OnLive gameing service
"Imagine playing a computer game without any hassles. Drivers, troubleshooting, installations, compatibility, performance--all thrown out the window. Upgrading? A thing of the past. All you have to do is click on the game, and seconds later, you're playing. That's what OnLive claims to deliver. Should it work half as well as advertised, expect to see the gaming world thrown into upheaval by a box no bigger than a deck of playing cards. The story gets even more unbelievable when you factor in price. According to company reps, OnLive intends to significantly undercut every existing console on the market.
At its core, OnLive is a subscription service similar to cable TV or Netflix. In other respects, OnLive is what you get when you pump something like YouTube full of steroids. Instead of just watching a pile of videos, you're streaming gameplay at HDTV resolutions and controlling your character in real time. You get Crysis on your HDTV at the highest-quality settings--run by a computer that's hundreds of miles from your doorstep. It's really no wonder Rearden Labs spent the better part of a decade perfecting and designing OnLive. "
Press conference:
http://uk.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324
Analysits sold:
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6206742.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=newstop&tag=newstop;title;9
Sounds great! No more hardware upgrading!
At its core, OnLive is a subscription service similar to cable TV or Netflix. In other respects, OnLive is what you get when you pump something like YouTube full of steroids. Instead of just watching a pile of videos, you're streaming gameplay at HDTV resolutions and controlling your character in real time. You get Crysis on your HDTV at the highest-quality settings--run by a computer that's hundreds of miles from your doorstep. It's really no wonder Rearden Labs spent the better part of a decade perfecting and designing OnLive. "
Press conference:
http://uk.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324
Analysits sold:
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6206742.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=newstop&tag=newstop;title;9
Sounds great! No more hardware upgrading!
Post edited by HonoredShadow on
Comments
Think one reason i'm not into any console is that they seem to bring out a new one quite recently and then all the games are mostly redundant.
This sounds very appealing, can see this taking off in the future.
A little bit like Steam then. And I've been using that for years now.
No no, this is something quite different. The premise is that the games actually run on servers somewhere, and all your PC does is upload joystick movements to the server, which it then plays in the game running on the server, and then the resulting display & audio are sent back down to your machine. You never actually have the game at all, or the hardware.
Personally I'm worried that latency will be as much of a problem as it always is, and that there's going to have to be some absolutely killer compression on the download screen or your going to hit your provider's bandwidth limit pretty quickly.
https://twitter.com/bobsstuffgames
https://www.facebook.com/bobs.stuff
http://www.bobs-stuff.co.uk
The things they're claiming (streaming of realtime-generated high-definition video data with low enough latency to be acceptable for gaming) are so far beyond any technology that exists on the market today, that this simply wouldn't just appear out of the blue. If this was for real, then Youtube wouldn't take 5 minutes to process an upload, video-conferencing would be mainstream, DVDs would be obsolete, and Second Life wouldn't look like crap. (As it is, Second Life is pretty much the upper limit of what's feasible in terms of processing power per user - IIRC, it's only a few dozen users per physical server. But these people are proposing to give every user one current-generation-console's worth of computing power, in addition to whatever's required to provide video encoding of unprecedented awesomeness? What kind of server farm are they planning on building here?)
I got on the public beta last night, and like gasman I couldn't possibly believe they we're going to be able to provide what they were claiming.
Guess what? It works. On top of that it works bloody well, too. I've been playing a fully-souped up Just Cause 2 and Batman AA on my bog-standard laptop with no lag. Admittedly it's not HD, but the quality is still pretty good.
I can't believe it works!
I have imagined that and it sounds very much like my DS!
I havent played many PC games recently, love the 'epics' like Half Life II etc but most of the other games i see just dont take my breath away. Dont want to spend 20-30 quid on a game i might only play for a few games.
This 'could' be pretty good for me. The 3 or 5 day passes dont look too bad.
I hope it works, it's going to be especially good for trying games out with the 30 minute limit. Saves a demo download at least!
Yeah, it's never going to be good for very twitchy games, although that sort of lag wouldn't be too bad for FPS, RPG and driving games at least so long as it's more or less even between players, and that's most of the mass market covered.
Mind you, it'll still feel a bit like going back to the days of dial-up online.
Nah thats not true ! My mum wont be shouting up halfway through a game 'can you get off the computer, your dad needs the phone....' ;)
If it's cheap enough it has a place. But it would have to be dead cheap to make up for the fact I wouldn't "own" anything or be able to play if not online.
I was an original LPB on quake (low ping bastard for the uninitiated!). I worked as a network engineer at an ISP when it came out, so ran rings round modem players on my multiple t1's and locally hosted servers :)
Not necessarily. The controller lag is roughly on a par with the mechanical delay you'd typically get for car controls (steering, brake, etc.) so provided that a sim racer is suitably configured (i.e. this isn't compounded with a simulated mechanical delay) it ought to pass as being fairly realistic.
I suppose that your mileage might vary for very twitchy arcade racers, but there aren't too many of those on the market these days.
Ah yes - if the game is tuned to expect the extra lag. GT for example already simulates the mechanical lag, so any extra I would expect to cause issues.