Feature

San Francisco based Rearden Studios announced at GDC that development of a game streaming service, named OnLive, is nearly complete. OnLive, offers a web based gaming service via a ‘Microconsole’, for those wanting to play via a television, or by software for use on both the PC and Mac.

The service replaces disks and consoles so that games can be played without having to install or process the games in the home. From the user interface gamers can navigate through a friends list, profile page and, most importantly, a list of available games. After a standard subscription fee you can view trailers, try demos, rent, or buy from a selection of games. All of this is done at OnLive centres with the information travelling back and forth across the internet.

The OnLive servers sends video data of the service being used, whether its scrolling through lists of available games, or actually playing a title, across the internet to a hardware add-on, or software plug-in, which decompresses the data back into video. The player never has any game processing equipment in front of them, as all that is needed is video conversion software or a Microconsole. The device comes retailed as a complete package with an OnLive wireless controller with microsecond latency and video controls for use with spectating and recording game footage to show off to your friends. The small box also has room for a USB controller or mouse and keyboard whilst Bluetooth pairing is also available.

OnLive have stressed that the very latest in technology is being used to not only deliver the service but to ensure that games are running at as high performance as possible. This allows for the user to play games with extremely high visual settings, which is usually only accessible from expensive hardware. Having a budget PC run OnLive software or a HDTV with a Microconsole will give the user the same standard of presentation from their games, without spending upwards of £2000 on a high specification PC. CEO Steve Perlman states that the only down side to the service is that it is only for those with a good broadband package, although those with download limits will still be able to play for a few hours a day. “The service is not for everyone. If you have a reasonable connection you should get results that are comparable to a very high end PC. If you take a game like Crysis, that really only runs on a small number of PCs with very high performance graphics processing units, it runs beautifully on an entry level PC or Mac without any problems. Even better with the Microconsole you can run Crysis, with all the features, shadows, and textures, beautifully, on a television.”

Mr Perlman continued in an interview with the BBC: “A broadband connection of 5Mbps will be fast enough for high definition gaming, while 1.5Mbps will be sufficient for standard definition. At those speeds and with a data center no further than 1,000 miles away for any gamer in the US the inevitable latency of the net as data has to physically travel across the network is within tolerable limits. The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds, although we usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds. The games themselves will be running on off the shelf motherboards at the data centres, with each server dealing with about 10 different gamers, because of the varying demands games have on hardware. Most games run fine on dual core processors but what users really want is a high performance graphics processor unit. While work continues on refining the algorithm the bulk of the technical work had been completed. A wider beta test begins this summer and feedback from the testing will be used to refine the service.”

When OnLive is released it will not be short of titles; Steve Perlman spoke to Gametrailers: “We have 9 major video game publishers as well as an indie game developer. All of these publishers are committing to make games available in the same retail window as you will find the games on store shelves. We will have a basic access fee to get to the OnLive service and then there will be additional tiers of pricing for different ways of accessing games.”
Since its announcement the scheme has received scepticism on its ability to deliver real time gaming, as OnLive suggests. The main concerns is the hardware required at the OnLive server centres to render and compress the video, as well as the impact of commercial internet broadband connections on its delivery. Mr Perlman responded to the BBC about these issues:“We are not doing video encoding in the conventional sense. Onlive has created a video compression algorithm designed specifically for video games that can encode and compress video into data in about one millisecond. A custom-built silicon chip does the actual encoding calculations at the server end, as well as the decompression at the gamer end, inside a cheap hardware add-on. It has taken tens of thousands of man hours to develop the algorithm. First of all it was a postage stamp size screen with no latency over the internet. It looked like the silliest kind of game because the screen size was smaller than a cell phone but nonetheless there was no lag. After years spent refining the technology we were able to make the video window bigger and bigger until achieving a resolution of 1280 by 720 at 60 frames per second. We have distilled this down so it can run on a custom chip which costs under £14 to make.

The algorithm had been designed with the imperfections of the internet in mind. Every time you present new material to it, you will see something that does not compress so well. We note those and correct the algorithm. Rather than fighting against the internet... and dropped, delayed or out of order packets we designed an algorithm that deals with these characteristics.”

OnLive is an exciting idea, and one that is being presented with incredible confidence. At GDC only the US has been labeled for receiving the service this year, but a successful start there can only see it expand to Europe. Or here's hoping.