Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

turingtribe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#31

Post by dragonwriter »

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #16
shultays wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to show something shiny to hide the fact that the system has 100ms of latency on a test environment. I wonder how much lag the style transfer would add

100ms+ feels worse in this kind of thing compared to 100ms ping to a multiplayer server because even if you have bad ping to a server the game still records your inputs locally and feels responsive. More realistically it will be more like 180ms+ on a home connection. I was an OnLive user when it existed earlier in the decade and I would say that it felt generally fine in games with forgiving timers that were not all…

> No one would be dumb enough to spend $300/month+ on a high bandwidth connection so that they can stream games to potato hardware.

I'm paying $80/mo for nominally gigabit (usually tests out at 700+Mbit from the router, a bit lower for WiFi clients) with no bandwidth cap, and not in a market with much (or any) competition for really high-speed connections. What are people paying $300+/mo for, and is even remotely needed for something like this?

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#32

Post by BeefySwain »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #23
caprese wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onlive - required other people's infrastructure and a hardware play, and a software client. Playstation Now - required Sony to buy/use a cloud service, maintain it, and expensive Sony hardware just as a force of habit. Google - negligible instance running on their existing infrastructure, maintained under existing processes, playable on chromecasts already in hotels and homes everywhere, alongside browsers and mobile…

Are you implying Google doesn’t need to maintain an expensive cloud infrastructure for it as opposed to Playstation? The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. When OnLive started they had to do it themselves. I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speakin…

> Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory

Can you give a little more info on this? Is this standard to consumer level GPU's? What is the tech called?

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#33

Post by j-c-hewitt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #31
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100ms+ feels worse in this kind of thing compared to 100ms ping to a multiplayer server because even if you have bad ping to a server the game still records your inputs locally and feels responsive. More realistically it will be more like 180ms+ on a home connection. I was an OnLive user when it existed earlier in the decade and I would say that it felt generally fine in games with forgiving timers that were not all…

> No one would be dumb enough to spend $300/month+ on a high bandwidth connection so that they can stream games to potato hardware. I'm paying $80/mo for nominally gigabit (usually tests out at 700+Mbit from the router, a bit lower for WiFi clients) with no bandwidth cap, and not in a market with much (or any) competition for really high-speed connections. What are people paying $300+/mo for, and is even remotely nee…

That's great for you and that is what it should cost but for a large portion of people that kind of bandwidth is not attainable for an affordable price.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#34

Post by cwyers »

dragonwriter wrote: post #17
lwb wrote: post #3

To me this was the least interesting part of the Stadia reveal. State share was the real innovation imo. Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists? Didn't seem like the quality was there. That said, it is an awesome PoC. Just not something I see being practically applicable.

> Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists? No, a serious (AAA) studio would not. OTOH, the platform might intend to support producers that aren't AAA studios, and whose limited pre-release resources are focussed on gameplay more than art assets, and those producers might view it very differently than AAA studios.

You still have to do all the work of building the geometries for the art assets, are you really saving that much on not having to color/texture those assets?

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#35

Post by jguimont »

caprese wrote: post #18
newobj wrote: post #12

There is nothing more Googley than building something that's technically impressive with absolutely no - or even antithetical - market fit

Onlive - required other people's infrastructure and a hardware play, and a software client. Playstation Now - required Sony to buy/use a cloud service, maintain it, and expensive Sony hardware just as a force of habit. Google - negligible instance running on their existing infrastructure, maintained under existing processes, playable on chromecasts already in hotels and homes everywhere, alongside browsers and mobile…

Throw in a VR headset and you got Ready Player One.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#36

Post by mikewhy »

BeefySwain wrote: post #32
heavenlyblue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying Google doesn’t need to maintain an expensive cloud infrastructure for it as opposed to Playstation? The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. When OnLive started they had to do it themselves. I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speakin…

> Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory Can you give a little more info on this? Is this standard to consumer level GPU's? What is the tech called?

Nvidia's is called GameStream, and has been in consumer cards for about 4-5 years now. Moonlight[1] is an open-source client that lets you stream your PC games to most any device.

They may be referring to ShadowPlay, a feature that keeps a buffer of the output so you can save something that just happened. Again, available for 4-5 years.

[1]: https://moonlight-stream.org/

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#37

Post by caprese »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #23
caprese wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onlive - required other people's infrastructure and a hardware play, and a software client. Playstation Now - required Sony to buy/use a cloud service, maintain it, and expensive Sony hardware just as a force of habit. Google - negligible instance running on their existing infrastructure, maintained under existing processes, playable on chromecasts already in hotels and homes everywhere, alongside browsers and mobile…

Are you implying Google doesn’t need to maintain an expensive cloud infrastructure for it as opposed to Playstation? The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. When OnLive started they had to do it themselves. I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speakin…

> I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speaking about.

You are gatekeeping based on irrelevant details when my point is that prior entrants had higher or untenable costs and Google might not, which I think you agreed on.

Google's advantage is that it doesn't need a dedicated hardware play, has saturation in relevant markets in their existing hardware plays, and has existing capacity in their large compute infrastructure. Whether consumers care is another story, but they can throw more money at things to make them care without having other untenable overhead costs as a distraction.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#38

Post by joshuamorton »

libraryatnight wrote: post #21
dragonwriter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists? No, a serious (AAA) studio would not. OTOH, the platform might intend to support producers that aren't AAA studios, and whose limited pre-release resources are focussed on gameplay more than art assets, and those producers might view it very differently than AAA studios.

Indeed, I'd be curious to see what some indie devs do with it.

Imagine a game where you step into a portrait and are suddenly in the art style of the image. You suddenly walk into a countryside that feels american-gothic style, and then time-jump to 1940s New York in the style of Nighthawks.

(different) Stylization as a medium in games isn't that explored, and the opportunity for indie devs to play with that is, IMO, really cool.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#39

Post by bilbo0s »

BeefySwain wrote: post #32
heavenlyblue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying Google doesn’t need to maintain an expensive cloud infrastructure for it as opposed to Playstation? The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. When OnLive started they had to do it themselves. I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speakin…

> Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory Can you give a little more info on this? Is this standard to consumer level GPU's? What is the tech called?

I'm assuming you mean how can you encode the output of the nvidia card to a memory buffer using an API?

The NVENC API allows you to do this on your commodity NVidia card. If you have the good stuff from NVidia, you can likely use the Capture SDK, which is a bit more scalable. If you use AMD there is AMF. And if you're cheap, you can just use QuickSync from Intel. All of the encoding API's will likely be unified with an industry wide API a la opengl at some point in the future, but it won't be implemented by everyone in a timely fashion, so you have to pick your poison right now.

One gotcha though, you can only do this if your game engine's license allows. Which means anyone who uses Unity is out of luck. Unreal and other engines? I don't know, I think you can talk to the companies and they'll probably? give you permission? (At least I'd hope they would give you permission until they go into the cloud gaming business.)

Your best shot though is just to take an open source engine, like Godot, and "NVENC it up" so to speak. It'll take maybe a couple of hours and it'll save you a lot of headache.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#40

Post by robotmay »

smaili wrote: post #30

Is anyone else concerned this will be yet another Google product that goes by the wayside in a few years? This has essentially become my biggest fear now with any new product they announce/release.

It's pretty much a certainty with this project, in my opinion. Until everybody somehow has gigabit lines to their home and to their phones, I don't see this becoming popular. Like most Google projects, their actual success period is most likely 10+ years away, and the project will be axed long before then.
Post reply on HN