Pyrian on 16/9/2014 at 01:14
Increasing bandwidth has thus far been a much easier problem than reducing lag. Reducing lag is a huge investment for Oculus Rift VR, without going over the net at all.
I just don't see the niche yet. It's like, games that work well streaming, don't need streaming. Why would I, as a game-provider, invest in architecture to run a game that streams to an end device, when that end device is perfectly capable of running the game itself, and is dirt cheap (or basically free with a monthly contract), and there's basically no cheaper alternative capable of supporting streaming but not the games?
Right now, server-heavy games that could easily be streamed, by-and-large are not. Why not? Because it would cost a lot of money to bring all that processing in-house, while the target consumers already have it.
Muzman on 16/9/2014 at 03:55
You fellas with your quaint practicalities.
The point is the latest iThingy is thinner and cooler than the everyone else's, even though it costs too much, but it keeps everything online including all of these games! Some of them exclusives! And it's so small
Well clearly it's the iThingy to get. Even though it doesn't work right and version 2 will be way better. But! all the cool kids have one. And most of its services don't work all that well outside major US cities. But it's still cool as shit!
Are my local ISPs and so forth going to fall over themselves to get the data centres and hardware to make this stuff work for other people and flog that service? You betcha.
And is doing this going to suck resources away from supplying games via traditional methods obsessed over by niche gamers who care about the highest res and the fastest response? Absolutely.
And are companies going to throw their efforts at a difficult concept but one that results in total control of the platform? That just sounds like money.
All it needs is the right mix of hooks. Not easy, but not impossible to imagine.
Mr.Duck on 16/9/2014 at 07:52
Quote Posted by Renzatic
WEE........
........WEE
I got your wee right here, boy...
Wait.
Shit....
SODDUH DAISUH!
:-|
henke on 16/9/2014 at 08:45
Quote Posted by Muzman
You fellas with your quaint practicalities.
The point is the latest iThingy is thinner and cooler than the everyone else's, even though it costs too much, but it keeps everything online including all of these games! Some of them exclusives! And it's so small
Well clearly it's the iThingy to get. Even though it doesn't work right and version 2 will be way better. But! all the cool kids have one. And most of its services don't work all that well outside major US cities. But it's still cool as shit!
Are my local ISPs and so forth going to fall over themselves to get the data centres and hardware to make this stuff work for other people and flog that service? You betcha.
And is doing this going to suck resources away from supplying games via traditional methods obsessed over by niche gamers who care about the highest res and the fastest response? Absolutely.
And are companies going to throw their efforts at a difficult concept but one that results in total control of the platform? That just sounds like money.
All it needs is the right mix of hooks. Not easy, but not impossible to imagine.
Wow this is a very cynical post from you Muz. I can't tell how much of it is in jest and how much of it is sincere. If streaming fast paced games is really as impossible as Gryz says then of course it'll never catch on. It's not like gamers are going to go from the games we have now to crappier ones just because there's cool new tech behind it (just look at the Kinect). And as long as there are enough people who want games with no input lag and people who want to own physical or digital copies of their games, there'll be companies to capitalize on that market.
Gryzemuis on 16/9/2014 at 13:19
Quote Posted by Muzman
Even though it doesn't work right and version 2 will be way better.
No. That's one of my points. Version 2 will not be better. Version 2 will be just as shitty as version 1. And version 3, 4, 5 and 6. It will not get better. Even when devices go faster and battery-life grows longer.
Quote:
But! all the cool kids have one.
As I wrote in my first post, this will be a service sold by, and associated with Apple. And therefor it will sell. But will it be a lasting thing ? Nope. From a technical point of view, this architecture is so shitty, only marketing people believe in it. It will not work. And customers will not like it in the long run.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic) Teledesic was a company that had a really bad technical idea. But they had $200 million in funding. Nobody dared to admit their idea was crap. They died. I hope game-streaming will die too.
Shadowcat on 16/9/2014 at 13:56
Quote Posted by MrDuck
I got your wee right here, boy...
Streaming on demand.
Tony_Tarantula on 16/9/2014 at 19:05
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
There were quite a few angry people in that meeting-room. Lots of em. And a few young technical guys who were honestly surprised that people were throwing money at this project. For a while I thought maybe we were crazy, and the Teledesic guys, our business-development guys, Boeing, Paul Allen, and everybody else were much smarter than us. And that they knew what they were doing.
But no. Teledesic died. It was just a crap idea.
Interesting to hear how things work from that side of the market. Keep in mind that a lot of those firms don't necessarily push ideas because they expect them to succeed. Sometimes it's just because there is government money being dangled in front of them that they will get for just working on the project, let alone whether it will work. Use the F-35 project as a good case study.
The question I have is why not use a geosynchronous orbit? When I did some government consulting we used a military network that was primarily satellite based and used geosynchronous satellites. It was slow but reliable.
Mr.Duck on 16/9/2014 at 22:04
Quote Posted by Shadowcat
Streaming on demand.
Just giving the public what they want, boyo! :angel:
Whether they want to or not. :ebil:
Gryzemuis on 16/9/2014 at 22:27
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Sometimes it's just because there is government money being dangled in front of them that they will get for just working on the project, let alone whether it will work.
In this case there was no government money involved. Just a lot of private money. But yes, I agree. That was the point of my story. People were working on an idea that was flawed, only because they could trick some other clueless people in paying them to execute the flawed plan.
Quote:
The question I have is why not use a geosynchronous orbit?
Because those already existed. And it is obvious the existing ones were expensive. And you weren't gonna make a lot of money by copying what already existed. So it had to be something "new". Also, when you use satellites that don't move, they have to be up pretty high from the earth's surface. And that means introducing extra delays. And delays are not good for many Internet-applications. Including simple web-surfing. One argument they kept using was: "but we're also gonna sell voice services over this network !" At the time, GSM had just started. But it was obvious to us that GSM was gonna be cheaper and better than any satellite-based service. So their counter-argument was: "but we'll offer this service anywhere in the world, including on Antartica and in the middle of the Pacific or the middle of the Sahara". If you use geo-stationary satellites, I think (not sure) that they need to hang above the equatar, right ? So you can't cover the north and south poles. You need satellites everywhere.
Imho the whole Teledesic project was the ultimate example of people trying to make pigs fly.
And I think game-streaming is very similar.
Yakoob on 17/9/2014 at 05:50
Shadowcat already pointed it out, but there IS a market for streaming: games with lots of eye candy/physics that dont require quick responses.
Square is smart for leading this with their Final Fantasy, it's the PERFECT game for it. Lots of graphical hoo-haa, little reliance on fast input (even with ATB). Being able to play latest stunning FF15 on a small iPad in one's cozy bed is very alluring. And the GBs of textures and voiceover wont even take any space on your device.
Twitch-based shooters that try to minimize the response time are only a part of gaming sphere. Heck, the proper niche of games for streaming might not even exist yet. Look at mobile games with their free-to-play and social-sharing models - that stuff hasn't even really existed before the devices became available and now it's HUGE. New models may emerge as streaming becomes somewhat more feasible and widespread.
(That being said, mobile game model blows and I mostly keep away from it. But its still a valid example here).
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
You could compress/decompress such a signal. But then you need extra compute-time, which increases response-time (lag). And you'll need more compute-power on the end-station (to decompress the received signal).
True, but for decompression at least its not much worse than the time needed to render a full scene with all the latest shaders, perhaps even quicker. So the client-side at least wouldnt introduce extra lag.
Quote Posted by Shadowcat
(I envisage that this will quickly become known as "dumbed down for streaming".)
Well, if the response time is an issue at least we can be sure it wont include Quick Time Events :joke:
