly be possible with a fast enough connection, but where the fuck has that outside of the Far East?

[BigJKO]

I don't believe a thing of it. A network latency of 1ms? yeah right.

I don't think they're claiming a network latency of 1ms. That's entirely based on what internet service bandwidth you have. It's the compression algorithm on their end that works at 1ms.

IGN were blown away, apparently.

Regardless, I think the market here is people who can't afford or simply won't buy into gaming hardware and they're not worried about the video quality. I only have a iMac and it certainly can't run the heaviest games out there (or for that matter most games, without Boot Camp.) I'd be pretty fucking psyched if I could rent this service for one month and play all the latest titles on my Mac at home.

I doubt this is meant to replace the regular form for gaming, but it'd certainly increase some people's playtime, since it doesn't require any fuss about system requirements and whatnot.

Edited March 24, 2009 by BigJKO

[elmuerte]

A compression algorithm that can encode at 1000fps? Probably not a very good compression algorithm w.r.t. compression ratio. Which means you need a fat pipe.

[Chris]

I played it last week, it works pretty well. Here's my piece on it:

http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22875

[elmuerte]

did you follow the cable to the hidden powerful PC?

[Thrik]

It's an awesome concept, but I can't help but feel the technology just won't do it justice for some time yet. Considering that some people complain about the input delay between their console and their TV (which is minute but perceptible), what must it be like for a web connection? Especially if that connection is a little unstable like many are — at least, they are here.

I can see this becoming massive eventually, though. I think it's more a matter of when rather than if. I mean, let's imagine for a second that a huge company with almost infinite resources like Microsoft did something mental like overlook a relatively basic hardware design issue in a console they've sold millions of units of throughout the world. It'd be nice if they could just make those fixes on their end rather than having to replace consoles every time one exhibits the problem, both for Microsoft and for us.

[snoopeasystreet]

It sounds like a really interesting idea and how I imagine gaming progressing in the future. The whole input delay thing is the toughest barrier to break and I really don't think that the whole broadband infrastructure is good enough to break it at the moment.

The question is though, if onlive actually become as big as they think they will be. Will they have the bandwidth/servers to support that many people online and streaming games at once?

[LetterT]

The question is though, if onlive actually become as big as they think they will be. Will they have the bandwidth/servers to support that many people online and streaming games at once?

If it gets that big, they will have the money needed to support the hardware issues I would imagine.

I would like to see some video of someone actually using the service. I really like the idea. There's games I would like to play, and that my wife would like to play, but our current PC hardware won't push them. To be able to play them without upgrading would be sweet. . . Especially when traveling with her laptop.

Not sure how the TV setup would work. . . and I'm not so sure about the controller design. I would like to see an reference image of someone holding one.

[modeps]

I just dont see how they're going to get past the latency issue. No matter where you are, you're going to have problems. Conceptually, its really cool sounding, but logistically, no matter how much work they put into the underlying tech, it just seems very implausible.

GameSpot has the whole press conference up on their site for view.

http://gdc.gamespot.com/video/6206692/

[n0wak]

Yeah. I don't think it's realistic either. Bandwidth might be better now than it was a few years ago, but it's still way beyond where it needs to be (not mentioning bandwidth caps )

This might work well for some types of games, but I can't imagine anything that requires good timing working. Can you imagine trying to play something like Rock Band on this? I can't. As mentioned above, the latency between console+sound system/tv is something that already hinders that game for some. I can't imagine adding internet latency to the mix.

If anything, even if it does work with FPS games, I imagine there will be a lot of reports of massive motion sickness. Any lag between input, expected result, and actual result messes with the mind's balance system. I just can't see this working in the real world* for a few years yet. And for it to work, they're going to have to have these data centres virtually in every major city and I can't see the cost of that being recouped.

* Outside of controlled demonstrations made specifically for the press/publishers.

[LetterT]

Truly only time will tell.

I signed up for the Beta. Hopefully I'm considered to be enough in the sticks or at least in a relatively low "gaming epicenter" that I'll be accepted.

Definitely a service that will need to be tried before making any sort of purchase.

[MonkeyWrench]

I don't know, it just all seems a bit pie in the sky to me and my first thought was that this will end up being another Phantom. The concept is great, and it probably works well in their tests, but I just don't think it'll handle well out in the real world.

[Thrik]

I honestly think it's impossible to satisfactorily do this with existing infrastructures. Unless they can get the entire round trip of sending the control input to the cloud, processing the 3D, encoding to a video format, and then outputting back again down to about 35ms or less it'll simply be too laggy.

At the moment when we play a PC game, it's generally double buffered and it renders a few frames in advance. As a result, most of what we see actually has a 32ms-ish delay. However, it is possible to bump this up to 42ms if you mess around with vertical sync and stuff, and even that is quite perceptible when it comes to input lag and totally ruins your accuracy in something like an FPS.

It's probably difficult to understand just how damaging to a game input lag like this actually is unless you've experienced it. Just take my word for it: it sucks. The closest thing I can compare it to annoyance-wise is when your audio and video goes out of sync, except because of the tactile element it's even worse.

[blackboxme]

This is crazy.

[toblix]

They said it couldn't be done.

[Nachimir]

I was thinking about this and the BBC iplayer today, which runs fast enough in HD if you have the bandwidth (Not sure what type of HD it is).

Last summer I also briefly got to play with a prototype that transcodes raw video then streams it on the fly. As in, select show from database, select video format from drop down, start watching stream. That was running over a university broadband connection, though not in HD. This wasn't some crappy faked up thing with a few videos either, it had years worth of TV shoved into it.

I don't know. We can manage network latency in multiplayer games right now. If the video can be compressed, sent and decompressed fast enough I don't see why OnLive would be impossible. Probably laggy in new ways and unreliable depending on your connection, contention ratio, time of day, etc., but possible.

[brkl]

Because when you stream video, you have a buffer, and lag in multiplayer games in not the same as input lag. It could work with slower paced games that don't use the mouse for input, but not shooters.