Skip to main content

OnLive - Gaming in the cloud

Thanks to the right star alignment and generous invitation from my co-worker I was lucky to be in the audience of the OnLive service announcement. After 7 years of secretly developing (can not imagine how anything related to game development could be hidden from public eyes and ears for so long), absolutely mind-blowing OnLive gaming service was finally announced today to the crowd of game developers.

It is hard to believe that high-end gaming experience will be available soon for most of the mortals who have simple PC, MAC, or TV with a small adapter.

Technology is, basically, high end game servers hosted in the data centers with low-latency compression boards and light-weight clients. Client could be either small (1Mb) browser plug-In on PC/MAC or game adapter for TV that connects to home-grade DSL/fiber/cable modem.
















Why OnLive is great? (at least on the demo, need to test myself at home):


  • unprecedented performance approaching realism

  • access to high-end games + games developed specifically for online experience

  • User hardware does not get obsolete

  • Extremely high-performance shared serves with 1-2 GPUs

  • Special card for HW video compression
  • 1 [ms] latency (can you believe that?)

Minimum requirements for the end-user hardware:

  • bandwidth 1.5 Mbps for regular video resolution
  • HDTV experience 5 Mbps downstream (very light for upstream, great for DSL)


Typical Social features (something that is really expected these days:

  • Arena
  • Brag clips
  • Spectating roles


Plenty of Games already available on OnLive:

  • Family games (LegoBatman is there)
  • Did not see any cooperative games but who cares – killing is more fun
  • Sport -spectator games are there. Are they more fun than “real” sport? Claim is that it will be possible to have 1 Mil people watching games. Hard to believe but - why not? Technologically it is possible these days


Gamers will love:

  • Simplicity
  • Gaming (and good gaming, finally!) on MAC
  • For Multi-player games – fast connection between game servers (LAN party environment)
  • OnLive makes easier to watch the game, why bother clicking and tapping when you can see masters at play.


Game Publishers will love it: rental model + exposure to bigger market. No surprise that big names are already there:


• Electronic Arts
• Ubisoft
• WB
• Take two
• THQ
• Epic Games
• Eidos
• Atari
• 2D Boy
• CodeMasters


Game developers will like it:

  • Single code – 3 devices
  • Social features integrated


Hardware Companies will hate it:

  • No need to buy and upgrade expensive game PC


Why I am still skeptical?

Networks are optimized for bandwidth – not latency, will that ruin the experience?

I am waiting (patiently) for the winter ’09 general service launch…

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Facebook Friends Connect

Is a way to extend external sites to provide: FB identity FB friends (relationship) Feed to FB   Demo app at http://www.somethingtoputhere.com/therunaround User experience: login: js login method requiresession(): detects state of usr-FB relationship, log-in into FB if needed. If user has not authorised app - present app auth dialog. If already has session - just go init JS, require session   access FB data: - FBML on external site - use JS FBML parser and replace in browser DOM with FB data - JS based API to get FB data, REST API on the server site. Sessions work accross any API - only small subset of FBML us supported at the moment   adding social content: - use access API   Connections: app developers can suggest connections (using e-mail hash) user get connect request on FB Move content from external sites to FB app can register feed template (3 types of stories) call JS "showfeeddialog" to request user to confirm data sharing on FB. privacy protection: app ca
Post a Comment
Read more

Posting to FaceBook feed using Graph API

Graph API was announced at F8 with a promise to dramatically simplify the FB API. I checked the read access over the new interface during the presentations and to my big surprise it worked flawlessly and from the first time. When I tried https://graph.facebook.com/facebook , JSON-formatted info about the FaceBook page was returned (as expected). Then I tried OAuth 2.0 way of accessing the API to post a message to the feed. And to my even bigger surprise it worked too! Here is what you need to do to access Graph API over OAuth: 1. Create a FB app, store app properties to a file: $appkey = '7925873fbfb5347e571744515a9d2804' ; $appsecret = 'THE SECRET' ; $canvas = 'http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/' ; 2. Create a page that will prompt user the access permission (I am prompting for the publish_stream and offline_access permissions at the same time) //http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/ require 'settings.php' ; $url = "https://graph.face
14 comments
Read more

Ripple Baby Steps

Ripple and XPR What is Ripple for people in business and finance? Ripple is a currency exchange and payment settlement platform built using blockchain technology. Unlike Ethereum that is a more universal distributed application platform, Ripple solves a more narrow set of problems such as sending payments (similar to Bitcoin), currency remittance, payments for invoices, as well as number of other use cases related to payment in different currencies between parties that may or may not trust each other. Ripple is fast, scalable, and provides number of functions needed to support different payment scenarios. XPR is a native Ripple currency with a fixed and limited supply coins. 100 Billion XPR cryptocoins are in circulation today and the same number will be in circulation tomorrow.  What is Ripple for a software engineer?  For a software developer, Ripple is distributed ledger platform accessible trough API. There are number of libraries to accommodate different developers&#
Post a Comment
Read more