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).

One of my friends tried it out, and was dismayed to find that his netbook was "below minimum spec". Wasn't one of OnLive's selling points that you didn't need to upgrade your computer to play the latest games?

Quote: Original post by Nypyren
One of my friends tried it out, and was dismayed to find that his netbook was "below minimum spec". Wasn't one of OnLive's selling points that you didn't need to upgrade your computer to play the latest games?

It runs on the IPad and the iphone. You need a processor? I'd double check and make sure there is one? :P I guess there is a limit given that the decompression algorithm has to run in a certain time frame. Might just be the higher resolution though. I believe the PC/Mac client uses more bandwidth.

Quote: Original post by Nypyren
One of my friends tried it out, and was dismayed to find that his netbook was "below minimum spec".

Most netbooks cannot decode 720p video in realtime. My eee cannot, for example.

Or better yet - it can, just not the flash decoder. See my other rant on "innovation" and how it relates to modern hardware.

IMO this would be perfect for MMO games from rendering POV. You could have servers distribute load spatially. The advantage of having one server do the rendering for one area is that you can do complex world space effects, like world space GI, animation and only pay the price once per frame instead of paying it for every user connected to the server individually. After you do the simulation, you do the global world effects, and then have bunch of read-only (independent/concurrent) threads render the stuff to each individual user.
If you keep the final pass light weight and offload the processing complexity to the world space processing you can have a good scaling between number of users vs quality of the world space effects per server.
And also, since the world data/complexity is pretty much constant (only the stuff user can affect/bring to area can change) you can have pretty constant performance and can localize/fix performance issues.
And spatial distribution of simulation processing subdivision requires only neighboring servers to have low latency direct connections, so you don't need to send simulation data around.
For smaller maps, you don't even need multiple servers - like for eg. a multilayer shooter.

As for OnLive - I don't like the idea of playing games via remote desktop, and I don't see much point in it. The only thing that rationalizes their plan is that that they can have higher utilization of the equipment than you and build specialized HW/bulk purchase, so for instance your play time might be 2h a day the rest of the time the hw is free. But still, you need to account for peaks, that not many people will play over night and distributing the load from different time zones is a no-go because of the latency, etc. so you hardly achieve 100% utilization, games aren't built for this architecture so it's inefficient...
Plus they have the cost of maintenance, bandwidth, supporting infrastructure - while eliminating none of those on your side since your computer is still not a dumb terminal that is maintenance free.

But even ignoring the above and other optimization options, if you can have a server processing multiple clients simultaneously then the current rendering architecture is just wasteful, since they are running those games as separate processes (not sharing the resource memory for eg.).

Overall the OnLive approach just seems too "brute force". But I like the idea of cloud based rendering :)

Quote: Original post by RedDrake
As for OnLive - I don't like the idea of playing games via remote desktop, and I don't see much point in it.

One thing that I've pointed out before and OnLive kind of stressed before was platform independence. Mac people can use OnLive to play PC only games (except for Mass Effect because of licensing issues). Also when an OnLive linux version is made people will be able to play games on linux.

I said this on IRC, but I think it would be cool to load up some DOS emulators and create a complete DOS collection. :P Or hook up some PS3's and XBox 360's or... well you get the idea. Streaming a game opens up a lot of interesting possibilities albeit OnLive has a lot of legal challenges and things to deal with. Kind of expected though.

I sort of wonder how viable it is in the long term though. I mean, it must require some pretty decent servers and a heck of a lot of bandwidth on their end, and if things pick up for them I wonder if they will be able to keep the happy balance of providing service to enough people while keeping quality up. That, and and as mentioned, not everyone has a fiber connection.

I do think the concept has a lot of merit, but I wonder if they are just a little too bit ahead of their time.

Quote: Original post by Moe
I mean, it must require some pretty decent servers and a heck of a lot of bandwidth on their end

Actually I think they teamed up with ISPs. They did that for a few reasons. One was routing and the other was cheap bandwidth. It's kind of like trying to figure out if Youtube costs google much money in bandwidth. Their servers are pretty custom and they're working with ATI/Nvidia, AMD, and Dell so I assume they have special bulk deals that most people can't get. They're also continuing to update their servers as they let people in to get a good regional feel for where people are connecting to and which data centers need the most work. I believe there's well past 30K users now.

They will probably survive as a niche alternative to those who don't want to upgrade their PC every generation or want to access games through non-traditional platforms like netbooks or iPads etc.. until the bandwidth becomes available for most people.

-ddn

Quote: Original post by Sirisian
I said this on IRC, but I think it would be cool to load up some DOS emulators and create a complete DOS collection. :P Or hook up some PS3's and XBox 360's or... well you get the idea. Streaming a game opens up a lot of interesting possibilities albeit OnLive has a lot of legal challenges and things to deal with. Kind of expected though.

Maybe not DOS, but...

">skip to about 1:30 of this video, if you haven't yet heard of Gaikai.