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Comment by liuliu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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