OnLive

[Badger]

I think this is the correct sub section ( looked for a Gaming News section but couldn't find one)

For those of you who haven't heard of OnLive yet I thought you might find the following links rather interesting.

OnLive is an on demand gaming service where all graphics are rendered server side. You need a high speed internet conection to get 1080 x 720 view and they attribute much of the success of the venture to an in house video compression algorithm. It's currently in open Beta and you, and you can play off the shelf titles.

I think this could be particularly pertinent to MMO's using the cryengine as it would effectively allow you to play the game with high specs on a low spec machine. This has evident benefit for those of us who travel a lot, being able to play on a Netbook rather than a MacBook Pro would make all the difference

Whether this can really be a succesful venture is yet to be seen. If the US and Europe get their act together and lay down the necessary high speed fibre optic cables then perhaps Onlive and similar services will carve out a slice of the huge gaming platform industry.

http://www.onlive.com/

http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=3329

Hope you enjoy

Regards,

Badger

[sahel]

Take a look here, i'm trying to make a discussion going about cloud computing and OnLive is one of the main ingredients of it :

Cloud computing

[warpath]

cool might be worth a look thakns for sharing

[thoreau]

There is a good article on why OnLive can't possibly work.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gd...y-work-article

So, let's say that Grand Theft Auto V is released via OnLive, and (conservatively) one million people want to play it at the same time. We can talk about Tesla GPUs, server clusters, the whole nine yards, but the bottom line is that the computing and rendering power we're talking about is mammoth to a degree never seen before in the games business, perhaps anywhere. There may be a way how this can be handled (more on that later), but even having capacity for 'just' 5,000 clients running at the same time is a monumental effort and expense. It would be the equivalent of us running a single Eurogamer server for every reader who connects to the site at the same time. The expense involved is staggering (not to mention the heat all this hardware would generate - think of the children!).

[h0n3y]

hehe the bot also noticed this

OnLive could threaten Xbox, PS3, and Wii

[trivan]

I think it is a great future for gaming no more buying expensive freaking consoles to play games!

[ACEwoK]

i'm going to have to re read all this as i'm totally lost

So if i don't need a console, how do i play stuff?

[SideWinder]

Originally Posted by ACEwoK

i'm going to have to re read all this as i'm totally lost

So if i don't need a console, how do i play stuff?

What i gathered was.

You pay a monthly fee for a client, that allows you to play games streamed through your broadband. Specs dont matter, as they got some super-computer down their end doing the hardware work.

[centech]

The thing I dont get is.. computers are frigging cheap.. Its bandwith that is in demand and not available to all. I feel like they are kind of solving the wrong problem?

[Mikass]

Originally Posted by centech

The thing I dont get is.. computers are frigging cheap.. Its bandwith that is in demand and not available to all. I feel like they are kind of solving the wrong problem?

They solve the problem of piracy. If this becomes the future of game distribution no one would be able to play a pirate copy.

Depends on computers. Some are not cheap at all. Games like GTA 4 need Quad Core CPU, good graphic card and lots of ram to play smoothly, no to mention the cost of a sli or crossfire config. Imagine that someone with cheapeast rip off laptop or 200usd desktop out there could play it with maximum performance.