Thoughts on OnLive | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on OnLive

blog.wolfire.com

94 pointsalexyim42 comments

What really amazes me about OnLive is the interface. It's really a thin client: your entire interface is streamed from OnLive's servers. Since the UI is a video, they jam it full of movie clips. Reminds me of the video wall from Back to the Future.

My expectations were shattered when I clicked on a game preview video, expecting a 10 second wait while it loaded and buffered. Nope! It started playing immediately. Heck, even the infinitesimal load screens they have are videos.

I clicked on all the "Brag Clip" videos and they played immediately. You can even watch people playing live. Since there's no wait penalty for moving through the interface, you find yourself clicking a lot more.

This seems like it could be a perfect complement to a low-power device running something like ChromeOS. I wonder if they'll branch out from games, though? Any CPU-intensive application could be made to live in the cloud: OnLive Photoshop, OnLive AutoCAD... it would just need to be coupled with a cloud document store of some sort. (Hopefully Dropbox.)

There was a story the other day that Google is investigating exactly that for supporting legacy applications. If OnLive can successfully stream a AAA video game at playable latencies, then they have pretty much proven that any application is doable.

He did mention there's a certain mouse-lag on cursor based games and Photoshop with mouse-lag would be kinda bad. I don't see how you could solve the problem either. His 14 ms ping is probably as good as it gets and even the smartest software can't circumvent physical limitations.

This is actually easy to solve -- most VNC applications already implement the solution, which is to have a local, lag-free cursor that is shown to the user, and hide the laggy cursor on the other machine.

One thing I forgot to mention in the post is that there is apparently an OnLive API that some games are using that replaces the cursor in the game with a local cursor. Not all games can use it (for example, World of Goo's cursor is blocked by walls and such which is critical to gameplay), but Unreal Tournament, and OnLive itself, use it in the UI.

Edit: of course this wouldn't solve the case where you are actually doing something in Photoshop that might require real-time feedback like the airbrush tool!

This is why I'm entirely skeptical of this whole OnLive business.

If you're having trouble with a mouse cursor, then no video game that requires interaction will be playable. QuakeWorld, IIRC, was the first real game to solve the latency problem. And they did it with prediction that lets the UI maintain responsiveness while hiding latency. That game was playable up to maybe a 200ms ping time and with a dial-up modem. That's impressive. But it was also a lot of client-side magic, which is what VNC is doing with the mouse.

In addition to that, no Wii game will be playable with this thing, no FPS, no World of Warcraft, etc. etc. I think this is why serious game companies aren't even commenting on it. It doesn't even register to them. I can really only see OnLive taking business away from the Appstore or Android handheld markets. Extreme casual gamers that don't know the difference between an Xbox controller, a Wii nunchuk, and a 1980s joystick will be the market here.

Disagree, I found FPS to be the most playable games on the service. You should definitely try it out. Also what makes you say that serious game companies aren't commenting on it? Their games are already there.

I'd love to try it out. How? It looks like their "sign up" is just a waiting list at this point. I'd also question whether they have really "launched" if at this point all they're doing is what amounts to a limited subscriber no-cost public beta.

Gaikai is a competitor to OnLive. In this demo video from a year ago, ( http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/dp_blog/gaikai_-_video/ ) they demonstrate using Photoshop remotely through Flash.

I tried OnLive in beta phase. For most 3D games, it works just fine, I can jump, turn my head around and everything. But for racing game, the lagging is killing me, I cannot finish one round because the dismatch between my perception and the actually driving. Not a FPS person, have no opinion on that.

Overall, I still think that OnLive is a product born too ahead of time; we just simply don't have that hight quality Internet to support it.

It's making me imagine a box that you can install in an apartment complex where you just plug in a number of game consoles and a SAN, and it allows anyone in the apartment complex to use an onlive-like interface to play the games. This is probably doable with today's technology, although the lack of digital delivery and HD game storage to the consoles makes it a little too much of a challenge in the short term. But that would get around the network infrastructure issue.

The reason why OnLive is economical than your game console is not that one OnLive server can power several game instances. Maybe the most powerful server (expensive ones but still x86 arch) can serve 3 or 5 game instances simultaneously. However, in per dollar perspective, it is not cheaper than your game console.

The way OnLive is cheaper is that it smoothes the usage curve by allowing people in different places, different time-zones to play on the same server. Once the utilization rate up, it is a scalable business.

In your "dorm room" scenario, I fail to see any advantages in server utilization perspective.

How do multiple time zones jive with local cdns serving at 14 ms...?

> In your "dorm room" scenario, I fail to see any advantages in server utilization perspective.

Well, look a little harder, bub. I'm talking about installing one to share amongst an entire highrise. :) A mini-datacenter if you will. Each city could have one out in the burbs.

Given that OnLive is in many senses a monopoly for the time being, I think they're plenty economical without that benefit. The cost of a wasted instance-hour will probably be negligible next to their weekly revenue per user.

Hotels might love this. I remember seeing something similar, with an N64 hotel console a while back.

I have seen this as well maybe ~15 years ago at a hotel. Only it was SNES. It allowed you to select games from a menu (no cartridge). The controllers were hooked up into a box with a line dissipating into a wall. The controllers were different than normal SNES controllers. They were more like the SEGA controllers.

I don't know the mechanics of how it was arranged. They charged only an "access fee" and not per game, so perhaps it was a shared emulator / arcade style machine?

I remember this when I was younger as well and it was similar to how movies in hotels were you ordered through the tv and yes I believe you had an access fee in hours to play all the games available.

Which console lacks HDD storage and digital delivery? Xbox 360? PS3? Wii?

I'm surprised hotels haven't moved much past N64, which even the ones that have it are using emulation (I am suspect of this claim myself, but confident enough to post it). ---Actually I think I've seen at least NGC available from hotels. (Both thru the CATV & ordering system.)

Edit (Yay, I thought my comment had baked set already!): LodgeNet used their hotel PPV delivery systems for game rentals on demand, and they were run on console hardware, with the video piped over the CATV channel dedicated to that room. I have no evidence to support this, it was a PITA to search.

I got hung up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_M82 , Which I knew wasn't the FAMICONBOX I was thinking of. http://web.archive.org/web/20071011234713/assembler.roarvgm....

My point is lost to me.

Edit2 (It's late): Anyways, I shouldn't have jumped so aggressively about your claim of no HDD & delivery, Since I also would like to see console aggregation.

Well, I've done a racing game over a typical cable connection and it was incredible. I really couldn't tell -- and that's crazy because I've been doing game development for a decade and can spot FPS rates to about a 2 frame accuracy.

What is with this crazy negativity around OnLive? I thought you guys liked new things -- don't be a hater!

The OnLive uses a crazy proprietary algorithm to get a ton of juice out of your line. The guy working on it is one of the most brilliant engineers I know.

What is with this crazy negativity around OnLive?

Because it sounds utterly impossible given the laws of physics. Which just means I'll be even more impressed if it actually works.

Mainly because there is only so much PR spin you can give to why "lag wont be a issue" and talks of so called secret algorithms.

If I am playing a FPS game, and someone shoots a bullet, that takes 30ms to get from his computer to the game server. Then its another 30ms to get from the game server to the onlive server. Then its ??? 5ms ??? to get processed and converted to video. Then its 30ms to get sent from onlive to your desktop.

So thats 95ms as a best case scenario. More than likely, it would be closer to 200-250ms most of the time.

And that is under absolute ideal conditions. I remember I frequently got a ping of 50-80 when I played TF2- It was quite rare to get near 30.

Also, just thought I would mention that the frame rate has nothing to do with the latency. You can have 200 FPS and still be playing 10 seconds delayed. Detail definition != Good latency.

Its not so much that we dont have the quality of internet to support it as that we are just too spread out. The time it takes for the data to travel from X to Y just takes 20-30ms. Not sure if that will change until we have fiber to our doors.

An unmentioned benefit is that this stops a lot of cheating.

It stops the customer from cheating (or, you know, modding, tweaking, sharing, hosting dedicated servers (?), etc.), but the people who cheat in multiplayer games are unlikely to be the same ones who are willing to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of paying full price for renting new titles. Until there are Onlive only servers, or Onlive only games, this won't really stop cheating.

I don't see the connection between cheaters and non-payers.

I've seen cheaters on an xbox live game that costs the monthly live fee + a $70 game + a $300 system.

These kids mostly just want to troll.

If they really want to troll, they'll choose "can troll" system vs "can't troll" one.

Until you use the free cpu to do image analysis for some cheap hacks like aiming. This might be interesting (I doubt people will do it though).

That would be possible, but other classes of cheating wouldn't be, like maphacks.

This is a pretty remarkable service, but there is one awkward caveat mentioned in the article:

"Unfortunately, because of licensing restrictions, we can only offer Mass Effect 2 for play under Windows. So, if you do not have access to a PC, your only option to play it on a Mac is under Windows using Boot Camp or a similar system. We apologize for the inconvenience. OnLive has no other games in the pipeline that are Windows-only, and we do not expect to have any others."

D'oh!

[edit: As a Canadian surfer, I run into US services and sites every week that don't allow non-US users. Netflix, Comedy Central, etc. I could imagine the licensing issues could be similarly irritating with OnLive as well]

"OnLive has no other games in the pipeline that are Windows-only, and we do not expect to have any others."

As they point out, this is the only game that's not available cross platform. It's understandable that this would happen during the beta period, while they are still trying to prove the model to game developers.

I wonder if the restriction is because EA already licensed the Mac publishing rights to someone like Aspyr?

It's more likely a Microsoft exclusive.

This is a great writeup of OnLive. I wrote one myself a few months back, http://siculars.posterous.com/onlive-shows-us-the-way-to-vid.... Like the author, I also agree that this is the real deal and will only continue to get better as technology improves and end users get fatter pipes. I, for one, am looking forward to giving this a go.

I might even venture to say that at some point in the future as the platform matures, OnLive will be the preferred distribution platform simply due to the fact that there is no way to resell a game by the end user. Resale is a major problem for publishers who are desperately trying to eek out every last cent from their investments.

I wonder if you could eventually sell cycles back to OnLive, since you aren't doing the heavy lifting on your machine ... Maybe offset the cost of the service? Or maybe OnLive could do an ElectricSheep-like screensaver for distributed processing. That could mitigate some of the latency issues as well, for those near you. Social rendering, comrade!

Edit: The more I think about this, the more it seems this is precisely (or at least should be) where they're going with this.

The added complexity and lack of centralized control isn't worth the cost of cycles.

I don't know. OnLive can't scale very well as is. A liberal estimate would be four game instances per server, which means 250,000 servers for a million players. But if you're spreading that around, especially on players' machines that aren't being used at the time and may be fewer hops from the destination, it may be worth it. Plus, it'd be a good first step towards a mostly decentralized gaming infrastructure.

This might be the killer app for next generation networks for countries that don't have it already. It'll go from "Oh well, Youtube is a little slow but I won't spend money on a better plan for that." to "I absolutely must have a 20Mbit connection in order to play all these amazing games."

I get 700kb-1Mb/s here in Berlin on a cheapo contract - I will definitely try it out if (and that's a big one) it becomes available here.

It actually requires 700 KB/s or 5.6 Mb/s but that should still be affordable in most of Europe.

I saw OnLive on E3 and was greatly impressed. I wish I had this technology, working locally at work for things like RemoteDesktop/VNC (okay not fair, as the latter would probably deal better with high-frequency detail such as fonts). But for testing/developing games off line, or even in a big office (to cut down few miles a day of walking) that would be great :)

How does it work with custom content? If I wanted to say play Mnerva for HL2 (assuming HL2 were offered on it in the future), is there a way?

There is none. It's like a console in that regard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com