OnLive

so essentially the video of the game that you are playing is streamed like the onDemand service you get thru cable and only the button presses are what's transmitted from your house?

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

Again, the problem is not your understanding of networking, but your understanding of how this particular product works. This is a way of piping video to people, it doesn't have anything to do with how the game itself is networked.

I like how you did exactly what I said you would do and told you preemptively not to. All of these factors are issues that would affect the single player, but are not made worse in any way because it's a multiplayer game being streamed to the player.

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The player has to react to the server's video output -- which is encoded, sent over the net, and decoded on the player's end.

Are you telling me every player is guaranteed to get every frame of video at exactly the same time? And the server is guaranteed to get control input data from all players at the same time/rate?

If you believe that you're clueless. If not, there are a lot of game sync issues to deal with in multiplayer. Either way you're wrong.

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Originally Posted by Daitokuji

so essentially the video of the game that you are playing is streamed like the onDemand service you get thru cable and only the button presses are what's transmitted from your house?

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Yes. You send the input, OnLive's machines process it, and they send you back the video/audio data.

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Originally Posted by PBMax

The player has to react to the server's video output -- which is encoded, sent over the net, and decoded on the player's end.

Are you telling me every player is guaranteed to get every frame of video at exactly the same time? And the server is guaranteed to get control input data from all players at the same time/rate?

If you believe that you're clueless. If not, there are a lot of game sync issues to deal with in multiplayer. Either way you're wrong.

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This entire service seems like a pipe dream to me at best, but I really do think you're mistaken.

There doesn't seem to be any extra hurdles presented by online multiplayer games. As far as this service is concerned, those games would be operating in a LAN environment or some kind of funky virtualization setup on the same physical machine. No players are ever sending input or coordinate data to each other, so there's no syncing issues present that aren't already present in a singleplayer game with this service. The end result would be similar to a normal online multiplayer experience, only (lol) with input lag added on top of it for every player.

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Originally Posted by Sixfortyfive

This entire service seems like a pipe dream to me at best, but I really do think you're mistaken.

There doesn't seem to be any extra hurdles presented by online multiplayer games. As far as this service is concerned, those games would be operating in a LAN environment or some kind of funky virtualization setup on the same physical machine. No players are ever sending input or coordinate data to each other, so there's no syncing issues present that aren't already present in a singleplayer game with this service. The end result would be similar to a normal online multiplayer experience, only (lol) with input lag added on top of it for every player.

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So what happens if one player falls 5 frames of video behind?

What happens if a player receives video data out of order?

What happens if the server receives control data based on an out-of-date video frame?

More players equals more chance that they get out of sync, which has to be dealt with or it would affect the game experience for all players. This is a problem.

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Originally Posted by PBMax

So what happens if one player falls 5 frames of video behind?

What happens if a player receives video data out of order?

What happens if the server receives control data based on an out-of-date video frame?

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Why don't you say what you think would happen in each of these situations, as I'm not seeing any issues that aren't already present in a single-player setting (not that those aren't significant in themselves). I mean, the best answer I could give to any of those would be "the player doesn't see what's actually happening in real-time," but that's true of any game you'd run on this setup.

Let's all thank Eurogamer for bringing some sanity back into the equation: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gd...y-work-article

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Let's say that I'm wrong. It's not completely unknown. I'm just a man (flesh and blood!) taking a pop at visionaries who reckon they have produced something truly epoch-making. But in order to make OnLive perform exactly as claimed right now, the company has to have achieved the following:

• 1. OnLive has mastered video compression that outstrips the best that current technologies can achieve by a vast margin. In short, it has outsmarted the smartest compressionists in the world, and not only that, it's doing it in real-time.
• 2. OnLive's unparalleled grasp of psychophysics means that it has all but eliminated the concept of IP lag during its seven years of "stealth development", succeeding where the best minds in the business have only met with limited success.
• 3. OnLive has developed a range of affordable PC-compatible super-computers and hardware video encoders that are generations beyond anything on the market at the moment.

At some point, Occam's Razor, along with an ounce of basic common sense, has to step in and bring an end to this fantasy, no matter how much we want it to be true. OnLive boss Steve Perlmen remains adamant: "Perceptually, it appears the game is playing locally... what we have is something that is absolutely incredible. You should be sceptical. My first thinking was this shouldn't work, but it does."


So let's put it this way - I can't wait to be proved wrong.

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Originally Posted by epmode

Let's all thank Eurogamer for bringing some sanity back into the equation: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gd...y-work-article

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But they said 1ms round trip so it has to be true!

;)

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Originally Posted by PBMax

So what happens if one player falls 5 frames of video behind?

What happens if a player receives video data out of order?

What happens if the server receives control data based on an out-of-date video frame?

More players equals more chance that they get out of sync, which has to be dealt with or it would affect the game experience for all players. This is a problem.

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Why do you seem to think there needs to be any sort of "snycing" going on, beyond what is already processed via online play right now?

If I were to take my monitor, my mouse and my keyboard 200 miles away from my PC, and they were magically connected via a 200 mile long VGA cord and two 200 mile long USB cords, my PC would still handle online play in the exact same way. It would still send the video signal to me, and my mouse and keyboard would still send their signal back to the PC. Sure there would be a delay between the two due to the distance the signal is traveling, but the data transmitted to the server from my PC is going to be exactly the same. If there was lag I wouldn't "fall behind" or become "unsync'd", I would just have lag and say "omgwtf fucking laaaaag" like I do right now in counter-strike or warcraft or whatever.

This is a small example of why "games journalism" is so easy to scrutinize. They hype a lot of games months in advance, sing the gospel, and when the title releases, hand out high to mid scores but criticize it like all those past praises were baseless. So I can see why people are hard to believe when IGN, Gamespot, et al are claiming this it the real deal. They do the same thing with nearly everything.

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Originally Posted by PBMax

Are you telling me every player is guaranteed to get every frame of video at exactly the same time?

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LOL, how do you think this works, dude? That it shifts the output into the future to compensate or something? What "syncing" is going on with the video output? The whole concept is that it can complete the entire loop very very fast so the lag isn't noticeable. There's no way to "sync" the video with the controller input, that's an impossible thing.

If it can get it to one person fast enough that the lag is imperceptible, than it can get it to two, and if it can't then it's not viable for single player to begin with.

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Originally Posted by PBMax

So what happens if one player falls 5 frames of video behind?

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It would skip 5 frames and they'd still be playing live. How could this service be remotely playable for anyone, SP or MP if it needed to "sync" like that?