The Internet is all abuzz with the announcement of OnLive, announced at GDC where they had a huge presence both on the show floor and in the chatter between conference attendees.

OnLive hopes to get rid of the hardware barrier in video gaming by basically doing all the game processing on servers in the "cloud" (it's like the Internet, but more pretentious) and just streaming it directly to the gamer as a video stream. No longer will you need to go and buy a game, wait for it to install (or download in the case of a digital download), patch it, wait for it to load, or anything - it'll all just happen remotely and be broadcast directly to your eyeballs via a PC or TV.

To use it all you need is a tiny little device (the OnLive MicroConsole), pictured below. It's a small black box with a couple of USB plugs, HDMI and S/PDIF audio sockets, and an Ethernet jack. You plug it in to the Internet and your TV (or PC), connect to the OnLive service and bam - you can instantly play from a wide selection of games. The OnLive guys have been busy in the background creating deals to get a stack of content.

In fact, OnLive has been in development for seven years - "stealth development", as described in the press release, which is certainly true given how little anyone had heard about it before GDC. After all that work you'd expect it to look polished - and it does.

The UI is very flashy and well presented - you can select from a stack of games that are all shown as little video clips from gameplay. It's easy to use and visually very appealing, all gelling nicely together to create a good user experience.

The Technical Questions:

Of course, the big obvious question everyone is asking is how the hell is this going to work?



The information sheet they were handing out at GDC indicates that you need a 1.5 megabit connection to be able to use the service. This doesn't seem like that big a deal - hey, we have those in Australia, right? After chatting with the OnLive guys on the floor though they seemed to be saying that it was a bit more like 2 megabit. If you want to game in SD, anyway. If you want to play in 720p (their high definition mode), you'll need around a 5 megabit connection.

The big question I had for them was about latency. Being Australian, we've long suffered the indignity of dealing with game publishers who insist on hosting services overseas and then the resulting high ping times that can render games painful or (at worst) unplayable. While the games on display all felt pretty good - there wasn't really any hugely noticable latency when playing - the data centre the games were being served from was only 55 miles (88 kilometres) away, so the ping times would have been pretty good. I think I noticed a few dropped frames in some of the games, but this is perfectly normal in a lot of streaming video applications, so it wasn't really surprising.

When I asked what the ping times were I was told they're not giving out that information (which could of course just mean they didn't know), but that they were hoping people would actually try the games on the floor, rather than get focused on the technical arcana.

Without local servers, it seems pretty obvious that this service will be of no interest to Australian gamers - latency will make it basically unusable. Don't forget that it's not like a regular game that you play on a remote server - there's no opportunity for client-side prediction. Every action you make has to be sent to the remote server to be processed, and the resulting rendered frames from that action sent back, so extra latency will have big effects. Still, this problem can be solved trivially with local hosting.

The other big technical issue is the scaling - most modern games use pretty much most of the full capacity of a single PC specced out for gaming. Keeping up with the latest games is going to require an aggressive hardware upgrade cycle - just like it does when you want to buy the latest game for your PC and you need to think about a new processor or some more memory. So it'll be interesting to see if they can keep pace with demand - the more subscribers they have, the more hardware they'll need to cater to them, in a much different ratio that is typical for a regular online services.

Effects on cheating in online games:

A few years ago, there was an interview - seemingly lost to future generations, as I couldn't find it after some searching - with an anonymous creator of one of the more widely used cheats for Counter-Strike. The interview discussed some of the issues with trying to stop people like him - mostly because of the way online games worked with the transmission of game state data across the wire and how clients were able to exploit that data (for example, with wallhacks) by messing with the game client.

One solution, he suggested, was to basically treat the client as a video player and just send them a series of "dumb" frames that are rendered server-side. Sounds familiar, right?

This was several years ago and at the time it was largely dismissed as a technical impossibility - but now we're living in the future, where anything is possible, and - as of GDC 2009 - suddenly it's not such a crazy idea any more. Streaming the game to users as "video" instead of a series of raw data will mean people can no longer alter their client and to gain unfair advantages - for example, using modified client files that allow you to see through walls or provide more high-visibility models. A whole class of attacks suddenly becomes completely irrelevant.

The practical upshot is that this could have a real and pronounced effect on cheating in online games - probably not all forms, but definitely some of the more pervasive, common and annoying things like wallhacks could possibly be made extinct. This alone is almost a good enough reason to keep an eye on the OnLive technology.

Stay tuned!

This has a lot of potential. It looks good, it plays nicely (if the network conditions are perfect), it has a lot of appealing features (not the least of which is never having to play the hardware upgrade game again) - and with the support of a lot of game publishers (including the likes of EA, Ubisoft and Take 2), it could be going places.