OnLive - Why Linux Gamers Should Take Notice

[Aradreth]

I went with iD because out of the large game developers its the one when a programmer has the most pull (to my knowledge at least but I'm sure someone will enlighten me )

[deanjo]

f) remember 'smart terminals' in the 70s&80s? same stuff

70's and 80's? Hate to break it to ya but that is still alive and flourishing, they call them thin clients nowdays. Hell the vm market lives off of it.

Back to latency, etc etc etc. Yes I'm doubtful too but you can be guaranteed that the net providers are going to give packet privatization to the service if they can pull in another $10-20 a month off the casual gamer in a day and age where people are trying to cut their cable bills down during the economic meltdown. Any way they can soak extra money out of ya they will give it a shot.

[deanjo]

I went with iD because out of the large game developers its the one when a programmer has the most pull (to my knowledge at least but I'm sure someone will enlighten me )

Not sure how much that applies now days. Carmack does not dictate the future of gaming as he once did. If he had the same amount of clout as he once did pretty much all games would be using openGL which was his "holy crusade" for years. That gave way to DX.

[Dragonlord]

70's and 80's? Hate to break it to ya but that is still alive and flourishing, they call them thin clients nowdays. Hell the vm market lives off of it.

Back to latency, etc etc etc. Yes I'm doubtful too but you can be guaranteed that the net providers are going to give packet privatization to the service if they can pull in another $10-20 a month off the casual gamer in a day and age where people are trying to cut their cable bills down during the economic meltdown. Any way they can soak extra money out of ya they will give it a shot.

That's also a bit something else. A thin client ( or in layman terms an internet browser with or without a plugin displaying a website ) does still all the rendering but the processing is on the server. This is different from this problematic here since there the server does the calculations and send parameters to the client which then does all the rendering work. So on a thin client you have separation of number crunching and rendering which works well over the internet and has been done successfully since ages. In this example though number crunching and rendering is on the server and the entire result is send to the client. Can't be compared in my opinion.

[Svartalf]

Not sure how much that applies now days. Carmack does not dictate the future of gaming as he once did. If he had the same amount of clout as he once did pretty much all games would be using openGL which was his "holy crusade" for years. That gave way to DX.

That has less to do with his "holy crusade" and more to do with the ARB sitting with their thumbs up their backside (and as you observed with Khronos, they did it again with the mainline GL standard to some degree...) for too many years.

It IS worth observing that DX doesn't do so hot in the embedded space and if you want handheld stuff, you're going to HAVE to use OpenGL ES. It's so close to OpenGL (1.3 for ES 1.1 and 2.0, sans the fixed function path in the case of ES 2.0...) that more often than not, you don't have to do much to get an OpenGL renderer to work on the embedded system.

As for this... Heh... I don't envision them being able to pull the server side together enough to be credible within the next 5 years because of expense reasons. Tech-wise, you can make it work. Tech-wise, you might even have a solution to the latency concerns that the nay-sayers point out. Tech-wise, though, you're not going to remove the expense of handling multiple OC-192's worth of data per server location to be credible.

[Arceliar]

If by some miracle, this turned out to be more than vaporware, then, lag issues aside, I ask myself this:

"How could it possibly be worse than Flash?"

[Dragonlord]

Flash is not streamed. You can have full quality flash animations as it is vector graphics. Unless you mean streamed flash movies. They are totally crap.

[energyman]

and 'Streamed' flash videos are saved on your harddisk anyway (and they don't have to be crap).

[deanjo]

(and they don't have to be crap).

Ya, you can get very watchable streams nowdays. When I'm out at my farm I usually capture the football games from the stream later on. Granted they are no 1080p but very watchable and better then a VCR recording. Lately I've been using vReveal to "fix them up" afterwards. A great app that really needs to be ported to linux.

[Duo Maxwell]

What I'd like to know is how this is even feasable? I mean think about the amount of bandwidth this would have to be sucking down toplay a game like Crysis or any other fast paced, super high detail game at a high resolution and 30+ framerate without lagging. We're talking Gigabit fiber optical connection minimum for anything I can think of.

I don't know about any of you but I play my games at 1920x1200 with a minimum frame rate of 60 fps, but usually vsynced to the monitor's 85Hz refreshrate.

I'm sorry, I just don't see how this could possibly work on a large scale unless they've found the holy grail of compression algorithms, allowing them to compress gigabytes into kilobytes.