H.Bogard
07-09-2009, 12:03 PM
Sheesh, you lazy fatties are slow!
No one bothered to post anything about this? (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gaikai-cloud-computing-gameplay-that-works-blog-entry)
For those who don't know, Gaikai is David I-hyped-Path-of-Neo-too-much Perry's take on what OnLive promises to offer: Streaming game play without any installations thanks to magical cloud computing on your internets.
In short, its kinda like OnLive, but without the marketing bullshit and with numbers that actually seem possible. But unlike OnLive, there are no billions of press releases and bullshit interviews bearing no real proof whether this thing works or not. Mr. Perry made a small announcement at the last GDC about the service being in the works, and then BAM! All of a sudden, a complete demonstration video captured via fraps with a visible bandwidth monitor all running on a computer that's allegedly 800 miles away from the Gaikai server, running every game shown without so much as an install or plug-in download.
That's right, Gaikai doesn't even require a browser plug-in to work. It just runs like any flash object on a website.
The service streams gameplay in realtime over computers that are only required to be powerful enough to play high res flash videos. Gaikai constantly monitors the lag and connection usage on your computer and switches video codecs on the fly to cater to the connection's capabilities accordingly. Among other things, there seem to be game-specific video encoding profiles that change with each game. For example, in a game with a limited colour palette like EVE Online, you'll have less lag and crisper quality... as well as a higher video resolution.
I could go on and on, but just watch the video with the annotations and read the complete article (highly suggested before chiming on with a reply... and assume that I am not saying these words in a nice manner!). This actually looks like it could work!
Choice quotes from the article:
What struck me about the presentation was that there was absolutely nothing unbelievable in it whatsoever. There were no claims of streaming 720p gameplay at 60 frames per second - games were running in differently sized windows according to how difficult they were to compress, and video itself runs at the internet standard 30FPS.
There was no talk of world-beating compression systems that annihilate the work of the best minds in video encoding today, the demo was using the exact same h264 codec that we use in the Eurogamer TV Flash player. And finally, there was nothing here to suggest that we were looking at a technological breakthrough that would make our PS3s and Xbox 360s obsolete... just that this was a brand new way to play games in an ultra-accessible manner. Fire up your browser and you're on your way.
Gaikai's approach seems to be not only to accept the technological restraints of so-called Cloud computing but to actively use them to bring gaming to a whole new audience. For example, the smaller the display window, the more "portable" the experience is and the more people will end up playing it. And while bizarro plug-ins often get blocked, everyone supports Flash.
Written by the guy who also wrote an article which effectively blasted OnLive's claims out of the water (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article)
No one bothered to post anything about this? (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gaikai-cloud-computing-gameplay-that-works-blog-entry)
For those who don't know, Gaikai is David I-hyped-Path-of-Neo-too-much Perry's take on what OnLive promises to offer: Streaming game play without any installations thanks to magical cloud computing on your internets.
In short, its kinda like OnLive, but without the marketing bullshit and with numbers that actually seem possible. But unlike OnLive, there are no billions of press releases and bullshit interviews bearing no real proof whether this thing works or not. Mr. Perry made a small announcement at the last GDC about the service being in the works, and then BAM! All of a sudden, a complete demonstration video captured via fraps with a visible bandwidth monitor all running on a computer that's allegedly 800 miles away from the Gaikai server, running every game shown without so much as an install or plug-in download.
That's right, Gaikai doesn't even require a browser plug-in to work. It just runs like any flash object on a website.
The service streams gameplay in realtime over computers that are only required to be powerful enough to play high res flash videos. Gaikai constantly monitors the lag and connection usage on your computer and switches video codecs on the fly to cater to the connection's capabilities accordingly. Among other things, there seem to be game-specific video encoding profiles that change with each game. For example, in a game with a limited colour palette like EVE Online, you'll have less lag and crisper quality... as well as a higher video resolution.
I could go on and on, but just watch the video with the annotations and read the complete article (highly suggested before chiming on with a reply... and assume that I am not saying these words in a nice manner!). This actually looks like it could work!
Choice quotes from the article:
What struck me about the presentation was that there was absolutely nothing unbelievable in it whatsoever. There were no claims of streaming 720p gameplay at 60 frames per second - games were running in differently sized windows according to how difficult they were to compress, and video itself runs at the internet standard 30FPS.
There was no talk of world-beating compression systems that annihilate the work of the best minds in video encoding today, the demo was using the exact same h264 codec that we use in the Eurogamer TV Flash player. And finally, there was nothing here to suggest that we were looking at a technological breakthrough that would make our PS3s and Xbox 360s obsolete... just that this was a brand new way to play games in an ultra-accessible manner. Fire up your browser and you're on your way.
Gaikai's approach seems to be not only to accept the technological restraints of so-called Cloud computing but to actively use them to bring gaming to a whole new audience. For example, the smaller the display window, the more "portable" the experience is and the more people will end up playing it. And while bizarro plug-ins often get blocked, everyone supports Flash.
Written by the guy who also wrote an article which effectively blasted OnLive's claims out of the water (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possibly-work-article)