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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#451

Post by Wowfunhappy »

derefr wrote: post #345
justfor1comment wrote: post #176

I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This…

How do you picture your hypothetical vision of things working on the server side? Naively using buffering would make the input stream desync from the output stream. "Input prediction" works well enough when a game supports it, but lag would reappear for titles where the game doesn't. A general solution (for games with no input prediction) would require you to run the game in an x86 emulator with save-state + rewind s…

But for everything besides cutscenes, game streaming essentially has to work like a VoIP call (hard-realtime), doesn't it?

I imagine most music, and some during-gameplay dialogue, could be buffered at the client. I'd expect sound effects to be the only audio that needs to be super low latency. Maybe certain dialogue too, if the speaker is visible on screen.

This alone might alleviate a lot of the GP's problems, since most audio wouldn't cut out. That can make a huge perceptual difference.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#452

Post by justfor1comment »

derefr wrote: post #345
justfor1comment wrote: post #176

I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This…

How do you picture your hypothetical vision of things working on the server side? Naively using buffering would make the input stream desync from the output stream. "Input prediction" works well enough when a game supports it, but lag would reappear for titles where the game doesn't. A general solution (for games with no input prediction) would require you to run the game in an x86 emulator with save-state + rewind s…

I think you pretty much explained the solution. You need buffering plus real time VM suspend+resume. I was thinking the client could keep sending last shown frame data back to the server and if a hiccup is detected the server stops the clock cycles on the VM and resumes the clock as soon as the buffer is empty. This may lead the user to see a loader for a short time.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#453

Post by neivin »

jdhn wrote: post #166
fileeditview wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F2P games are the incarnation of grindy.. and more of them is the worst thing that could happen to gaming.

For some people, the grind is the main attraction, especially if it's well balanced. Look at Path of Exile, that's one hell of a grindy game and people absolutely adore it.

People love Path of Exile because it's essentially a slots machine.

Also, it doesn't have that high of a playerbase.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#454

Post by [deleted] »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #39

Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content. Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model. The cost per user will va…

[deleted]

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#455

Post by nsfmc »

pier25 wrote: post #233

Sounds great on paper but I'm skeptical. Not only you will need a really good internet connection and wifi, but also being close to a Stadia data center. The best possible case scenario will probably be a latency of around 50 ms, but I'm guessing the average will be closer to 100 ms which is too much for many types of games (specially competitive games the streamers play). Heck, even streaming in your local network i…

i tried this and found it to be pretty satisfying. i played entirely on a macbook while traveling during my winter vacation. It worked surprisingly well even with mixed wifi, i would compare it to the experience you get from using PS4 Remote Play or Steam Link over ethernet.

The only time i found it lagging was similar to the times when both of the above lag: during particularly complex visual scenes (i.e. you're circle strafing around a target and the entire screen is constantly redrawing). I thought it was great for playing a game casually: i.e. story mode. Lots of people use that phrase as a put-down, but the system is well suited for a game like ACO where you are mostly being tactical, planning, exploring, and moving the story forward.

I think of a game like 2016 hitman: i hesitated to install 30G of it to my ps4, but if you told me i could drop into the demo/prelude in less than a minute, even at 720, it's a very appealing concept for somebody like me that plays video games the way other people watch netflix while they're eating dinner: basically whenever i have some downtime and want to dip into a story or mechanic i like for ~30 mins.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#456

Post by jotm »

_ea1k wrote: post #378
gcbw2 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tradeoffs lag is the least of your worries. Encoding artifacts will get to you and completely ruin the experience on anything that is not a simple puzzle game.

So basically the same issues as onlive then? I remember thinking that it was pretty good for a while. Then I tried the same game on a decent PC immediately after using the service. It was night and day, both in terms of latency and graphics quality. I don't have high hopes for this service.

It worked great, in my experience. The most awesome thing about it was playing Dirt Rally 3 I believe, on a Motorola Droid/Milestone. A full PC game on a smartphone, pretty mind blowing at the time, and it was quite good even over 3G.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#457

Post by justfor1comment »

kofejnik wrote: post #326
justfor1comment wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that seems about right. I would say lag occurs once every 5 mins and lasts for roughly a second. Not longer than that. But since gaming is such a visual medium that 1 second seems longer than it actually is. One thing I forgot to mention is I was on wifi and the performance may have been better had I plugged in an ethernet cable. Although I would add that wifi usage is going to be what the typical user opts for.

I used to get these, every 5 minutes, right on the clock. Turns out, OS X location services rescan wifi every 5 minutes, God knows why. Turn it off, lag gone.

Fascinating. I tested this on Windows 10 PC, though. So may not be the same issue.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#458

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Jwarder wrote: post #235
ehsankia wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the arguments being made above. Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones. Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.

> Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones. I'm not sure about that. Currently tons of people pay monthly for grindy MMO games. Expanding that sort of revenue scheme to single player games would encourage devs to create more Skinner boxes to keep players "engaged" over the long run.

MMO's are pay-monthly for unlimited hours, not pay-per-hour, that's a big difference. The marginal cost of an additional hour of play is zero.

Players aren't going to spend hours grinding if they know they're paying extra money for each of those hours.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#459

Post by Wowfunhappy »

amaccuish wrote: post #426
jedieaston wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, everyone on the east coast (therefore using east coast edge nodes) will be playing from 8-11 EST when the new Wolfenstein game comes out, so how is stuff rationed? Do you make people queue until there is a node close enough to them available? Do you sell the spare GPUs to people in GCP to use for their compute on off times to make up the cash? Do you make it $40 per month?

I think this comment is super underrated. If America is asleep, you can't really use that capacity for players in Europe, since the latency would increase. Likewise if Europe is over capacity, you can't really just assign players to a US server.

And (while I realize you're oversimplifying for the sake of example), it's not just per-continent in this case, but something more akin to per-metro-area.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#460

Post by richdougherty »

ergo14 wrote: post #257
zarriak wrote: post #229

I really don't understand why people here aren't talking about the real underlying principle of this service. Google has captured the education and cheap laptop space with chromebooks. This is the logical extension of that software. Sure they will eventually combine chromeos and android but this is one more step in the direction of everything happening inside of your web browser. The entire reason this is happening i…

Unless I'm mistaken ChromeOS is only used in US schools on a wide scale.

Common in New Zealand too.
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