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OnLive has now shut down and the patents were sold to Sony report Ars Technica.
Remote game services (OnLive, Gaikai, etc.)
- Thread starter Rangers
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Deleted member 11852
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New industries are difficult to predict. Very few technology pioneers last the course because they are the ones who usually make the mistakes that others learn from.
The finances are hard.
Sony's move is very interesting though. They are fully committed to game streaming and are almost a monopoly depending on patent portfolio. Have MS talked about a streamed gaming service yet?
A quick google search and M$ too is/was working on a streaming service, codename Arcadia.
More here: http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/16/7401913/microsoft-streaming-games-apps-arcadia-report
Still Sony now should have the "best possible start in life".
More here: http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/16/7401913/microsoft-streaming-games-apps-arcadia-report
Still Sony now should have the "best possible start in life".
Is Azure going to be a suitable system for game streaming? The obvious advantage is it already exists and is big, but I'm not sure if it's designed for/can handle low latency. And will they hit a patent wall?
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We looked at Azure about 18 months back and the VMs had rudimentary graphical capabilities. That may well have changed but I've not read anything about Azure expanding from from traditional compute (CPU) to graphics.
edit: obvious Azure is a commercial service, they'll go where the the market dictates because you can be sure Amazon will
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Close. Sony are buying parts of OnLive and Sony don't intend on continuing any desktop services.
https://support.onlive.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/239
So, not shut down and sold to Sony. But sold to Sony and Sony are shutting them down. Service will end Apr. 30th.
So they aquired Gaikai and now significant portions of OnLive for patents.
Regards,
SB
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We looked at Azure about 18 months back and the VMs had rudimentary graphical capabilities. That may well have changed but I've not read anything about Azure expanding from from traditional compute (CPU) to graphics.
edit: obvious Azure is a commercial service, they'll go where the the market dictates because you can be sure Amazon will
There is Thunderhead and it's hardware is an unknown at this point. But given the leaked MS data about its future plans, low latency streaming is something MS has been working on for a long time.
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Azure as a platform is more than capable of streaming data but the data you want stream is rendered graphics and you need to render those graphics using hardware (a modern GPU) or a software renderer. This is the big unknown with Azure. When we looked at Azure the focus was on general compute (CPUs, not GPUs) and the graphics capabilities of individual VMs were rudimentary. Microsoft may now have a software renderer but mimicking GPU functions using a CPU would seem an inefficient use of resources but if they've got a lot of overhead then it's likely cheaper than deploying, maintaining and upgrading GPU hardware.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Thunderhead merely the Azure reservation for servicing compute for Xbox One?
I can see its uses for mobile gaming, or unifying your PS, Xbox, etc experiences, where you can play a game in the train, metro, whatever... but other than that I don't like that technology at all. I am the biggest advocate of physical hardware, because using a service like that I feel like I am playing a video...
Another issue I see with that technology is...video artefacts aside... competitive multiplayer gaming where the video is downloading and you need low latency to play online.
Anyways I think this technology is the last straw that will cause the disappearance of classic handheld gaming.
The problem I think is that depending on a internet connection is a huge deal breaker for me, another inviolable superb huge deal breaker is having a video decoder instead of a console/PC to play games. I'll never stand playing games like that.
I wonder what you prefer, but for me it's all about buying an actual CPU and GPU, plus knowing that I actually own the game, not others owning it and making me play it.
In games like Diablo 3, where latency can be easily hidden, that's quite understandable, and maybe you could play a co-op game somehow smoothly.
What I wonder though is how it could handle games like Battlefield and its 64 players, and similar games, and how much disadvantageous it would be to a stream video user against other players.
Do you stream videos?
I don't care any more than I care about having a box to play DVDs instead of steaming videos from the net. I just want the content/experience, and don't care for the hardware. The days of interesting hardware are long gone.
Every networked game hides the latency.
If they're streaming, none whatsoever. If they're not, the game could certainly compensate on their end. If it doesn't, you might have a higher latency, but then again if your TV is lower latency and theirs is higher, or they've got an inferior connection to you, they can still be disadvantaged. Online gaming is something of an illusion. You'll never have player equality and all the interactions are prone to late instructions and best guesses and predicted outcomes and emergency corrections. Most of these are small enough and handled subtly enough that you don't notice, but it's quite possible that your shot's TCIP message is delayed 150 ms longer than your rivals and the system has to adapt to this.
If you are streaming a network MP game your setup will be like this:
Input machine -> internet -> streamer machine -> internet -> MP game server -> internet -> streamer machine -> internet -> display machine.
That will lead to more lag (vs the standard setup) unless you combine your streamer machine and MP game server somehow (like Square is trying to do).
Input machine -> internet -> streamer machine -> internet -> MP game server -> internet -> streamer machine -> internet -> display machine.
That will lead to more lag (vs the standard setup) unless you combine your streamer machine and MP game server somehow (like Square is trying to do).
Something like Grid can put the streaming machines and the game servers on the same local network, no?
Input machine -> internet -> streamer machine -> MP game server -> streamer machine -> internet -> display machine.
Local wired intranet should add far less to latency, next to nothing I'd have thought.
Input machine -> internet -> streamer machine -> MP game server -> streamer machine -> internet -> display machine.
Local wired intranet should add far less to latency, next to nothing I'd have thought.
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Deleted member 11852
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Try it - you may be surprised. It's a real test of your network controllers and router.
Huh? If consoles can do peer to peer multiplayer then why can't streaming hardware? Shouldn't things like host advantage be somewhat nullified if all the hardware is locally networked. And cheating and security is less of an issue since users lack direct access to the hardware.
Is a client server setup even necessary?
OnLive used to do on site dedicated servers to minimize that latency for multiplayer.
