Archive for March, 2009
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
OnLive is a service which claims to stream you your games – taking your input and processing it on the server and sending you the graphical and sound output. All through the internet. I want to dispell some myths about it.
Myth 1: input lag has been largely solved by online games, so won’t be a problem here
This is one of the most patently incorrect things you will hear on the internet – and that’s quite an award.
Existing games use client-side prediction to reduce lag. In online games like first person shooters and so on, you don’t have input lag for movement or mouse movement because it is all done on your computer first. You only have input lag for shooting – and anyone who’s played an online FPS knows how incredibly jarring that is. In Counter Strike, you do not even have shooting lag – it’s all done client side straight away and the game uses some clever maths to sort it out.
None of this is possible on the onLive light client. You will be dealing with the full ping + processing lag for every action.
They said the wheel would never work! Technology will improve and this will be totally viable
That’s a fine point, except the barrier we’re dealing with is a nasty little thing called the speed of light. Newton is fairly convinced you can’t get around it.
I don’t think you can expect an average ping of less than forty. And I’m being VERY generous there – that requires that they have a HUGE number of server farms. In that case, you’re looking at an input lag of 50. I’m in the process of mocking up a demo of something with this kind of input lag, but I can tell you it’s not going to be nice to play with.
And in an online game, when the ping spikes a little, you often don’t notice it because your computer is doing all the prediction. If you have a spike in the middle of a Mario level everything will stutter and you’ll mistime the jump and die.
It’ll be cheaper because I won’t have to upgrade computers and so on
You think it’ll be cheaper? If it was just a case of centralising your computer then yes it would be, because you’d only need 25% of the computers because even at peak only 25% of people would be using the service.
But there’s a very big problem here – the onLive computers have to be MUCH more powerful than yours. Why? Because, to make lag even mildly handlable, they have to process a game tick in 1ms (this is what they’re claiming to be able to do). Generally, your computer has 30ms to do this. Can you see the maths? The onLive computer, to run a high end game, needs to be AT LEAST ten times as powerful as the equivalent home computer.
And the onLive economies of scale are not going to be that good. They have to have loads and loads and loads of farms to be within a suitable distance for lag purposes. Each farm will have to have enough processing power to serve 25% of it’s local customer base.
onLive is for you
OnLive is not for you. OnLive is a good idea for non gamers and families who want easy to access casual gaming. For all the reasons above onLive will not be able to make you happy.
Ironically, the new WordPress has input lag for typing, and I have had an absolute nightmare writing this post.
Posted in News | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
Good things come in threes, and so does Visiting the Village. This week, Ian and I wrestle with space stations that appear inside people’s houses, Derek Smart and underwater bad guys. We also have a special surprise for astronomy fans…No, we really mean that: astronomy fans.
Here’s those essential links:
Auntie Pixelante vs. the IGF – via Auntie Pixelante
The Path – Tale of Tales
Spiderweb Software sales figures – via The Bottom Feeder
Corewar – via Gamesetwatch
Game writing from the inside out – via Gamasutra
Councilman allegedly emailing racist games – via Gamepolitics
Derek Smart RPS interview – via Rock Paper Shotgun
Zeebo – via Gamasutra
Max Payne 3 – via videogaming247
Confessions of a Star Wars Galaxies CSR – via Fidget
Underwater video game bad guys – via Tiny Cartridge
Posted in Podcast | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
We have iTunes now – the artwork keeps appearing and disappearing – apparently this is normal and nothing to do with me! Gotta love it. Remember, you can still subscribe to the RSS feed like normal people to avoid all of that nonsense.
Posted in News | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
We burst forth with show two! Featuring The Rock, Ian calling someone an “idiot” and even more arguments about Change 4 Life.
Links for this episode:
Worlds.com suing various people – via Massively
Dark Forces Retrospective – via Eurogamer
The Big, Fat Question – via Eurogamer
Blu-ray forever! – via Joystiq
GTA Chinatown Wars review – via Eurogamer
How indie video games helped bridge the culture gap – via Gamasutra
Bob’s Game campaign was viral – via Destructoid
New Sega Megadrive – via CVG
Alpha Protocol Trailer – via Gametrailers
The Rock bashes Doom – via MTV
Posted in Podcast | 11 Comments »
Monday, March 16th, 2009
As requested, we now have an RSS feed which will let you subscribe to just podcasts. That is here.
If you are a Twitter user I am tweeting quite regularly about Village-related stuff. Follow me here if you’re not already!
We’ve submitted to iTunes so we’ll hopefully have an iTunes link for you whenever Apple want to give us one.
Posted in News | No Comments »
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
While reading this mildly interesting interview on GSW with the Night Game people I came accross this quote, and mailed it to EC to see if there was anything interesting there. The quote:
On Cave Story, I used AWave Studio, and a whole bunch of VST plugins for sound generation. We used a lot of sounds from GXSCC which is a really neat GM compatible chip synthesizer
Aparently translates to:
“We used [some deeply weird-ass *converter program* I've never heard of], [just a generic term for things you might use that wouldn't be compatible with the first thing mentioned]. We used a lot of sounds from [the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen] which [takes a protocol from the early 90's and then replaces all the sounds with "chip tune" ones].”
And, on some other level, translates to:
It’s like someone asking me what I use to make music and then me starting by talking about the options I set in LAME to encode to 160kbps with a lowpass filter at 16.7k and then going, “Oh yeah, sometimes I like making noises with the PC speaker”.
Posted in News | No Comments »
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
And to celebrate post 1000, I am drinking vermouth, ginger ale, and bitter lemon. At 4 in the afternoon.
It’s fitting that we start the podcast at least near 1000 – I hope you guys like it. It’s a great thing to be doing, and as we go along we hope to add features on game design and indieness… anything that works really. I need to thank EC for doing such a stellar job on the engineering and music, and also the presenting – can you tell which one of us did radio for three years? Also a huge thanks to Jimmeh, who does a lot of our web stuff.
Anyway, subscribe to us and let me know what you think.
Posted in News | No Comments »
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Still testing various things…
A big huge thanks to Jimmeh for helping us out on the web side, as ever, and cheers to everyone who has been giving us good feedback on Episode 1. Really looking forward to the next one.
Posted in News | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Welcome to VTV 1, where Ian and I tackle the gaming issues of the day, including streakers and Poland.
Here’s the promised link to Chrontendo. I also neglected to mention our source for the Brandon Crisp item which was Joystiq.
Thanks to Binster for the background music!
Download the episode
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Posted in Podcast | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Changes, I’ve made seem to be working. SEEM!
Posted in News | No Comments »
