Koki on 17/12/2010 at 06:48
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
Yeah, Onlive has a bit of control lag, but it's not crippling
How much is not crippling?
Eldron on 17/12/2010 at 15:12
Quote Posted by Koki
How much is not crippling?
You know, I've actually encountered people who use cheap hdtv's (obviously not built for low latency) as a monitor for their computers, and the mousecursor felt like it was being dragged around like on the end of a rope.
So it's fully possible there are people out there who wouldn't find the latency bothering, and would have fun playing bejeweled through onlive.
Inline Image:
http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/1100632405_k8Jbq-L.jpgBriareos H on 17/12/2010 at 15:39
All I know is that if I could enjoy the 2/3 FPS of old Mercenary games or Far Cry at around 20 FPS on my horrible PC back then, half a second of latency will be easy to overcome by many people. Not that I'm defending OnLive's model, doing everything "on the cloud" is a big risk for the consumer. But I have tried a few OnLive demos (ACII and Lego Batman) and I found them perfectly playable (from Paris) with a visual quality relatively similar to an XBox 360, codec glitches aside.
We'll see if internet access quality/latency improves fast enough for the service to take on momentum. Right now I'm thinking they might be a little too early in the game.
Anyway this service doesn't interest me, as I'm one of those willing to shell out more for a PC upgrade if it means I can keep everything (or almost) local and under my control.
Sulphur on 4/1/2011 at 21:43
Hey guys, this is the future of consoles.
Not OnLive, exactly. Think Ubisofts's über-DRM fused to an OnLive box; when digital distribution becomes the mandate for consoles somewhere down the line (the exact point being when bandwidth growth has outspurted video/game/data usage), all you get when you buy a game and download it is the executable. The rest of the game data? Downloaded on demand from a central server/hub, cached temporarily on the box's hard disk, deleted after a certain set period of inactivity.
With a real closed system, there'd be no way to copy or modify data if the OS didn't let you come within a mile of game code. Hacking the game could only be done by intercepting the data directly from the internet connection -- after breaking the encryption on it. Then you'd need to reverse engineer the code to figure out how to run it. And then, after putting it out for distribution, you'd still need a hacked/modded console to run the pirated game distro.
It'd be a pretty incredibly painful process to hackers/would be piraters. And to customers who just wanted to run their games without any issues.
It's the future of gaming, tested and proven on PCs right now, as all emergent game technology has been.
It's only a matter of time.
/ridiculous (BUT TRUE) new year tinfoil hat scaremongering
