Anyone else used OnLive?

Brandon Andrews · 2010-07-08T00:41:37

I made a post in the news section when OnLive was released, but not many people comment on those. Right now their service is on a first come first serve basis, but I got the free 12 months free offer.Since this directly affects how games are played did anyone feel surprised at how well it works (if you've played it). Any ideas or thoughts you had toward it?Currently I'm using it on my work's fiber line with around an 8 ms latency to their server (from Kalamazoo, Michigan). It plays exactly as if I was on my computer. Right now the stream is limited to 720p which seems perfect for games. Their compression algorithm is really good for video it looks like. Should be interesting when they release the 1080p version.I played Borderlands, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Trine, Babo (game with the spheres that roll around with guns) and a few other games already and they all run fine. When I tap the mouse I see instantly movement with what looks like no latency. I'm curious what other games they'll begin adding. They added Lego Harry Potter when it was released yesterday so it looks like their plan will be to get to games and offer the instant play option. The ability to just jump in and play is amazing, especially for demos. Also it appears like they have all the games stored on RAM so even though you still see load screens the actual load time is a few seconds (like 2 or 3).Also if anyone is curious their games don't run at max settings. They run them at what looks good while not sacrificing their data center's computing power too much. This normally means running the game at high settings. Seems to be a balance and to keep their PR up since a laggy games would probably make people angry. Also I've read they run ATI graphics cards so PhysX I guess in the Batman game is not enabled.It would be interesting to see this system for an MMO game. Technically by using a cloud as it's called they could produce a game (not just MMO) that's beyond the capability of most peoples computers. (Just rendering camera into one world basically for an MMO and not separate game clients). It would be an interested future if that occur ed. (Photorealistic MMO essentially o_O).The one downside with this is that currently the US and most countries don't have the fiber necessary for everyone to use the service. It's interesting how far ahead of the game they are. I would have expected thin client gaming to be in the future when most everyone had 100 mbps connections, but it's happening so quickly. Think about it. Just 10 years ago most of us were on dial-up (8 years ago for me). Just passed by a series of road crew laying down fiber into the ground and it's nice to think that slowly but surely we're marching into a fiber only future. I digress though. OnLive works if you have the latency/download. (I measured between 4.7-5.3 mbps at the maximum 720p stream. It dynamically adjusts quality apparently if you can't maintain that. If you have it just open the Windows 7 Resource viewer from the task manager to view the network up/down from OnLive.exe). That seems to be a given though that having the download and latency will make things work flawlessly. I'm glad OnLive does their own latency and download checks before launching the client or a lot of people would be complaining even though they fall below the threshold.Anyone have any FOSS worries about closed source super "DRM" games? I think Steam already desensitized us to the fact of DRM for games, but the whole games as a service seems to be new. OnLive for instance has game rentals currently for some games. If you're the kind of the person that just plays a game once and never touches it again, like me, then it's the perfect system since it's very cheap. Having the game disc though seems to be a sticking point for some. However, while games on a disc lack updates, OnLive keeps games fully up to date.About the whole security thing there's one nice advantage and it comes in the form of multiplayer games. Unless you create one that reads the screen and does image processing it's really hard to bot the game. You can't cheat in anyway since it's just a video stream. (This basically makes it even more sandboxed than a console. Also the hardware is basically fixed until they update their data centers).One problem that my coworker is worried about with this whole thing is how it'll effect the modding community. It's a niche in games that many people love, including my coworker. For instance, as he pointed out, you can't just put WoW onto OnLive since you'd need to include options to enable all the UI mods for people. (He said he can't play the game without them :P). Do you guys have any worries if your favorite game sequels move to it?(Also I'm trying not to sound like a fanboy, since I wanted this to succeed, but it might come off that way >_>. There's probably many downsides to games/software as a service that I left out. Feel free to list any that come to mind).

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Started by Sirisian June 30, 2010 03:26 PM

31 comments, last by Sirisian 14 years, 4 months ago

mutex

1,112

July 07, 2010 09:21 PM

I just tried OnLive with Unreal Tournament 3 on my Comcast cable connection. I've played UT3 locally before so I know how good the graphics can be, and while OnLive's graphics were noticeably degraded it wasn't to the level of unplayability. There was definitely input lag but I got used to it surprisingly quickly. The lag reminds me of multiplayer gaming with several hundred milliseconds of lag, so it wasn't completely unfamiliar.

By far the best part was playing instantly. I didn't need to wait an hour for Steam to download UT3, or wait for it to install from my DVD copy. It just started instantly, and being the fickle gamer that I am this may be the solution to my gaming needs.

shurcool

439

July 08, 2010 12:01 AM

Quote: Original post by mutex
By far the best part was playing instantly. I didn't need to wait an hour for Steam to download UT3, or wait for it to install from my DVD copy. It just started instantly, and being the fickle gamer that I am this may be the solution to my gaming needs.

This paragraph, visualized.

An interesting thought: even though you will feel some input/output latency for visuals, multiplayer will be no worse. Because all players will be playing essentially on a LAN. So everyone's ping will be 0 (locally within the OnLive servers). You will only have OnLive's input/visuals lag to worry about.

Sirisian

Author

2,263

July 08, 2010 12:41 AM

Quote: Original post by shurcool
An interesting thought: even though you will feel some input/output latency for visuals, multiplayer will be no worse. Because all players will be playing essentially on a LAN. So everyone's ping will be 0 (locally within the OnLive servers). You will only have OnLive's input/visuals lag to worry about.

With a real multiplayer game the game will extrapolate forward severely limiting the perceived lag. OnLive doesn't have that luxury.

(heh, my coworker and I are still below 10 ms round trip so yeah latency hmm. OnLive in the ideal world is amazing :P) I'm expecting people are going to start blaming their latency issues on "oh no OnLive is adding more people so the latency is going up!" I like this slow transition that's been happening though since whatever they're doing is working to keep the games playable. I've been jumping into a random demo everyday to see how things perform and it hasn't changed yet.

Quote: Original post by MJP
Quote: Original post by Sirisian
I actually had to to look it up since I wasn't paying attention when I played. They're running at 60 fps 1280x720 resolution.

Are you sure that's the framerate the game is rendering at, and not just the rate of the video stream? When I played AC2 at E3, it was not holding a steady 30fps (and this was at settings worse than the Xbox 360 version).

Actually I'm not sure. It feels like I'm playing a local game, but then again I played Crysis at <30 fps pretty much the whole game without noticing. I'd have to send them an e-mail to make sure (which seems pretty common when people have questions).

Anyone else used OnLive?

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Anyone else used OnLive?

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