OnLive Gaming Service Launches; 1st Year is Free

[jimslaid2]

I signed up on the 15th and still no invite. Anyone else had any luck?

 

[cobra5000]

Read the fine print, the so called FREE membership entitles you to some demos ooo and some online chat, WOW! I cant wait too not sign up! Ill stick with Steam and buying the games I want for my PC, no membership fees or laggy service needed here.

 

[rohitbaran]

Well, I think that this concept is novel, but the time isn't right. While people have internet connections good enough to download movies via digital distribution channels, 5 Mbps is still too much of a requirement. By the way, if one has a bare minimum pc, then given the price of the subscription, one can buy a decent graphics card that could last 2 years or so for playing games at moderate settings (talking about a $150 card). So there isn't any price advantage either.

 

[Yagame]

Just a heads up, "the first year is free" only refers to the service. You have to pay for each and every game you want to "borrow."

 

[reasonablevoice]

For all the people making Steam comparisons, don't. There is one BIG difference between Steam and OnLive.
With Steam you don't have to pay any monthly service, if you buy one game, don't log into your Steam account for 2 years, then download the Steam client and install it you can still play that game you bought.
With OnLive you have to pay a monthly fee to keep your account. You stop paying the fee? Your games are gone.
Steam > OnLive

 

[Userremoved]

I'm sorry but what will happen when some of the games will start to be replaced with newer titles? It's the same thing as stooping paying. You lose the game!

 

[nottheking]

I already went through all the figures, numbers and math before... So I know that OnLive is still going to fail. It's going to run for a few months, then shutter, leaving all those that "bought" games on them without anything to show for their cash.

Simply put, trying to shove this whole thing across as "cloud computing" runs into a bunch of problems, that currently don't show up yet, but will rather soon.

■The first biggie comes from the connections to the servers themselves; you're streaming a video of you playing. The STANDARD bitrate for a DVD movie, using MPEG-2, is 9.8 megabits per second, twice what OnLive is calling for. And what is DVD quality? It's 480i/p. And no, it's only ~30 fps, (technically 29.97) not 60. And of course, the tradeoff for not going with a full 237.3-mbps bitrate for uncompressed video means you get artifacting.

It's true that better compression methods (namely from the H.264 family, be they MPEG-4, Xvid, etc.) could offer a better deal, but not by a HUGE margin; a 5-meg connection still means that even at 640x480, you're looking at artifacts even at 30fps instead of 60. And more-advanced codecs have a downside, too: they require more CPU power; that means that if the resolution is high enough, it's quite possible that a game would run SLOWER through OnLive than directly. 'Course, the service probably cleverly offsets it a little by actually streaming at only 20 or even 15fps, under the idea that the user won't know the difference.

And of course, there's the whole issue with latency; in a game on a console or PC, there's very, very little latency between your input and what's on-screen; technically, using a traditional double-buffer-rendered game, it's going to be equal to whatever the current frame delay is. (i.e, 1 second divided by your fps) So 30fps means a latency of approximately 33ms, the time for the computer to pick up the input, calculate the effects of it in the came core, then pass off the results to the rendering engine to be eventually displayed.

Inserting a whole two-way Internet connection to this makes it vastly more complicated, and WILL add tons of lag. First, there's the nominal latency just between when the OnLive service on the computer reacts to the input, and then packages it into the next 'input packet' sent to their servers. Then it has to bounce across the Internet to get there, potentially adding anywhere from 30-200ms of latency assuming a GOOD connection. Then once it's finally arrived at the server that processes it (after being shunted around OnLive's own farm network) it then still has to go through the normal process of converting the input to game data, then to a rendered output; since OnLive obviously doesn't like wasting power, they aren't running infinite framerates, and instead, only allocate enough power to get exactly 30fps, which means +33 miliseconds there. Then after that, it STILL has to be encoded, which takes yet more time; possibly way more if a separate server handles it. Then the video packet makes the trek back to the user, which then their computer takes the time to DECODE it; assuming you don't have an enthusiast rig already, and you're running the highest video setting your CPU will handle streaming, this'll add another 30-35ms in lag. All told, you're looking at a minimum of 250-500 miliseconds of extra lag, potentially way more. Sure, many people likely are too slow to notice it. But most serious gamers would get headaches from trying this; it'd be basically as hard as playing a game where you got 4fps.

■Of course, the above wall of text is only ONE major part of the problem... The rest lies with their own servers, and the permanency (or specifically, lack thereof) of their service. Basically, you rest at the mercy of your ability to stay in touch with OnLive:
■Your Internet connection go out? Well, you could play single-player games on your computer, but not OnLive!
■OnLive's servers went down while you were playing? Well, no gaming until they come back up, and you lost whatever you did right before then!
■Their servers are all full? Either you wind up having to wait more, or you might get in, and have it running poorly!
■Random Internet disruptions result in the normally shortest path to OnLive being useable? Well, now you've got more lag.
■OnLive folds? Say good-bye to all the games you paid them money for.

All told, it's got tons of huge problems, and they'll only start becoming apparent once people actually start using the service.

[citation][nom]filmman03[/nom]got to demo OnLive at E3 this year... not too bad. barely noticeable lag.[/citation]
That's because at E3, you were playtesting on servers that were probably located in that very booth. At worst, it was located in a trailer outside the convention center; this is like what they did at previous demonstrations of their service. The other advantage there is that they had VERY few clients connecting to a large array of servers; real-world usage would NEVER be able to replicate that.

[citation][nom]wortwortwort[/nom]You may be able to play the games, but it might be at the minimum settings. You could get better than that just by cramming a 5770 into your generic Best Buy office PC. In a year or two, buying a cheap GPU will have been cheaper.[/citation]
Indeed, many people don't realize that in many cases, a good-value graphics card can turn a relatively-recent "BestBuy/Wal-Mart PC" into a decent-level gaming rig. Top-end CPUs are overkill these days, and even those "crappy" OEM boxes tend to pack a decent amount of RAM.

[citation][nom]mlopinto2k1[/nom]Let's say 10,000 people are logged in all playing Crysis... how do they accomplish this task? Do they have 10,000 machines rendering the images for each player????[/citation]
More likely, the first few hundred would get in, and all the rest would get a message of "The servers are busy, please try again later."

[citation][nom]CPfreak[/nom]I don't uderstand, I live in the netherlands and I have 100MB/s for 15 euro per month.[/citation]
Availability of decent Internet varies depending on region/country. Ethernet-to-home (which it sounds like you have there) is almost unheard-of in most of the world; in North America (and also many other places like UK and Australia) the standard fare is 1.5 mbps cable-based Internet that is generally unreasonable in cost, and often high in latency.

 

[rodney_ws]

Right idea. Wrong decade. Patent your ideas and come back in 2020 and you'll be sitting on a gold mine.

 

[makwy2]

Not sure how useful this really will be. As an idea it seems all well and good but don't most "gamers" just turn to consoles for this kind of gameplay?

 

[bluekoala]

Simply put: This is the AOL of gaming.
Not to mention the added charges for bandwidth overuse.
Uses roughly 37.5megaBYTES of bandwith per minute.
2.25GB per hour.
You can blow a 40GB monthly bandwidth cap in less than 20 hours.
That's on top of paying for games with extra lag, and commitment.

Downloading an 8GB game off steam will save you bandwith in less than 4 hours.

 

[tommysch]

''Ninety-nine percent haven't had any lag complaints''

99.5 percent of gamers have no clue of what a tick rate, choke, loss, hit registry, ping or FPS mean.

 

[dark_lord69]

[citation][nom]wortwortwort[/nom]You may be able to play the games, but it might be at the minimum settings. You could get better than that just by cramming a 5770 into your generic Best Buy office PC. In a year or two, buying a cheap GPU will have been cheaper.[/citation]

Yeah, I would be interested to see the graphical quality. But if it looks good, it could save me a couple hundred bucks, why wouldn't I do it? I have to say I'm not nearly as skeptical as so many of you. My only comment is... have you played Qakelive?

www.quakelive.com

 

[jimslaid2]

I tried it, it's strange, it's like playing a compressed video.... The picture quality is like comparing a divx encode to an original vob video. colors don't pop and are not as saturated sometimes washed out. lighting effects and detail are high but again it's a video encode and divx vs real high def = divx loses. I normally use a 9800gt and play at 1680x1050 and my games look better. Demos are good because they start right away and load times are short. There is still the vertical sync issue that all games have, I thought they could do away with that. The lag is not noticeable, unless your a freak. IT'S the crappy video quality that I don't like. I use a 14 Mb connection.