New gaming Platform. (in Off-topic)

Hey I stumbled upon this when I was on MLG. It's brand new system of gaming and it's just entering the beta phase. Hopefully it'll be out soon, but I figured you gamers would like to see this. Here's the link: http://www.mlgpro.com/forum/showthread.php?t=235623

"(there will be NO response lag. It will perform like LAN)"

I don't think they understand how the internet works.

indeed; they have a bandwidth specification, but no mention of latency. anyone trying with satellite internet will be sorely disappointed :P

they want 1ms response, even if you have fibre optics working at 300.000km/h you can only be 300km away from the server.

as 300.000 * 0.001 = 300 km

This is already doomed to fail

If this is legit then it'll be the best thing that's ever happened to gamers.

The internet: a series of tubes.
But really, there is no way this can work.

I'm hoping in 7 years someone would have noticed that. I think it could be sweet.

this removes competetion. what comes from SUPERCOMPUTER FARMS anyways?

Why wouldn't it work? Just because we can't think of a way to make something like that work doesn't mean it's impossible. It must be at least somewhat impressive because OnLive has 6 major game publishing companies supporting it. I've been watching the OnLive Press Conference at GDC 2009 and it looks really legitimate.

1ms latency actually implies a 150km maximum distance, given 300,000 km/sec.

This seems like a really cool idea. I'm not sure how Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will get their slice, but it would be nice not to have to upgrade as frequently.

Btw isn't this how terminals were setup in the past? Or am I confusing that with some sci-fi..

I'm interested to see if they can accomplish the 1ms. Just because we don't see how it's possible, maybe they've found a way. I'm not going to get my hopes TOO high, but this could potentially be one of the greatest things to happen to gaming in a long long time.

They cannot find a way to create pings of 1ms, unless they can move information faster than the speed of light.

Actually they have done that :p

Yeah, but is the first application of faster-than-light information travel really going to be in the gaming sector...? (The answer is no)

Anyways, I'll put a thousand bucks on this technology not catching on, at least for the next... six or seven years.

I believe they may mean to say that interaction between all players will be under 1 millisecond (They are all on LAN after all). For this to increase performance, their new "HD stream encryption: algorithm would need to transfer an entire high definition screen's worth of pixels (Mine is 1920x1080) 60 or more times per second. The load could be eased by only sending pixels that have changed color since the last update, but that might not be very helpful in a 3D game setting where a slight perspective shift can change every pixel on your screen.

If you've ever watched videos online, you might notice that these much, much smaller than full-screen videos, playing at less than 60fps, often chug and download slowly. With high definition screens at 60fps or higher I'm not sure exactly how realistic this idea is.

Yeah, tell them they're all complete morons and they were talking about the video decompression. They compress the video so it doesn't take nearly as much bandwidth to send and the decompression rate, which is generally about half a second, is at 1 millisecond for this system. I have ADHD and I was able to pay attention and figure that out.


From a friend.

Slayer, this isn't a hypothetical gaming console. It starts open beta testing in the summer and it will be released in the winter...

I'm told they are also selling a bridge, somewhere in New York...

Usually announcements like these are made next Wednesday...

Well the Sears tower is to become the Willis tower... (a London based company)

*edit for next Wednesday*

State, are you attempting to dig into me or did I read you incorrectly?

I'd love to know how they cut video compression so that it the compressed data or stream is only 1/500 of the size (As you describe, from 500ms to under 1ms) of the industry-leading video compression, and why it's not already being used for 50 things that aren't video games.

just wondering how many of u actually watched the conference video?

I watched the G4TV broadcast from the GDC. Im also not sure how they can do this without people lagging in at least some servers. Thing is, is this gonna be a monthly payment, AND pay for each game? How will that work?

You click Buy on the game you wanna buy, it's charged on your debit card, in addition to the monthly fee charged. Why is that complicated?

I said i didn't know how it was to do business, didn't know if it was free, and you just paid for games, or if it was p2p, and pay for the game.

I realize this device already exists, I'm just saying, the claims they make are outrageous, and I cannot wait to see it fail upon launch. :)

the crappy thing is if they stream graphics to you as a raw signal. Something in your pc must surely convert this signal in graphics again? (GPU anyone?)
And to get smooth graphics you need one of the latest GPU's around

HD4890 or the GTX275?

Wow another better than can believed compression technology that's going to lead to amazing video transfer speeds...

This crap is old hat. Unless you've got fiber running to your house, the latency for even the best DSL is 20ms, cable tends to be similar if not worse. This type of investor scamming hokum comes around every so often...

Or a GTX300. :)

Would never work like it is supose to unless they have wires running from there servers directly to your house. Your internet signal tranfers over a couple mediums types before it gets to your house. So unless all those mediums are up to par with the standards, or goes though quite a few repeaters, your signal will be slowed before it gets to your house.
Just my opinion, would be cool though

just do a tracert to this site and the only one that will take a 1ms is the hop to your home net router if you have one. How are they going to keep that speed up through the other routers you hop through.
Heck pinging this site alone is a average of 55ms for me.
Answer i want to know about this thing :P

I'm signed up for beta testing hopefully they respond and i can give you the detailed specs

"Wow another better than can believed compression technology that's going to lead to amazing video transfer speeds...

This crap is old hat. Unless you've got fiber running to your house, the latency for even the best DSL is 20ms, cable tends to be similar if not worse. This type of investor scamming hokum comes around every so often..."

Man nov you should go and work for EA games and Ubisoft, you'd never get fooled like hooligans working there providing the games.

Of course game companies support a technology like this, start making releases exclusive to this technology and you wipe out piracy, and force people to purchase this medium to play your games.

If you don't think a company will lie to people to get investors/hype, you are wrong.

"Your controller responses upload instantaneously to the game and the compression rate sends you an HD stream of the game back to your computer in under a millisecond.
They are able to do this with a new form of compression they created called Interactive HD Video Compression."

This is hokum, it's magic and without quantum communication (http://eve.physics.ox.ac.uk/NewWeb/Research/communication/communication.html) isn't possible. This really is probably the umpteenth time someone has made these claims only to eat crow raw when the investors realized what was going on.

All I see so far are interviews, give me a URL to an actual review done by someone connecting over DSL or cable (Hell I'd even except FiOS) and I'll start considering the possibility.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/25/video-onlive-streaming-game-demonstrated/ explains the latency issue partially.
They make no claim to have solved the issue, and are already putting distance limitations on it. 1000miles sounds like a lot, but it will really limit where they can take this tech. If you want to do ANYTHING else on your connection while you play, you're hosed.

They have NOT solved the very real issue of latency, I think your helping of crow is just about ready AG.

lol nov :)

as much as i have to say (that has mostly already been said), our arguments are primarily against the post in the mlg forums rather than the claims made by the actual service... i'm having trouble loading the official site (local lag, i'd guess) but i doubt theirs are as idiotic. beyond the standard sales hyperbole, they would get sued for such things.

For the layperson all this talk of latency might be confusing. I've recently had to explain this a number of time to people who either had or intended to use high bandwidth high latency connections for gaming.

Imagine a road, it has two lanes and a 55 mile an hour speed limit.
There is a certain number of cars that can safely drive on the road over a given period. If any additional cars attempt to drive on the same road you will experience traffic, and slower speeds.

This is dialup.

Now imagine a highway with 4 lanes on either side, but still having a speed limit of 55. You can certainly pack a lot more cars onto that road, but they don't really go any faster, they just don't get bogged down in traffic thereby keeping the evil demon latency from bringing thing to a near halt.

This would be satellite or cell phone based connections, No matter how many lanes (bandwidth) you add, you can't get past the speed limit (latency)

Ok take that same 8 lane highway, move it to Germany or Montana and raise the speed limit to whatever it is that your particular mode of transport is capable of... say you're in a rocket car capable of breaking the sound barrier. You can get down the same length of road a LOT faster than the pokey old law abiding folks and because you have a wide road with many lanes it's unlikely that your fellow drivers will keep you from driving those insane speeds.

This last example is an attempt to explain what the typical consumer level of internet is capable of. Even the fancy new 100 megabit a second connection we in the US are (finally) starting to see have to deal with the limitations of the speed of light, not to mention the latency of the users network gear.

Yeah but why would they straight up lie? I can imagine them overexaggerating but to completely lie seems unlikely, given that they have 6 major game publishing companies backing them.

Every company lies, they do it to create a rabid fanbase who romanticize the product and in the end, will buy it no matter what. As far as companies that produce games/consoles, that is.

Anyone remember the Phantom game console, by Infinium Labs?

It's a lie of omission.

What they say is "we've eliminated latency"

What they mean is "we've lowered the latency for a particular piece of the puzzle that is HD video streaming" Which in this case is the video compression.

I'm not saying what they've done isn't cool, I just don't see hard core gamers going for something that can't manage to keep a frame rate that's better than TV.

That's exactly what came to mind when I saw this Bart