Quote: Original post by Andrew Russell
Anyone here technically brilliant enough to implement a system that will lag your keyboard and mouse by about 60ms (assuming they have some kind of expensive edge network) and seeing if it's playable?

Actually, if I turn off extrapolation of input in the Source games, I can no longer play HL2 at 50 ms ping without frustration. When I rotate my view, it feels very rigid and trying to react to events around myself is impossible. Definatly unplayable.

I can live with movement being delayed for as long as my roundtrip is (at 50 ms), but rotation is so obvious it hurts my head.

TBF, there would be simple ways to reduce certain types of lag. If the video stream were slightly larger in each dimension than the actually displayed FOV, it would be possible to instantly rotate the view by a few degrees, until the server could catch up. Similarly, a zoom could approximate the first few frames of a forward motion. It wouldn't be perfect, but this simple degree of latency hiding would definitely be possible with today's technology.

Quote: Original post by Andrew Russell
The biggest question is - will anyone buy it? This reminds me of movies-on-demand that was big 1-2 years ago. How did that turn out?

Pretty well, actually. You can do this from your 360 now, but it's a noisy beast. My cable service, however, provides movies on demand with no problems at all.

My guess is it will take a similar 1-2 years for this tech to mature to a usable level. Don't underestimate the motivation to make it work from a business perspective... it has the potential to open the games market up considerably. I don't know details, but I've been told advances in compression tech. are central to this concepts sucessful execution. I guess we'll see.

For small games this kind of system would be flawless pretty much. Imagine playing a puzzle game or some turn based game. There are so many genres that would work perfectly. (MYST anyone?) Also for those developers if they release licenses in this way they can be sure that no one is pirating the game for the most part unless there is a leak. Friends might decide to share their On Live account though.

I really want this to work, but I know for a lot of genres this is going to fail miserably. I'm not sure why the company is pushing so many twitch based games unless their system works much better than we imagine. They are doing beta stuff.

Also something else I wanted to point out. I have zero interest in owning games. I play them once maybe for a few hours and then get bored and stop. Using my university's connection I can easily run this On Live stuff probably. I'd love to be able to rent games essentially and have fun for a little while. I know this differs from other gamers that believe they have to own the game or it isn't really theirs. I actually thought this way for a little bit then I bought L4D using steam and haven't regretted it.

What if they sent analog video signal back in response to user input? Like those TV shows you can play games with your telephone? If they set up a TV channel for each client they only need to recieve the input and broadcast the video back to the user TV.

Quote: Original post by owl
What if they sent analog video signal back in response to user input? Like those TV shows you can play games with your telephone? If they set up a TV channel for each client they only need to recieve the input and broadcast the video back to the user TV.

Analog TV is not long for this world. And digital TV will have the same compression issues.

Sirisian:

For puzzle games and Myst there is no point then. The hardware to run games like that is trivial.

I have the same thoughts as that article. I think it's impossible on many levels, but I do hope I'm wrong and that it works, because it's a pretty neat idea. If it worked it'd be fun to take while traveling for something to do.

Quote: Original post by Sneftel

Quote: Original post by owl
What if they sent analog video signal back in response to user input? Like those TV shows you can play games with your telephone? If they set up a TV channel for each client they only need to recieve the input and broadcast the video back to the user TV.

Analog TV is not long for this world. And digital TV will have the same compression issues.

Maybe someone can put all that remanent analog equipment to good use. :)

Quote: Original post by owl
Maybe someone can put all that remanent analog equipment to good use. :)

Playing NES games?

Quote: Original post by ElectricVoodoo

Quote: Original post by owl
Maybe someone can put all that remanent analog equipment to good use. :)

Playing NES games?

?