Spring RTS Engine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZfEWYt ... re=related

Wow. Just wow.

gotta have a decent internet connection (downstream) and live in specific areas though

i.e. won't work in Australia until they put a server farm or two there

also, you will not own physical copies of any of your games...

pretty interesting concept though, if they can keep the latency between you and the server under 20ms :)

This looks like a very rigid way of playing games..
But....i guess it can be fun to be able to just connect play a bit and disconnect..

on any crappy computer/console with decent internet.

It looks awesome, I'd like to see what kind of adoption rate they get, and then when they have their million players what kind of lag we see there.

I'm thinking Video-Streaming and Virtualized applications would be trivial on this thing.

Also, they're talking a Winter 2009 release date. that KARAZY

I think they might get a rough time if they don't let people connect without a subscription... I mean If I buy a game through their interface and then no-longer subscribe to it I can't access that game anymore. Monthly fees are still very scary to a lot of people.

I'm getting the feeling that the technology works by sending commands to a server that plays a game for you, while all you on screen are getting is a video stream of your commands ingame - at a glance.

It's probably a nice idea and will find lots of friends. I wouldn't use it because of the disadvantages though. It's like the end of mods, you cannot play offline and you probably only will be able to play the games they offer - i.e. you for example want to play Battlefield 2. Now in five years when there might not be so much players anymore and its predecessor is around they'll just pull it off their servers and you'll never ever be able to play it again...

Probably a good way to keep people playing instead of looking at the new games and saying: "Well it's pretty much the same I have with better graphics." I also don't believe that it's going to be cheap. I mean they try to make it look that way but hey - with servers around with enough power to play things like Crysis fluid ... well you don't really think that letting THEM put up a PC with all the High-End GPUs & stuff plus paying power costs and people which attend to the servers plus paying for the development of the whole base plus giving them profit is going to be cheaper than buying a PC for yourself and that's it. It probably will show up with monthly rates that don't seem too expensive at first sight but in the end will be more expensive than a PC / console of your own...

I sign up if they start wrunning operation systems :D

I wrote an essay on the concept of this hapenning 5 years ago. At the time I cited global internet penetration and available bandwidth being the key limiting factors on making it commercially viable.

That and the relationship between hardware developers and the game industry pushing things forward.

I think incentivisation is the key; if the service as a whole works out substantially cheaper than alternatives, consumers will take it up. I imagine a lot of the more clued-in consumers (read: pirates) will need quite a nudge to get on board.

One fucking huge advantage (imo) is the death of aim bots and wall hacks.

I think it is a really nice Travell Alternative too Laptops or Consoles.. no hiend Hardwar to carry around, no bundle of Games..

But in the Ende, the virtuall Hamster inside all of us will triumph, saying, my StatusSymbol, my bought stuff, is working on a faraway farm, it is not in my room, therefor i can┬┤t say save that it is my own, my precious.. kind of sick, because it is a really cool concept, but human nature has spoiled other cool concepts before this..

It solves alot of security prblems but creates much more!

Recording, manipulating and storing streams by interrupting streams :D

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-w ... cle?page=2


Makes a good point, I would still like to believe it's possible... but if their compression/decompression/network optimization stuff really can manage a lagless 17ms server to user and still look HD, this technology could give the upper hand to on-demand video service... like the article I posted says... why are they bothering with video games if they really have what they say they have.

Let's not forget that latency is more than just the size of your tubes and computer, the signal run time is significant for interactive applications like videogames and you cannot reduce that without reducing the phsical distance between the user and the computer. Of course the best way to reduce that is to simply put the computer into the user's home...

Also how often have idiots tried to sell us thin clients as the solution to all upgrading woes?

Finally, a link for you: http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/ ... investors/

Anyone remember phantom OS?

KDR_11k wrote:Finally, a link for you: http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/ ... investors/

This guy assumes that gamers are unwilling to use games as software as a service, but completely ignores the phenomenon of the hour, wow.

And he also claims that the trend for better and better graphics will stop, so nobody will be forced to update all the time in the future, completey ignoring, well, every single hardcore gamer.

I don't think OnLive would work technically, but as a business idea it is absolutely brilliant, and I have no doubt it would be a huge hit if it was somewhat affordeable.

Why OnLive should work(assuming some things are true):

If they say in from of a room full of people that they can process and compress game frames in 1-15 milliseconds, they have figured out a way to do it, this is not the kind of thing they would lie about.

Gamers who play online multi-player games already crave sub-50ms ping times and have sought high speed connections in the 10Mbit range to get it. Additionally it was claimed by the OnLive guys that they have figured out ways to to improve QOS and router latency by slightly altering packet headers and packet size, I can hardly imagine they would have mentioned this unless it was giving them a decent improvement (let's say 20%).

So, from a "games that play online anyways" perspective, I see know reason to believe that there will be any MORE latency then we see in games on the market now, with the slight difference that the visual frames will be more in sync with the actual server state at the time you see them.

Summing Up What We Have so far, providing they are not lying they have the ability to provide a significant %age of the high-performance gaming population a decent equivalent to a home console performance... which is all they need for now, they get in on the ground floor with the 1,00,000 customers they CAN provide decent service to and just wait for the rest of the internet infrastructure to catch up.

In my mind their primary partner should be Blizzard, I know a few people who play WoW at 10 Frames Per Second... they are paying a monthly subscription fee to play a game at 10 frames Per Second, OnLive would be Certain to improve their user-experience.



The only real question in my mind right now is pricing. Some sites have basically stated that OnLive will need the equivalent of one HighEnd gaming rig for each active user... now, given OnLive's claims that they have revolutionary custom designed technology to minimize this and the fact that they will essentially be mass producing it there is a good chance this means about a $500-$1500 hardware investment for each active user in addition to them needing to recover all the cost of investment. It's hard to see users getting away with an affordable monthly fee in addition to paying for the time they are "renting" the games.

SinbadEV wrote:[...]there is a good chance this means about a $500-$1500 hardware investment for each active user in addition to them needing to recover all the cost of investment. It's hard to see users getting away with an affordable monthly fee in addition to paying for the time they are "renting" the games.

Yeah I'm also sceptical about the pricing. On the other hand they make a good point which minimizes the said costs:

Let's say people averagely play 6 hours a day. When getting an enormous playerbase which fits that 6 hours spread over the whole day in an ideal way you would be able to split the costs of one high end rig to 4 customers thus really reducing the hardware costs per player (not mentioning that they'll get their hardware far cheaper than we could do). So I guess the main problem will be to get enough systems which fit such a calculation but still have enough room for "rush hours" where you have high peaks of players being online...

What really made me sceptical too was the whole point about that intro / menu showing at least some live streams of other people playing. I can't really believe that's going to be in the final version as it's the absolute waste of an enormous amount of processing power for no good...

The fine thing is that there Rigs, can do other work, while not used.. so they can make money, while the Gamingrig is not needed, selling them as temporary servers or RenderfarmRigs.. and if they do good enough.. Google will buy them, that alone will get them Shareholders en masse, jumping on the bandwagon..

Problem is what happens when Game Crashes? Return to that virtual Desktop with the Ability to kick the Game back into a sort of internal e-bay? Sb already mentioned it.. what happens to Old-Games, who are unsupported?

PS: Can i have RenderedQuake after all, if they have that powerfull machines?

Sindbad, it's input lag. Normal games have lag compensation algorithms that hide the full extent of the lag from the user, with OnLive you'll have a lag on simple things like moving the mouse.

Boirunner wrote:And he also claims that the trend for better and better graphics will stop, so nobody will be forced to update all the time in the future, completey ignoring, well, every single hardcore gamer.

He considers the hardcore a bunch of pompous idiots, a tiny niche that screams loudly but if you try to build a business on them you will fail because there are way too few to make any real money from them. The rest of the people simply don't care enough about graphics to warrant pushing them further, games cost shitloads to develop and that increases exponentially with better graphics while the graphics have long passed "good enough" and stopped increasing the sales the games get, leading to cost increases at constant revenue and eventually bankrupcies, downsizings or getting bought and gutted. If you think it's the recession that's killing all these companies lately you haven't looked close enough, they always had trouble with expensive games that failed to meet expectations and dragged the whole company down.