AT&T Invests In Onlive Streaming Gaming > Onlive Gaming and streaming

reply to KrK

Re: Onlive Gaming and streaming

Imagine a modern FPS.

Now imagine you press controls (move, run, fire, throw grenade, etc whatever)

And there was .5 to .75 second delay before your instruction occurred.

It would be unplayable.
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"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

reply to swintec

I have to agree with this. Also keep in mind it's not just the network latency, but the latency in processing. Such as the server needing to process the video feed, encode it, and send it back to you. That's gonna add some noticeable latency depending on what type of technique they use (high res, high motion video in most games at the speeds they plan on supporting is gonna need some really unique system to make it work)

So even if the network latency between you and their server is only gonna be like 75ms or so, I say add another 75ms on the low side to get the full latency involved.

I await to see this thing go full hog and see how they plan to manage all these little 'aha's' involved.
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I swear, some people should have pace-makers installed to free up the resources. Breathing and heart beat taxes their whole system, all of their brain cells wasted on life support.-two bit brains, and the second bit is wasted on parity! ~head_spaz

reply to swintec
There's more than just connection latency involved here. In order to stream the game, you need to compress the video. Compression adds latency, much more than the connection latency, and then there is the decompression on the player's end, adding more latency.

Connection latency is really of no concern here, you can more than play a game with just 30-40ms of latency, even 100ms is probably doable.

But when you add compression and decompression of video, you are talking about a second of latency. And that just won't do for any action oriented game.

reply to swintec
Being within 1000 miles of where the games are located won't help with video compression/decompression latency. That latency would be there even if you're 10 feet away.

They need to show this outside of a closed network. As far as we know, in their closed and small network test, the video probably wasn't compressed at all.

But if they're going to get down to 1.5mbit for SD and 5mbit for HD, they're going to need some serious compression.

reply to wifi4milez
Yes, but you are talking about latency between your console, and the server. That is more than supportable. but we are talking about that latency added between you, and your console. I happen to know that my reaction time on average is about 400ms. If you add another 200ms of latency between the time I hit jump, and I actually jump..... It will be extremely visible, and unacceptable in comparison to a local console.

That is another consideration that many may not be looking at, the competition. This will have to perform, and compete with local consoles. I don't think it will fare well.

cw