Onlive games

[Josquius]

Has anyone else seen this new service?
Its still in beta right now IIRC but from what I read its very interesting.
What it is essentially is streaming games or playing games from afar-
Your mouse/keyboard clicks are sent over the net to them where they are used on the game and the video is then sent back to your computer. Using this you can pretty much play the most cutting edge modern games on the shittyest of shitty computers.

Of course, you'll need a hell of a connection and I'd imagine the service will be expensive when properly launched - it'll require some pretty awesome servers- but still....its intruiging.
To me it sort of sounds like a return to the old days of computing where your computer would just be a crappy little terminal with no computing power of its own and everything was ran through a true central computer.

[Liep]

Yeah I've heard of this, it also makes your PC able to run every kind of console game. Sounds pretty neat.

[Korea]

Pretty amazing.

[Tamas]

Amazing?  The lag would just make anything non-turn based unbearably unplayable.

[Josquius]

Amazing?  The lag would just make anything non-turn based unbearably unplayable.

*insert comment about Hungary and mud huts here*
But yeah, that is the concern. Broadband is a thing of the past now though, super high speed connections are the way of the future and they are spreading.
I remember with online FPS a ping of under 200 used to be good enough. These days though its a disaster when you creep over 100.

[Liep]

Amazing?  The lag would just make anything non-turn based unbearably unplayable.

I suppose this will depend on your connection and the server they'll put up. But I'm willing to read reviews about the playability of this before I ignore it.

[derspiess]

I signed up for the beta but didn't hear back from them.  I love the concept, but I'm still skeptical how they'll deal with latency.

[Tamas]

games are made to react to clicks/control moves you actually make on your own computer. If you add to this the latency of the connection (smaller issue) to the actual process of streaming the reaction to you, you watching, then making a reaction move based on what happened in the moment when the whole encoding of the given streaming moment started.... impossible to be made properly.

[Slargos]

Amazing?  The lag would just make anything non-turn based unbearably unplayable.

*insert comment about Hungary and mud huts here*
But yeah, that is the concern. Broadband is a thing of the past now though, super high speed connections are the way of the future and they are spreading.
I remember with online FPS a ping of under 200 used to be good enough. These days though its a disaster when you creep over 100.

You played online FPS in the 80s? 

In the civilized world, any ping above 50 marks you a n00b when it comes to FPS. 

[Slargos]

games are made to react to clicks/control moves you actually make on your own computer. If you add to this the latency of the connection (smaller issue) to the actual process of streaming the reaction to you, you watching, then making a reaction move based on what happened in the moment when the whole encoding of the given streaming moment started.... impossible to be made properly.

Depends on where the servers will be located and the quality of your uplink.

10 or even 100mbit fiber connections are becoming more and more common in the civilized world, and back when I was on one of those I recall getting as low as 15-20 to the best servers.