O-M-Jizzle, yo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ncx43iajVPo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJIxF6kdZZc
Full Version: Onlive
Oh lawdies.
I've seen their concept and i honestly think it isn't going to work.
Why not? It makes sense... All the computing power is out there, you really just need a good connection to stream the result to your screen with decent resolution. Though there will be a slight latency hit, it sounds like their focus has been on making it negligible. Though of course having a top of the line gaming computer is going to be superior, I'm ecstatic that I may be able to run E:TW on my piece of crap laptop, on highest settings in college. It's a great alternative for people like me.
I'm sceptical.
Lag will be a factor.
I don't see how they plan to maintain all these high end computers that will be running our games, they'd go bankrupt.
Lag will be a factor.
I don't see how they plan to maintain all these high end computers that will be running our games, they'd go bankrupt.
I'm assuming the subscription fees will cover that.
Lag will be a factor for limiting cases, I think that generally if you meet their requirements then it will all work out. Still, personally I don't like this but thats because I have a old fogey attitude to game distro.
Lag will be a factor for limiting cases, I think that generally if you meet their requirements then it will all work out. Still, personally I don't like this but thats because I have a old fogey attitude to game distro.
And pretty much everything else.
I swear it's just a huge April fools joke.
Its a great concept, i like it, but they are trying to make one happy coalition of console gamers and pc gamers, and that just isn't going to happen. It also seems to be a little to demanding of the internet speed for right now, when a 360 and the like don't need near as much speed.
QUOTE (WolfXI @ Mar 25 2009, 04:12 PM) 
I swear it's just a huge April fools joke.
Except you know...April fool's is in one week...
QUOTE (KingTut @ Mar 25 2009, 11:59 AM)
I'm assuming the subscription fees will cover that.
Just think about it. Say I want to play ETW on Onlive. To run it at the claimed 720p/60FPS would require a PC costing what, $1000 at the least. Per person. And on the scale it aims to become, multiply that by tens of thousands. And think about all the power this rendering plant would consume, the heat it would generate... it's just not conceivable.
Add into that, these machines won't only be rendering the game, but encoding it and sending to you at 5Mbps streaming video at 60FPS, with surround sound. Perfectly possible, yes... but encoded in real-time? Ever tried to encode a video at that quality on a PC? It can take a long, long time, and forcing it to do it faster results in poor, poor, image quality. Yet, they claim their encoding process will introduce only 1ms of lag. To be frank, that is BULLSHIT. I'm not sure there's any current encoding/compression system on the planet that can manage even half that even with a supercomputer behind it.
And then there's the matter of lag and unreliability of telecommunications networks. Maybe, just maybe, if all the other conundrums were solved and this was running on a network, yes, it may be possible to have reasonably lag-free gameplay. But what happens if you're on the other side of the US, or better still, on another continent? Not noticeable my arse, that's an extra 100ms thanks to the laws of the universe, lag is not a limitation of software that can just be 'tweaked away' like they claim, it is a physical limitation.
TLDR: For this concept to be possible as they are promising they pretty much will have had to have invented a system that put every expert on the planet in every field of video encoding, compression, 3D rendering, and telecommunications to shame. By a significant margin.
Well it sounded like bullshit from the beginning for me. Low expectations here...
Oh, I never thought that this would be available from outside the US. I have been reading more and more sites about it and they are just as skeptical as you. The guy in the interview mentioned some new tech that they were using that took 7 years to develop and to be honest I haven't looked deep enough into this to find out how it exactly works. The whole "cloud" thing just sounds like lag city. The guy also was fairly adament about it being run significantly lower then 5 Mb on most televisons (at least that's what i inferred from the interview Dwnloaded posted).
What I think is that while they are doing something that is way too ambitious and revolutionary for me to either a) believe or
like, under the CORRECT CIRCUMSTANCES and in a CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT should theoretically work. But the way they are hyping it does sound extremely dubious.
What I think is that while they are doing something that is way too ambitious and revolutionary for me to either a) believe or
like, under the CORRECT CIRCUMSTANCES and in a CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT should theoretically work. But the way they are hyping it does sound extremely dubious.
They say they've got a set of fancy shmancy logarithms that make it all work fine. I guess I'm skeptical, but I'm also eager to see how it performs when it comes out, imagine what this means if they succeed.
Oh, is that the 'psychophysical' research into reducing latency? What a load of bollocks.
Even in the best case scenario of them managing to pull it off by having massive funds and today's best technology, games will quite literally for most people be little more than web streaming/Youtube quality because of the compression, and as I said mainly because of how long it actually takes to encode at the quality they state, the delay perceived as lag will render it an uncomfortable experience, and that's in the US only...
Wouldn't surprise me if they're just profiting on all the hype and investments just to go 'oops didn't work out'. We're pretty much looking at the next Phantom.
Even in the best case scenario of them managing to pull it off by having massive funds and today's best technology, games will quite literally for most people be little more than web streaming/Youtube quality because of the compression, and as I said mainly because of how long it actually takes to encode at the quality they state, the delay perceived as lag will render it an uncomfortable experience, and that's in the US only...
Wouldn't surprise me if they're just profiting on all the hype and investments just to go 'oops didn't work out'. We're pretty much looking at the next Phantom.
I'm such a pathetic optimist... Oh well, I hope it works out for them. If doesn't, it's not like I've lost anything. I just think it's interesting that so many big-name companies said they would develop games for the platform when it's not even certain that it will work.
They're not developing games for the platform though, they're just running them on PCs at the back-end. Supposedly.
I suppose, but that still means they support the platform, doesn't it?
I would presume so.
But support =/= having to develop separately for.
But support =/= having to develop separately for.
No no, of course not. I guess what I meant was that it seems to me that such big companies wouldn't invest in something they felt would be a failure.
http://kotaku.com/5186946/peter-molyneux-t...fable-onlive-e3
At roughly 13 mins in, gaming most effective (to some) hype machine talks some onlive.
At roughly 13 mins in, gaming most effective (to some) hype machine talks some onlive.
Can barely hear. Argh.
New writeup pretty much saying what I said a little more eloquently.
New writeup pretty much saying what I said a little more eloquently.
QUOTE
The scale of the enterprise - and of the costs - we're talking about here is absolutely unprecedented. What OnLive is proposing is nothing short of the largest, most expensive and most energy-hungry datacentre ever constructed; an infrastructure undertaking on a scale which would make enterprises like Google, YouTube, iTunes and Facebook look like a walk in the park.
There is simply no readily available comparison for what OnLive is suggesting here. Streaming high-definition video services, even hugely popular ones like YouTube or the BBC's iPlayer, are several orders of magnitude less demanding - because all they're really doing, at the end of the day, is serving a pre-rendered file to their users. They're not doing anything in real-time, unlike OnLive, which is proposing to 3D render an extraordinarily taxing scene, encode it as a high-definition video and send it across the network, anything from 30 to 60 times a second - for every single connected user.
However, even overlooking the technological problems (frankly, broadband networks in most places simply aren't up to the task suggested here, and that's even if the video compression works as well as advertised), OnLive's business model simply doesn't add up. Videogames remain cutting edge, technologically, because the cost of new hardware is spread out among consumers. Pooling that entire cost into a gigantic datacentre, an IT engineering feat beyond anything previously attempted, and then trying to pay for it through an ongoing subscription system is an idea which may sound great - but making it work economically is very, very hard.
There is simply no readily available comparison for what OnLive is suggesting here. Streaming high-definition video services, even hugely popular ones like YouTube or the BBC's iPlayer, are several orders of magnitude less demanding - because all they're really doing, at the end of the day, is serving a pre-rendered file to their users. They're not doing anything in real-time, unlike OnLive, which is proposing to 3D render an extraordinarily taxing scene, encode it as a high-definition video and send it across the network, anything from 30 to 60 times a second - for every single connected user.
However, even overlooking the technological problems (frankly, broadband networks in most places simply aren't up to the task suggested here, and that's even if the video compression works as well as advertised), OnLive's business model simply doesn't add up. Videogames remain cutting edge, technologically, because the cost of new hardware is spread out among consumers. Pooling that entire cost into a gigantic datacentre, an IT engineering feat beyond anything previously attempted, and then trying to pay for it through an ongoing subscription system is an idea which may sound great - but making it work economically is very, very hard.
TLDR its a stupid and unrealistic idea. And if it even did work, it wouldn't last long.
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