On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:59:03 -0700, Kevin Callahan <[email protected]> wrote: > http://blog.mlive.com/manzero/2009/03/onlive_streaming_game_service.html
The talk around here about this is along the lines of "WTF are they smoking?". Since details on the tech are scarce, there's some withholding of judgment - but even assuming everything else works without a hitch, how the heck do they address i/o lag when everything you do has to roundtrip to a remote box that's actually running the game. I mean, there's only a few obvious models for how this would work: - they are transmitting what's effectively high-framerate, high-resolution video back to the client... think VLC for Games. Yeah, that's gonna work great. - they are virtualizing the GPU on the server, and passing at least some of the primitives back to the client and doing (at least some of the) rendering there, lightening up the bandwidth requirements somewhat; not unlike remote OpenGL... which works fine for some applications - or the box is just a thick client, running code and drawing content locally, but storing it all remotely (in which case, it's just Steam in an appliance) Only the third option there seems to be able to cope with much of the latency inherent in the network, since it basically acts just as games do now on Steam (at least some Steam games can allow you to start playing without downloading the entire game - as games like WoW do too now). Otherwise, if all the execution of the game and rendering is happening remotely, there's a huge potential for network latency to kill gameplay for all but the most slow-paced, least reactive games. But hell, maybe they've come up with something unimaginable... other theories around here involve rainbows and unicorns, wormholes, quantum entanglement, and other common ways of avoiding network latency in latency-sensitive apps like games. FWIW, I'm definitely no game developer... but I do work with more than a few, and have at least a generalist's understanding of the issues involved. _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
