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What platform ?

PS3 & PC

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Something tells me the first game for this device will be Duke Nukem Forever.

LOL

Guys, watch the video. Many of the issues you've raised are answered there. The guy plays video game real time and the servers are 50 miles away. It looks atleast plausible and they wouldn't do this unless they've figured out the scalability issue.

Playability on a server 50 miles away is not something to brag about IMO.

50 miles? Bah. Show me performance under load with the servers nationally interlinked and the users distributed over the entire ConUS.

They say in the video they are going to set up three main server areas East, West and Central. They are fiber all the way till the last mile, latency problem has been solved and they say their packet delivery is highly tuned.

No way this is vapor ware, the guy who developed it is highly skilled.

It is a game changer, the limitations of the console are always what holds people up.

This is like a typical thread on Slashdot - everybody are commenting without having read - or in this case watched - the ****ing presentation.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?si.... (Let the complaints begin...)

I'll believe it when I see it.

Look, I have built national networks for a living - my entire professional life.

Unless this guy has managed to violate the laws of physics (speed of light) he can't "solve" the latency problem, he can only get to the limits of signal transmission time over distance. Getting THERE requires spending a ****load of money so that instantaneous packet load never exceeds available pipe size.

This is possible but it is not cheap and doesn't "solve" the latency problem.

If it is possible for his architecture to queue packets then his design does not "solve" (to the degree possible based on physics) the problem.

I remain skeptical.

Presentations in a lab environment with a couple of people showing something off prove nothing.

It's not really a /. lookalike thread without a Frist P0st! and coprophilia troll post.

Marketing hype, I will believe it after someone else pays for it and I see it ;).

GDC is often full of vapor and/or broad promises. This would be one of them.

Even if the latency and bandwidth issues were not a problem, this will not scale. Based on the power requirements alone. You would need to colocate the farms near hydro plants.

And how does it enable hardware innovation like balance board, etc. It doesn't.

Memory is dirt cheap. It is easier and cheaper and better user experience to dl'd directly to a local console and play w/o reliance on video compression.

This is a ponzi like YouTube. They will try to build the user base fast and sell it off for way more than its worth. Then the buyer will be stuck with a bunch of exponentially increasing capital requirements (power, bandwidth, storage) to operate the thing.

Jeebus, I have VNC sessions hiccup all the time over supposed 10mbps networks. Lets not even talk about going more than a few hundred miles. They have proved nothing except that they have a sweet fiber connection from GDC to San Jose. Yay.

Like others said.. this smells like vaporware.. and I've only watched the first few minutes/skimmed over things.

Let me get this right.. You are essentially playing a game over a network on remote servers, correct? I can't see how this thing ISN'T choppy/crappy. Like others said.. you CAN'T fix latency issues. With load, I imagine it being a complete disaster. I'll believe it when I see it.

I'm a developer myself, and don't see how this is possible. Like Gen said, latency is the big problem here, not to mention, they would require an IMMENSE amount of processing power server side to handle everything, which is just NOT feasible/scalable to millions of users without high costs.

Aha! The solved the latency problem using quantum entanglement! Kudos to them!

Hot Grits!!

Presumably they could crossconnect into major cable/dsl providers' networks to 'guarantee' low latency (aka forklift the server cabinets into the same datacenter serving particular major metro areas), but that'd be kind of.. expensive.. Think having cages near where Comcast, Verizon, ATT, et al. terminate their customer connections..

What's the highest latency can be without hampering gameplay experience significantly? And how far a distance is that in miles? Then you just figure they need to have a server center in each of these areas.

In the video the presented said they were going to use specialized servers housed in normal server centers.

He talks in the video about how they have developed technology that can actually go faster than fiber transmission. They are utilizing cloud computing technology and AI predictive quantum array architecture for the system. You can actually be playing on line with your friends in Sydney Australia while sitting in your office in Canberra and not only that, you actually don't even need to actually be playing yourself. The system is so intelligent that it can predict what you would play and what your score would be. They simply then send you a bill and tell you how much fun you had playing, for the time saving advantages alone this thing will take off.

(of course by saying the latency problem has been solved they mean reduced to a minimum level)

There's no trick to that sort of "solving"; it simply requires money.

Lots of money.

The BASE latency is ~60ms or so round-trip coast-to-coast (e.g. NY to SF.) This is the speed of light and nothing can get under it, and this also assumes straight-line transmission (HA!) Reality is typically in the 70-100ms range for small packets since the wires (fibers) are NOT straight lines.

To that you must add switching delays for any node that does not "cut through" (and most do not); any node that stores and forwards has a delay component internal to it that is determined by, at minimum, the amount of time required to both read and replay the packet, to which one must add the decision-making time internal to that device (which port does this go to?)

A "server center in each area" does not solve the problem unless you cannot play against anyone in other than the local area.

"Fairness algorythms" can be put in place that measure latency to each client and then internally penalize those who are closer so that everyone has the "same experience". The problem with this is obvious - everyone has the same experience as the WORST connection! That's not so cool. Adaptive versions that degrade everyone only to the point where "we hope nobody notices" are a compromise.

There is no free lunch in networking just like there isn't in anything else.

BTW 100ms is enough latency to provide a MEANINGFUL advance in a first-person "shooter" type of game. I used to run a "doom" server and woe be to you if I was playing on the local infrastructure (less than 1ms delay) while you were on a remote with ~60-100ms in latency. By the time you "saw" me you were dead.

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BTW 100ms is enough latency to provide a MEANINGFUL advance in a first-person "shooter" type of game. I used to run a "doom" server and woe be to you if I was playing on the local infrastructure (less than 1ms delay) while you were on a remote with ~60-100ms in latency. By the time you "saw" me you were dead.

Ahhh, I fondly recall the old LPB days on my Quake server. I couldn't play on my own server for long before everyone ran off.

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A "server center in each area" does not solve the problem unless you cannot play against anyone in other than the local area.

From, the video this sounds like what they are doing. It will be interesting, if it is laggy at all the whole thing is fubar.

Gamers are the least forgiving tech users.

Doom and Quake were done on servers a long time ago. I ran 'em on MCSNet's infrastructure and it was well-known that if I was playing you were ****ed because I was sitting on the local infrastructure.

This despite the fact that I'm not particularly good at these sorts of games - it simply was that I'd have a ~100ms advantage in seeing you before you could see me.

What problem is he trying to solve, or asked another way, why is this better than a PS3 or Wii, or XBox? No, I did not watch the video.

I was under the impression that the games are both single and multiplayer games. We already have plenty experience about latency issues in multiplayer games. But what about single player? How much lag can there be before it becomes impractical?

Chip, basically they're introducing a "game system" where you don't need any "hardware" besides a display/input devices/minimal hardware for video decoding on the consumer end. Everything is done server side. So, no product upgrade cycles (on the consumer side).

Think of the device as the "terminal" like back in the days of mainframes.

It's realistic that they could offer 30-35ms ping times if they use local data centers. That's what the Playstation Network delivers today.

I don't know how they would do that if everyone is streaming at 5MBps, however. No cable/DSL network can handle that right now. Yes they offer that peak rate but they're not equipped for everyone in your neighborhood utilizing that level of bandwidth at the same time for hours at a time. Every 10,000 users would dump 50 GBps of traffic onto the networks while you're trying to guarantee QoS.

Also I don't know how they can afford to buy a CPU/GPU for every online user.