News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

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Share Play is spectacular, and a lot more innovative/important than suspend/resume.
Not that suspend/resume isn't very important, though. The process of pausing a gameplay always seems too bulky everywhere, compared to my Vita. I wish Windows games had the same versatility (alt+tab still crashes a lot of games).

I also think they've been finetuning the RemotePlay for the Vita. Streaming performance and stability seems to increase with almost every firmware iteration.
 
ToTTenTranz said:
Share Play is spectacular, and a lot more innovative/important than suspend/resume. Not that suspend/resume isn't very important, though.
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It depends what feature you as a user personally want. I take the reverse position but both features are important because Sony make a big deal about immediacy (suspend and resume) and social (share play) at their February 2013 event which they need to deliver on.

Good to know they've not forgotten it, though. Suspend and resume is very tricky, streaming really isn't as they have the foundation already present for Vita remote play.
 
I don't understand the fuss with suspend/resume.
Maybe I'm playing my games wrong but generally I will play until I'm tired/bored/hungry, I will save when I can - these days saving a game is a matter of waiting the next minute or so - and turn the PS4 off. The end. Loading times are so short these days that it's hardly a problem when I turn it on again and keep going from the last save.
Maybe suspend/resume would make it all more immediate, but good Lord guys, how much more immediate do we need to get? Are your lives so busy that you can't spare those 30 seconds (if even that) to turn the console on? Surely you don't have time to play videogames for hours then!
 
Shifty's Bitch said:
I don't understand the fuss with suspend/resume.
Maybe I'm playing my games wrong but generally I will play until I'm tired/bored/hungry, I will save when I can - these days saving a game is a matter of waiting the next minute or so - and turn the PS4 off. The end. Loading times are so short these days that it's hardly a problem when I turn it on again and keep going from the last save.
Maybe suspend/resume would make it all more immediate, but good Lord guys, how much more immediate do we need to get? Are your lives so busy that you can't spare those 30 seconds (if even that) to turn the console on? Surely you don't have time to play videogames for hours then!
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It´s a neat feature that was advertised, the PS4 has dedicated low power hardware to handle "stuff" when in suspend. And with a game like Alien Isolation, it would be nice if i could suspend and resume that game within seconds..

Also, it has a lot to do with everything else we use in the everyday life, my phone is nearly instant for most functions, even my SSD based PC is superfast. Waiting is getting old /hehe
 
Shifty's Bitch said:
Are your lives so busy that you can't spare those 30 seconds (if even that) to turn the console on? Surely you don't have time to play videogames for hours then!
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I'm guessing you don't have kids? :) When you do your life belongs to them, particularly when they're young, and you have to squeeze everything in between them. Seconds count! :yep2:

Besides its not 30 seconds. To start up the PS4, start up Shadow of Mordor and load a game is more than 3 mins. The amount of times I've started something then had to shut down before I've even got started is crazy. If I had a pound for each time, I'd be rich!
 
DSoup said:
Besides its not 30 seconds. To start up the PS4, start up Shadow of Mordor and load a game is more than 3 mins. The amount of times I've started something then had to shut down before I've even got started is crazy. If I had a pound for each time, I'd be rich!
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If you were only going to get 3 minutes of play time, was it/is it really worth it?
 
I'm in the same pond as L-B. Can't see me needing this feature. The biggest convinience for me is that the fact that all my games are stored digitally - meaning I don't have to get up to change discs. This is the biggest time saviour for me IMO. Once the PS4 is booted up (only have to do that once every play session, so adding that to the overal loading doesn't really count), starting games start reasonably quick. The only difference is not having to rely on saves but continue exactly where you left off. I see this a good thing in games that are long or make it difficult to save at any time, but it's easily solvable. Technically, there's no reason why a game couldn't do this by itself - have the game boot directly into your last position instead of bringing up a main menu first. Guess it's nice if the OS takes care of it, but it just seems a lot of dedicated functionality for little (real) benefit.
 
Technically, there's no reason why a game couldn't do this by itself - have the game boot directly into your last position instead of bringing up a main menu first.
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Lots of games have no need for current position by design, so to add that would be considerable effort. Many work on checkpoints and only save a limited snapshot of the world state, while others like racing games don't save at all, serving up portions designed to be played from beginning to end. On a per title level, asking devs to add this to every game they make is asking a lot for a little practical value adding to sales. However, it makes sense on a system level. Considering it's a feature present on a lot of devices these days, it's not unreasonable to request it from Sony. And conceptually it's a lot more straightforward to capture a system state uniformly for every game and restore than to work on a per-title level of recoding all actors and rebuilding a game midway through a play.
 
I tested SharePlay with gaffer that lives 7000+ km away from me in Canada. Picture quality was great, but as expected, lag was noticeable. The mere fact that it worked and it was borderline playable just proves that this tech works great. Here are some of the impressions from gaf:

Originally Posted by shagg_187
Holy fucking shit. Share Play plays like a dream! It's so lag free and smooth that it's baffling me.

Is it like Remote Play similar to that on Vita?
Is it Streaming like PS Now?
Is it running on both hardware?
I'm so confused with this awesomeness.
Holy shit!



Originally Posted by sun-drop
holy fucking shit this works ...
i just shared second son to a psn mate in brisbane , aus, from wellington , new zealand ..... and totally playable.
i'm on fiber and my ps4 is cabled, but he was on lowley VDSL and had his ps4 connected via wifi at his house.
AMAZED

Originally Posted by sun-drop
and i think i just sold him on infamous (he hadn't played infamous since the first one) ...... sony you evil geniuses





Originally Posted by CozMick
Oh man it works soooooooooo good.
Just had a coop match on fifa 15 and played split screen on PvZ garden warfare.
It just works :O
Im amazed.


Originally Posted by Konosuke
I'm currently hosting a Driveclub session, the guy sounds so happy lol.


Originally Posted by backbreaker65
I just share played with my brother in Tennesse and I'm in Cali. We were playing NBA 2K15. This is by far one of the best features. My brother said he wasn't getting any lag and he was playing like it.


Originally Posted by Jburton
Well I had a gaffer hit me up to test it.

Towerfal, host in Canada and I am in Ireland.
Worked great.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
On a per title level, asking devs to add this to every game they make is asking a lot for a little practical value adding to sales. However, it makes sense on a system level.
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It's not exactly for free on a system level though; Doing it on a system level is even more costly because the OS will have to dump the entire allocated memory to properly save the state of the application where ever it may be - and to do this reliably isn't an easy task (hence why they are probably still working on it). The OS can't know which bits are important - it has to save the entire lot so that when it reloads the dump back into memory, the app has no idea it was ever stalled/stopped/reloaded. And that's only covering main RAM...

It's probably easier on a per title level (if the developer actually included this into their planning).

One way or the other - it's a complex mechanism. The OS can do it easily, in theory, but dumping 4-6 gigs of allocated memory on to the harddrive and back into memory isn't exactly nothing either (and takes time too).

A rather simple example; On most laptops, booting windows is quite a bit quicker than waking it from hibernation (and while simple in theory, there are programs that do crash at times.).
 
Phil said:
One way or the other - it's a complex mechanism.
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Sure. It's just that one of the choices is complex for one company, and the other is complex for hundreds, including indies who have enough trouble just creating the game in the first place! ;)
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Sure. It's just that one of the choices is complex for one company, and the other is complex for hundreds, including indies who have enough trouble just creating the game in the first place! ;)
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I'm not disagreeing with this. My point is rather; it's a more complex mechanism to take care of on the OS level than it is if developers would program their app/game with this in mind. ;)

Remember; doing it on the OS level mandates a consistent experience - a flawless working mechanic, if you will. And I have my doubts if it really is as simple as simply dumping memory to a harddrive and dumping it back for a quick suspend feature. Quick in italic because as mentioned; copying 4-6 GBs of data probably isn't all that quick at the end of the day.

It's a bit like having the suspend feature on my laptop. It comes in handy here and then, more because I multitask a lot with 5 browser windows open etc, but ignoring multitasking/multiwindow usage (which doesn't apply to consoles anyway), shutting off and booting up a complex OS like Windows is actually quicker. So, I'm basically comparing the workload it takes to implement this on the OS level with the practicality of the feature in the first place.

I'm going to be very interested in how they are going to solve some rather unpredictable situations too; for instance; what happens if I suspend the game while the game is in the process of installing content, or saving a game-save? Lets not forget; the game has no idea what the OS is doing and the OS has no idea what the game is doing. Is it possible for a game to set a flag saying "disable suspend mode because I'm right in the middle of doing something that might seriously f up if you do"? Then again, how does Vita solve it or other portable systems that handle power-off and resume?

I'm actually suprised there are people excited over this; if we were still playing games without the ability to save at all, I could understand it - but the ability to save your progress (together with rather quick loading times) have kind of made this an overkill feature - IMO of course.
 
Phil said:
Remember; doing it on the OS level mandates a consistent experience - a flawless working mechanic, if you will. And I have my doubts if it really is as simple as simply dumping memory to a harddrive and dumping it back for a quick suspend feature. Quick in italic because as mentioned; copying 4-6 GBs of data probably isn't all that quick at the end of the day.
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Yes, you'd really want to just dump non-asset data (working data) and ignore everything that can be loaded in as per normal.

...shutting off and booting up a complex OS like Windows is actually quicker.
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Sleep on my PC is instant. That's what people are really wanting from their consoles. Switch 'off' the console for the interruption, then switch it back on and carry on where they were.

I'm actually suprised there are people excited over this; if we were still playing games without the ability to save at all, I could understand it - but the ability to save your progress
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Does every game feature arbitrary save points? If so, pause and resume could just be an autosave feature. As I understand it though, many games (most games?) don't have arbitrary saves.

I can cite an anecdotal example. I played ICO and loved it, but the ending was spoiled for me because no save points were provided for an hour and a half. It was late, I wanted to stop, but I had no means to without losing my place. So I carried on playing, and when it finally concluded, I was too tired and annoyed to really appreciate it. A pause/resume option would have fixed that, giving me the option to stop when I want with no penalty.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
If you were only going to get 3 minutes of play time, was it/is it really worth it?
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Again, I guess you don't have kids. Frankly unless they're out of the house, you don't know how long you'll have to game. Quick start is less important than quick stop without losing progress.

You can't just wait for a save point sometimes so being able to suspend/resume like you can win a PSP, Vita, iOS or Android device is HUGE. I game more on Vita than PS4 for this reason.
 
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For some arcane reason, the only way to have the the USB music player show up is if you have a root directory called "Music" on your USB device.

Listening to tunes now while I play some Diablo III.

Cheers
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Does every game feature arbitrary save points? If so, pause and resume could just be an autosave feature. As I understand it though, many games (most games?) don't have arbitrary saves.
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We're probably moving away from the topic with this, but it seems I have been rather lucky, as most games I play that would benefit from a suspend feature (from the gameplay perspective), also feature arbitrary saves. Point in case; The Last of Us, which features continuous gameplay with the game being split into chapters. It's can be played as a continuous experience; from start till scratch, without a single loading screen. Well, arbitrary save in the sense that the game might reset you back around 2 minutes depending on where you might have been when you saved, which IMO is good enough.

Other games that don't would be racing games and shooters. Racing and shooters are better played without a arbitrary saves, as the gameplay it split into chapters or races. Other games like Alien Isolation, I think, is also better off without arbitrary saves; Imagine playing the game, wasting ammunition and later finding out that you probably should have saved some up. By having save-points, it forces you to think twice before saving your progress.

GTAV is perhaps the only game where at some point I wished there was a suspend feature - but even that has an arbitrary save feature (with some limitations).

I used to remember a time when I used to let my PS run because I was scared of losing progress and couldn't find a save point. But these times have long gone IMO, for the most part anyway. Games today go through great lengths to make the experience enjoyable for even mainstream non-gamers that can't afford to play for hours.
 
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