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 MxxCon
join:1999-11-19
Brooklyn, NY | reply to Rekrul
Re: I dread the future of gaming... said by Rekrul:Running at a television’s native resolution will also reduce local latency due to it not having to scale the image, which will also help offset some of the network latency. Theoretically true, but the service would have to let you enter arbitrary screen sizes, both in the X & Y dimensions for that to work. Every TV and monitor has a different native resolution. If you simply select the width of your monitor and the service automatically selects the height, it's never going to match everyone's screen size. So the image will almost certainly still be scaled. Every time I go into a store and look closely at the TVs, I see scaling artifacts because the video signal NEVER matches the TV's resolution. You must be talking about either extremely old or extremely cheap TVs.
Every TV worth buying on the market now has 1920x1080 native resolution.
Older "HD" TVs and current super-budget models have some non-standard resolutions like 980 or 830. Everything else is now 1080p.
said by Rekrul:The most glaring issue in the face of cloud gaming is two-fold: bandwidth and latency. To me, the most glaring issue with cloud gaming is its temporary nature. Exactly how long are companies going to keep each game available? Will the games released today still be available to play a decade from now? Or will the company decide that they're not worth keeping on the system when the number of people playing them goes from the millions down to a few thousand? Want a concrete example? The game Thief: The Dark Project was released 14 years ago in 1998, and while it's not exactly a blockbuster, there are still dedicated fans who replay it, create mods for it, make patches to keep it running on new hardware. Eidos doesn't support the game any more. Sorry, I meant Square Enix. Just try to find a mention of it on their site. If Thief had been a cloud game, do you think it would still be available to play? Also, what about mods? You can't exactly create new content for a game on a remote system. Look at how many maps have been created for games like Doom and Quake. How many user-created maps are there for Onlive games? Provided I have the appropriate hardware, I can still run any of the games that I've bought. Through emulation, I can run thousands of games from older systems, both console and computer. I can load and play games from the late 1970s if I want to. By contrast, cloud games will appear, be played for a few years and then disappear. Once gone, they will exist only as screenshots and maybe gameplay videos on YouTube. They'll be like those old lost TV shows and movies that now only exist as still photos and short clips taken from other sources. To me, that's sad... I see a very easy solution to your 1st problem.
There will be services that cycle current ~3- year old games, and there will be services or service levels that offer huge back catalog of games. Games are not stored on each server/computer, they use a centralized SAN/NAS/Whatever, so disk space usage is not a problem. It will take them no effort to provide an infinitely large catalog of games.
To install mods you don't need a direct game access. Games could/will be coded with such services in mind and will provide facility to install and access mods directly from within the game. Same with creating mods. Who says you can't run Unreal or Cry Editor from those cloud services?
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Rekrul
join:2007-04-21
Milford, CT Reviews:
 ·AT&T U-Verse
| said by MxxCon:You must be talking about either extremely old or extremely cheap TVs.
Every TV worth buying on the market now has 1920x1080 native resolution. Even the ones marked as 720p, or are those the ones you don't consider worth buying? Not to mention that some people will be playing them on a computer monitor and those also have a range of sizes. A quick look at Amazon shows sizes of 1600x900, 1360x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900 and others.
Just because you consider them outdated or worthless doesn't mean that everyone is going to go out and dump them for something new.
said by MxxCon:I see a very easy solution to your 1st problem.
There will be services that cycle current ~3- year old games, and there will be services or service levels that offer huge back catalog of games. Games are not stored on each server/computer, they use a centralized SAN/NAS/Whatever, so disk space usage is not a problem. It will take them no effort to provide an infinitely large catalog of games. You're trying to apply logic to the business world and that rarely works out.
Once a game reaches a certain age, the company declares it obsolete and washes their hands of it.
Plus, the games have to run on some kind of a computer. What happens when the hardware and OS is upgraded and the old games no longer work? Is the company going to hire someone to patch their entire back catalog to make sure it works on the new system? Or are they just going to dump everything that doesn't work?
Because they sure don't do that now. Even when the company knows about a bug and what causes it, if the game is more than a couple years old and not a huge seller, they're not going to bother fixing it.
said by MxxCon:To install mods you don't need a direct game access. Games could/will be coded with such services in mind and will provide facility to install and access mods directly from within the game. Same with creating mods. Who says you can't run Unreal or Cry Editor from those cloud services? So the mods can disappear along with the game when the company takes it offline...
Not to mention since everything is in the cloud, on the company's servers, they will have the final say about what mods get released and which ones don't.
What about 'total conversions' which require patching the original game files to work? How are you going to patch game files on a remote server? Will you be able to tell the system to create a 100% working duplicate of the game installation for you to tinker with?
Cloud gaming is going to be a closed, locked-down system. | |
MxxCon
join:1999-11-19
Brooklyn, NY | said by Rekrul:said by MxxCon:You must be talking about either extremely old or extremely cheap TVs.
Every TV worth buying on the market now has 1920x1080 native resolution. Even the ones marked as 720p, or are those the ones you don't consider worth buying? Not to mention that some people will be playing them on a computer monitor and those also have a range of sizes. A quick look at Amazon shows sizes of 1600x900, 1360x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900 and others. Just because you consider them outdated or worthless doesn't mean that everyone is going to go out and dump them for something new. Budget monitors use TN panels, their refresh rate is pretty low, 2-10ms. Proper monitor use IPS panels, their refresh rate is 5-16ms. In both cases local latency produces by monitors resizing image is not a problem. If you are playing it on a computer, then your video card scale images with much better quality and much faster where this is not a concern at all.
said by Rekrul:said by MxxCon:I see a very easy solution to your 1st problem.
There will be services that cycle current ~3- year old games, and there will be services or service levels that offer huge back catalog of games. Games are not stored on each server/computer, they use a centralized SAN/NAS/Whatever, so disk space usage is not a problem. It will take them no effort to provide an infinitely large catalog of games. You're trying to apply logic to the business world and that rarely works out. I'm implying logic based on personal experience working with this technology in this field.
said by Rekrul:Once a game reaches a certain age, the company declares it obsolete and washes their hands of it. read what I said in the previous reply.
said by Rekrul:Plus, the games have to run on some kind of a computer. What happens when the hardware and OS is upgraded and the old games no longer work? Is the company going to hire someone to patch their entire back catalog to make sure it works on the new system? Or are they just going to dump everything that doesn't work? Windows compatibility is going to last for a very very long time. Every single game released for XP can run on Win7. Only some Win95/98 have problems. Once we reach the point where games will be no longer compatible with then-current OS, computers will be fast enough to be able to run emulation of Win7 w/o any problems.
said by Rekrul:Because they sure don't do that now. Even when the company knows about a bug and what causes it, if the game is more than a couple years old and not a huge seller, they're not going to bother fixing it. They will fix problems if service provider will tell game mft about those problems.
Situation will be much different where instead of a single user worth $5-60 complains vs a service provider that serves 100s if not 1000s copies of their games.
said by Rekrul:said by MxxCon:To install mods you don't need a direct game access. Games could/will be coded with such services in mind and will provide facility to install and access mods directly from within the game. Same with creating mods. Who says you can't run Unreal or Cry Editor from those cloud services? So the mods can disappear along with the game when the company takes it offline... Well mod is useless w/o the game its written for anyway, so I don't see that being a problem.
said by Rekrul:Not to mention since everything is in the cloud, on the company's servers, they will have the final say about what mods get released and which ones don't. It won't be any different when what we currently have with Steam or nexusmods.
said by Rekrul:What about 'total conversions' which require patching the original game files to work? How are you going to patch game files on a remote server? Will you be able to tell the system to create a 100% working duplicate of the game installation for you to tinker with? if there will be enough demand, there will be services that offer that.
said by Rekrul:Cloud gaming is going to be a closed, locked-down system. Market forces will decide if that's going to happen or not.
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