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Rekrul
join:2007-04-21
Milford, CT

Rekrul

Member

I dread the future of gaming...

Running at a television’s native resolution will also reduce local latency due to it not having to scale the image, which will also help offset some of the network latency.

Theoretically true, but the service would have to let you enter arbitrary screen sizes, both in the X & Y dimensions for that to work. Every TV and monitor has a different native resolution. If you simply select the width of your monitor and the service automatically selects the height, it's never going to match everyone's screen size. So the image will almost certainly still be scaled. Every time I go into a store and look closely at the TVs, I see scaling artifacts because the video signal NEVER matches the TV's resolution.

The most glaring issue in the face of cloud gaming is two-fold: bandwidth and latency.

To me, the most glaring issue with cloud gaming is its temporary nature. Exactly how long are companies going to keep each game available? Will the games released today still be available to play a decade from now? Or will the company decide that they're not worth keeping on the system when the number of people playing them goes from the millions down to a few thousand?

Want a concrete example? The game Thief: The Dark Project was released 14 years ago in 1998, and while it's not exactly a blockbuster, there are still dedicated fans who replay it, create mods for it, make patches to keep it running on new hardware. Eidos doesn't support the game any more. Sorry, I meant Square Enix. Just try to find a mention of it on their site. If Thief had been a cloud game, do you think it would still be available to play?

Also, what about mods? You can't exactly create new content for a game on a remote system. Look at how many maps have been created for games like Doom and Quake. How many user-created maps are there for Onlive games?

Provided I have the appropriate hardware, I can still run any of the games that I've bought. Through emulation, I can run thousands of games from older systems, both console and computer. I can load and play games from the late 1970s if I want to. By contrast, cloud games will appear, be played for a few years and then disappear. Once gone, they will exist only as screenshots and maybe gameplay videos on YouTube.

They'll be like those old lost TV shows and movies that now only exist as still photos and short clips taken from other sources.

To me, that's sad...

MxxCon
join:1999-11-19
Brooklyn, NY
ARRIS TM822
Actiontec MI424WR Rev. I

MxxCon

Member

said by Rekrul:

Running at a television’s native resolution will also reduce local latency due to it not having to scale the image, which will also help offset some of the network latency.

Theoretically true, but the service would have to let you enter arbitrary screen sizes, both in the X & Y dimensions for that to work. Every TV and monitor has a different native resolution. If you simply select the width of your monitor and the service automatically selects the height, it's never going to match everyone's screen size. So the image will almost certainly still be scaled. Every time I go into a store and look closely at the TVs, I see scaling artifacts because the video signal NEVER matches the TV's resolution.

You must be talking about either extremely old or extremely cheap TVs.
Every TV worth buying on the market now has 1920x1080 native resolution.
Older "HD" TVs and current super-budget models have some non-standard resolutions like 980 or 830. Everything else is now 1080p.
said by Rekrul:

The most glaring issue in the face of cloud gaming is two-fold: bandwidth and latency.

To me, the most glaring issue with cloud gaming is its temporary nature. Exactly how long are companies going to keep each game available? Will the games released today still be available to play a decade from now? Or will the company decide that they're not worth keeping on the system when the number of people playing them goes from the millions down to a few thousand?

Want a concrete example? The game Thief: The Dark Project was released 14 years ago in 1998, and while it's not exactly a blockbuster, there are still dedicated fans who replay it, create mods for it, make patches to keep it running on new hardware. Eidos doesn't support the game any more. Sorry, I meant Square Enix. Just try to find a mention of it on their site. If Thief had been a cloud game, do you think it would still be available to play?

Also, what about mods? You can't exactly create new content for a game on a remote system. Look at how many maps have been created for games like Doom and Quake. How many user-created maps are there for Onlive games?

Provided I have the appropriate hardware, I can still run any of the games that I've bought. Through emulation, I can run thousands of games from older systems, both console and computer. I can load and play games from the late 1970s if I want to. By contrast, cloud games will appear, be played for a few years and then disappear. Once gone, they will exist only as screenshots and maybe gameplay videos on YouTube.

They'll be like those old lost TV shows and movies that now only exist as still photos and short clips taken from other sources.

To me, that's sad...

I see a very easy solution to your 1st problem.
There will be services that cycle current ~3- year old games, and there will be services or service levels that offer huge back catalog of games. Games are not stored on each server/computer, they use a centralized SAN/NAS/Whatever, so disk space usage is not a problem. It will take them no effort to provide an infinitely large catalog of games.

To install mods you don't need a direct game access. Games could/will be coded with such services in mind and will provide facility to install and access mods directly from within the game. Same with creating mods. Who says you can't run Unreal or Cry Editor from those cloud services?
Rekrul
join:2007-04-21
Milford, CT

Rekrul

Member

said by MxxCon:

You must be talking about either extremely old or extremely cheap TVs.
Every TV worth buying on the market now has 1920x1080 native resolution.

Even the ones marked as 720p, or are those the ones you don't consider worth buying? Not to mention that some people will be playing them on a computer monitor and those also have a range of sizes. A quick look at Amazon shows sizes of 1600x900, 1360x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900 and others.

Just because you consider them outdated or worthless doesn't mean that everyone is going to go out and dump them for something new.
said by MxxCon:

I see a very easy solution to your 1st problem.
There will be services that cycle current ~3- year old games, and there will be services or service levels that offer huge back catalog of games. Games are not stored on each server/computer, they use a centralized SAN/NAS/Whatever, so disk space usage is not a problem. It will take them no effort to provide an infinitely large catalog of games.

You're trying to apply logic to the business world and that rarely works out.

Once a game reaches a certain age, the company declares it obsolete and washes their hands of it.

Plus, the games have to run on some kind of a computer. What happens when the hardware and OS is upgraded and the old games no longer work? Is the company going to hire someone to patch their entire back catalog to make sure it works on the new system? Or are they just going to dump everything that doesn't work?

Because they sure don't do that now. Even when the company knows about a bug and what causes it, if the game is more than a couple years old and not a huge seller, they're not going to bother fixing it.
said by MxxCon:

To install mods you don't need a direct game access. Games could/will be coded with such services in mind and will provide facility to install and access mods directly from within the game. Same with creating mods. Who says you can't run Unreal or Cry Editor from those cloud services?

So the mods can disappear along with the game when the company takes it offline...

Not to mention since everything is in the cloud, on the company's servers, they will have the final say about what mods get released and which ones don't.

What about 'total conversions' which require patching the original game files to work? How are you going to patch game files on a remote server? Will you be able to tell the system to create a 100% working duplicate of the game installation for you to tinker with?

Cloud gaming is going to be a closed, locked-down system.
dra6o0n
join:2011-08-15
Mississauga, ON

1 edit

dra6o0n to Rekrul

Member

to Rekrul
Only Onlive has crappy resolutions like they are rendering it on a 480p...
Their budget and their data center hosting is nothing compared to the bigger companies.

Cloud based clients are one thing, but what about tools that can create content and be uploaded to the cloud?
You are already doing that with Steam Workshop btw.

The problem here is that everyone think of 'cloud gaming' like Onlive and GaiKai, where you get a video stream back and sending a controller function over...

Nay, that's not completely true, for there exists other forms of cloud gaming that you can innovate, but they would rather work on something that's already there, plus video streaming means you literally 'don't own' anything and that's what they are going for.

At the very least with steam, the data is downloaded and although internet connection is needed to maintain login, you'd need internet to download games in the first place.

The most simple form of image of cloud gaming is as so:
Division between client and server in %
Type | Client | Server
OnLive | 1% | 99%

But what if there is a universal game client that can play multiple games on it, but uses cloud to stream 'data' onto it while you play, instead of a flimsy video stream?
Type | Client | Server
Universal | 10% | 90%

That 10% means the game will render stuff but it will only render stuff that the server sends, and it's specific and also encrypted so people cannot read it and understand and modify the packets sent to it.

World of Tanks and World of Warplanes utilize server sided gaming over client sided, but the client still contains the general data, still, hacking is very hard to do and controls is limited to your latency (delayed response).

But then I get to FPS games where client sided controls is freely given away and hackers or laggers can move and shoot freely while lagging and not being responsive properly to the server, resulting in impossible things happening as it's p2p, like being killed when the person is still behind a wall, since you are experiencing 'ghosting' where a laggy player pops out and kills you, but you only see him pop up 2 seconds later and died before that.

MxxCon
join:1999-11-19
Brooklyn, NY
ARRIS TM822
Actiontec MI424WR Rev. I

MxxCon to Rekrul

Member

to Rekrul
said by Rekrul:

said by MxxCon:

You must be talking about either extremely old or extremely cheap TVs.
Every TV worth buying on the market now has 1920x1080 native resolution.

Even the ones marked as 720p, or are those the ones you don't consider worth buying? Not to mention that some people will be playing them on a computer monitor and those also have a range of sizes. A quick look at Amazon shows sizes of 1600x900, 1360x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900 and others.

Just because you consider them outdated or worthless doesn't mean that everyone is going to go out and dump them for something new.

Budget monitors use TN panels, their refresh rate is pretty low, 2-10ms. Proper monitor use IPS panels, their refresh rate is 5-16ms. In both cases local latency produces by monitors resizing image is not a problem. If you are playing it on a computer, then your video card scale images with much better quality and much faster where this is not a concern at all.
said by Rekrul:

said by MxxCon:

I see a very easy solution to your 1st problem.
There will be services that cycle current ~3- year old games, and there will be services or service levels that offer huge back catalog of games. Games are not stored on each server/computer, they use a centralized SAN/NAS/Whatever, so disk space usage is not a problem. It will take them no effort to provide an infinitely large catalog of games.

You're trying to apply logic to the business world and that rarely works out.

I'm implying logic based on personal experience working with this technology in this field.
said by Rekrul:

Once a game reaches a certain age, the company declares it obsolete and washes their hands of it.

read what I said in the previous reply.
said by Rekrul:

Plus, the games have to run on some kind of a computer. What happens when the hardware and OS is upgraded and the old games no longer work? Is the company going to hire someone to patch their entire back catalog to make sure it works on the new system? Or are they just going to dump everything that doesn't work?

Windows compatibility is going to last for a very very long time. Every single game released for XP can run on Win7. Only some Win95/98 have problems. Once we reach the point where games will be no longer compatible with then-current OS, computers will be fast enough to be able to run emulation of Win7 w/o any problems.
said by Rekrul:

Because they sure don't do that now. Even when the company knows about a bug and what causes it, if the game is more than a couple years old and not a huge seller, they're not going to bother fixing it.

They will fix problems if service provider will tell game mft about those problems.
Situation will be much different where instead of a single user worth $5-60 complains vs a service provider that serves 100s if not 1000s copies of their games.
said by Rekrul:

said by MxxCon:

To install mods you don't need a direct game access. Games could/will be coded with such services in mind and will provide facility to install and access mods directly from within the game. Same with creating mods. Who says you can't run Unreal or Cry Editor from those cloud services?

So the mods can disappear along with the game when the company takes it offline...

Well mod is useless w/o the game its written for anyway, so I don't see that being a problem.
said by Rekrul:

Not to mention since everything is in the cloud, on the company's servers, they will have the final say about what mods get released and which ones don't.

It won't be any different when what we currently have with Steam or nexusmods.
said by Rekrul:

What about 'total conversions' which require patching the original game files to work? How are you going to patch game files on a remote server? Will you be able to tell the system to create a 100% working duplicate of the game installation for you to tinker with?

if there will be enough demand, there will be services that offer that.
said by Rekrul:

Cloud gaming is going to be a closed, locked-down system.

Market forces will decide if that's going to happen or not.
MxxCon

MxxCon to dra6o0n

Member

to dra6o0n
said by dra6o0n:

But what if there is a universal game client that can play multiple games on it, but uses cloud to stream 'data' onto it while you play, instead of a flimsy video stream?
Type | Client | Server
Universal | 10% | 90%

That 10% means the game will render stuff but it will only render stuff that the server sends, and it's specific and also encrypted so people cannot read it and understand and modify the packets sent to it.

This is exact opposite of cloud gaming.
The whole point of cloud gaming services that all the rendering and processing is happening at the datacenter. You can run client on any dumb client with absolutely no processing power. You can run GaiKai and OnLive on a TV that has CPU weaker than your iPhone.
If you are doing local 3d rendering you are defeating the whole purpose of such a service.
said by dra6o0n:

World of Tanks and World of Warplanes utilize server sided gaming over client sided, but the client still contains the general data, still, hacking is very hard to do and controls is limited to your latency (delayed response).

But then I get to FPS games where client sided controls is freely given away and hackers or laggers can move and shoot freely while lagging and not being responsive properly to the server, resulting in impossible things happening as it's p2p, like being killed when the person is still behind a wall, since you are experiencing 'ghosting' where a laggy player pops out and kills you, but you only see him pop up 2 seconds later and died before that.

You are confusing anti-cheat methods with lag compensation.