OnLive - Why Linux Gamers Should Take Notice

[tball]

It would work great in Denmark :-)
Constantly < 14 ms lag from every single place in this little country.

~$ ping x.x.x.x
PING x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=0 ttl=250 time=7.220 ms
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=1 ttl=250 time=7.403 ms
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=2 ttl=250 time=6.895 ms
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=3 ttl=250 time=7.790 ms

[Zhick]

By that logic, I have been playing Burnout on Linux for ages - my PS3 is plugged into a TV card- I play on Linux using tvtime!

Haha, great example/analogy.

[Dragonlord]

It would work great in Denmark :-)
Constantly < 14 ms lag from every single place in this little country.

~$ ping x.x.x.x
PING x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=0 ttl=250 time=7.220 ms
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=1 ttl=250 time=7.403 ms
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=2 ttl=250 time=6.895 ms
64 bytes from x.x.x.x: icmp_seq=3 ttl=250 time=7.790 ms

No, you won't. This is time measured for a couple of bytes. We talk here about entire fullscreens 30-60 times a second.

[daveerickson]

How do other over-the-net-online games work then?

I must me missing something here. I have played many games over the net, and I know that lag sucks, but is generally tollerable.

I frequently fire up Diablo 2 these days and I float around an 80-150 ping and the game works fine. How is this different from the lag onlive would experience?

I also remember back in the day with Quake 2 and pings over 200 and still being playable.

The point is I can see needing more bandwitch since you are essentially streaming video from their servers to your screen. And if you have lower bandwith you would probably end up with a crappy looking stream, just like streaming from Netflix to my Roku box. It just seems to me that the games are already handling the fact that the games are being played by many humans in different areas and compensating for the lag. Why can't this service?

[MartjeB]

Like someone said.. closed minded soules here..

Do you really think this service will be ready in 2010? Do you really think the whole Internet will be upgraded in a year? No of course not! This will take years. Here in the Netherlands it will be (in a few years) perfectly possible. In a short while we'll all have fiber.

And who cares what OS the servers run on? It's all about the clients.

[Dragonlord]

I must me missing something here. I have played many games over the net, and I know that lag sucks, but is generally tollerable.

I frequently fire up Diablo 2 these days and I float around an 80-150 ping and the game works fine. How is this different from the lag onlive would experience?

I also remember back in the day with Quake 2 and pings over 200 and still being playable.

The point is I can see needing more bandwitch since you are essentially streaming video from their servers to your screen. And if you have lower bandwith you would probably end up with a crappy looking stream, just like streaming from Netflix to my Roku box. It just seems to me that the games are already handling the fact that the games are being played by many humans in different areas and compensating for the lag. Why can't this service?

Game state updates are a a small package of data every now and then. Here though it's huge amount of pixels to send over the wire. It's like comparing squeezing a bug or a Brontosaur through a wire. Obviously it takes a lot longer to get the Bronto through if the line isn't much fatter than a bug is.

And streaming of some video at crappy low resolution can not be compared to a game screen. In a video it is acceptable if the resolution is low and compression artifacts are visible. In a game though you want 1680x1050 at pixel precision so any trace of compression artifacts is not tolerable. Furthermore as Svartalf mentioned above ( and I can confirm this doing this in my company too to do support over the net ) try doing 1680x1050 through VNC over the internet and then we talk again about how feasible streaming such screens is. Hell even over LAN ( if I sit in the building not at home for example ) this is damn slow and totally unusable to play a game.

[Svartalf]

Like someone said.. closed minded soules here..

No, you've got several professionals telling you WHY it won't work the way you guys think it will.

I've been dealing for the last decade plus with the sort of stuff you and everyone else that thinks this is a nice idea keep glossing over.

It's part of my current day-job even.

Do you really think this service will be ready in 2010? Do you really think the whole Internet will be upgraded in a year? No of course not! This will take years. Here in the Netherlands it will be (in a few years) perfectly possible. In a short while we'll all have fiber.

Heh... Riiight. Let me run the numbers again so it'll soak in.

1.5 Mbits/s per SD level link.
5 Mbits/s per HD level link.

An OC12 consists of ~622MBits/s worth of data rate. THAT is still going to cost a pretty penny. Your fiber you remark on is to your house which translates into ~5-20Mbits usually, with a few notable exceptions around the world at 100Mbits. Business service, though, is framed in in terms of OC3, OC12, and so forth to OC192.

An OC12's worth of link will set you back ~$3-5k/month.

You can do the math on the OC192- and finding someone that'll feed you just shy 10G/sec worth of data directly to the Internet will be...interesting.

Now...

At 1.5 Mbits/s you're going to be able to service only about 414 clients simultaneously with a smidge of headroom to spare on that OC12.

At 5 Mbits/s you're only going to be able to deal with at most 123 with that same headroom, probably a little less- probably more like 80-ish if you're lucky.

Now, that presumes you don't have anything WRONG with your pipe at all on either end. If you knew anything about the way IP networking works, you'd realize that it's not going to work nicely and you're going to have a hell of a lot less people able to use the OC12's worth of link.

Why do I make this remark? If you use TCP, the congestion algorithm that is applied to each and every system, from the desktop machines, to the servers serving the data, to the routers and switches delivering it to you and the server, will cause random delays in packets once any one of them senses congestion. This injects latency into your game play- BAD latency. If you use UDP, the congestion algorithm will likely drop some or ALL of your traffic because that's how it does things on UDP. You go into low levels of congestion mode at 30-40% utilization of the link. It gets worse as you jam more crap through the pipes. SCTP ameliorates some of this, but not all routers grok SCTP traffic (there's you a hint...) and it still doesn't remove the issue completely.

Adding more bandwidth makes it worse.

No, no closed minds here. Just hard brutal reality- and one that won't change magically like you seem to think it will in just a couple of years' time. No, it doesn't matter what server hardware it runs on as far as the users are concerned. But with the Internet the way it is, it's just never going to work in your or my lifetime in a manner that will be commercially viable (here's a hint, you would have a 5-10 MILLION US per month burn rate to be close to making it commercially viable with the infrastructure costs where they are right now and will be for at least 5-10 years from now- and that's to service a quarter of a million people...)

This.
Is.
DRM.
Snake.
Oil.

The reason why the players bought in is most of the publishers don't listen to the people who do know better and they hear "all server side and nothing on the client of their assets" and they'll shower money on anyone claiming to make it happen.

[BlackStar]

A simple calculation shows that an uncompressed 1360x720@60Hz consumes about 1793Mbps of bandwidth. Assuming their HD stream is close to this resolution (if it's lower, it won't be HD, duh), they'd have to compress their stream about 350 times in order to fit their 5Mbps target.

a) There is no current technology that can compress a video stream 350 times in real time.

b) Even if they have created such a compression scheme, the quality will be atrocious. Ever seen youtube fullscreen? Something like that.

Also, keep in mind that every time you hit a key or move the mouse, you'll have to wait a full roundtrip before you see the results. Ever used a computer where the pointer reacts 60ms after you move the mouse? I have (VNC) - it's unusable.

You still think this may work? I have some money in a Nigerian bank that need a recipient - help me and half is yours. Interested?

(Yes, I'm implying this whole thing is a scam.)

[Aradreth]

This discussion is just going to go in circles until the company disappears or becomes a success. I'd put my money on the former but there is no harm in approaching them for a Linux port.

The reason why the players bought in is most of the publishers don't listen to the people who do know better and they hear "all server side and nothing on the client of their assets" and they'll shower money on anyone claiming to make it happen.

This is why I hate management (and politicians...), they make decisions they generally know bugger all about. When iD stands behind it I'll be sure it'll work, Carmack wouldn't support them otherwise.

[Dragonlord]

I don't want to step on John's toes buuuuut... Quake based games never had that much of good netcode as other applications. I would therefore not bet my money concerning network stuff on him