So much of the Stadia launch coverage was written assuming a "Streaming Future," as if they expect the speed of light to "improve."
While the cloud streaming technology was there, playing to Google's strengths
And to Google's dismay, gaming was there, playing to all the weaknesses of "cloud streaming."
From the moment you select a (non-live) streaming video to play, most every bit from the beginning of the stream to the end is known, or can be (barring the invocation of features like automatic on-the-fly quality/bitrate adjustment). The entire movie/show/vlog can and will play without any further user input.
Games in general are completely interactive on the level of seconds and usually milliseconds: i.e. in an FPS it often isn't known what the screen should look like even a tenth of a second from now, so the dumbest thing you could do is make everything rely on passing (a round trip) through an internet connection.
I see why publishers will always push this customer-rights-raping tech as aggressively as they can, and I see how startups like Onlive might do it to con investors out of a fortune. What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product, except for the most simplistic explanation that no one cares because they have a bottomless pit of money.
Stadia only runs from Google’s Asia-southeast1-c, Europe-west4-a, Europe-west4-b, US-central1-a and US-central1-c data centers using the Google Cloud Compute e2-standard-4+A100 configuration.
For people in North America, all their games are delivered from Council Bluffs, IA.
That lack of hardware investment speaks more heavily than how they are approaching software partners and licensing.
I live right next to CB and my games are defaulting to European settings. I have yet to experience input lag. I see video quality drop to potato for a few seconds several times a day, but it's doing better than my rig would running those games locally.
I've been using Stadia to bide time while I ride out this chip shortage. My rig is 4+ years old now but I can't get my hands on a new video card unless I want to pay newest-gen prices for a card that's already last-gen. At this point I'll probably just wait t
I see how startups like Onlive might do it to con investors out of a fortune. What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product
Google Stadia was based on new algorithms for predicting the game, finding the forks and rendering and sending both possible outcomes to the clients before either happens.
But no, I agree. I think Stadia is still not suitable for FPS, even with these predictive enhancements, Competitive FPS gamers do chase those milliseconds. Some gamers still use CRTs to avoid screen lag. Gaming hardware companies compete on reduced latency, claiming that their product will give be just a little faster, providing that edge t
You can make many complaints about Stadia, but the responsiveness for many kinds of games is not one of them. I didn't think it would work either, but the last game I worked on also released on Stadia, and it was really snappy over a 30mbit connection. It was way better to play than when I was doing it natively at my desk before the pandemic. It's a melee combat heavy RPG, so responsiveness matters (though I won't make any claims about FPSes or fighting games; especially fighting games. Those guys still pla
i.e. in an FPS it often isn't known what the screen should look like even a tenth of a second from now, so the dumbest thing you could do is make everything rely on passing (a round trip) through an internet connection.
You mean like multiplayer WAN gaming in those FPS games have been doing since the 90's? It's not like your computer magically knows what someone else's computer is doing when playing an online multiplayer match.
All Stadia and other streaming services do is offload the frame renders and game engine computations from your CPU / GPU. Which if you don't have a hardware accelerated network card to offload to, and have your OS set to not CPU offload to the network hardware stack, means better performance on the n
What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product, except for the most simplistic explanation that no one cares because they have a bottomless pit of money.
Have you not been paying attention to the last 23 years of gaming? They've been winning the war on software ownership and general computing which began with mmo's in the mid to late 1990's (aka rebranded PC rpg's to undermine game ownership). In the mid 90's everyone was gearing up for every game to be like quake 2 (aka you own it, have dedicated servers, no steam, level editing, modding, the works... that all went away because of the success of stole RPG's with a subscription (aka ultima online) everyone was expecting PC RPG's to get the quake 2 treatment but that didn't happen because of the success of Ultima online which changed the direction of the entire industry.
The nerd zeitgeist back then was fear of hardware/software DRM and Palladium (trusted computing) see here:
Two or more machines connected in a network behave as a single machine, so that means every program from adobe photoshop, to quake to Windows OS can be split into two seperate executable files and split between your machine and a companies. That's why you never want to buy client-server anything, but people did en masse with Ultima online, Everquest, Asherons call, Guild wars 1 and world of warcraft, those games accelerated Microsoft/intel/amd's drm plans by miles. That's how we ended up with Steam, Origin, Uplay, Denuvo, Rockstar social club, Battle.net DRM, Diablo 3's always online drm, etc.
Everyone was expecting Diablo at some point to get level editing and dedicated servers, that didn't happen because of "MMO's" aka the game industries rerbrand of PC RPG's to deceive the public and put an end to game ownership where you are given the complete honestly C++ compiled binaries for your games. Just try running something like Deep rock galactic without steam running to see how far we've fallen, against something like Quake 2/Quake 3 (which you can get on gog.com btw).
Microsoft accelerating developments for "silicon innovation" (aka encrypted computing) windows 10 is the first OS with major drm in it which is what the nerds in the 90's feared. Either way the average member of the gaming public is chimp factor five levels of stupid and Intel, MS and the rest of silicon valley software and game companies have been on a full scale assault against general computing. Any game or app that's client server and demands a login 9/10 equals you getting screwed.
They've been winning the war on software ownership and general computing which began with mmo's in the mid to late 1990's (aka rebranded PC rpg's to undermine game ownership).
You're not wrong that the game industry has been one of the worst offenders about software ownership, but you're doing MMOs an injustice. The MMO architecture allowed a new kind of game to exist which had never existed before, with features that are impossible without that architecture.
Without the client/server architecture, running a world that can accommodate a massive number of players is beyond the means of any individual gamer. They can't afford the hardware. MMOs allowed previously unimagined level
By all means, lament the state of software ownership, but MMOs were not the thin edge of the wedge.
They were you idiot, all mmo's are are just rpg's with game code and functionality ripped out and held hostage, MMO's are literally just hardware dongle Role playing games by way of network connection, your network connection to a 2nd computer half a world away keeps the files and code missing from the game you paid for it to continue to function. That's why most games from the 90's to the mid early 2000's are complete local apps where you can host your own multiplayer games with no DRM (corproate news-spe
You're not wrong that the game industry has been one of the worst offenders about software ownership, but you're doing MMOs an injustice. T
No I'm not dude, game clients of the late 90's and early 2000's could barely handle over a 100 objects on the screen to render at once, when Ultima online was released most people had 28.8K modems, downloading a game state representing all object positions over 28.8K don't give me this crap RPG's with large # of players rebadged with the "MMO" marketing moniker to confuse the lay ppublic are some special category of software. The fact you buy into the mmo mythology of the game needing "special server" prov
game clients of the late 90's and early 2000's could barely handle over a 100 objects on the screen to render at once, when Ultima online was released most people had 28.8K modems, downloading a game state representing all object positions over 28.8K
So much vitriol, so much incoherent ignorance. MMOs don't have hundreds of objects. They have hundreds of millions of objects. The MMO server keeps track of all of them, without burdening the client with them. Ultima Online had no volume or stack limits, so people grinding their production skills would fill chests in their houses with tens of thousands of shirts, all of which were unique objects in the game database. If you never went into their house, your client never saw all those objects, but their server did. It eventually became such a drag on their systems that something had to be done about it, but that's just an exemplar of the reality that MMOs are always bigger than any client sees. And you obviously haven't the first clue how many orders of magnitude the difference is.
I do, because I was there, and I wrote some of that code. No I'm not John Carmack, but John Carmack never wrote MMO code and I have. Don't quote Carmack at me. Especially don't quote him while continuing to display your wild ignorance. He projected "150" players in Quake, not "unlimited", and the original Quake peer to peer limit was just eight players. Eight. The machine couldn't handle more than that while rendering the game. It wasn't until the Quake dedicated server that the limit was finally increased to 32, where it remained for many years (because Carmack had to move on to the next thing), and it had to exploit plenty of clever hardware tricks to handle even that many. It's no accident that the limit was a power of two.
Where do you think valve got the idea for steam from?
From their need for an autoupdater you absolute gronk. Ultima Online wasn't relevant to Valve's decision to create an online autoupdater for their multiplayer games which required matching versions to play online. That's all Steam was, for the first two years of its existence. An autoupdater with a little bit of cheat prevention in it. If anything, I expect their inspiration was Windows Update, which debuted in Windows 98, less than a year after UO was released.
That's why every game suddenly had "MMO" stuck to the front of it to justify back ending it and preventing piracy...
You are obsessed, and blinded by your obsession, and flat wrong. "Every" game does not have "MMO" stuck on it, and the vast majority of the GOG catalog is available DRM-free. There were over 10,000 PC games released in 2020 (completely ignoring mobile games), and how many of those were MMOs? Lists I see online run to no more than 20 of those, and that's only if you count retreads like WoW Classic and the weird little thing that is Elder Scrolls Online. The VAST majority of new games are not MMOs and do include all of the game logic in their download, with nothing hidden on servers. The SimCity debacle is a rare exception, not the rule. If you hadn't covered your entire face from foaming at the mouth, maybe you could see enough of reality to know this.
The fact you bought into the mythology is why we lost dedicated servers and level editors to begin with and why Modern quake champions has no modding, maps, skins or open file access...
You act like that was even remotely normal. It was not. Doom didn't come with modding or mapmaking tools. I know, because I knew the guy personally who created them, by reverse engineering the format. We went to the same university. I saw him working on his Doom map editor in the labs on more than one evening. Level editors and dedicated servers have been extremely rare for the entirety of the existence of PC gaming. Lode Runner came with a level editor, and I whiled away many an hour on my 286 in it. It was the ON
So much vitriol, so much incoherent ignorance. Especially don't quote him while continuing to display your wild ignorance. He projected "150" players in Quake, not "unlimited"
Dude watch the video again, he said NO LIMIT to the # of players, the 150 player remark was he expected to see 150 player quake 2 game at quake con.
From their need for an autoupdater you absolute gronk. Ultima Online wasn't relevant to Valve's decision to create an online autoupdater for their multiplayer games which required matching versions to play online.
No dumbass this is your delusionsal world idiot, EVERY ROLE PLAYING GAME IN DEVELOPMENT was rebranded mmo after the succes of ultima online idiot, Ash
Every" game does not have "MMO" stuck on it, and the vast majority of the GOG catalog is available DRM-free
All the big AAA games have been back ended idiot, it doesn't matter whether it has an mmo tag or not, EVERY FUCKING GAME now has a login screen and has been reprogrammed client server.
Mech warrior "online" client server Tribes Ascend - client server
They used you as a useful idiot to steal PC games and undermine game ownership, the fact you cant' see mean's your a moron, we specifically lost dedicated servers in quake and level editing BECAUSE Ultima online, everquest made it permissible to steal games by bac
Latency in Stadia, and Nvidia's streaming game service for that matter, is fine.
Modern games are designed with a fair amount of latency in mind. Time between pressing a mouse button and the character on screen reacting is rarely much less than 40ms, and some games add even more to make online play work better. For example Street Fighter V has 112ms latency from button press to action, which allows it to hide most internet latency in online play.
Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:5, Interesting)
While the cloud streaming technology was there, playing to Google's strengths
And to Google's dismay, gaming was there, playing to all the weaknesses of "cloud streaming."
From the moment you select a (non-live) streaming video to play, most every bit from the beginning of the stream to the end is known, or can be (barring the invocation of features like automatic on-the-fly quality/bitrate adjustment). The entire movie/show/vlog can and will play without any further user input.
Games in general are completely interactive on the level of seconds and usually milliseconds: i.e. in an FPS it often isn't known what the screen should look like even a tenth of a second from now, so the dumbest thing you could do is make everything rely on passing (a round trip) through an internet connection.
I see why publishers will always push this customer-rights-raping tech as aggressively as they can, and I see how startups like Onlive might do it to con investors out of a fortune. What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product, except for the most simplistic explanation that no one cares because they have a bottomless pit of money.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
For people in North America, all their games are delivered from Council Bluffs, IA.
That lack of hardware investment speaks more heavily than how they are approaching software partners and licensing.
Re: (Score:2)
I live right next to CB and my games are defaulting to European settings. I have yet to experience input lag. I see video quality drop to potato for a few seconds several times a day, but it's doing better than my rig would running those games locally.
I've been using Stadia to bide time while I ride out this chip shortage. My rig is 4+ years old now but I can't get my hands on a new video card unless I want to pay newest-gen prices for a card that's already last-gen. At this point I'll probably just wait t
Re: (Score:2)
I see how startups like Onlive might do it to con investors out of a fortune. What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product
Someone conned Google out of a fortune.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Google Stadia was based on new algorithms for predicting the game, finding the forks and rendering and sending both possible outcomes to the clients before either happens.
But no, I agree. I think Stadia is still not suitable for FPS, even with these predictive enhancements,
Competitive FPS gamers do chase those milliseconds. Some gamers still use CRTs to avoid screen lag. Gaming hardware companies compete on reduced latency, claiming that their product will give be just a little faster, providing that edge t
Re: Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:3)
You can make many complaints about Stadia, but the responsiveness for many kinds of games is not one of them. I didn't think it would work either, but the last game I worked on also released on Stadia, and it was really snappy over a 30mbit connection. It was way better to play than when I was doing it natively at my desk before the pandemic. It's a melee combat heavy RPG, so responsiveness matters (though I won't make any claims about FPSes or fighting games; especially fighting games. Those guys still pla
Re: (Score:2)
i.e. in an FPS it often isn't known what the screen should look like even a tenth of a second from now, so the dumbest thing you could do is make everything rely on passing (a round trip) through an internet connection.
You mean like multiplayer WAN gaming in those FPS games have been doing since the 90's? It's not like your computer magically knows what someone else's computer is doing when playing an online multiplayer match.
All Stadia and other streaming services do is offload the frame renders and game engine computations from your CPU / GPU. Which if you don't have a hardware accelerated network card to offload to, and have your OS set to not CPU offload to the network hardware stack, means better performance on the n
Re:Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:4, Interesting)
What I don't understand is how Google could go as far as approving and launching a physical hardware product, except for the most simplistic explanation that no one cares because they have a bottomless pit of money.
Have you not been paying attention to the last 23 years of gaming? They've been winning the war on software ownership and general computing which began with mmo's in the mid to late 1990's (aka rebranded PC rpg's to undermine game ownership). In the mid 90's everyone was gearing up for every game to be like quake 2 (aka you own it, have dedicated servers, no steam, level editing, modding, the works... that all went away because of the success of stole RPG's with a subscription (aka ultima online) everyone was expecting PC RPG's to get the quake 2 treatment but that didn't happen because of the success of Ultima online which changed the direction of the entire industry.
The nerd zeitgeist back then was fear of hardware/software DRM and Palladium (trusted computing) see here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja1... [cam.ac.uk]
Two or more machines connected in a network behave as a single machine, so that means every program from adobe photoshop, to quake to Windows OS can be split into two seperate executable files and split between your machine and a companies. That's why you never want to buy client-server anything, but people did en masse with Ultima online, Everquest, Asherons call, Guild wars 1 and world of warcraft, those games accelerated Microsoft/intel/amd's drm plans by miles. That's how we ended up with Steam, Origin, Uplay, Denuvo, Rockstar social club, Battle.net DRM, Diablo 3's always online drm, etc.
Everyone was expecting Diablo at some point to get level editing and dedicated servers, that didn't happen because of "MMO's" aka the game industries rerbrand of PC RPG's to deceive the public and put an end to game ownership where you are given the complete honestly C++ compiled binaries for your games. Just try running something like Deep rock galactic without steam running to see how far we've fallen, against something like Quake 2/Quake 3 (which you can get on gog.com btw).
Microsoft accelerating developments for "silicon innovation" (aka encrypted computing) windows 10 is the first OS with major drm in it which is what the nerds in the 90's feared. Either way the average member of the gaming public is chimp factor five levels of stupid and Intel, MS and the rest of silicon valley software and game companies have been on a full scale assault against general computing. Any game or app that's client server and demands a login 9/10 equals you getting screwed.
https://blogs.windows.com/wind... [windows.com]
Re: (Score:3)
They've been winning the war on software ownership and general computing which began with mmo's in the mid to late 1990's (aka rebranded PC rpg's to undermine game ownership).
You're not wrong that the game industry has been one of the worst offenders about software ownership, but you're doing MMOs an injustice. The MMO architecture allowed a new kind of game to exist which had never existed before, with features that are impossible without that architecture.
Without the client/server architecture, running a world that can accommodate a massive number of players is beyond the means of any individual gamer. They can't afford the hardware. MMOs allowed previously unimagined level
Re: (Score:1)
By all means, lament the state of software ownership, but MMOs were not the thin edge of the wedge.
They were you idiot, all mmo's are are just rpg's with game code and functionality ripped out and held hostage, MMO's are literally just hardware dongle Role playing games by way of network connection, your network connection to a 2nd computer half a world away keeps the files and code missing from the game you paid for it to continue to function. That's why most games from the 90's to the mid early 2000's are complete local apps where you can host your own multiplayer games with no DRM (corproate news-spe
Re: (Score:2)
You're not wrong that the game industry has been one of the worst offenders about software ownership, but you're doing MMOs an injustice. T
No I'm not dude, game clients of the late 90's and early 2000's could barely handle over a 100 objects on the screen to render at once, when Ultima online was released most people had 28.8K modems, downloading a game state representing all object positions over 28.8K don't give me this crap RPG's with large # of players rebadged with the "MMO" marketing moniker to confuse the lay ppublic are some special category of software. The fact you buy into the mmo mythology of the game needing "special server" prov
Re:Streamed Games != Streamed Video (Score:4, Informative)
game clients of the late 90's and early 2000's could barely handle over a 100 objects on the screen to render at once, when Ultima online was released most people had 28.8K modems, downloading a game state representing all object positions over 28.8K
So much vitriol, so much incoherent ignorance. MMOs don't have hundreds of objects. They have hundreds of millions of objects. The MMO server keeps track of all of them, without burdening the client with them. Ultima Online had no volume or stack limits, so people grinding their production skills would fill chests in their houses with tens of thousands of shirts, all of which were unique objects in the game database. If you never went into their house, your client never saw all those objects, but their server did. It eventually became such a drag on their systems that something had to be done about it, but that's just an exemplar of the reality that MMOs are always bigger than any client sees. And you obviously haven't the first clue how many orders of magnitude the difference is.
I do, because I was there, and I wrote some of that code. No I'm not John Carmack, but John Carmack never wrote MMO code and I have. Don't quote Carmack at me. Especially don't quote him while continuing to display your wild ignorance. He projected "150" players in Quake, not "unlimited", and the original Quake peer to peer limit was just eight players. Eight. The machine couldn't handle more than that while rendering the game. It wasn't until the Quake dedicated server that the limit was finally increased to 32, where it remained for many years (because Carmack had to move on to the next thing), and it had to exploit plenty of clever hardware tricks to handle even that many. It's no accident that the limit was a power of two.
Where do you think valve got the idea for steam from?
From their need for an autoupdater you absolute gronk. Ultima Online wasn't relevant to Valve's decision to create an online autoupdater for their multiplayer games which required matching versions to play online. That's all Steam was, for the first two years of its existence. An autoupdater with a little bit of cheat prevention in it. If anything, I expect their inspiration was Windows Update, which debuted in Windows 98, less than a year after UO was released.
That's why every game suddenly had "MMO" stuck to the front of it to justify back ending it and preventing piracy...
You are obsessed, and blinded by your obsession, and flat wrong. "Every" game does not have "MMO" stuck on it, and the vast majority of the GOG catalog is available DRM-free. There were over 10,000 PC games released in 2020 (completely ignoring mobile games), and how many of those were MMOs? Lists I see online run to no more than 20 of those, and that's only if you count retreads like WoW Classic and the weird little thing that is Elder Scrolls Online. The VAST majority of new games are not MMOs and do include all of the game logic in their download, with nothing hidden on servers. The SimCity debacle is a rare exception, not the rule. If you hadn't covered your entire face from foaming at the mouth, maybe you could see enough of reality to know this.
The fact you bought into the mythology is why we lost dedicated servers and level editors to begin with and why Modern quake champions has no modding, maps, skins or open file access...
You act like that was even remotely normal. It was not. Doom didn't come with modding or mapmaking tools. I know, because I knew the guy personally who created them, by reverse engineering the format. We went to the same university. I saw him working on his Doom map editor in the labs on more than one evening. Level editors and dedicated servers have been extremely rare for the entirety of the existence of PC gaming. Lode Runner came with a level editor, and I whiled away many an hour on my 286 in it. It was the ON
Re: (Score:1)
So much vitriol, so much incoherent ignorance. Especially don't quote him while continuing to display your wild ignorance. He projected "150" players in Quake, not "unlimited"
Dude watch the video again, he said NO LIMIT to the # of players, the 150 player remark was he expected to see 150 player quake 2 game at quake con.
From their need for an autoupdater you absolute gronk. Ultima Online wasn't relevant to Valve's decision to create an online autoupdater for their multiplayer games which required matching versions to play online.
No dumbass this is your delusionsal world idiot, EVERY ROLE PLAYING GAME IN DEVELOPMENT was rebranded mmo after the succes of ultima online idiot, Ash
Re: (Score:2)
EA literally cancelled ultima 9, the game were expecting to get level editors and dedicated servers and modding.. So no, you are still an idiot:
See the postmortem of UO by the original devs:
https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t... [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:2)
Every" game does not have "MMO" stuck on it, and the vast majority of the GOG catalog is available DRM-free
All the big AAA games have been back ended idiot, it doesn't matter whether it has an mmo tag or not, EVERY FUCKING GAME now has a login screen and has been reprogrammed client server.
Mech warrior "online" client server
Tribes Ascend - client server
They used you as a useful idiot to steal PC games and undermine game ownership, the fact you cant' see mean's your a moron, we specifically lost dedicated servers in quake and level editing BECAUSE Ultima online, everquest made it permissible to steal games by bac
Re: (Score:2)
Latency in Stadia, and Nvidia's streaming game service for that matter, is fine.
Modern games are designed with a fair amount of latency in mind. Time between pressing a mouse button and the character on screen reacting is rarely much less than 40ms, and some games add even more to make online play work better. For example Street Fighter V has 112ms latency from button press to action, which allows it to hide most internet latency in online play.
Stadia's problem is that it's a shitty deal.