yeah, make that 9 months.
the greatest game ever would be a 2d castlevania style game with the following elements of mmorpgs:
* classes
* skill trees
* procedurally generated weapons, armor and accessories (as well as uniques)
* group instances
* crazy scripted boss fights
now if you would be so kind, konami…
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article
i was linked this article earlier as proof that onlive cannot possibly work the way it has been presented. the writer does make several good points, but they are presented in a way as to easily sway the reader instead of just stating facts.
To give the kind of performance OnLive is promising (720p at 60 frames-per-second) realistically its datacenters are going to require the processing equivalent of a high-end dual core PC running a very fast GPU – a 9800GT minimum, and maybe something a bit meatier depending on whether the 60fps gameplay claim works out, and which games will actually be running. That’s for every single connection OnLive is going to be handling.
this is obviously false. with most of today’s games, if you have a very high end consumer pc with 4 of the best video cards, you can run multiple copies of a game simultaneously with no problem at all. later on he makes an allusion to having high end servers, but for some reason he still says that you’d need one machine per user.
Not only will these datacenters be handling the gameplay, they will also be encoding the video output of the machines in real time and piping it down over IP to you at 1.5MBps (for SD) and 5MBps (for HD). OnLive says you will be getting 60fps gameplay. First of all, bear in mind that YouTube’s encoding farms take a long, long time to produce their current, offline 2MBps 30fps HD video. OnLive is going to be doing it all in real-time via a PC plug-in card, at 5MBps, and with surround sound too.
several things here. first of all, i’ll be nitpicky and say the units he used were incorrect. it should be 1.5Mbps and 5Mbps, because it’s referring to megabits not megabytes. second, they have only stated that those speeds are the minimum required connection for using the service at SD or HD resolution. they have said nothing about it actually using all that bandwidth (or bitrate) all the time. in fact they have explicitly stated that most of the time with 720p video you’re looking at closer to 2Mbps (just like youtube’s HD video). also, the framerate isn’t really as much of an issue as people make it out to be. going from 30fps to 60fps hardly increases the bitrate of a video because most of those frames are b-frames (tiny interstitial frames that only contain a bit of delta information, that tell the decoder where objects have moved and how fast they’re moving, etc). lastly, he makes it sound like the video encoding hardware is just a pci card that anybody can buy in a store, when clearly it’s very specialized.
The bottom line here is that OnLive’s ‘interactive video compression algorithm’ must be so utterly amazing, and orders of magnitude better than anything ever made, that you wonder why the company is bothering with videogames at all when the potential applications are so much more staggering and immense.
it’s definitely true that it sounds too good to be true, but what other potential applications are there? i’m not quite sure what media needs instant video playback other than video games.
he posted a “sample video” of what it would look like to encode game footage in realtime. unfortunately, the test in question is obviously not very scientific. he wrote nothing about the encoding process or the source material. to me it looks like the source of the video was previously-encoded game footage which means you’re looking at generational loss. he obviously used a software compressor to do the encoding. using a hardware compressor will obviously increase the quality by quite a bit. this is the part that doesn’t make any sense to me. why is it so unbelievable that they have a low-latency realtime video encoder that can produce high quality video? realtime LOSSLESS video encoding has existed for at least 8 years, and that’s just off the top of my head. it’s probably been longer than that. the point he brings up that actually raises a legitimate question is, onlive has stated that their video encoding only introduces 1ms of latency. for that to be true, the video encoder has to be running at 1000fps. i would assume their model includes running multiple users per server, and somehow creating hardware that can encode many 720p signals in realtime at 1000fps seems basically impossible. this is the first real point that makes it seem like onlive is trying to pull a fast one.
the second and last point that makes it seem unlikely is the issue of latency. if you assume onlive’s claim of introducing 1ms of latency in the encoding process is true, there is still the issue of sending that video stream over the internet. even with the most optimized routing and data centers all over the country, it seems unlikely that you could get latency to any less than about 50ms. with 50ms of input lag, almost any game would be unplayable. if they have somehow gotten around the network latency issue with their “psychophysics” development, i’d be very interested to read about how that works.
what i don’t understand is how they could have gotten all these publishers/developers to sign up with them if they didn’t even have to give a real demo. if i worked at EA and i was being presented with this technology, i would say, “okay, can we load this up on my laptop and see how it performs?” if anyone did that, that proves that it works. if not, why the hell not?
i’ll remain skeptical about whether or not this service is going to work. but i really really hope it does.
i know this guy who will take every opportunity to gloat about how ps3 is failing. he cites a multitude of “game blog” writers who have nothing better to do than post sensational articles with absolutely no substance. many of these try to show why ps3 is doing poorly. however the fact is that it is not doing poorly at all. below is a sales chart with the release dates for all 3 current gen systems lined up at the origin.
hardware sales since release (source: vgchartz.com)
clearly, ps3 was basically neck and neck with xbox 360 for since-release sales until about halfway through ps3’s life when it actually gained a lot of ground on 360. if this trend continues, 360 will eventually be overtaken. that’s not even considering the facts that ps3 has always costed more than 360, and 360 had a failure rate of nearly 30% at release, causing many people to go buy another system, artificially inflating sales figures.
another way to look at this is to imagine of ps3 had been out as long as xbox 360 has. we can basically estimate mathematically how this would look. to do that, you just need the number of days since each console’s release date, and the number of units sold.
xbox 360 came out in the us and canada on november 22nd, 2005, 1209 days ago. ps3 came out in japan on november 11th, 2006, 855 days ago. since the most recent known hardware sales figures are from march 7th, we’ll subtract 8 days giving us 1201 and 847 respectively. since then, xbox 360 has sold 29.1 million units, and ps3 has sold 20.98 million units. (source vgchartz.com)
29,100,000 units / 1201 days = 24,230 xbox 360 units per day 20,980,000 units / 847 days = 24,770 ps3 units per day
from there, we can extrapolate based on the average units sold per day to arrive at a theoretical number of ps3s sold if it had been out as long as xbox 360:
24,770 units * 1201 days = 29,748,770 units 29,748,770 ps3s - 29,100,000 360s = 648,770 more ps3s than 360s
so basically, in spite of more expensive hardware, hardware that actually works, and having “too few good exclusives”, the ps3 hardware is still selling just as well or better than 360. don’t let the naysayers misguide you.
p.s. i don’t want to hear about how it’s because ps3 has a bluray drive. sony gambled on bluray and won. that’s business.
only lazy complacent businessmen are afraid of services that we once paid for becoming free.
google is beginning to dominate the market with free applications that can easily replace expensive ones. google can afford to do this, so why shouldn’t it? businessmen would have you believe it’s stifling the economy to give these (and other) things away (or sell them cheaper than they can). what’s stifling the economy is people complaining that one company can afford to give away (or sell for cheaper) products that have traditionally been expensive. why is this? because people are too comfortable with the way things are. they’re too lazy to imagine what else they could possibly be doing other than their current jobs.
if a job becomes obsolete due to technological advancement, there is no reason to try to “save” that job. it is obsolete. everybody has heard the guy talking about how pretty soon machines are going to be doing everything and that’s so terrible. well, people aren’t born to do manual labor. the less tedious nonsense people have to do, the more time they have available to do more important things.
people are clamoring about the automotive industry as well. it would have evolved past what it is now years ago if it wasn’t for the leaders of said industry stifling innovation because there wasn’t as much money to be made if cars didn’t run on gasoline.
wall street has suffered a huge blow due to investors thinking they can nudge the market around in whatever direction they like in order to make more money.
all these mistakes that have been made to further the ends of businessmen by growing companies too big just because they can (could), setting up extremely risky investment portfolios, giving out sub-prime mortgages, et cetera have culminated in suffering for everyone, even those who weren’t involved at all.
but why did those businessmen do all those things in the first place? well, that’s because we’re all trained to believe capitalism is the greatest possible economic system. well, capitalism only works if you actually meet the demands of the consumers. shoving things down people’s throats is only going to work for so long. screwing everyone else in order to further your own private interests will only work for so long. and now we’re beginning to see what happens when people do those things.
so to bring it all together, people need to open their minds to advancement. previous generations understood these things are necessary. now people have come to look at job obsolescence as something scary, instead of something liberating. we need a paradigm shift in order to progress as a civilization. how that can happen, i don’t know. i just hope i live to see it.
i guess i’m going to start doing this now. i have several posts that i want to write built up, so i’ll probably write a few in a row and then stop for like 3 months. look forward to it.