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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

So, uh, the controller has a microphone, and connects directly to the Internet over Wi-Fi. I guess it's nice this time they told us upfront?

Really curious what the network performance requirements would be for 4K or 8K game streaming. Haven't heard them admit to that.

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..and I'd bet competitive gaming is out (need for low latency).

I wouldn't be so sure.

Competitive games already need to compensate for latency in the network. This system technically won't have any "additional" latency, it will just move where it happens.

The amount of time between you hitting a button and a server somewhere registering the command and sending it to other players should be roughly the same (or close enough not to matter all that much for the vast majority).

Sure, some games where local timing is everything won't work as well (Super Smash Bros probably won't be able to be played on this system at the top tier), but the vast majority of players and games won't ever need that kind of millisecond precision.

It really doesn't take much input lag for things to feel sluggish and unresponsive. I've tried to play Rocket League on a Steam Link, and while it was technically _possible_ to do so, there was just enough sluggishness in the controls that it just felt _off_ - like I was at a disadvantage to every other player. Even something as simple as a 2D platforming game can require precise timing of button presses, and it seems unlikely to me that Stadia or any other similar service will be able to fully address this. I'd love to be proven wrong, however.

Yeah i've experienced it as well.

I'd imagine a big part is that games which are written for a system like this can do some compensation if they know the latency is between controller and the system (vs games which expect the latency between the client and the server).

I'm also curious if there is anything else going on here than just "streaming video to the user", like allowing some "smearing" to compensate like how VR headsets will do some fancy stuff to compensate for head movement faster than the round trip communication time between the sensors on the headset and the PC.

Latency hiding in "traditional" multiplayer games basically works by doing computations for other players locally (even if it's as simple as dead reckoning and extrapolating a few milliseconds into the 'future'), and only apply corrections when this diverges too much from the server because of network hick-ups. Unless Google invented some new magic, that's not possible with a video stream (but hmm, who knows, maybe they have invented their own 'game-streaming video codec' with additional information for some sort of 2D-dead-reckoning for regions of the video frame... but my guess is they simply don't care about latency).

Yeah, i'm really curious to read more about the tech here.

I know things like the Oculus Rift does some fancy processing to kind of "smear" frames to compensate for head movement while the PC renders a new frame. I'm wondering if this service is going to be doing a bit more than just "streaming video to the user". Like including some metadata and allowing the client to make cheap adjustments to various parts of the scene to compensate for lag?

Either way, I really want to see some people play things on this and talk about how it feels, because I can't imagine Google would just release a gaming platform that's nothing more than streaming video. Especially since it's been tried multiple times before.

> 2D-dead-reckoning for regions of the video frame

That is, in fact, how video compressors work. It's called motion estimation.

Yep, if you did something where local controller input directly impacted the motion vectors for macroblocks in a video frame...you could maybe hide some of the latency, but that seems dubious...

Why wouldn't you be able to apply the same type of compensation for games like Super Smash Bros? The system (should) know what frame was being displayed when you press your button, and would use that to calculate whether it was a hit or not, rather than the current position.

Lets start by getting obvious out of the way - no such thing as competitive gaming on a gamepad. Then you have just encode/decode taking longer than some competitive players whole end-to-end latency.

Gaming can be competitive on all kinds of consoles, input devices, and levels.

Some games like Rocket League and many fighting games are primarily played on a controller or some kind of gamepad at the top tier.

That's what everyone said about controllers for FPS games, yet there's still console tournaments for Call of Duty and the like. If everyone is playing with the same handicap, it's still a fair match. And sometimes mass appeal is better than playing at the top level.

Its special Olympics, average k&m players beat console FPS "champions" every single time.

Some people - strange people - actually prefer a gamepad as an FPS controller, probably because that's what they grew up with. Nobody prefers extra input lag.

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