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Comment by felipesoc | Hacker News Reader

Prediction requires full game emulation on client, defeating the purpose of streaming.

It doesn't defeat the purpose of streaming. You don't have to emulate everything in the game, just everything in your vicinity that can possibly affect what you see and hear.

That is how client-server games already work. The server has the full world state, and each client has a subset necessary to render the world for that player. Ideally the absolute minimum subset, so as to reduce the potential for cheating (wallhacks, etc.).

The purpose of streaming is to remove the need for the simulation and rendering at all. The client is a dumb terminal that just renders frames and records input.

The moment you start making the client smart again — making it aware of a subset of the world state, making it do its own rendering based on the input — you've just reinvented current client-server gaming.

Maybe with remote rendering though. Which has advantages already, such as ease of spectating, lack of multi-GB texture downloads.

You still get to run a physics model and game logic though and that is a non-neglible part of modern games.

That would be extermely complicated and would require additional support from every game. Streaming right now takes every frame, compresses it and forwards it, as simple as that and works for everything.

The cost you are talking about is only for physics and logic in multiplayer games, it doesn't apply to single player games. And even then it is negligible compared to the biggest cost in gaming: rendering. Prediction requires rendering being done on the client, which requires a hefty video card and defeating the purpose of streaming.

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