The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Is Remote Play for the PC possible?
emnmnme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The big barrier in PC gaming is keeping up with technology. You can't play modern games on a four year old budget machine and most casual types don't seem to get that - what with all the integrated graphics and slow RAM, they buy their $500 PC + monitor and Windows '98 package and expect to enjoy Bioshock when the thing can barely run The Sims 2. But after I read about how the PSP is expected to be able to stream PS3 games and HD movies with some miraculous future firmware update that does some jiggery-pokery with encoding, I wondered why the same can't be done with PC gaming.
Using an online service, players' input is sent to a more beefy system actually running the game. The gameplay is streamed back to the player's monitor. Through a broadband connection, there is no lag. The player takes his or her 500Mhz e-Machine with no video card and is able to enjoy Crysis with detailed DX10.1 settings.
Now, I'm not interested in the economics of it all or if the service would mimic Steam or Gametap - I just want to know if it can be done short of setting up a video camera in front of a monitor. If a Tandy or a Pentium III could run Team Fortress 2, that'd be pretty sweet.
Using an online service, players' input is sent to a more beefy system actually running the game. The gameplay is streamed back to the player's monitor. Through a broadband connection, there is no lag. The player takes his or her 500Mhz e-Machine with no video card and is able to enjoy Crysis with detailed DX10.1 settings.
Now, I'm not interested in the economics of it all or if the service would mimic Steam or Gametap - I just want to know if it can be done short of setting up a video camera in front of a monitor. If a Tandy or a Pentium III could run Team Fortress 2, that'd be pretty sweet.
emnmnme on
0
Posts
Ever use a webcam? Same basic issues. And keep in mind that most webcams only do 640x480.
I'd look at Remote Desktop and the like to give an idea of the expected experience.
Oh, I know. I'm just saying after seeing Netflix and Hulu in action, I'm sure we'll figure something out in the next couple of years.
It's not a software issue that can be just "figured out". You need an absurdly low-latency connection. It's a hardware issue.
Look at MMOs. They basically do what you're talking about in that the processing of gameplay mechanics is done on the server side. For any kind of gaming that requires reflexes, there is a limitation to how low you can bring latency just due to simple physics. It's why people playing FPSes and RTS for professional competitions will almost always do so in a LAN environment.
The person who brought up Remote Desktop is spot on. There is a very large difference between buffering and real-time input processing. Buffering is enabled by greater bandwidth. Real-time input processing requires consistent, guaranteed lower latency.
It can be done, but the problem ends up being that the kinds of games that you'd want to use your kind of proposed service for (high end FPS like Crysis) suffers the most from that kind of distributed model.
In the end it's going to be easier for people to buy a console. It's why I swapped from PC to console for the majority of my gaming.
Jakob Nielsen disagrees.
I can't find anything on his Wikipedia page that seems to relate to the issue. What are you referring to?
I'm really not sure what a UI consultant can do to get around simple physics in relation to latency as a problem for playing high-performance games via essentially remote desktop.
Oh, that Nielsen.
For desktop UI stuff you could do it a lot smoother since you could do most of the UI rendering locally. But the whole point of emnmnmnmnmnmnmnmnmne's scheme there is to do all the complicated 3D graphics and physics stuff on the remote machine, so it wouldn't work.
Yeah, it's not a problem of designing a sleeker interface or less processing, it's a problem of there's no bloody way to predict highly reflexive, randomised gameplay in the type of games that are 'worthy' of this kind of idea, in any meaningful way.
Because that is the most ridiculous claim.
Well, you see, we've tesseracted the bandwidth, so the packets are actually received before they're sent. That way, we narrow the one mile problem down to a quantum state, and rarefract it upon the timecube. Using a standard pattern of vestibulation, we therefore ensure gaming not only in the three typical dimensions of the lesser consoles, but in the dimension: Sony as well, which as I'm sure you're aware, is also known as Dimension Awesome.
Look up the Last Mile problem. To put it simply, we can refine a lot of things, but that last mile of cable between your house and the main pipelines is going to cost money to replace.
It's not even a bandwidth problem.
It's a latency problem, which is unfortunately harder to solve.
edit: Sony is using Time Cube now? No wonder their console is so unworldly powerful!
Right now, and in the foreseeable future, there is just no way to get that reliable of a connection out of a shared network. Maybe (MAYBE) with a dedicated point-to-point connection at some kind of ridiculously high speed with the minimal number of hops between them as possible. At some point, even the speed of light is going to start working against you.
As John Carmack once quipped, regarding network latency ... "The speed of light sucks."
- Don't add me, I'm at/near the friend limit
Steam: JC_Rooks
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JiunweiC
I work on this: http://www.xbox.com