Thoughts on OnLive

June 17 OnLive officially launched in the United States. Wolfire Games has delivered an article about this, the free translation of which I offer to your attention.


If you have never heard of OnLive, then this is an ambitious gaming service with a unique concept: instead of downloading, installing and running games on your computer or console, you are delivered an audio-video stream from a server where the running game is controlled by you remotely.

When OnLive was just announced, many, especially gaming journalists and developers met the idea with hostility. Basically, it all came down to the fact that the time for such services has not yet come - the network infrastructure is not yet able to drive interactive video in real time. The fabulous optimism of the OnLive team along with the policy of total secrecy gave rise to skepticism - if everything is so good, why not show the goods face?
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On Thursday, June 17, the covers were thrown off. I was a member of the beta test program and played pretty tight on my Macbook pro and PC, so here are my five kopecks. Just want to say - it works. Not perfect, but at least for beta testers in San Francisco it works quite well.

At a minimum, OnLive proved that some of the most demanding computing applications — games — can be virtualized and transferred in real-time stream with a very low latency. And what does this mean for the gaming industry and gamers of all the Earth - mmmm ...

How it works

OnLive for Mac OS X is an 8 MB application. You run it, enter your username and password and connect. After authorization, OnLive performs several network connection tests.



From my computer, OnLive sent requests to several different servers located in different data centers and then decided which one to use. For me in San Francisco, the best data center in Santa Clara was chosen, located in 14 milliseconds of flight test packets.



According to the native Makovsky Monitoring, OnLive opened a stream at a speed of 700 KB / s.
So ... 700 "boars" say? So far, South Koreans and Japanese, as well as some lucky Euros, hang out every day on classmates and contacts at such or even higher speeds, here in the US, such an Internet is a wonder. I have the cheapest fare, no buns. How is this possible ?? I will focus on this below.

On the other hand, I tried OnLive at a friend's house, with AT & T's ADSL. Although her house is only one and a half kilometers away from me, she can hardly watch videos on YouTube with her bad Internet. So, OnLive didn't even let me log in.


The general distrust of OnLive comes down to the following: “700 KB / s seem implausible. Usually, I'm happy when the download goes at about 150 KB / s. And unless such speeds will not be worth OnLive of many millions? It can't be true. ”

If you are not familiar with content delivery networks , such as Akamai, then this seems like a fatal blow to OnLive. However, there is another food for thought: how much does a transfer of 100 gigabytes at a speed of 100 megabytes to your neighbor's computer cost? And transfer terabyte? And petabyte? The answer is 10 dollars at a time at the rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, this is the price of a standard twisted pair of the fifth category. The same is with regard to transferring information to a neighboring house - the main thing is to be on the same subnet. In addition to paying for cable, such packages do not require any other costs. The infrastructure is already laid. Any cash wrap is the amortization by providers of the initial investment in infrastructure. In many cases, this is just marketing, just as mobile operators charge 10 rubles for several dozens of letters in SMS and simultaneously give you free minutes of conversation, during which a thousand or two SMS messages can flow through the busy channel. Data centers usually take money for unlimited connectivity, you simply reserve a channel in X gigabytes.

Difficulties come when you try to transfer information to different underdeveloped subnets. My home is just a couple of routers from the data center in Santa Clara, but my girlfriend's ADSL modem is fenced off from the same center by twice as many. And the more networks there are on the way, the more data transfer turns into a bottleneck of the system.

OnLive seeks to circumvent these problems by increasing the number of its data centers in different parts of the Earth and concluding partnership agreements with providers ( this has already been agreed with the British and Belgian telecoms ), although OnLive is very hidden in terms of these details. All I can say is that it works for me, at least at the time of beta testing with a small load. Soon we will find out whether it will work at full load.

What about lags?

It entirely depends on your location and the quality of communication with OnLive data centers. The data center in Santa Clara responds to ping from my residence in San Francisco for 14 ms, so I assume that the delay on the screen will be the same, plus a few milliseconds to compress the stream on the server.

This is definitely a noticeable delay, but I quickly got used to it. I lost the whole FEAR 2 with such a delay and did not feel discomfort. However, if you have a regular version of FEAR 2, then when you switch to the OnLive version, it takes time to get used to it.

Remember how the first LCDs appeared with a huge delay? Some of them even had a special gaming mode that made the screen more responsive. The game OnLive is similar to the game on one of these displays - quite playable for many, but if you are used to the complete absence of delay, it will be uncomfortable.

Interestingly, when I only heard about OnLive, I thought it would be the perfect solution for games like World of Goo, while all kinds of shooters would be contraindicated. After I tried the system myself, the point of view changed to the opposite. Games in which you want to move the cursor are very difficult to manage with any delay, while 3D games like Batman, Borderlands and FEAR 2 are very easy to manage.

Another interesting feature is that OnLive does not allow using wi-fi, although I think this restriction will be removed in the future. At the moment, the computer must be connected by cable. I got it a bit jolly and I conducted an experiment by connecting the cable to the wi-fi point. This added about 4 ms of delay and affected the quality of communication - some packets were lost. So it becomes clear why they require wired Internet at the moment.

What do the games look like?

Games look like videos of these games in 720p resolution. Very good and close to the original, but the compression comes with a loss, so the quality is not perfect.

This is easy to see in games like World of Goo with its clear two-dimensional image; in 3D games, compression artifacts are very difficult to catch.



World of Goo OnLive against the "native" version.




FEAR 2 OnLive vs. FEAR 2 demo on the PC in maximum settings.


When I studied FEAR 2, I found that the OnLive version does not work at maximum detail compared to the “native” version. I asked the guys from OnLive about this: it turns out they compromised in the settings for a good balance. It is difficult to accurately describe what their algorithm does.

Iron is no longer needed

The main thing is that OnLive reduces the technical requirements for the player’s computer to a minimum. It does not matter on which ancient laptop you try to play a fashionable title, the main thing is to “pull” HD video. The value of this factor is very large.

Moreover, OnLive can theoretically provide such games that on the overwhelming majority of computers cannot even be launched ( ultrahigh cruise in 2007 ... oh :) ).

OnLive - a platform

You "port" the game from the PC to OnLive and get OnLive clients. But OnLive works on both Windows and Mac OS X, and soon it’s just “on TV”. At E3, the game was shown on the iPad.

Apple now get access to tons of games, which they have never had before. If OnLive is smashed up by a client under Linux, it will be even more fun: Linux users, who usually get good games every five years, can become desirable consumers for game publishers.

Of course, as one might guess, some publishers are not very happy about this turn:


This is an attempt to run Mass Effect 2. Here's what they write about this in the OnLive FAQ:

Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions, you can offer Mass Effect 2 only for playing under Windows ... We apologize. In OnLive there are no more games with such an idiotic restriction and are unlikely to appear in the future.

This idiocy of pure water and a great example of the attractiveness and suspiciousness of OnLive. I can enable VMWare with Windows and thus run MassEffect 2 in OnLive under Windows, virtualized in VMWare under Mac OS X.

Super Sandbox Games

A strange feeling when the game is launched not in a sandbox, but in general on a remote server. As a result, regardless of what is happening on the screen - even though there are a lot of bots exploding each other with megatons of polygons - the OnLive application always consumes the same amount of resources. Completely free, you can minimize the application and switch to others, pause the game or resize its window.

We are used to the fact that it is not recommended to run other heavy processes during the game. The transition from a game to another application often ends with the collapse of a game program, or even the entire operating system. With OnLive, all games become white and fluffy. Simultaneously with the game, you can encode video, install programs, compile codes, and perform everything that you normally cannot do at the same time as a game. Of course, depending on the task, the delay in OnLive may increase - when I squeezed the video, everything was fine, but as soon as I turned on the stream recording from the screen, I found noticeable brakes in OnLive responsiveness.

Demo Games

I will try to compare the demo version of Unreal Tournament 3 as a traditional game and through OnLive.

First you need to find a link to the file. Googling, fished out a few links, but these were beta versions. Finally, the demo showed up on the NVidia website .

I started uploading a 758 megabyte file (quite a small file, the demo versions of Batman and FEAR 2 weigh 2 gigabytes each). Half an hour of waiting and here is my file.

Run the installer. For starters, he began to unpack himself, which took about 5 minutes. At the same time, I had to watch the process all the time in order to click the “Continue” button when there were any worthless questions. Unfortunately, Windows decided to update something at the same moment and demanded a reboot. Again, unpacking, running the installer and countless clicks.

Even more routine was required to install additional packages, like PhysX. This process requires your constant presence instead of just quietly setting in the background.

In the end, everything was installed successfully. I ran a demo and, you will laugh, received an error message telling you that it was impossible to work.

And now OnLive.
Perhaps I will post a video here instead of a description of the process. It shows all stages of getting a demo version, from the launch of the OnLive client to the game itself. Do not judge the quality of graphics on the video, the video was pinched three times (OnLive, Screen Flow, YouTube).



And by the way, UT3 never came out under Mac OS X :)

Honestly, I also tried Batman and FEAR 2 demo versions on my PC. Deploying them through Steam was much easier, despite the size of 2 GB. Batman on my weak PC was lame in both legs, but FEAR 2 ran perfectly.

SaaS

Being a Saas, OnLive provides tremendous opportunities. For example, you can sell access to games by day, with discounts for holidays, etc. Steam and other more traditional methods of distribution can not provide this, until you get your spooky DRM bundled with the game. In OnLive there is no need for any kind of chain dogs like this. OnLive also gives you to try most of the games for half an hour for free (and at the moment - also as many times as you like for half an hour).

The flip side of the coin is that you absolutely do not own the game.
Here is Stallman ’s warning about program-as-services . This is essentially a nightmare on the street of free software - you run a proprietary piece of code to access the world of closed applications, where the only connection between you and the game is a proprietary audio-video stream.

I have a premonition that this will be the reason for numerous discussions in a separate post, but I don’t think that it will bring anyone suffering, because as a consumer of OnLive you know perfectly well what you are going. It is absolutely clear that you are not buying a game, but just playing through a thin client. Like watching a movie in a movie theater instead of buying a DVD. And DVDs usually contain the entire set of licenses and DRM, which makes it difficult to make watching as easy and convenient as in a movie theater. In addition, sitting in the cinema you realize that you are not the owner of the disc, so all this is not such a problem.

Indie indie game developers

World of Goo is already in OnLive as a starting title, which is a good sign. I talked with the guys from OnLive at GDC and realized that they definitely want to cooperate with such developers, but due to the limited resources of such partnerships, there will not be many of them yet. See if they can get into OnLive Overgrowth or Lugaru .

Results

I think OnLive is the most amazing cloud computing show to date. Video games are the most demanding applications that strain every cog in your computer. OnLive enthusiastically tames these monsters, which opens up many possibilities.

I, like many, was very impressed with the news of the grand launch of OnLive on June 17th. But it looks like they are counting on a more modest launch, gradually attracting new users.

If you sign up for the Founding Users program, you will receive a letter explaining:

The number of accounts is limited for each US region. All registrants are placed on a waiting list to which invitations will be sent as each OnLive region is launched.

Well, OnLive - a revolution in the gaming industry or a cesspool for investment?