Interesting product

[rursusferre]

so the idea behind this new product is to basically destroy computer and console gaming. instead of buying a computer or console, you play on something like a remote computer, and the video is streamed to your television. Interesting idea.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/965/965542p1.html

[Yooxra]

Interesting.

[Hondadude]

www.onlive.com

Here is some minor info on the CEO of this company (Steve Perlman). He use to work for APPLE and was head guy on making products like "Quicktime", and "Made Mac have color screens" and other notable things. One thing he was known for in the mid 90s was that he was working on a product to make sega gensis and nintendo able to go online and play each other. Rumor is he left Apple because he was just upset that it wasn’t a mainstream computer for gaming and went to work on way to make that no longer an issue.

Anyways this product rather people like it or not is the future of gaming, matter of fact future of computers. Instead of us the consumers spending a shit ton of money, say two thousand on a super duper computer we can now pay say 15 bucks a month for service that we connect too for high speed gaming.

But anyways this is how it works.

It’s called "Cloud Computing" for the nerds. Basically you can be on a computer even a net book that cost about 180 bucks at best buy and open up your Internet Explorer, and install an add on that’s 1mb big not 1 gig and bam that’s it, and you can play games like "Cyris" without any problems.

Draw back to this is that you must have High speed internet like almost everyone already has now.

But also note that many and I think as of today all high speed carriers in the U.S. has a limit on how much you use. For example Comcast you can only use 250gb a month while others are around 50g.



Great thing about this is that you can now play games the way it was meant to be played with out purchasing hardware upgrades.


Steve Pearl said something that made me go wow. "The servers we built and the new technolgy we invited both hardware and software has a lag speed of 1ms or less within 1500 miles of each data center". 1 ms............. thats fast as hell.

[Gogan]

This doesn't have anything to do with Cloud Computing, but moreso their claimed advancement in video compression. He just says Cloud Computing because that's the latest buzz word today. They're actually using just regular co-located data centers, which he admits in the Q&A.

The servers we built and the new technolgy we invited both hardware and software has a lag speed of 1ms or less within 1500 miles of each data center"

What he said was they reduced the video compression to 1ms. That has nothing to do with the latency between a client and their data center. Think fraps.

The OnLive service, he says in the Q&A, will be playable if you're ~1000 miles away from their data center -- 1500 miles tops. Anything outside of that and you'll notice the latency (which probably means ~500ms). He also admits that you won't be able to play a "lag-sensitive" game between the east coast and west coast. So if you, on the east coast, want to play Crysis with me, on the west coast, you're shit out of luck.

They can't solve the "last mile" problem, so there's going to be inevitable shortcomings with this service. There's just no way around it.

This also seems like it could get very expensive to play. Granted, you're not shelling out a couple grand up-front plus the cost of games, but you know this won't be as simple as $15/mo. It's going to be like $5/game/5 days or something stupid like that. Also realize you'll never be able to play things like WoW on this, where you customize your game with addons and such.

Overall, their video stuff seems really cool, but it's just not going to replace home gaming rigs. Could be cool if they brought in a few of these servers for gaming tournaments so the tournament sponsors could stream the competition online and whatnot.

[Hondadude]

Originally Posted by Asano

Could be cool if they brought in a few of these servers for gaming tournaments so the tournament sponsors could stream the competition online and whatnot.

I agree. This will be like Battlenet when you pick west, est, etc. Overall nice product but not something for wow people.