OnLive

[Letter3]

It's been awhile since I have heard anything from them and thought it might have turned into Vaporware.

But I received an email today with updates and went to their blog: http://blog.onlive.com/

Looks like they received more support(funding) from AT&T and Warner Bros and a couple others. They are still Beta testing, but all seems to be moving along.

There pictures from PAX (from their flickr site) look promising.

I am still interested to see how it plays out. Could be a console/steam killer, but I doubt it. Sony, MS, Nintendo and Valve won't let that happen.

[Bodknocks]

I just don't understand how there's no latency issues. I mean, you input the key for "Jump" on your keyboard, it sends it to the server, the server makes your character jump, then it sends the visual back to your screen... It seems like even with a relatively low ping of oh, say 50, you would still preform actions and then not actually see those actions until well after it happens. Which is really really bad in FPS games.

It's different than FPS multiplayer games because in multiplayer games you have many different clients contacting one server. When you input jump, it sends it to the server, then sends it to everybody else. It's not streaming what's happening on the server, it's just sending packets back and forth.

It just seems like the stream wouldn't sync up with your input, because in multiplayer games you see client side because you ARE client side. With OnLive, the client = server, meaning when you press jump you do not see your character jump right away because it's streaming from the server, which doesn't know you've jumped yet, and even when it does it needs to send this whole thing streaming video with no buffer time at all.

And speaking of streaming, I have some pretty decent internet going on here and I still have to occasionally pause hulu and youtube and wait for it to buffer when watching hi-def video. How and the FUCK are they going to stream Crysis at max quality to your computer the instant you input commands??

Basically, I don't understand OnLive and don't possibly see how it's going to be any good with the current level of technology.

[Scavengeriot]

Definitely an interesting concept but I have to agree with Bodknocks I have no idea how they are going to do this and still get good performance.

[Letter3]

I got my invitation today to join the Founders group. I signed up and played some world of goo and red faction guerrilla. I did get a warning about my network latency, so I removed my router and it improved, but I still had some network issues.

It still lets you play, but sometimes I would get a spike of latency. I am guessing it's because the cable lines in my building and neighborhood have been here since the Cretaceous period.

It was cool to instantly jump in a game though and play. I wish I was back at my other apt to try it out. It says you need 5Mbps of constant DL streaming and I'm guessing these old lines can't do that. (when I moved here, I had to replace the wallplate just so the modem would connect to the internet)

I like it so far and I hope it's the cable lines here causing the issue and not the actual service. I will have try on my laptop from somewhere else. Also, it doesn't work with Wifi, need to be wired, for this same reason.

It's pretty much the only requirement: 5 Mbps wired connection + any computer = any game.

[Letter3]

UPDATE: my internet keeps timing out tonight. I think it might be a temporary issue. Fingers crossed for this weekend.

[rekon]

http://cnettv.cnet.com/hands-onlive-fut ... 89598.html