Reducing PS2 hardware requirements with Onlive.com?

[Figment]

A friend of mine introduced me yesterday to this website:

http://www.onlive.com/

From what I understood, basically they render a game for you with their hardware, after which they stream the video result back to you.

Again, as I understood it, at the cost of some lag (say up to 170 ms ping depending on where you are).

You reckon PS2 could also be rendered elsewhere and streamed to you for those players that don't have the hardware to run it optimally? What would be the downsides by going through a third party like onlive? Would lag ruin the gameplay experience?

To me it looks like all the games on offer at onlive are one off purchases or more or less subscription based as an alternative. Free to play games like PS2 may not fit in their profile. I also wonder how safe your login information would be. On top of that of course, you can look directly over the shoulder of other players with this particular online service, which would create spying issues.

If such a service would become available at any time, would it be better for SOE/Prosieben to offer such a service themselves? Would you be interested in such a service?

[Shogun]

these services are quite new and still need to evolve a little.
but i really think once they manage to provide lagfree gaming worldwide, they might kill the console world.

but those services don´t let you play for free. you basically rent the game and pay for the time you want to play it, so free to play games don´t really fit into their profile.

another cloudgaming site:
www.gaikai.com

[Ragefighter]

is that like the mac version of gaming =p
gotta buy an app for it to work lol
jk

But really I think this would just cause more lag for you since it would have to send the video feed over the internet and than all your inputs will have to be sent to their server than to SOE.

plus PS2 is made to play on old hardware (i mean not like 10 years old but I think i read 5 year old machines could handle it. if you want the bells and whistles you'll probably need a moderately spec'ed PC. I doubt you'll need something like SLI or a high end cpu.

What are your specs now?
I know, afaik, the sys reqs are not public yet but should be able to give a ballpark estimate of how it will be.

"If such a service would become available at any time, would it be better for SOE/Prosieben to offer such a service themselves? Would you be interested in such a service?"

Probably not since than they would be spreading themselves too thinly imo. better to keep them focused on games than the services this company provides, it looks kinda expensive to run an an optional feature tbh but idk.

[Gandhi]

Important thing to remember is that the lag is for your own input as well as everyone else's. Meaning if you press a button it'll take 150ms or whatever the lag is until your character reacts, I don't know about you but in an FPS game I'd find that infuriating. That's on top of the extra lag it creates for everyone else's actions from your point of view.

My old E6850 with 2GB of RAM and an HD 4870 won't be running this game on high, but maybe it'll be enough to run it decently at medium or at least low. It runs Tribes: Ascend just fine, so I'm hopeful.

[Mastachief]

Onlive and the like are potentially the future of gaming but they just are not quite there for FPS games just yet.

[Figment]

Fyi, my PC is up to spec, just musing about it since I knew a lot of people with low fps rates for PS1. And that's with less graphical strain.

[Sabrak]

Basically, you'll just avoid the hardware requirements, but you'll multiplicate the lag.

Instead of this: SOE Servers > Your game client > SOE Servers
You'll do this: SOE Servers > Clouding game client > Your computer > Clouding game client > SOE Servers.

That's not worth it.

[WarrantOfficer]

This service is truly awful when it comes to any sort of twitch shooter, Onlive may be good for puzzle games and other things that aren't as much about reaction and speed so much as solving but when it comes to any other genre it falls out due to the fact that it is nothing more than a middle man.

What do I mean?
Well if you already have input lag at your home like I do (Do not ever pay for any comcast services if theres an alternative) then Onlive will effectively double that because the game is streamed to you and the SOE server. So you hit the W key to move forwards, that packet is sent to the SOE server and processed and then sent to the Onlive server and the result is streamed back to you.

Keep in mind that the distance of the onlive datacenter from you and the SOE datacenter can be so significant that you could effectively triple current input lag that you may already have, overall Onlive is little more than paying for something that you don't need to pay for in the first place and if you really think you can play a twitch shooter seriously with 550ms of input lag, smeary visuals, and regular freezing then you will be sorely mistaken.

Did I mention that the service is only open for consumers in Canada, the U.S. and England? No? Well there you go. In the end you will have more fun when you're paying for a PC or laptop that is capable of running Planetside 2, I'm not saying Onlive can't be a good service; But if you think it is right now then you must not have a good understanding of networking, if you're already shelling out 120$ a month or so for a 4MB DL 0.5MB UL connection then you better be prepared to start paying more if you want to make serious use of Onlive, it is by no coincidence that ISP's are some of the biggest supporters of Onlive.

[DaSwede]

Can't beat physics.

Having to go through their service and then to the game servers and back will never be viable for a FPS game.
The way the internet is wired and routed it's just way to many hops which add latency, simple as that.

[Chinchy]

Yawn this peasant talk bores me. I will never have to use Onlive to play any games with my computer specs this "Future of Gaming" is garbage and tbh I don't think that it will ever catch on someone with a superior home computer will always have a huge advantage over someone who uses that bogus rental service. But you have fun playing your bejeweled for $50 a month I'm gonna go play Planetside 2.

[DayOne]

Onlive is a great service. I doubt it will ever truly overtake console/PC gaming because of graphics and sending packets straight from your computer to a server you're playing on will always be faster than sending the packet to Onlive, the server you're on, back to Onlive and then back to your screen.

Also the graphics will never be as good.

[Chinchy]

What I would actually like to see them do is make onlive a tablet app it would make way more sense than trying to push it on us. It would be an almost instant monopoly for them to exploit as well.

[Sirisian]

I've used both OnLive and Gaikai at my work under ideal conditions and the services are both amazing. Ideal conditions being a 1 gbps LAN line and I live in Michigan so I have an 8 ms latency to their Chicago servers. There is no input delay in that situation so twitch FPS games work perfectly fine and play just like a desktop game.

However, as others have mentioned and it's been hinted at the SOE servers for Planetside 2 might be located in Las Vegas. The latency from Las Vegas to Chicago using the fiber backbone would be around 20 ms. (Note, there is no last mile latency to OnLive or most game servers). For me using OnLive to play Planetside I'd probably experience around 30 ms latency.

The more ideal scenario would be OnLive building datacenters into SOEs system. Under that scenario anyone with 5.3 mbps down (the maximum bandwidth OnLive uses which I've tested over a period of an hour of running it) would be able to play it at whatever OnLive sets the quality. (Their system requires almost no upload bandwidth except for voice since input is basically nothing).

If anyone is curious OnLive because of their specialized algorithms is higher quality than Gaikai. So it could work, but not for enough people to be useful probably. Then again for a free to play game paying OnLive, say 5 dollars a month, to play Planetside 2 from anywhere with good Internet isn't a bad idea and would get people at universities. OnLive works over wi-fi surprisingly well at my university.

[Vash02]

When internet speeds get up to around the 10+mbps average it will probably be viable then.

[ThGlump]

For online shooters this is no good service. But if SOE would offer something similar, on servers that are in same datacenter as game server (so no additional lag), it could be handy for some, and good subscription model for soe to earn some money.

[Geist]

I'm hopeful that some point in the future latency will be a thing of the past. Then things like Onlive will be commonplace, even for twitch shooters.

Won't stop me from building my super computer though. Gotta love building something with your own 2 hands. :D

[dachlatte]

I'm hopeful that some point in the future latency will be a thing of the past. Then things like Onlive will be commonplace, even for twitch shooters.

Won't stop me from building my super computer though. Gotta love building something with your own 2 hands. :D

i dont think the latency problem will be solved in our lifetime though :D

and you are right. building your own rig is half the fun of gaming

[Ragefighter]

hmm after looking around the site a bit this looks pretty cool. NOT for mmo or online multiplayer but to use with a tablet or my Xperia Play (YES i actually bought that phone...) for singleplayer stuff.

might check out a demo/trial to see if it works on my phone (since my phone has all the Playstation buttons could be fun to see if they got anything worth playing for $10 a month or if i just buy a specific game...
not sure how that would work.

but yea, this has it's place, defiantly wont replace my rig but nice to know I may have options if im on the road.