Onlive earned in the USA, the first service in history based on cloud computing technologies. The future of the gaming industry largely depends on his success or failure. It's time to look at Onlive in action and try to understand what is hiding there, behind the clouds.
June 17, 2010 in the United States, the service was launched Onlive ( www.Onlive.Com). The big premiere did not work – to reduce the load on the servers, the accounts were activated gradually, in the order of registration.
Ten days later in the official blog BLOG.Onlive.Com It is reported that Onlive is operating 7 days a week 24 hours a day in 48 states of North America without any serious linings.
Many users have not yet been connected. There are more people who want to play than the creators planned, the data centers are not raised in all regions, the fight against small bugs continues … But Onlive works-you can enter the game instantly, from the old PC or a laptop who turned to the arm, you do not need to download or set gigabyte programs, And even the video card does not buzz with a fan.
A year of suspicion
All games in Onlive-at the moment it is the multi-platform blockbusters and a pair of casual indie games-are launched on the servers of distant dates-centers. On your PC or Macintosh, the sound and picture are broadcast on a broadfill Internet, and data on the keys or buttons of the gamepad are going on to the server.
Onlive was announced last year at GDC in San Francisco. Since then, developers have extremely reluctant to part with technical details, and beta testers were forbidden to share their impressions before the official launch of the service. Some sources said that Onlive opens new data centers and concludes secret agreements with American providers, which will soon be able to play in Crysis On the iPad. Others assured that all this project is a continuous infection, that for broadcasting the video game the Internet is not enough, that the required throughput can be considered normal perhaps in South Korea or Japan, and that in the USA services similar to onlive can appear only in two to three years later.
Today it is enough to live in North America and have a wired Internet connection with a bandwidth of 5 megabits per second in order to actually check the words of enthusiasts and skeptics. After connecting to the service, you can start playing for a minute. The online client (PC version weighs less than megabyte) is installed, connected to several data centers, selects a geographically optimal server-and the main menu appears on the screen.
In addition to universal things for all gaming services (a list of games purchased, internal messenger, profiles with animated avatars), the menu contains Arena and Brag Clips. In the Arena section, you can follow the game of other users in real time. See how playing F.E.A.R. 2 The newcomer is frightened at the sight of the alma and begins to water the ceiling with bullets, express his attitude to his actions (thumb up or down), add it to friends … In the Brag Clips section, you can record a ten -second fragment of the game and save it to the profile. Even the Coming Soon section looks unusual: twelve squares, which shows the videos of future games, any of which can be instantly expanded to a full screen.
This is the rental
Section Marketplace (trading area) – the center of the entire event. In the middle of summer, Assassin's Creed 2, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Tom Clancy's Splinter, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Batman: Arkham ASYLUM, JUST, JUST Use 2, Borderlands, NBA 2K10, Colin McRae Dirt 2 and f.E.A.R. 2. From here you can instantly start a free half -hour demo version of any game; Further actions depend on how long the game has come out and what agreement exists to Onlive with the publisher.
Say, at the end of the Borderlands Demo (Take-Two Interactive), it is possible to buy full access to the game for $ 30 (you can play until the subscription to Onlive ends), pay $ 9 for five days of the game or $ 6 for three. But in Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Convaction (Ubisoft) you can only buy full access for $ 40 – there are no rolling options. In Batman: Arkham asylum ( Square Enix ), on the contrary, only rental options are available ($ 5 in three days, $ 7 for five), and you cannot buy full access.
Actually, it is rental options that the main trump card onlive. For example, the same Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands on PS3 costs $ 60 and passes in a couple of days – the game would cost you $ 5 and subscription fees for a month of subscription (the first year for many users is free, the second – $ 5 per month, after The price can rise to $ 15). It is unlikely that anyone will pay a full retail price to Onlive, but it is quite possible to see what Batman: Arkham asylum (if you have a good Internet connection or a powerful PC), or play with friends, is quite possible for a symbolic five. In Borderlands.
The strange conditions of the publishers are the first, but not the only problem to solve onlive and similar services (say, Gaikai David Perry) in the near future. When trying to launch Mass Effect 2 under the client for Mac OS instead of the game, there is a proposal to put Windows on your Macintosha – although the developers assure that “there are no other plans for Windows in the plans”. Before the service that is going to abolish operating systems and platforms once and for all, there is a lot of licensed problems. Onlive will never appear games, exclusive for a particular console, and publishers of multi -platform blockbusters will do everything so that users prefer the new -fucked service the most ordinary physical store or at least Steam.
The time of the answer
So, what is the game on online?
Three -dimensional action like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands and F.E.A.R. 2 are controlled quite acceptable. The most difficult thing is to play, oddly enough, in casual games like World of Goo , where the exact movements of the cursor are needed.
The notorious delay is still noticeable-some subscribers compare this with the game on the early LCD monitors with the big response time. Does not spoil pleasure, but the sensations are still different than when playing on your own car.
Whoever has a connection, someone is not able to connect to Onlive from the ADSL modem. And even with the most ideal Internet connection between your actions and what is happening on the screen, a break of about 14 milliseconds is obtained-not counting those milliseconds that go to the compression of sound and image.
In fact, you see not a game in front of you, but its YouTube Video in resolution 1280×720. The compression of the image is noticeable primarily in the drawn flat mini-games-in three-dimensional ones you need to peer for a long time, especially textures and details of the background (not on static screenshots, but in live video) to make out at least some differences. Another thing is that you can immediately see the difference between the game in Onlive and the PC game in maximum settings. Even f.E.A.R. 2 – not the most demanding game – does not go in maximum options. Onlive developers admit that they do not always twist everything to the maximum and choose those settings that, in their opinion, are optimal.
But if you get used to the features of the image and management, the advantages of the game, which is entirely going Pyramid Spins Casino on someone else's computer, become noticeable. You can easily exit through Ctrl + Tab, you can start the game in the window, change its size in real time, at any time put the game by pause, and then go from another computer and continue to play from the same place. You can simultaneously encode the video or install programs … Complex three-dimensional action, shooters and simulators have traditionally been considered something incredibly resource-intensive, requiring the allocation of the resources of the entire computer. The creators of Onlive made a game at Batman: Arkham asylum or Dirt 2 with the same trivial side activities as listening to music.
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Onlive is primarily a great tool for acquaintance with fresh games. No need to suffer, download two gigabytes demo from Steam or from the website of the video cards developer, install, run, mess with the settings … You can run a free demo version in Onlive in a couple of seconds and see what the game is.
Well, in global plan Onlive is an impressive demo version of what cloud computing is capable of. Video games are one of the most difficult computer programs, and once onlive more or less copes with them, it means that cloud computing has a lot of interesting applications in other areas.
There is still a question of access capacity. How soon today's online users will choose a limit from their provider? How quickly the providers will begin to change tariffs due to increased traffic? If the speed and reliability of communication in the United States are far from ideal, then what will happen when the 2011 scheduled for 2011 launches in the UK and Belgium? Actually, it depends on whether the service will be successful or will ruin its investors in a matter of months.