OnLive Game Streaming Service Impressions

said by ajac:

doesnt say anything except what they did and what not nutin about results... and were we can see the results..

said by KoRnGtL15:

Between caps and you having to live with in a 1,000 feet of service. Yeah it will be tanking real fast.

said by KoRnGtL15:

Between caps and you having to live with in a 1,000 feet of service. Yeah it will be tanking real fast.

said by MSauk:

man the day I could use this would be great....sick and tired of having to worry about disks.

said by MSauk:

man the day I could use this would be great....sick and tired of having to worry about disks.

I only use around 10 to 30 gb a month of usage so I am not worried about this..

I don't know what you guys are downloading but if you hit 250GB you have issues!

said by BabyBear:

Wonder if it did work completely as hoped, would MS/Sony/Nintendo join together in some unholy alliance to DDoS onlive's data centers? Or even join up with ISP's? Oh the horror!

said by deadzoned:

That's some entertaining conspiracy talk though!

said by deadzoned:

I think that the ISPs do quite a good job of making themselves look bad without any help from an outside source. That's some entertaining conspiracy talk though!

OnLive is backed by financing from Maverick Capital, AutoDesk and Warner Bros

OnLive's backers include Time Warner through its Warner Bros. unit and the software company Autodesk. It's been secretly operating inside Rearden, a technology incubator that also started Mova CONTOUR,

said by Romney2012:

Why in god's name have these idiots designed an interactive game using a client/server architecture with a dumb client model? It seems as if they designed a bandwidth hogging application where the whole point of doing so was to just hog bandwidth.

Makes one wonder who these clowns really are fronting for - Google? Because it seems that the whole purpose is to make the ISPs look bad. It certainly has nothing to do with making a good gaming experience.

said by Romney2012:

Why in god's name have these idiots designed an interactive game using a client/server architecture with a dumb client model? It seems as if they designed a bandwidth hogging application where the whole point of doing so was to just hog bandwidth.

Makes one wonder who these clowns really are fronting for - Google? Because it seems that the whole purpose is to make the ISPs look bad. It certainly has nothing to do with making a good gaming experience.

As proof, it showed off an actual Time Warner cable modem to prove that the experience was real, complete with blinking lights (pictured above) and bundles of cables. An OnLive executive told us that speeds through the modem were averaging four to five megabits per second, which is at the top end of a low end cable modem usage tier.

-snip-

Although the speeds indicate almost full usage of a low-end cable modem connection, which are below normal DSL levels, so you're probably going to use cable if you plan on getting on this service.

The service worked well to make us suspicious that OnLive actually moved one of the its servers into the back bedroom, but we were assured that it was running off a bank of machines in Santa Clara, almost 350 miles away.

Of the four games, the shooter was the only one that felt slightly sluggish

and it was also the only active multiplayer game out of the bunch, pairing us with other OnLive users scattered around the country.

said by DrModem:

So it sucks pretty much the entire 5mb of the connection's bandwidth. At that rate, you'll down about 4gb for every 2 hours of gaming. If you play 24 hours a month(6hrs/week) that'll be about 48gb for just Onlive. Most gamers I've seen usually play around 40 hours a month at least, which would take ~80gb. Hello bandwidth cap...

350 miles is a very minimal distance. It would have been better if they had had their machine bank closer to their distance cap, like 800+ miles away. That would probably come close to demonstrating the average user's distance.

Slightly sluggish at a mere 350 miles away. That means it would probably be a nightmare at a further distance. And what are the great graphic games that people's PCs aren't able to run that they want to play so bad and is subsequently the main selling point for this service? Oh that's right, shooters.

Where was the multiplayer game server located? If it was sitting in the same datacenter with the Onlive server equipment, then this is not a real-world multiplayer experience.

In summary, Though the article is sparse on details we can conclude several things from the details that ARE there:

- This service will be a major bandwidth hog. So all people on ISPs with slower connections(WISPs, Most DSL connections) will have to stay away. Most of the ones who have fast enough connections will run into bandwidth caps and subsequently overage charges because their ISP is likely to be a cap nazi cableco. So it looks like the only winners in this area of users of FIOS.

- The main attraction, FPS games and other shooter types will fail miserably. The Onlive datacenter is likley to be far more than 350 miles away, causing horrendous button lag. To complicate matters, the actual game server for multiplayer games(such as Call of Duty) is likely to be in variable distant locations away from the datacenter the Onlive user is currently connected through. So that will add normal game lag on top of the button lag, making multiplayer in a shooter nigh unplayable. To even further complicate matters, these Olive users will likely be playing on servers where there are people with PCs playing. The Onlive users will be unable to react fast enough due to all the latency and subsequently be easy game for PC users. Shooters on Onlive will be a nightmare.

Other complications are likley to arrive when this thing hits the real world (not an engineered real world, which is what this test was in)

said by sonicmerlin:

Your reasoning if flawed. I don't think you quite understand how much legacy hardware is out there and being used by everyday consumers. A very small minority of people upgrade their computers regularly. All the people who don't (whether due to lack of interest or lack of funds) fall outside the potential crowd of customers for the PC game industry.

Mar 27, 2009

Gavin Cook said...
Latency is the really important part as it effects the timing of your actions and the game's response to those actions.

If I ping Google, which I think stands as a good example of a company with good if not great infrastructure, I get an average response time of 196ms. So for me to push a button, have the signal go up to the server, effect the rendering, and get a frame back that relates to my action will take somewhere around 392ms. (assuming a rendering time of 0 ms).

At 30fps you need to be spitting out 1 frame every 33.33ms. So a roundtrip latency of 392ms means you are going to have a delay of 11.87 frames. basically a 1/3 of a second to see your action change the game. If the latency were to increase the game would become unplayable.

Being an avid WOW player I've often seen my latency creep up in to the 500-700ms range, and occasionally into the 1500ms range when there is an issue on the network. Most games have tricks in the client to compensate for this, sometimes you see another player snap to a different location as the client gets the updated data for their location. Without a local client and renderer the game is would have to pause (skip?) when there is a hiccup in the network.

All of this is ignoring the other side of the equation which is the rendering of that many frames for that many clients would need some massive hardware and bandwidth. It's a cool idea but I'm not sure there's a workable business model here.