june gloom on 26/3/2009 at 18:35
so much text... staggering...
Think I'll eat lunch before tackling this thread.
steo on 26/3/2009 at 19:04
Don't worry, just about every post bottles down to "it won't work".
Koki on 26/3/2009 at 19:13
And you should eat lunch while reading this thread.
steo on 26/3/2009 at 19:56
Koki, you and your wacky ideas!
Koki on 26/3/2009 at 20:08
You mean you don't eat at your PC?
That's a huge waste of time.
SubJeff on 26/3/2009 at 21:05
Quote:
This thing would likely get more traffic than youtube, the cost of millions of high-end computers would be monumental and, as has been discussed, the problem of streaming the video through networks is insurmountable.
Thats why it all hinges on some fancy compression technology.
june gloom on 26/3/2009 at 21:05
Koki how can you see your keyboard under the piles of soda cans and candy wrappers
Gryzemuis on 26/3/2009 at 23:16
I found this. A 53 minute presentation by the CEO and COO of OnLive.
(
http://gdc.gamespot.com/video/6206692/)
After seeing this presentation, I've changed my mind.
They're gonna sell this.
But it's gonna be crap.
I always think that crap stuff won't get used. But of course it will. It's not about technology, it's about what marketing can shove through people's throats. And OnLive is gonna shove it through a lot of people's throats. Especially through the throats of clueless people.
The questions that remain are: will the customers accept the lowered quality of their product ? And will it still be cost effective ?
I see this being sold to very casual gamers. To parents who buy this service for their kids and teenagers. For single player games mainly. Not for multiuser games. Not for games that require fast reactions and reflexes. But for casual games. Maybe people who want to see the latest games briefly, but who won't finish the game anyway.
From the video, I think I saw that the texture quality in the Crysis demo was pretty low. Low res textures, and no 16xAF will give blurry textures, which can be compressed into a video stream much more easily. I wouldn't find this acceptable. But then again, millions of people play on consoles, which give very crappy rendering too. OnLive can run a high-end game on low settings (saving rendering cost), and most customers wouldn't notice.
Note, twice during the presentation, the CEO made a joke about the speed of light. And how they are "working on it". Just like I predicted. Speed of light is their biggest problem.
Yakoob on 27/3/2009 at 02:35
Quote Posted by LittleFlower
I think those 2 could meet somewhere in the middle. When the game is rendering objects, it saves data about those objects, and puts those in a new kind of video stream.
Yea, lets rewrite all the already complex rendering pipelines of a shitton of games, that sure sounds feasible :D
Gryzemuis on 27/3/2009 at 03:22
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Yea, lets rewrite all the already complex rendering pipelines of a shitton of games, that sure sounds feasible :D
If the abstraction layers in gaming software are nicely followed, you don't need to rewrite any games.
application -> DirectX -> Direct3D -> videocard driver -> videocard hardware.
If somewhere in that flow you can replace calls to your own rendering, you can change all games without touching a single game. I'm not an expert, so I can't tell how feasible it is.
However, after watching the presentation I don't think this is what they do. The only clientside software you will download is a browser addon. Around 1 MB large. That seems to imply that the client PCs don't do any fancy rendering stuff during the videostream decoding.
