OnLive 48 Mins Video Demonstration

[XS2K]

I dunno,80ms is "livable" if you played on HDTV's when the next gen consoles arrived 80ms input lag from the screen would be normal if not "good"
For MP it's fail though but for single player it's ok especially since the target won't be midrange PC-gamers and most likely mobile and console gamers.
I for one think it's a great idea and one of the few which really bring something innovative to the table.

[spoof]

Cut off this 80ms latency, you can play Crysis on your iPhone!

[Hornet331]

you can play Crysis on your iPhone!

With even more latancy.

[SamHughe]

If everyone in the server has 80ms latency that would be fine. The real problem is the different latency rates between the players. Yes, it sucks to have 80ms latency when everyone else don't and you can really feel it. I wish they develop some kind of buffer or L-Synch to keep the players balanced. So everybody in the server has the same latency as the slowest player.

[zalbard]

80 ms latency = 12 FPS. I'm not up for such a downgrade. They'll have to put a server or two in every city in order for this to work.

[Eastcoasthandle]

Thats just it, it Cant be as responsive, the latency is on your input, thats Way different then playing a online game on your computer with 80ms latency because as was said, your actions are still instantaneous.

Imagine every movement you make having a slight delay.

I think you are missing my point. If the 80ms lag isn't perceived by the player it doesn't matter. There is lag in all the games we play be in online or off. Even with the best PC setups there is still lag so lets not forget that. Now will 80 ms of lag make a difference compared to the lag we experience via LCD, input lag and even ping? That will be something that will need more demoing before we will know for sure. Or better yet, try to get in on the beta. However, if the video is clearly showing online gaming in real time then I don't see the problem.

Funny to because I've not read any post that suggest there was any lag in their demonstration. Again, if it was a live demonstration as they claimed. If that's what you truly get I don't see a problem. But again, I need to see more of this. I think in the video they were like 250 miles away or something like that.

[saaya]

Cut off this 80ms latency, you can play Crysis on your iPhone!

he mentioned 150ms... thats 10frames at 60fps and 20 frames at 30fps.

but the biggest question is, do we WANT to play crysis on an iphone?
its cool that you COULD do it... but... is it actually useful?
the iphone has NO buttons whatsoever... playing games on consoles is already annoying because of the limitations of a gamepad which has "only" a dozen or two dozen buttons... then what about the iphone where every "button" basically blocks a square inch of the tiny screen? the button may be invisible, but if you use it your finger will cover it at least temporarily if not constantly... even IF that would work well to play a game, it would be way annoying to constantly have your fingers moving over the already tiny screen...

if you ask me... crysis and ut3 on iphone sound cool, and are cool... but completely useless in real life. its like reaching a suicide cpuz screenshot of 7ghz on liquid helium... its cool, but if it has no relevance to the real world and what you do with the system 24/7

80 ms latency = 12 FPS. I'm not up for such a downgrade. They'll have to put a server or two in every city in order for this to work.

80ms is 12 frames? that would mean one frame per 6.67ms, which would be 150fps...

yeah, its def a downgrade for people like us...
but to see it from the side of onlive... they most likely dont target people like us...
this is kinda like wii... they are aiming at people who rarely play games...

Funny to because I've not read any post that suggest there was any lag in their demonstration.

most of the people in the room seemed to not play games at all... so im not surprised... barely anybody knew crysis... i mean who doesnt know crysis? even my gf and my mom know crysis!

[Manicdan]

this will feel alot like playing on a console over the internet. a mouse lets you feel input lag as low as 10ms for some of us. a controller and joysticks probably couldnt tell he different though honestly. i sure wouldnt want to play a FPS or racing game, but a hack and slash game will probably feel pretty good.

[Jowy Atreides]

I don't want the world to be able to see me playing.

I like to do questionable things in games.

[saaya]

hmmmm looks like google is working on this as well

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/...ractive-games/

[orangekiwii]

80ms is 12 frames? that would mean one frame per 6.67ms, which would be 150fps...

he meanss 12 useful frames


if you start at 0 ms and send out your key action/mouselook

it will be 80 ms before you get ANY useful information back about what you did

1 USEFUL frame at 80ms now you send out more information based on this new frame (meanwhile filler frames are flying in based on previous actions you really knew "nothing" about) now at 160ms you now have two USEFUL frames where you can clearely see the direct result of your action and not the inbetween

Online gaming will fail horribly for this... seriously no more precise jumps through windows or anything - its simply NOT possible when so much of what you respond to is just filler frames with no real information of what you did

add this to the fact that there is 80ms delay on INPUT (you can notice 80ms lag on servers anyway) and then most likely a 80 - 100 ms delay to the SERVER your playing on and now you get a picture of utter failure

you see a player in front of you at 0ms you hit the fire button

80ms later you see it starting to fire but you also see that he has moved to the right 10 feet

now just by chance if you do somehow get him in your crosshair while your firing it will likely miss at this point due to the inherent server lag



its like playing with at least 200 ping and thats not fun for anyone


it will fail (i hope it fails) as if it succeeds it just further s on the pc gaming market (no need for new hardware in turn hurts hardware makers), online gaming will become even more casual which will

A. mean more terrible personalities playing

and

B. lead to worse games and fewer games with support for proper pc gaming (look at mw2)


this is bad news for the pc market if sheeple are willing to take mediocre crap

(which will in all likelihood cost as much as if not more than a useable computers lifespan [two years at 20$/mo = 560 dollars worth of upgrades they could have spent and had a better experience])

over actually putting one ounce of effort into fricken understanding what they use everyday

[Thallid]

What computer would render the game? I'm sure it isn't the iPhone, but it may be the server, right? What happens when a couple of hundred players wants to play Crysis on their iPhone? No computer known to mankind would have a sufficient computational power for that kind of thing.

[Mad1723]

What computer would render the game? I'm sure it isn't the iPhone, but it may be the server, right? What happens when a couple of hundred players wants to play Crysis on their iPhone? No computer known to mankind would have a sufficient computational power for that kind of thing.

And remember they have to have a load of servers ready at any time for any game. The sheer size of the project seems a bit... over the top. If they nail it on a large scale while keeping the whole thing profitable, then hats down, but I doubt it will be such a big thing. When players will see the results of the input lag + server lag, they will return to their beloved PC/PS3/360/Wii and enjoy the immediate response of their own actions.

Honestly, I don't see it being the way of the future for many reasons. Playing an FPS with such an input lag will kill the experience. I don't care about Crysis, my computer runs it fine, maybe not at 60 FPS, but I get no input lag and I can install mods, which probably couldn't be done on OnLive. (Mechwarriors Living Legend is pretty fun, it made me reinstall Crysis )

[Manicdan]

i really think people are taking this .08 seconds thing too seriously. if your using a controller, you probably cant tell the difference.

[Starscream]

i really think people are taking this .08 seconds thing too seriously. if your using a controller, you probably cant tell the difference.

what your forgetting is that this latency is added onto the latency that you already get.

You get some latency from your controller, ofc a bit from the PC doing its job and then your screen. All of this is so smal that you wont notice it.

But this latency is added on top of that. And that is only in a SP game if you go MP then this latency is added on top of the one you get from the server.

And OnLive cant guarantee you any maximum latency because it al depends on the quality of your providers network and ofc the load on the hops between you and the OnLive server and ofcourse your distance to their server.

Til now OnLive has only shown videos of how it should work but i havent seen any realistic tests.

technology and the infrastructure isnt ready for this yet.

@Mad1723
Exactly theyl need alot servers to give all their client top service and no waiting time.

This really reminds me of this company that wanted to make a new console with dekstop pc hardware with i believe online distribution.
Their idea for the hardware in the console was 512MB of ram and a Athlon64 3000+ . This was i believe when Quad cores already existed (or shortly before).

[Hornet331]

^ your referring to phantom, which was already announced somewhere in 2002 and demoed in 2004 (still not delivering) and then finaly died (after suckering many inverstors into the debacle) in 2008...

[Starscream]

^ your referring to phantom, which was already announced somewhere in 2002 and demoed in 2004 (still not delivering) and then finaly died (after suckering many inverstors into the debacle) in 2008...

ty i remembered it had some ironic name but couldnt remember the name.

I got the feeling that this will turn out to be the same thing. The guy keeps explaining how it is supposed to work and when he has enough investors the money disapears and the company folds.

[Kingcarcas]

Wow i thought it had already disappeared, but still aren't these the same people from WebTV?.....

[iddqd]

I can see the nightmares this will cause for those of us with bandwidth caps...

if all the other flaws of this tech could be described as the nails in its coffin, then the trend towards arbitrary bandwidth caps is the coffin, lid and all.
the ISPs are digging this tech a shallow grave.

[ajaidev]

I would not be surprised if that Apple/Intel laser data transfer system is use to reduce the latency. I remember the latency is suppose to be very low in that but i forgot the name of the system.

[Bodkin]

^ Light Peak

[saaya]

light peak is kinda like usb/pciE via optical cable... has nothing to do with compressing data afaik...

what raised my eye brows the most was how he claimed that there are 100.000 beta testers playing with onlive right now? 0_o
seriously, is there a single beta tester anybody has heard of?
i registered months ago and never got anything besides the confirmation that they got my registration, not even an info email or update, news... nothing
yet they supposedly have a MASSIVE beta going on? and nobody knows about it? nothing in the press or forums? yeah right...

[zalbard]

80ms is 12 frames? that would mean one frame per 6.67ms, which would be 150fps...

1000ms / 80ms = 12 fps.

[Nedjo]

This is the beginning of the revolution! All the latency problems will be solved, and infrastructure to. Result will be that game publishers will take over gaming market from the hardware providers (Sony, M$, Nintendo) 'cos their games will be playable on anything!

Big servers based on Lucid chipset (no doubt that server providers will try to be GPU agnostic) will be deployed in every big city, so geographical limitations of 1000 miles will be bridged.

This is ultimate weapon against piracy, and if you calculate how much distributors like EA are being cut shorten on account of piracy, it's obvious that investing billion or two in this cloud gaming will payoff much faster than it takes console makers to return investment.

[saaya]

1000ms / 80ms = 12 fps.

???

80ms is one 12th of 1s...
but how do you make that 12 fps?
its not like they are waiting for one frame has been received until they send off the data to generate the next frame, that wouldnt make any sense... its a constant streamlining of sending and receiving.

send data1
send data2
send data3
send data4
receive frame1
send data5
receive frame2
send data6
receive frame3
etc
etc

and what they are saying is that the delay from sending dataX until received frameX is 80ms... thats at least how i understood it.

if you stream @ 60fps then the distance between each frame is 16ms... which means the gpu has to calculate the whole frame in 16ms.
that means an 80ms delay is a delay of 5frames...
so in that case:

send data1 (jump)
send data2
send data3
send data4
send data5
send data6
receive frame1 (jump)
send data7
receive frame2

so if you jump you will see 5 more frames before you actually jump in the game. thats not much, not at all... the thing is that their 80ms is, like others pointed out, on top of everything else.

theres a great article about this on anandtech!
even if you render a scene on your own pc, and have a kickass system, and great display, you will always have an 80ms delay from input to actual action displayed on the display. and thats just the hw side of things, the nervous system delay isnt in that calculation... so the delay is even higher... but its confusing, cause our brain actually compensates for those delays and we dont perceive most of it.

anyhow, adding a 5 frame delay is a totally different story...
thats the difference between a fast FPS game and laggy games like oblivion, cryostasis and fallout3

fyi:
if you drive your car and suddenly have to brake, it will take you 500-1000ms to brake.
typically 500ms for perception and 100-200ms to move your foot.
once you actually hit the brake, it takes another 150ms until the brakes actually start working and the car starts slowing down.

so in theory, this shouldnt be a problem... the thing is, when you drive you dont expect to brake.
when you play a game, you are tense and constantly waiting for something to happen and training your reflexes.
and while it takes your brain and eyes a few hundred ms to figure out whats going on and how to react, it compensates for that delay and you dont actually perceive it... its a pretty tricky mechanism and very confusing the more you think about it, so lets skip that

so when we drive a car, it takes 100-200ms to move the leg and hit the brake, and then another 150ms until the car actually starts braking.
so thats a delay of 250-350ms. and thats something that feels pretty instant to us, right? with games you constantly push yourself to the limits though, so your used to around 300ms, maybe less... and then you add 80ms to that... thats a 25-30% increase in latency... thats definately noticeable...