On 10/27/2010 10:53 PM, Stickman wrote: > Had a thought, figured I'd share it in case someone with authority > wanted to explore the topic.
I'm not an authority, but I have explored it a bit. > On Live (http://www.onlive.com/) is a cloud computing gaming service. > You open up the client and their computers run the game and graphics > and stream the video to you while accepting your controls. It means > you can run games on systems that otherwise wouldn't run them. > It's an iteration on an old idea. Render the scene, stream it to the user, accept user input back to the server to render the next scene, etc. It's always been a huge boondoggle because of the amount of bandwidth it takes, loss of image fidelity, and the control lag. > Pros: > -Less powerful computers can run SL on high settings It still requires a fairly beefy computer to run the decoding in high image quality with high frame rates, which is pretty much a requirement to avoid image artifacting. > Cons: > -$5/month subscription fee per user (Premium option?) > -Requires high bandwidth (3mbit) connection > -Probably consumes more bandwidth than SL itself would -Control lag; even though they claim it is "good enough" for FPS games, many FPS players who have tried it out report serious latency in control response, turning them off of it. -Image quality issues: viewing a virtual world as a compressed movie will have significantly noticeable image quality issues (and has been noted in reviews of the service). My personal take on it (and has been since the mid-90s, when this concept was first proposed) is "no thanks". I prefer to use the horsepower of my system to generate the world, especially since that horsepower is still ever-increasing on a geometric scale, and getting cheaper all the time. It also isn't that hard to keep SL's platform requirements within the grasp of older hardware for a good long while. --TL _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
