Loyd Case explains how OnLive, a gaming service that offloads the rendering to a server farm and streams the results to your home over the internet, will work:
When you fire up a game using the browser built into the client software, the game will actually launch on the server. It’s possible you’ll see a “game loading” progress bar, but the goal is to have games load nearly instantaneously. As you play, the server compresses the outgoing, rendered video stream in real time, while accepting game input packets from the client.According to Perlman, the latency of playing a game is at least as good, and usually better than, playing on a LAN, and should be as good as playing on a local PC. Multiple server sites will exist, with the goal of having no gamer be more than 1,000 miles from a physical server.
For some games, sure. Streaming a 720p feed on a 5Mbit connection sounds fine—we can do that now. (Although video is pre-compressed then streamed, not compressed in realtime.) But even if they can consistently provide round-trip packets in 80 milliseconds, as Dean Takahashi reports, it’s difficult to imagine that sending back all the user interface data like mouse or controller position will really work so quickly that it will be playable for the fastest, most twitch-oriented games.
Color me hopeful but unconcerned about the future of local console or PC gaming hardware…for now. (If the subscription for OnLive isn’t too onerous, however, I could see using this to play WoW on a netbook and other gaming that lies between casual and attention-intensive gaming.)
If you don’t understand this essay, you need to read it, repeatedly, until you do.
“It’s the Latency, Stupid!” by Stuart Cheshire.
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html
1. Come up with something that seems clever
2. Find clueless venture capitalists
3. If same turn out to be slightly less than clueless, describe everything as proprietary
4. Come up with some excuse to explain that “the market wasn’t ready”
5. Bahamas!!!
Phantom!
UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, E, L, L, E, STOP, PLAY
yuck.
80ms is significant. Why yes, I would like my reaction time increased by 30-50%!
so basically it’s the gaming system found in most hotels but now in your house.
Doubt it.
It is completely possible, perhaps even likely, that they are snake oil salesmen.
BUT
I can imagine that for multiplayer online games, where you already have the inter-player latency issue, this might work well.
Lag: It’s a feature, not a bug!
I’m drooling for this technology, but definitely NOT for twitch games. I wanna play Wow at full quality on my laptop without having to spring the grand or more for a gaming rig. (I don’t have a netbook yet, but I’d be more inclined in that direction if I could game with it.)
And, as Tycho says, turn-based or even RT strategy games would be a perfect fit.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/3/25/
Most serious video codecs have a buffering scheme (or two) built into the decode process. When you watch a Blu-Ray disc, there’s a buffer between the disc and the playback hardware to smooth out any unevenly sized frames and then there’s another buffer which holds several video frames for reference purposes.
Basically, naive video encoding would be to just try to compress each frame of the video independently. To make things more efficient, instead the following process is used: 1) divide each picture into 16×16 blocks of pixels. 2) encode some blocks directly 3) for the rest, find another block which looks similar to it (usually in the previous or next frame) and record that 4) take the difference between those two blocks and then just encode that.
The tricky bit is that the referenced block can be chronologically after the block you’re decoding. So frames can’t necessarily be decoded in the order which they are displayed. As such, they have to be buffered appropriately.
So generally, you’re talking about necessarily being 2-4 frames behind depending on the specifics of the codec used. If it’s 60fps, 4 frames is about 60 milliseconds. And that’s not counting the network delay or any frame buffering which the television does (quite common in newer televisions). Obviously, you can reduce that some by changing your codec details, but that means using more bandwidth (and in turn having to have a larger buffer for the incoming video stream to make things smooth).
This isn’t a technological impossibility, but it’s not clear that it’s worth it. Fundamentally, you’re talking about using your whole network connection for this and possibly having to upgrade to a higher internet plan. If going from the 1.5 Mbps plan to the 5Mbps plan means going from $30/month to $50/month, then after two years you’ve spent an extra $480. At that point, you might as well just buy a gaming console.
There might be a point where this make business sense, but right, in the United States, computing power is cheap and bandwidth is expensive, so it doesn’t seem to me like it will be a good solution for very many consumers.