Why do Americans get all the cool stuff…
It seems like OnLive is going to be released to the general public pretty soon despite all the skepticism towards it. Of course, when I say “general public”, it really means “the American public”. And as I said, there’s a bunch of skepticism as to how well and compelling this will really be. Personally, if I had the chance, I’d sign up for this service on day one. My computers are always so outdated (I’m typing this on a 3 year old iMac now, that takes like 10 seconds to open up Firefox mind you) and I don’t have a console (because my TV doesn’t even have a HDMI input), meaning there’re a bunch of games that I can’t play. Or rather every single game that’s been released within the last year can’t run on my computers. If only I had OnLive, everything would be so much better.
I have to admit I was pretty skeptical about this service when it was first announced, because it sounded too good to be true. Even now there arre people commenting that something like this can’t be fully realised for at least another 10 years. However, after watching the video below, I truly believe something like this is actually going to be possible within the next year or so. Reason being they’ve done so much technical stuff to surpass the current limits, not only that but they’ve also thought about the problems they’re facing from a new perspective.
For example the way OnLive basically works is that the game itself will run on they’re uber fast servers that can even run Cysis at max settings. Then, these computers will process whatever is supposed to be shown on screen, apply a video compression algorithm and what the user ultimately sees on his or her screen is essentially a video of what happened after each of their button presses.
Now such a thing would have been impossible in the pass due to current video compression techniques. Reason being they’re built to make each and every frame of the video look the way it should look. Meaning that if you pause a movie, the frame will show all the details perfectly, since a video is basically a bunch of images displayed one after another so when you pause a movie you’re basically staring at a single picture.
It would have been impossible to use such techniques to conduct live streaming of a video game, because the video would be too damn big. So what they’ve (somehow) done is to use a completely new video compression technique that makes the video look good while it’s in motion, reason being one would never actually “pause” a video game. Thus, while the game itself will look good when it’s playing, if you went and paused the video that’s being streamed to your computer screen, the resulting frame might or might not look good, as there’ll be packet losses along the way and stuff. However, this isn’t a problem at all since the video of the game will never actually be paused, thus solving the problem.
Pure genius honestly.
How do I know all this? From the presentation the CEO of OnLive gave to a group of students at the University of Colombia. It’s 48 minutes long, but it’s really informative about the service itself, and shows you how the many obvious problems they faced were ultimately solvable.
Games like Killzone 2, Gears of War, Halo, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, etc. are often touted as “games that sell consoles”. They are supposedly so amazing, both graphically as well as gameplay wise, that they’re supposed to convince people to buy one console or the other just to play these exclusive titles. The production values for such triple-A titles are even comparable with that of big-budget films, with voice-actors having to rehearse their lines multiple times, designers and animators making everything look as realistic as possible, programmers making turning all that into action-packed gameplay. Not to mention plenty of these titles easily have budgets that hit 8 digits (Killzone 2 had a budget of over US$40 million).
Memory cards