What really amazes me about OnLive is the interface. It's really a thin client: your entire interface is streamed from OnLive's servers. Since the UI is a video, they jam it full of movie clips. Reminds me of the video wall from Back to the Future.
My expectations were shattered when I clicked on a game preview video, expecting a 10 second wait while it loaded and buffered. Nope! It started playing immediately. Heck, even the infinitesimal load screens they have are videos.
I clicked on all the "Brag Clip" videos and they played immediately. You can even watch people playing live. Since there's no wait penalty for moving through the interface, you find yourself clicking a lot more.
This seems like it could be a perfect complement to a low-power device running something like ChromeOS. I wonder if they'll branch out from games, though? Any CPU-intensive application could be made to live in the cloud: OnLive Photoshop, OnLive AutoCAD... it would just need to be coupled with a cloud document store of some sort. (Hopefully Dropbox.)
There was a story the other day that Google is investigating exactly that for supporting legacy applications. If OnLive can successfully stream a AAA video game at playable latencies, then they have pretty much proven that any application is doable.
He did mention there's a certain mouse-lag on cursor based games and Photoshop with mouse-lag would be kinda bad. I don't see how you could solve the problem either. His 14 ms ping is probably as good as it gets and even the smartest software can't circumvent physical limitations.
I tried OnLive in beta phase. For most 3D games, it works just fine, I can jump, turn my head around and everything. But for racing game, the lagging is killing me, I cannot finish one round because the dismatch between my perception and the actually driving. Not a FPS person, have no opinion on that.
Overall, I still think that OnLive is a product born too ahead of time; we just simply don't have that hight quality Internet to support it.
It's making me imagine a box that you can install in an apartment complex where you just plug in a number of game consoles and a SAN, and it allows anyone in the apartment complex to use an onlive-like interface to play the games. This is probably doable with today's technology, although the lack of digital delivery and HD game storage to the consoles makes it a little too much of a challenge in the short term. But that would get around the network infrastructure issue.
Its not so much that we dont have the quality of internet to support it as that we are just too spread out. The time it takes for the data to travel from X to Y just takes 20-30ms. Not sure if that will change until we have fiber to our doors.
Well, I've done a racing game over a typical cable connection and it was incredible. I really couldn't tell -- and that's crazy because I've been doing game development for a decade and can spot FPS rates to about a 2 frame accuracy.
What is with this crazy negativity around OnLive? I thought you guys liked new things -- don't be a hater!
The OnLive uses a crazy proprietary algorithm to get a ton of juice out of your line. The guy working on it is one of the most brilliant engineers I know.
It stops the customer from cheating (or, you know, modding, tweaking, sharing, hosting dedicated servers (?), etc.), but the people who cheat in multiplayer games are unlikely to be the same ones who are willing to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of paying full price for renting new titles. Until there are Onlive only servers, or Onlive only games, this won't really stop cheating.
This is a pretty remarkable service, but there is one awkward caveat mentioned in the article:
"Unfortunately, because of licensing restrictions, we can only offer Mass Effect 2 for play under Windows. So, if you do not have access to a PC, your only option to play it on a Mac is under Windows using Boot Camp or a similar system. We apologize for the inconvenience. OnLive has no other games in the pipeline that are Windows-only, and we do not expect to have any others."
D'oh!
[edit: As a Canadian surfer, I run into US services and sites every week that don't allow non-US users. Netflix, Comedy Central, etc. I could imagine the licensing issues could be similarly irritating with OnLive as well]
"OnLive has no other games in the pipeline that are Windows-only, and we do not expect to have any others."
As they point out, this is the only game that's not available cross platform. It's understandable that this would happen during the beta period, while they are still trying to prove the model to game developers.
This is a great writeup of OnLive. I wrote one myself a few months back, http://siculars.posterous.com/onlive-shows-us-the-way-to-vid.... Like the author, I also agree that this is the real deal and will only continue to get better as technology improves and end users get fatter pipes. I, for one, am looking forward to giving this a go.
I might even venture to say that at some point in the future as the platform matures, OnLive will be the preferred distribution platform simply due to the fact that there is no way to resell a game by the end user. Resale is a major problem for publishers who are desperately trying to eek out every last cent from their investments.
I wonder if you could eventually sell cycles back to OnLive, since you aren't doing the heavy lifting on your machine ... Maybe offset the cost of the service? Or maybe OnLive could do an ElectricSheep-like screensaver for distributed processing. That could mitigate some of the latency issues as well, for those near you. Social rendering, comrade!
Edit: The more I think about this, the more it seems this is precisely (or at least should be) where they're going with this.
This might be the killer app for next generation networks for countries that don't have it already. It'll go from "Oh well, Youtube is a little slow but I won't spend money on a better plan for that." to "I absolutely must have a 20Mbit connection in order to play all these amazing games."
I get 700kb-1Mb/s here in Berlin on a cheapo contract - I will definitely try it out if (and that's a big one) it becomes available here.
I saw OnLive on E3 and was greatly impressed. I wish I had this technology, working locally at work for things like RemoteDesktop/VNC (okay not fair, as the latter would probably deal better with high-frequency detail such as fonts). But for testing/developing games off line, or even in a big office (to cut down few miles a day of walking) that would be great :)
[+] [-] jordanroher|15 years ago|reply
My expectations were shattered when I clicked on a game preview video, expecting a 10 second wait while it loaded and buffered. Nope! It started playing immediately. Heck, even the infinitesimal load screens they have are videos.
I clicked on all the "Brag Clip" videos and they played immediately. You can even watch people playing live. Since there's no wait penalty for moving through the interface, you find yourself clicking a lot more.
[+] [-] derefr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeff18|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zyb09|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corysama|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liuliu|15 years ago|reply
Overall, I still think that OnLive is a product born too ahead of time; we just simply don't have that hight quality Internet to support it.
[+] [-] houseabsolute|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBlake|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddustin|15 years ago|reply
What is with this crazy negativity around OnLive? I thought you guys liked new things -- don't be a hater!
The OnLive uses a crazy proprietary algorithm to get a ton of juice out of your line. The guy working on it is one of the most brilliant engineers I know.
[+] [-] bdr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aw3c2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crystalis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maciek416|15 years ago|reply
"Unfortunately, because of licensing restrictions, we can only offer Mass Effect 2 for play under Windows. So, if you do not have access to a PC, your only option to play it on a Mac is under Windows using Boot Camp or a similar system. We apologize for the inconvenience. OnLive has no other games in the pipeline that are Windows-only, and we do not expect to have any others."
D'oh!
[edit: As a Canadian surfer, I run into US services and sites every week that don't allow non-US users. Netflix, Comedy Central, etc. I could imagine the licensing issues could be similarly irritating with OnLive as well]
[+] [-] thiele|15 years ago|reply
As they point out, this is the only game that's not available cross platform. It's understandable that this would happen during the beta period, while they are still trying to prove the model to game developers.
[+] [-] siculars|15 years ago|reply
I might even venture to say that at some point in the future as the platform matures, OnLive will be the preferred distribution platform simply due to the fact that there is no way to resell a game by the end user. Resale is a major problem for publishers who are desperately trying to eek out every last cent from their investments.
[+] [-] thunk|15 years ago|reply
Edit: The more I think about this, the more it seems this is precisely (or at least should be) where they're going with this.
[+] [-] po|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenni|15 years ago|reply
I get 700kb-1Mb/s here in Berlin on a cheapo contract - I will definitely try it out if (and that's a big one) it becomes available here.
[+] [-] mkuhn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malkia|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaar333|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeff18|15 years ago|reply