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Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

investors.unity.com

91–97 of 97 posts

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#91
post #51

Really wish there were opensource alternatives to Parsec and Rainway that weren't tied down to hardware (Moonlight). As/if we move away from x86 I think it would be a great way to archive old games that haven't found their way to Webassembly. It would definitely be great to see archive.org use something like it stream old software/games/media without having to distribute it.

“remote desktop with low-latency, sound, and gamepad support” _feels_ like the sort of well-scoped highly-technical problem that open-source should excel at... I remember wanting that back in the days when VNC was considered state of the art and being told it was impossible, and now we’re once again in the situation of closed-source innovation and open-source trying to copy it :(

I wonder what the odds are of parsec opening their code / protocol, making their money from renting out servers...

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#92
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it work similar to rollback netcode in fighting games? Where the game tries to predict what the other player is going to do by looking at what they’ve done in previous frames, and if there’s lag or dropped packets and a destiny happens it rolls back the game state and replays it correctly?

Not exactly, FEC basically means you add in redundant data to your transmission so that if some of the data is lost, you can “rebuild” the missing data from the packets that did arrive. The cost of this is extra bandwidth spent on the redundancy, as well as a little latency. Rollback is as you say, if the game loses connection with your opponent, rollback 1) uses your opponent’s past actions to predict what they will…

thanks for the explanation

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#93
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue increased probably because of the hack, because that seems to be how it works in this twisted world. (i am looking at you Zoom)

Yea I heard TeamViewer is insecure. And average internet users don't care about privacy. More than 2 billion people using Facebook confirms my hypothesis.

Would like to know more about its security breaches. Really hard to find anything. I suspect that they've scrubbed a lot of the bed press off of google and the internet in general.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#94
post #58

What's special about Parsec compared to competitors like Shadow.tech that seems just as good? (if not actually a bit better - i think personally after trying both) Both are impressive but the tech must be somewhat standard no? Also Shadow runs its own datacenters which seems far more impressive team wise. Can anyone shed some light on why this technology is worth so much in that context?

Shadow has you uses their servers to put your stuff on. Parsec is more like TeamViewer, VNC or AnyDesk in that you uses your own hardware to both connect to and from, albeit with a latency that's low enough to play games, and color fidelity that's good enough to do graphics. It is much valuable to businesses that wants to levrage their own powerful hardware but no be limited by teleworking employee.

Thanks, but i've used both of for an extended amount of time and Shadow is just as good, and honestly is more stable in games in my opinion - of course it's a bonus that you can host yourself in Parsec but the tech seems like it's the same since Shadow does this in its own datacenters and it works exactly as parsec with remote work.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#95
post #63
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me rephrase your question: can they sell three thousand more enterprise license seats by bundling this in? Because they’ll have made it back in a couple of years if they do.

An enterprise seat is $2400 a year per seat, no? At 3000 seats, isn't it closer to 40-50 years?

sigh You’re right, my back of the envelope dropped a zero so yeah their plans had better be a tad more ambitious.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's Game Pass xcloud service for iOS leverages Rainway, a competitor to Parsec. As a user of both I can say that Parsec outperforms Rainway although Rainway works in the browser. Seems like Unity is looking to build a similar stack with Parsec at the helm, but I guess we'll see...

Parsec also works in a browser and quite well I might add. I get very similar performance between their web and desktop clients

Thanks for letting me know about this, I did not realize. It does not seem to work on iOS devices but they do seem to have browser support!

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#97
post #79

I think tech like this is really fucking neat. I've been playing around with similar ideas in the space. For instance, instead of delivering full frame buffers to your clients, send them instructions on what to draw based on their current viewport dimensions (e.g. webgl). This is more constrained and requires the application to target a specific UI framework - although I can support arbitrary 3d scenes of modest mesh…

Interesting, what do you mean by it would look like a stock exchange?
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