(Not a typo up there)
I searched and found no topics on this. I kinda had to make a topic on this, especially with the buzz surrounding it.

Onlive, the service that made their first appearance at the recent GDC (same place Data was?).
Claims to have technology that could possibly eliminate the need for computer upgrades.

How they say the technology works.

1. After hooking up onlive, subscribing for onlive, and buying a game, you play it.
2. When you press a button, it sends a signal to the main server
3. then the computer over there figures the next frame
4. then the signal comes back.
5. It supposed to come back so fast that it seems instantanous enough to make it seem as if the game is running.

It claims to run Crysis at 60fps at maximum settings.

But I feel that there are flaws. Like, how many computers are you going to have? And will they handle the millions of people that might use this?

Discuss.

In my opinion, network latency. Ping will be more important than ever. If the service has an average two-way ping much larger than 300 you can bet that FPS junkies will abandon the console.

I'm sure that the major issue is the speed of light.

You get about a latency*2 amount of lag between controller input and screen return.
From what I've heard, it seems like they have claimed to beat the speed of light with some "trademark algorithm".
Bandwidth != Latency.
Latency is the time it takes, while bandwith is how much data can travel.
Compression boosts bandwidth.
Not latency.
Beating Latency to >1ms as they claim would require putting the server in the area of the player's own home. Or using quantum devices.
Compression can reduce processing time, but that doesn't count as latency.

Or perhaps I can state it as this:

There truck carrying 1 ton of goods, on a 60 mph 360 mi highway.

It then picks up other goods and returns for the same speed.

Just because you make the truck fit 2 tons of goods doesn’t mean they get there faster.

This relates to games because the truck’s goods represents the info.
The compression is making the truck bigger.
The speed limit is the speed of light.
The length is the distance.

The only way this could work is by hiding the lag.

Also , if there are people who hate big trucks on the way(traffic shaping), it takes longer.

On the bright side, you have have teh laggy video chip, and are lucky to live near a server and have a good ISP, the latency should be less than Intel chip processing latency. That is the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is somewhere like Hawaii, or Australia, or some one with satellite which has *horrid* latency.

I dislike the lack of control, stuff like playing minor mods, or editing little stuff like config files yourself can't be done with this.

It certainly has appeal to people with lacklustre computers, and if it gets very popular, the market will have lots of thin clients to take advantage of it, but there will always be people who want to run the game locally.

i concur.

off topic: are you a ♥♥♥♥ genius?

Dude, they said that you need to live within 1000 miles of one of their data centers to get full service.

At 1500 miles is where it just stops working well.

Still would depend on your ISP and location.

Satellite users are out of the question.

So are people on islands located not close to the US or Europe.

People with retarded ISPs who decide to route though Kansas even though the California server is much closer to them will have problems.

People with more retarded ISPs which bannify/laggify their users for using their connection at high bandwith will have issues.

Generally physical distance isn't a necessarily a 100% guarantee of low latency.

Taking my road and truck analogy, the road may be twisty, there may be detours, ect.

I looked at that and wondered, if i ever stopped paying for the service would I lose all my games? Also you would not be able to mod games like Crysis which I love doing.. (Just started!)

I'm certain that they will add modding.

From the looks of it, the executable is accessing separate config files, so maybe space for mods could be made as an (extra,paid of course to keep up with extra costs of keeping more game files up in the cloud) option.

Now that i thought about it, isn't this just a steam clone but a bit better?

This design will only work in a perfect world.

The monthly fee is what gets me very mad, its like paying 5$ every month to keep your Wii working or it will never work again. I mean if i ever wanted to get a game, wouldn't I want it permanently and not have the risk of losing it, or getting tons of lag while playing due to 500,000 Chinese players playing other games?

Uhh, no.

This is a reversion back to 80-90's stlye computing. Which was working from extremely dumb terminals with only connection and display abilities, hooked up to an extremely smart mainframe.

Steam is more of a content manager.

I'm fairly certain that games will be cheaper in the system. Like 5$ ish. But only on the inde games because the big companies are arses and wish to keep a profit.

Or, with digital licensing, you could also get a license to download the game on your computer. And have the reverse, eg registering your games onto the main server.

But cross licensing won't happen because EA and the like want you to buy many copies of a game so you can use multi-platform and multi-unit, instead of making it so you only need one licence that allows it to work on all and as many of your platforms as you want.

I do see a nice thing with this system.
By using custom hardware and custom servers running custom modified games, you should have it optimized for the servers and servers optimized for the games.

This just put a visual in my head

Huge dump-truck full of PVC and sewer lines, with rocket boosters duct-taped to the sides, with a huge sign on the side that says "The internet: it IS just a big truck"

No, he's not. He is actually just someone pretending that they are an electrical engineer. First and foremost, latency is not a pure function of distance. It is a derived benchmark involving the time when an action began, and when it concludes. That time is a function of throughput, distance, computational capacity, and node traffic.

You certainly can decrease latency through increased compression. Compression does not increase your bandwidth. Your bandwidth is a static metric dictated by the throughput of your line (Dialup is slower than ISDN is slower than Cable is slower than T1/3).

Unfortunately, the genius you so love has got it completely backwards. They are not increasing bandwidth, they are decreasing packet size and traffic (through compression).

Latency if < 1ms is achievable, if you are within a certain distance. That distance can be found here. As long as you are within approximately 299,000 meters, you can achieve a 1 ms latency (299,000 meters being the distance one photo travels in a milisecond). Does that make sense to everyone?

Now, to be honest, that is completely outside the realm of logic, and no businessman or technologist would make that claim short of having an ansible--but that isn't the point.

tl;dr: mail234x^69 doesnt really know what he is talking about, he just wants you to think he is smart.

On the bright side, he did manage to get one thing right: this is very reminiscent of dumb terminal-ing. You pay to hook your machine into a "mainframe" that offers content distribution. The only difference is that thin-clienting has been around for ages. People stream entire operating systems over VPN and the Internet. You know that handy-dandy Remote Desktop Protocol? That is exactly what OnLive is. The only exception is that they have some kind of patented compression algorithm.

So OnLive gets points for wrapping old technology in new wrapping paper for idiot consumers.

A++