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[Nosf3ratu]

http://kotaku.com/51...ysis-on-your-tv

I'm extremely excited about this service. If OnLive really does work like its supposed to I won't have to spend 10k for a PC that'll play whatever games run on CryEngine 3. The only thing is that I see this as a model for future consoles as well. We already know in the next 5-10 years videogames will not be available as a physical format, right? How do you guys feel about the whole "Marketplace Model" that everyone is slowing getting herded into?

[Heimdall]

QUOTE

What about lag, you say? OnLive's technology "incubator" Rearden Studios claims that its servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond.

Either that's an overenthusiastic marketeer talking to a gullible journalist, or they've invented time travel! I'm on a solid 7 Mbit/s ADSL line, and typically get 60 millisecond (mS) round trip ping times - and no technology short of time travel will bring that down to below 1mS. Light in a fibre takes 5ms to travel 1000km, or 8ms to travel 1000 miles (assuming 66% of c), then on top of that there's the packet serialisation time and processing time in each device that the packet transits - and note that these are one-way figures - they have to be doubled for round-trip times! For comparison, very low latency links (between data centres, for example) run at 3-6 millisecond latency (again one-way), and they are very expensive - and distance limited. Maybe I'm just being cynical, but from where I stand that basic factual error makes the rest of the article doubtful. I'm sure they mean that the latency in their servers will be less than 1mS, but:

A. It makes very little difference, the real problem is round trip lag across the Internet
B. I don't believe they'll be able to afford to scale their infrastructure to maintain that level of performance at all times and under all loads, and people measure their satisfaction of on-line services based on the worst performance at peak times, not on how well it works at 3 a.m.!

And, having deployed and used Citrix (the same principle but designed for Office apps- remote access to conventional desktops over the Internet), I doubt very much that they can compensate for Internet lag - it's bad enough optimising the data flows to get fairly static screens with occasional typing (like Word or Excel) to respond acceptably. "Conventional" on-line gaming services (like Xbox Live) struggle occasionally as the Internet or their servers get congested, and they're just sending basic position and action information, not rendering the whole screen. OnLive may have made their beta test work over a limited trial using hand picked ISP connections, but it won't survive contact with the real Internet and high volumes of users. Anyone who uses iPlayer knows how choppy it can get at peak times, and that's medium definition video with buffering - but you can't buffer a real-time game.

I'll not be buying shares.......!

This post has been edited by Heimdall: Mar 24 2009, 12:48 PM

[Nosf3ratu]

Well played sir, I see what you mean. It may very well be targeted toward fiber users such as FIOS or similar services, especially if your going to make it output at 720p. I have a decent connection and 720p hd videos don't just load automatically. There are definitely some humps but I just like the whole idea/concept. We'll see how it all plays out.

[hyfall381]

i think its a cool concept, but way ahead of its time. itll be yearsss until something like that can do 1080p over an online setup without any lag/connection/buffer issues. it might have worked well for them, and at 720p. but imagine when thousands of player are all trying to use it.
in the future.. it could become an online gaming standard. but not anytime soon.

[Nosf3ratu]

I wonder what kind of storage they would need for all of the systems and servers...

[Nosf3ratu]

http://i.gizmodo.com... on-impressions

[throwingks]

^ I cannot remember where I read it right now, but I did read that they were 50 miles from the server for that demo.

[Nosf3ratu]

It actually says that in the article.

[throwingks]

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif) I don't know how I missed that!

This post has been edited by throwingks: Mar 27 2009, 06:12 AM