OnLive

[Crevan]

I run my games at 1650x1080. Why would I be interested in 720p? My PC from 2001 could manage better than that.

[watercooled]

Yeah I can't see it denting the PC gaming market. I think it's more casual gamers and console gamers who would be interested. I don't know if I've already said it but I'd prefer to own my own hardware anyway.

[Blastuk]

did someone link this?
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gd...y-work-article

forgot about encoder lag, it is way too good to be true.. however i wouldn't be in the target demographic anyways.. i like to keep my games running locally

[watercooled]

Yeah I linked that in the OP.
What about mods and things? I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this but there would only be a few (if any) approved mods that could be used.

[lim_ak]

I'm really interested to see how this works in beta and when its released properly. Conceptually its all possible to do and I think that there is a market for this and I almost certainly would want to try it out when/if its released in the UK. Even if this completely crashes and burns it'll still be interesting to watch.

[smithy1158]

It would take half the fun out of PC gaming - Building your own PC even if its a budget one. Plus I dont see there being 20Mg broadband everywhere in the UK in the next 20 Years let alone 3 lol...

It does say it only requires 5Mbps download speed but thats in bytes not bits surely.

[roorooroo]

It'll play havoc with anyone's usage allowance i wager.

[CaseyV9]

I don't really get it.

Surley the only people who would mainly benefit from this are Laptop users? I would have thought most of them would use a USB modem?

And even if not, Do you really want to use all your data usage playing a single player game when it could be used on downloading movies and music?

I think I'll have a go at setting up a poll.

[watercooled]

I was thinking of adding a poll to this thread but I couldn't think of what to put as the choices lol. I agree completely with Smithy - I enjoy building and tinkering with a PC, possibly more that gaming on it. And, even if ISPs can provide 20Mb/s to everyone in the UK, it doesn't mean it could keep up with so many people using it so heavily.

[Zenin]

this will never work, maybe only if 1000 people in the world used it but no way a server can handle hundreds of thousands of gamers playing high end stuff.

and the slightest bit of lag will make the game unplayable, your inputs wont match whats on screen.

[finlay666]

Because I am a lazy sod..... my reply on the matter from another forum:

Problem comes in when those calculations need to be sent from the host to the machine to process it, process the information then send it back in a split second. These are time critical, as otherwise the game will stutter, sound will be missed and otherwise the experience won't be enjoyable (try playing a multiplayer FPS like Unreal tournament with a very high ping). This would happen if it was a public service as I know how bad my internet gaming experience becomes when my housemates start downloading tv or watching stuff via BBC iPlayer...it's unusable simply as there is too much delay between my data going out and the response coming back, you really need a good number of those packets each second, and delaying those makes it a very choppy experience.

Another way we could look at how the service would work is as an 'interactive' (but dumb) video (personally how I think the system will likely play out spec wise). To look at this we need to view the old way of how we would get our newly created image and audio (as they are 2 seperate parts, lots of images make up a video etc.) from the server to the client, because these have to be synced it is pretty likely that one machine would do both of these at the same time. If you look at a Youtube video, you have the chance to preload the content before you watch it, or depending on how good your bandwidth is it will prebuffer more of it before you need it, so you see the red bar move quicker from start to finish than the play icon.

With (as I said, how I think the system will work) it will likely use an on the fly video encoding service (the boxes aren't cheap, but do cut down a LOT of the work and actually make it feasable) to do on the fly encoding before sending that video stream to the user, so what you think is an interactive experience, but what you get is the video of you playing, same as if you were to play a game on someones compute while looking at their screen via a webcam (pretty poor example....but I just woke up)

I THINK the system works with a huge number of private servers that process the data in a giant server cluster. I don't honestly think any other option is really feasable. They said themselves when it was demoed the server farm was under 50 miles away.

I would go into the potential pitfalls of DRM as well.