OnLive

[kuze]

http://www.destructoid.com/gdc-09-playing-...ve-126223.phtml



thoughts?

[Falcon]

Pretty interesting, although it is going to be a bandwidth monster. The ISPs are going to 'love' this.



If I may grossly simplify for a second the technology appears to be like streaming video from a website. Except that it's not a video it's you playing a game. This means that there isn't much in terms of hardware requirements for your end. On the server side they have some RIDICULOUS shit to power all these gaming sessions.



They advertise 0 lag but of course it'll be effected by your connection etc.



If you want a rough approximation of what experience might be like install VNC on one computer and remote connect in and fire up a game. Any computer that can run the VNC client can handle whatever the game throws at you, in fact it doesn't matter what it throws at you at all as it is just a video stream. Now imagine this, over the internet and with extremely expensive hardware on the provider end.



In short they have something interesting going on and I'll be neat to see how they handle the transport of the data to your end point. However it is going to eat the shit out of your bandwidth. 1.5 mbps for the standard definitions/resolutions and 5 mbps for hi-def.



This is centralized computing at it's finest. Next thing you know everyone will own little thin clients instead of full-blown computers. Vista/7/Mac will be offered as a part of the service and SKYNET WILL TAKE OVER THE *ahem* sorry.



Pretty cool stuff!

[neshcom]

I've seen this here and there and, while it is conceptually interesting, I don't believe it will be as lag-free as they have claimed it. And for something like a mfirst-person-shooter, any lag is bad, right? If it's exactly what they promise, I may consider it.

[Falcon]

The lag, in theory, should be identical to twice your internet lag anyway so it shouldn't be too bad. In practice though? I guess we'll have to see the beta to get a real feel for it.

[Ap2000]

[quote name='Falcon' post='62834' date='Mar 25 2009, 07:12 PM']The lag, in theory, should be identical to twice your internet lag anyway so it shouldn't be too bad. In practice though? I guess we'll have to see the beta to get a real feel for it.[/quote]



This is not the usual lag that will plague this system, there will be input lag and that is the most horrible thing that can happen when you play a game.

It can even happen offline, when the game has been shitily/not optimized (especially with crappy console ports).



@News; I've seen the interview on GameTrailers.com and am very sceptical.

Extremely horrible idea actually, unless everybody has a 10mbit connection. Besides, why have all high details enabled, if I can't run it in my monitor's native resolution ? I'd rather downscale it in terms of details, than have it run at a wishy-washy looking resolution.

But hey, THE INTERNET IS A SERIES OF TUBES.

[Sabaku Ika]

If this is anywhere near as good as they say it is, it will change everything. Slightly more lag than advertised would not much diminish this.