37 replies to this topic

[sean ryan]

I think Mechwarrior Online will be really good for Onlive. They are only making a PC version. With onlive, Mac's users can play it as well with no porting issues for piranha games. In the future Tablets, phones, Tv's, Blu ray players and anything else onlive is on can play it too. If they also would allow you to connect with PC user, that would be sweet. If you dont know what onlive is (alot still don't) go here. www.onlive.com (US) or www.onlive.co.uk (UK) (onlive is only in the US and UK right now) anyone else think this too?

Edited by sean-ryan, 31 October 2011 - 02:15 PM.

[Victor Morson]

Absoultely. I don't get why anyone would vote No; it's of no risk to the developer and there's no real downside.

All you're doing is giving more people a way to play the game, including those whose hardware might otherwise be too weak.

EDIT: Do all you no voters even know how OnLive works or what it is? Did you read "Mac" and have a fit about the game being PC centric? If OnLive took the game on, it'd literally just sit on their servers with NO PORTING by the developer to take time away from other things, and give people that don't have high end hardware or a gaming PC a chance to play the game. Outside of a business agreement, it's no risk. There's literally no reason for users to be against it.

Edited by Victor Morson, 01 March 2012 - 08:37 AM.

[Ray Mason]

We're not there yet, definitely not for a competitive title. Something about Onlive from me:

It's still much more efficient to buy computing power (your own computer) rather than renting it over the internet - 720p @ 5mbps ~ 18Gbits = 2,25GB per hour just for 720p with a lot of artefacts. That's like 90GB for a quick playthrough of Deus Ex: Human Revolution + 50USD for the game. You could rent some of the games for 5 days (7USD) and that's something quite new to the PC market. If they release Witcher 2 I might end up playing it because I'm trying to wait with a new laptop purchase till I see hardware requirements for Guild Wars 2.

All in all, the pricing is not so bad if you happen to be in a situation when you can't get the proper hardware and are already paying for a good internet connection without bandwidth cap. I have a friend who owns just a netbook so she has to pick a handful of new games to play every summer and that's it. This could help people with older hardware/slower laptops, decent internet connection and lack of gaming time to actually invest in a gaming PC. I’ve seen MMO players with extremely old PCs playing one MMO for years so I guess they could get swayed to play some of the newer games with OnLive.

Regarding MWO you'd have to play for it anyway and the amount of data downloaded (as most people player MMOs for months) would be insane. Also, go watch this video from Total Biscuit:



It has lag issues which is terrible for competitive gameplay.
PS: I love the concept, I read about it in Permutation City by Greg Egan, but we’re not there yet.

Edited by Ray Mason, 01 March 2012 - 09:16 AM.

[Halfinax]

No, no, and hell no. I don't want to have to stream it all to my machine, then back to the server, then for it to respond to my inputs before I know what happened 3 seconds ago. Storage space is on PCs is dirt cheap I have absolutely no use for, nor can I see anyone needing such a service for gaming. It makes sense for movies and such, but absolutely absurd for gaming.

Edited by Halfinax, 01 March 2012 - 10:25 AM.

[Garth Erlam]

I have no knowledge of any contact we've had with OnLive.

The idea is interesting - I'm curious though, I've heard the only real problem with it is control lag, which... seems like it would be a huge deal for this game. Is that true? I've never used it.

[TheRulesLawyer]

Playing onlive is kind of like more than doubling the lag you get in normal games but without the benefit of prediction. I'm not against people getting to play through it, I just don't want them on my team.

[Ray Mason]

This reminds me of the Starcraft 2 controversy with regional servers. In my ideal game there should be a couple of tick boxes so that you can decide which regions will the match-making search in. For example in NA you could tick only NA for the best possible latency, but if you feel like playing against the best you will want to tick the South East Asia region (at the cost of worse latency)…

Anyway, I wouldn’t mind if this game came out on Onlive (even though I don’t think it’s effective) as long as in the settings I could select “I do not want to play with Onlive users”. Some people would mind, some wouldn’t, for some it might be the only option how to play with a particular friend. If that’s taken care of I see two issues:

• Onlive costs money so even a F2P game would have a monthly cost there.
  
• Over time more and more people might decide to not play with Onlive users which leaves a very small part of the playerbase in isolation.

Outright forcing all the players to play with the Onlive users would be a bad decision considering the input lag (24 people, one is lagging -> everyone is angry).

[Adridos]

I was prepearing to post reasons why not to, but the person above me got it right.

OnLive is a good thing, but just in places with top-of the line connections. Otherwise, it has hardly any potential besides demos of games that can't be downloaded normally (mostly a trial for 30 minutes). If you have slower connection, however, you'll experience seriously low quality and cyber screams (loss of packets with music).

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Garth Erlam, on 01 March 2012 - 10:29 AM, said:

I have no knowledge of any contact we've had with OnLive.

The idea is interesting - I'm curious though, I've heard the only real problem with it is control lag, which... seems like it would be a huge deal for this game. Is that true? I've never used it.

As an online user, it is not that bad, suitable for a game like MWO well that is a different question and depends on the game itself, my advice look into it try it yourselves.

Asking on here will net you responses from people who have never used it, don't understand it.

Edited by DV^McKenna, 01 March 2012 - 01:16 PM.

[Halfinax]

Rethinking my earlier statement. As long as it's not only available via OnLive I don't see a problem with people using it if it suits them. My earlier post was reactionary based on slightly misinformed information, and assumptions.

[Sirisian]

Ray Mason, on 01 March 2012 - 09:14 AM, said:

It has lag issues which is terrible for competitive gameplay.
PS: I love the concept, I read about it in Permutation City by Greg Egan, but we’re not there yet.

It lagged for you? Runs fine here in Michigan. I believe the server I connected to is in Chicago. Feels identical to a local game. You need a 5.3 mbps connection thouh. I noticed a lot of people complaining about problems were trying to play it below the recommended requirements. Like they thought their ISP would let them use 5.3 mbps constantly, but were getting choppy results.

I've also used Gaikai, which is a little bit lower quality, but it definitely playable. The 720p is the real "issue". I've heard they tested 1080p and they have capability, but it's probably slightly more bandwidth.

Also since OnLive servers are embedded into ISP infrastructure they don't suffer last mile latency issues so it's definitely possible to send input to them then have them send the input to the game server then back to the OnLive server in a very reasonable speed. (30 ms type stuff). I've used OnLive so far with 8 ms latency. Obviously not everyone is as lucky with their location and distance to the OnLive servers.

Garth Erlam, on 01 March 2012 - 10:29 AM, said:

The idea is interesting - I'm curious though, I've heard the only real problem with it is control lag, which... seems like it would be a huge deal for this game. Is that true? I've never used it.

Since when is Mechwarrior a fast paced game? I've played Metro 2033 and borderlands with OnLive and it's just like a local game. You really need to take other people's experience with the system with a grain of salt.

I would recommend everyone voting no to download the 500 KB program and run it. Takes 5 seconds to see their system and play a demo of a game. (Assuming you have a 5.3+ mbps download. Don't bother if you can't get that via http://speedtest.net/ since I've heard from a friend that you'll start to see artifacts which happens as their algorithm compensates for a poor connection.

Edited by Sirisian, 01 March 2012 - 05:55 PM.

[Dlardrageth]

sean-ryan, on 31 October 2011 - 02:10 PM, said:

[...]www.onlive.com (US) or www.onlive.co.uk (UK) (onlive is only in the US and UK right now)[...]

There you go, that's the important part right there. That covers how much of the global gaming community exactly? 10% perhaps? (Let's not argue about 2 percent more or less). Now ask yourself, how much sense would it make for PGI to adapt MWO for OnLive even before release to cover 10% of the possible market (customers) they could reach with a "normal" release as well? And yes, there might be a diminishingly small number of people they won't reach without going via OnLive. But that is probably even less a factor percentage-wise than the people they won't reach as customers by not having a hand-tailored Linux version of MWO or whatever. (Yes, there are people who refuse to "dirty their hands" by using something like Wine to play games with no dedicated Linux client, lol.)

[TheRulesLawyer]

Sirisian, on 01 March 2012 - 05:54 PM, said:

I would recommend everyone voting no to download the 500 KB program and run it. Takes 5 seconds to see their system and play a demo of a game. (Assuming you have a 5.3+ mbps download. Don't bother if you can't get that via http://speedtest.net/ since I've heard from a friend that you'll start to see artifacts which happens as their algorithm compensates for a poor connection.

Tried it. Not a fan. I'd still rather have local hardware unless they can do something for me local hardware can't.

[Victor Morson]

The thing that I am most confused about is why everyone here thinks that bringing the game to OnLive would be a problem. The majority of OnLive titles are of games you can already own directly on your PC.

Because of this, bringing the game to OnLive would be an option to bring the game to a wider audience! I'm not suggesting it's made an OnLive exclusive. That would be terrible. But there are almost NO OnLive exclusives.

Sure, OnLive players might lose those ticks and it'll hurt their game experience. I agree with you, it's not perfect. However, I see no reason it shouldn't be available to players there as an option, in particular due to it's Free to Play nature; if you were to pay OnLive a small fee to access it there, that means say if you are a hardcore MWO player you'd own the game on your PC - but could still play the game from a sub-par netbook if you happened to not be at home. That's not even counting the people who don't have PCs at all, but would still love to play the game.

Long story short: OnLive would bring the game to a WIDER audience, not erase MWO from your gaming PC's harddrive and murder your children. I'm kind of shocked about the anger about it here, really.

[Morashtak]

from the Cnet UK review of OnLive;

There is lag in OnLive and it's noticeable, although we've found that the degree and severity of the delay varies. We tested a variety of games over what we'd consider to be a fairly normal home broadband speed of 6.5Mbps, and also over our much faster office connection, with no obvious improvement. There doesn't seem to be any consistency to the types of games that are affected, and we couldn't pinpoint any particular in-game events that triggered the lag.

We noticed some lag in OnLive games.

Sometimes the delay is so minor you'll forget it's there, and sometimes it makes for stuttery visuals and stop-start audio. We found that, most of the time, OnLive gameplay was sufficiently smooth to be enjoyable, but it's not as slick and responsive as that offered by a traditional console or PC.

---

Not liking what I'm seeing here. 12v12 lag is not going to be fun at all. And much, much more mentioned in the article to justify my vote "No".

[Kaemon]

TheRulesLawyer, on 01 March 2012 - 08:56 PM, said:

Tried it. Not a fan. I'd still rather have local hardware unless they can do something for me local hardware can't.

QFT.

When you can beat my local hardware/net connection with a 'cloud' or online instance (that I don't have to pay extra for) let me know.

Otherwise I'll keep everything I can in house, thanks.

/control

[Victor Morson]

Yeah, the lag sucks for people using OnLive. That's important: It sucks, again, for people using OnLive.

This does not impact the rest of us.

I see no reason to be fighting against including it as an option soley because you personally don't want to play that way. I plan on playing on my home computer almost exclusively, but I can tell you this, if I went on a vaccation I'd TOTALLY sub to MWO on OnLive so I could play it on even mid grade Tablet PC. It'd not be as good as home, but it's a neat option.

Nobody is asking you to sign up to OnLive. I don't get the venomous dislike for other people not in our position, though.

[Ray Mason]

Do you not understand how online gaming works? If there are 24 people on the map and one is lagging, there is a high chance the game will try to compensate and the overall gameplay experience will be harmed. I don't mind Onlive as long as I can chose not to connect with anyone using it which sounds really bad for the Onlive players as there would be much smaller player pool for them. It’s the same as trying not to have 23 people with 100ms latency and one person with 300ms latency in one match. I don’t mind what other do, just don’t force it on me.

[Morashtak]

After downloading OnLive I had a fellow gamer try out a FPS he normally plays. His verdict is that the slight lag he noticed in the game was "kinda okay" for the casual gamer. For the hardcore types it wouldn't be. Also, we noticed quite a a loss of graphics.

Made us wonder how handcuffed one would be to the person with the highest amount of lag. Without getting 24 people together and buying the same game through OnLive as well as have it installed on our pc it's impossible to say with any exactness how badly, if at all (granted), the other 23 players would suffer.

The current client/server model has worked fine and will continue to do so. While it would be nice to have more players enjoy the game... wait, that statement is inherently flawed. Let me say it this way; More people would have access. It's highly debatable that more people would enjoy the game through OnLive.

[Victor Morson]

Ray Mason, on 03 March 2012 - 02:07 PM, said:

Do you not understand how online gaming works? If there are 24 people on the map and one is lagging, there is a high chance the game will try to compensate and the overall gameplay experience will be harmed. I don't mind Onlive as long as I can chose not to connect with anyone using it which sounds really bad for the Onlive players as there would be much smaller player pool for them. It’s the same as trying not to have 23 people with 100ms latency and one person with 300ms latency in one match. I don’t mind what other do, just don’t force it on me.

Morashtak, on 03 March 2012 - 03:45 PM, said:

Made us wonder how handcuffed one would be to the person with the highest amount of lag. Without getting 24 people together and buying the same game through OnLive as well as have it installed on our pc it's impossible to say with any exactness how badly, if at all (granted), the other 23 players would suffer.

There's so many things wrong with this - I think you're the do not fully understand how multiplayer routing works. However, this is based on a very very common internet myth regarding lag, so let me quickly explain real quick:

The two major methods of multiplayer are Peer to Peer and Server to Clients. In Peer to Peer, everyone is basically transmitting data to a handful of other players in the game, who are in then transmitting the data back to others. The advantage of this system is that companies do not need to pay for servers to host their games and if proberly done, it allows for the game to move to a new host when the host leaves. In this method a lagging player CAN cause lag issues for other players, just due to the nature of it. This allows extremely easy cheating, as seen going rampant in the PC releases of say Modern Warfare 2. In some games this works fine, generally for co-op experiences but again: This is a situation where some lagging players can, in fact, cause huge amounts of lag for everyone, though even then typically one player won't cause too much of an issue.

However, in a dedicated Server to Client setup, which is almost positively what a game like MWO will be using lagging players do not impact YOUR play experience at all. You could literally have a lance of people with terrible connections from Russia join your game with pings of 500+, and your personal experience in the game will not be impacted by this whatsoever. The only thing that might negatively impact you is that players are severely lagging may not properly report their position to the server, so might appear to "warp around" or "rubberband", in particular in fast moving vehicles. This can in fact be somewhat annoying or worse - for example, in the Living Legends mod servers would ban high ping players less because of damaging the connection (though some people incorrectly believe that the case - this myth is hugely popular) and more because a player with extreme lag, say, flying a high speed fighter would make it almost impossible to hit as it's position would steadily get reported incorrectly. The severeity of this goes down based on the speed of movement, as less distance is covered per position update and is likely to be much less an issue in MWO.

Of course there are other factors for other kinds of games; RTS games for example are generally peer to peer but also need to update so much information, they actually slow drastically against poor connections (bandwidth, rather than lag) and the hosting CPU creates what a lot of people recognize as lag, but it's input / processing lag and not connection lag, producing very different results - it's possible to have a great ping to a Left 4 Dead game, but everything is warping anyway, because of this effect. Neither really apply to MWO though.

Finally, your concern that OnLive players will be lagging more than others, impacting your enjoyment of the game is incorrect, because that's not why OnLive lags. OnLive effectively streams video from a central computer to the user, which is where the lag comes from. The actual connection of OnLive -> Multiplayer Game is the same as any normal computer. For example, if I were lagging 70ms to OnLive, and OnLive's computer was lagging 80ms to a MWO server, we are talking about 150ms lag total for the player, as an example. However, as far as you - the non-OnLive user - are concerned, they are lagging 80ms, not 150ms. The OnLive computer is updating as fast as your personal gaming PC would, it's just that it's video information takes a while to reach the end user - more than usual. Believe it or not, there's a 1-5ms lag time for both input and video output on your local computer - mouse to computer, computer to monitor .. sometimes worse with a bad monitor; it'd be like saying these factors impact the gaming experience of others, when clearly they don't.

Sorry for the wall of text. I just really wish people would understand that laggy players do not wreck the majority of Server/Client PC games, despite greatly impacting others. If you've ever tried to play a fighting game with someone that has a terrible ping (Soul Calibur, Street Fighter) that's a prime example of a peer to peer style game that is MASSIVELY impacted by the other person's lag on an extreme level, as due to the nature of the game sync is absoultely vital and a prediction model can't really be used for fast actions. But if MWO is peer to peer, being an online centric PC game MMO I will be nothing short of jaw droppingly shocked. Lagging players shouldn't impact us at all.

PS: Also despite all your concerns, I should point out that a player from the UK or even Alaska connecting into a game will be far, far laggier than someone using a central Los Angeles OnLive account. Even if we were in a game where that sort of thign is important, it wouldn't be a huge deal compared to that.

EDIT: One exception to the server/client lag rule is when a LOT of data needs to be pushed. For example one method taken up by EVE Online recently, when a large number (hundreds) of players are in the same area, and thus the server needs to update client information to every client in the game steadily - which is so much data that it cannot possibly be reported accurately at an acceptable speed, a huge amount of lag shows up. The method they used to fix this is to literally slow the game based on how much data needs to be pushed, so that the updates do not need to happen as often. The result is your equipment is fairly responsive, rather than taking 10+ seconds to activate (or more!) Again this really doesn't apply to MWO but I thought it was worth noting given the discussion here.

Edited by Victor Morson, 04 March 2012 - 12:27 AM.