Pandora For Online Gaming

[darien]

If they're using the bandwidth available in newsgroups through partnerships with providers, that's a plus. 80ms is a 2 to 4 frame difference depending on whether you're playing at 30 to 60 fps respectively. If people can remote desktop at worse speeds, I can see people playing games alright. If I can download a movie in less time than it takes to watch, and it looks good on my HDTV, I know I'm really only worrying about how fast I can get that frame.

We can't make assumptions about their compression algorithm, it's very unscientific to include unknowns simply because one has doubts. I can tell you that the only real concerns with streaming has stemmed from the economics of bandwidth, otherwise this would have happened much sooner. At the Pandora's side of things, it will only require 1.5Mbs since the screen won't be rendering more than SD or 480p. 5Mbs is for 720p junk. Average Americans at 3 something Mbs won't be able to take advantage of the higher resolutions unless they get an improvement in their provider speeds. When the demand increases, providers will 'provide' or risk losing business to a company that will. The opportunity is too profitable to pass up. If Windows is any proof of the matter, a third rate service can win out in the beginning and improve later, despite not being the first to market.

I recall reading about how early beta impressions say latency is only noticeable during high traffic in FPS or anything requiring mouse precision, and that the resolution at 720p isn't ideal compared to what you would be used to if you run a high end computer, but you rarely see games running on home consoles at 1080p. Nothing that somebody with a low spec computer or console isn't used to. This is from people with 12Mbs connections. I have a 15Mbs where I am so this won't be much of a problem for me in Canada.

 

[emil10001]

The way that they encode the video so quickly is using specific hardware. They designed the algorithms, one for the gameplay and one for video and reduced both to separate silicon chips. The gaming algorithm used is also claimed to be something very different from a standard video stream. I would suggest actually watching the video from Columbia before saying that it's impossible. I'm not going to claim anything about it, because I haven't seen it yet, but I'm also not going to go around saying that it's impossible before getting my facts straight. Single purpose chips, like the ones that they claim to have developed for their video encoding, could certainly do real time encoding in the kind of time they are talking about. There are consumer devices that you can buy to do similar things for h.264 encoding, they've been out for at least a couple of years now.

As to the question about why they would be wasting such a useful codec on gaming, I think that there are perhaps a few answers. First, the codec specifically developed for the gameplay would likely not be useful in other situations due to the fact that it is designed to only work well enough such that the user does not notice errors in the picture while they are playing the game, and need the information to get to them as quickly as possible. They are using another codec for video streams, and a fair question would be why keep this to themselves? Well, who said that they aren't going to license the technology out to other companies? They have a wholly owned subsidiary which is in the film business, they did the facial creation and motion capture software for the Benjamin Button film. They also have Warner Brothers and Autodesk as investors, not that that proves anything, but I think that it shows that they are thinking beyond the gaming application of their tech.

@God Ginrai - the guy in the video said that if you freeze frame the gameplay it is likely not to look very good. He said that the reason for that is that they can't ensure that every packet is going to make the trip properly, with getting dropped or something, and that they can't afford the time to re-request it. He said that it's not really noticeable while the game is in motion though. In the Columbia U video that I saw, I really couldn't notice any issues with the picture, thought I wasn't watching it in HD, and wasn't looking real hard for issues.

I think that in the end, it'll be worth giving it a shot once it launches, especially if they produce a pandora compatible client for it. I mean, they might have a free trail, or it might be cheap enough to just pay for the first month, and check out the free demos that they have. They have a live beta going on, and you can find mini-reviews if you search for them. It sounds like they are still shooting to launch it this winter. I don't really see the point in too much argument about it until then, when if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, it doesn't.

 

[HackModford]

They don't resend for the packet... as far as I understood it they basically go "Okay we got this we're just missing this one patch what could it be?... Hmmm. well it's brown here and yellow here so I'm gonna guess that this missing pixel is a brownish yellow. Bingo!" Atleast that's how I understood it and I'm sure it's alot more complicated than that. And yes I didn't really notice anything bad when watching the video.

That first article that was linked said the latency was going to be 150ms it's going to be 80ms any slower than that and they're not going to garuntee you like it

I'm not saying this could replace everything we can do on the pandora but why not make it available?

 

[ashdjones]

They don't resend for the packet... as far as I understood it they basically go "Okay we got this we're just missing this one patch what could it be?... Hmmm. well it's brown here and yellow here so I'm gonna guess that this missing pixel is a brownish yellow. Bingo!" Atleast that's how I understood it and I'm sure it's alot more complicated than that. And yes I didn't really notice anything bad when watching the video.

That first article that was linked said the latency was going to be 150ms it's going to be 80ms any slower than that and they're not going to garuntee you like it

I'm not saying this could replace everything we can do on the pandora but why not make it available?

I would imagine they use some type of connectionless protocol like you get with all IP telephony/Streaming Media/Online Gaming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol#Comparison_of_UDP_and_TCP

 

[emil10001]

I would imagine they use some type of connectionless protocol like you get with all IP telephony/Streaming Media/Online Gaming.

http://en.wikipedia...._of_UDP_and_TCP

They said in the video that they are using UDP.

 

[Trip]

With a very experienced team writing a new video codec that only makes the picture look good when its moving + UDP as they don't need all the packets verifying + new wireless algorithms to speed up the sending of button presses + dedicated graphic processors that have been designed and tailored to do exactly what they need them to do..
I really don't see why people are saying OnLive isn't possible, even taking into account the fact that most current broadband sucks balls :huh:

EDIT: Do I believe that it will completely replace home PC gaming? don't be daft. One of the best things about PC gaming is the ability to create and add maps, weapons etc. to enhance the game. This obviously won't be possible with OnLive.

 

[emil10001]

Do I believe that it will completely replace home PC gaming? don't be daft. One of the best things about PC gaming is the ability to create and add maps, weapons etc. to enhance the game. This obviously won't be possible with OnLive.

They could be aiming more for the console market and/or the casual gaming market.

 

[Trip]

Do I believe that it will completely replace home PC gaming? don't be daft. One of the best things about PC gaming is the ability to create and add maps, weapons etc. to enhance the game. This obviously won't be possible with OnLive.

They could be aiming more for the console market and/or the casual gaming market.

Yeah probably. That's the main reason why I personally don't believe that the pay a subscription + pay for the games is a good idea. Casual gamers simply won't see the need to pay for a subscription to anything. I quite like the idea of paying per episode though and making games more like stories

 

[emil10001]

Yeah probably. That's the main reason why I personally don't believe that the pay a subscription + pay for the games is a good idea. Casual gamers simply won't see the need to pay for a subscription to anything. I quite like the idea of paying per episode though and making games more like stories

Well, they also mentioned possibly giving the hardware away with a subscription. That would be compelling to a lot of people, as opposed to paying a few hundred dollars up front, then paying for the online service, and paying for games too.

 

[juniorm33]

Not read it yet but should be interesting read about onLive at digitalfoundry

Edit: Interesting enough read but doesn't tell us anything new really, apart from the view it may still be based on h264 encoding.

 

[Trip]

Not read it yet but should be interesting read about onLive at digitalfoundry

Edit: Interesting enough read but doesn't tell us anything new really, apart from the view it may still be based on h264 encoding.

Pretty good read Na-Noo. Quite informative too as I've never even heared of Gaikai before.

It's no wonder the Pandora devs aren't rushing the cases to get the Pandora's out earlier.
With services like OnLive, Gaikai and SteamMyGame coming out, the Pandora will be in a very good position to be the perfect hand held partner for these companies.. as long as they make it good enough quality that is

 

[Awakening]

I just watched this movie (probably linked somewhere in this thread) and I must say I'm very very impressed. If the pricing is good then I see no reason why I wouldn't get into this, well they would have to get a server over here. Personally I wish they would just charge a monthly fee and allow me to play all games for free, just clock the time I spend on every game and split the money. Imagine never having to pay for another game or piece of hardware ever again and just play whatever you like whenever you like.

 

[emil10001]

Not read it yet but should be interesting read about onLive at digitalfoundry

Edit: Interesting enough read but doesn't tell us anything new really, apart from the view it may still be based on h264 encoding.

Pretty good read Na-Noo. Quite informative too as I've never even heared of Gaikai before.

It's no wonder the Pandora devs aren't rushing the cases to get the Pandora's out earlier.
With services like OnLive, Gaikai and SteamMyGame coming out, the Pandora will be in a very good position to be the perfect hand held partner for these companies.. as long as they make it good enough quality that is

That's a really good point. Instead of trying to get the Pandora 'supported' by those companies, it might be better to 'partner', so that the pandora is the official handheld for using that service. Perhaps those companies might even want to resell units down the road, or sell at a discounted rate with a 1 year subscription. OnLive is already talking about possibly giving away their hardware to subscribers.

A couple of other small points, Gaikai looks like it's using flash player on the client end, and this is not good for us, because flash sucks on linux. I have problems just trying to get youtube not to stutter on my x86_64 linux box, I doubt that flash player will be up to the task of streaming a game with any sort of fidelity. Also, adobe has promised to release a flash lite for mobile systems by October of 2009, which did not happen, who knows when it'll be finally released for us. That said, Gaikai looks really cool, and in the demo video they had some interesting things like mario kart 64 running on an emulator and adobe photoshop cs3, although it looks like those were mainly for demo purposes, it shows that they are thinking outside of strictly the gaming market. I think I'll look into this one a bit more.

StreamMyGame has its own issues, for me at least, as it requires you to serve the game yourself on a windows pc, which I do not have.

And of course, OnLive has not announced any plans to support Linux or ARM Linux, as far as I am aware of.

@Na-Noo: h.264 might be used for their spectator stream, but they have two video streams for each game. One is a proprietary codec that they developed for gameplay, and the other is closer to a normal video codec (could be h.264) used for viewing clips, or another person's game.

EDIT: @Awakening: I was also hoping that they would go for that sort of a model. Really, that's the model that I want for films/tv as well. I want to pay a monthly fee and be able to get unlimited access to whatever I want to watch. Netflix 'Watch it Now' is great, but it doesn't have everything. I would be willing to pay a decent amount/mo for either service. With the film/tv service, I'd be able to scrap cable (and not need to supplement with pirating), and with the gaming, I wouldn't really need to keep buying new games and game consoles.

 

[juniorm33]

@Na-Noo: h.264 might be used for their spectator stream, but they have two video streams for each game. One is a proprietary codec that they developed for gameplay, and the other is closer to a normal video codec (could be h.264) used for viewing clips, or another person's game.

They were talking about the gameplay stream I believe.

They say their hardware costs peanuts to make, that's why they may give it away with the subscription.

 

[emil10001]

@Na-Noo: h.264 might be used for their spectator stream, but they have two video streams for each game. One is a proprietary codec that they developed for gameplay, and the other is closer to a normal video codec (could be h.264) used for viewing clips, or another person's game.

They were talking about the gameplay stream I believe.

They say their hardware costs peanuts to make, that's why they may give it away with the subscription.

I obviously don't have any specific details as to how their system is implemented. I simply watched the 48 minute presentation/demo, and have read posts from several beta-testers. The article's source is a guy who knows h.264 really well and 'probably has connections,' he doesn't seem offer anything but some educated guesses about how their system works. That's better than I can do, but we don't really know how much real information the guy has.

At the end of the article, eurogamer said that given what was said above, that there is nothing technically outrageous about OnLive's claims, and that it will probably do a good enough job. The posts that I've read from beta users have said that the system was better than they expected. Though one tester complained about the 720p resolution, as he was used to 1920x1200.

In the end, I don't really care whether or not they're using h.264 as long as it works as advertised. Although, there would be a plus for us if it was using h.264, and that is that there is already support for that codec on our platform, so hopefully it would make developing a client that much easier.

 

[juniorm33]

You may have misunderstood me. Digitalfoundry are what's called pixel counters, and they admit it themselves, their not there to judge games on gameplay just pick the engines etc apart. I was just pointing out that the article didn't tell us much more than what's suspected about using h264. (which that's there purpose the technical side of gaming)

As they and yourself say it maybe good enough for most people other than a select few who thinks games don't look good when rendered at sub hd resolutions. Personally I agree with you, don't care how it's done when playing, although I am interested in those sides when I'm not.

 

[juniorm33]

I've not read the article yet, but they've used the onLive service so hopefully an interesting read PC Perspective

 

[mali]

I've not read the article yet, but they've used the onLive service so hopefully an interesting read PC Perspective

That's not encouraging, fps are basically unplayable

 

[Trip]

I've not read the article yet, but they've used the onLive service so hopefully an interesting read PC Perspective

That's not encouraging, fps are basically unplayable

Like the reviewer said though he was out of the service zone so you should expect some degradation of service.
Good review over all but I really do think that the reviewer needs to do another review (identical to this one) but from inside the support zone

 

[mali]

Like the reviewer said though he was out of the service zone so you should expect some degradation of service.
Good review over all but I really do think that the reviewer needs to do another review (identical to this one) but from inside the support zone

Oh, I missed that. Just had a quick glance at the UT3 part.