Oh I Do Wish I Could Stream Games, Like I Stream Movies and TV...

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

XCOM2 is going to take 20 hours to download!
And that's if I dont use the internet in the mean time. Which I will. I have Netflix stuff to watch tonight. I'll probably want to play Arma III, or Elite tomorrow.

I wish I could start playing XCOM 2 while it finishes downloading the rest... Lol

I really need better internoots.

You wouldn't think I lived in the centre of a busy town, less than 1/4 mile from the exchange. Lol

My internet was better at my houses I used to live in, in Cornwall...!
And they were both 3 miles from the exchange. Lol

BT, GIVE ME FIBRE!

Urgh. Lol

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Caramel Clown]

You can actually stream games. There was this thing from NVidia, forgot the name.
You would stream the game played on their machine cluster. Obvious problem arise - latency...

 

[Brett C]

You can actually stream games. There was this thing from NVidia, forgot the name.
You would stream the game played on their machine cluster. Obvious problem arise - latency...

Not just latency, have to deal with grabbed inputs from the client to the remote host.

I've used the in-home streaming that Steam has to play games on my power house machine to my laptop. It appears to use h264 compression and streaming. This meant fuzzy-looking reds and "warm rounded/fuzzed edges", and random square blocks if you watched carefully enough. The latency was hit and miss, due to how much was going on with my screen.


It's an interesting technology honestly, but there's so many issues where costs become inane for game companies.

1) Dedicated GPU's on the remote servers.
2) Powerhouse CPU's on a per-instance setup. Some games seriously EAT your CPU i/o's to the limits.
3) Internet bandwidth. When streaming locally, you don't have to worry as much, as most of the time, it's 1000Mbps/1Gbps.
3a) Have to deal with local infrastructures for bandwidth transit and have to seriously know the bandwidth capacity (not just speed, but latency, routing, congestion) of the end client down to a T.
4) Server storage.
5) Dealing with hundreds of regions to ensure low latency from the server to the client. Ideally, less than 35ms roundtrip latency.
6) End-user client configuration to the server. Not every machine has the same hardware.

 

[metatheurgist]

Hmmm, internet not good enough to dl games but good enough to remote games to anyone at decent speed and resolution. I think there is a flaw in there somewhere.

 

[Alien]

XCOM2 taking 20 HOURS to download?

It's a shame people have forgotten the original (link to it on Steam and GOG )
So much better than these modern remakes (in my opinion) and certainly won't take 20 hours to download (unless your internets is really rubbish )

 

[wstephenson]

I've used the in-home streaming that Steam has to play games on my power house machine to my laptop. It appears to use h264 compression and streaming. This meant fuzzy-looking reds and "warm rounded/fuzzed edges", and random square blocks if you watched carefully enough. The latency was hit and miss, due to how much was going on with my screen.

If you have an NVidia card, I recommend using their Gameshield streaming technology, together with the free Moonlight implementation of the client. It seems to encode more efficiently than Steam's for some reason (both use hardware decoding on the server), giving better performance over Wifi, and uses h265 where the client can decode it. Moonlight embedded also works great on desktop Linux, allowing me to play ED on my laptop in bed: https://github.com/irtimmer/moonlight-embedded/wiki.

Hmmm, internet not good enough to dl games but good enough to remote games to anyone at decent speed and resolution. I think there is a flaw in there somewhere.

Latency != bandwidth =)

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

XCOM2 taking 20 HOURS to download?

It's a shame people have forgotten the original (link to it on Steam and GOG )
So much better than these modern remakes (in my opinion) and certainly won't take 20 hours to download (unless your internets is really rubbish )

I play the original on my phone at work.

Best. Game. Ever.

Admittedly, using a 5" phone ends up in many many miss clicks. Lol
Which makes an already brutal game, even harder. Lol

I usually play OpenXcom. (And OpenTTD, the other best game ever).

2 hours to go on XCOM 2. Yay!

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[YinYin]

I've used the in-home streaming that Steam has to play games on my power house machine to my laptop. It appears to use h264 compression and streaming. This meant fuzzy-looking reds and "warm rounded/fuzzed edges", and random square blocks if you watched carefully enough. The latency was hit and miss, due to how much was going on with my screen.

[...]

When streaming locally, you don't have to worry as much, as most of the time, it's 1000Mbps/1Gbps.

My steam link works really well

Played a lot of Thumper through it without any issues (high speed rhythm violence game).

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I think Steam/Nvidia Shield streaming is a way to go and I would prefer games that can be ported to more portable devices/Android/Linux than streaming.

 

[Kintch]

XCOM2 taking 20 HOURS to download?

It's a shame people have forgotten the original (link to it on Steam and GOG )
So much better than these modern remakes (in my opinion) and certainly won't take 20 hours to download (unless your internets is really rubbish )

Well, I've played both the original (first X-COM on my Amiga... I've read many books because of the loading times! ) and the new games, when they were released, and I'd say they both have their merits. Now, if you want modern take on the old X-COM I have to recommend Xenonauts (Steam and GOG links); the game is similar yet different enough and it managed to tick all the boxes, for me. Can't wait for the second one!

 

[Shadowdancer]

I think Steam/Nvidia Shield streaming is a way to go and I would prefer games that can be ported to more portable devices/Android/Linux than streaming.

① EA are planning to go full streaming, and we all know how consumer-oriented they are, and

② have you looked at the number of people having issues when a game just tries to get miniscule amounts of data transferred around just for moment to moment gameplay? So many ISPs can't even deal with that, tmen trying to deal with anything really complex like very low-latency robust networking can only end in tears.

 

[Insomnia]

If it helps, I'm getting fibre very, very soon.

Nvidia made a half bred console named Shield which you can use to stream games But you needed a good connection (think it was a minimum of 10mbit for 30fps gaming and 40mbit for 60fps, or something). But AFAIK it flopped kinda immediately upon release.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Didn't nvidia end up with an hourly rate where you could just buy hardware if you had a good gaming weekend once a month?

 

[Alien]

There was also OpenXcom a remake of the original and they made one major change, they took out the ability to save during ground combat (and thereby, removed the ability to cheat if your soldiers got killed).

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

There was also OpenXcom a remake of the original and they made one major change, they took out the ability to save during ground combat (and thereby, removed the ability to cheat if your soldiers got killed).

I Love OpenXcom. My first ever game on there ended in disaster. There was a 'minor' bug that made mutons invincible. Lol
My entire 12 man team unloaded lasers in to just one, and it didn't die!
I even kept throwing proximity grenades down in its path.
It then proceeded to kill my entire squad. Lol


It was fixed later on. Luckily. Lol

I made a load of mods for it, including a mortar tank (deadly, but highly inaccurate), laser sniper rifle (so OP, it's ridiculous. Lol), and my personal favourite... The Nuke Tank, a devastating guided missile. I made it expensive ($1m a shot). But it is literally a last resort, because it doesn't leave much left for salvage. And obviously has a huuuuuge blast radius, in which nothing is left, not even buildings.
Although, a bet the bugged mutons would have survived. Lol

Having a look at Xenonauts now. Looks good! And probably runs on my Potato laptop.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[S3B4ST13N]

I really need better internoots.

[yesnod]

I usually let my downloads run overnight; easier that way because I get to FlixNet my soapies TV shows; and in the morning I has new stuff to play. :>
Except last night... I only managed half of Destiny 2's 44gb download from 12am to 6am. :/ Wasn't happy.

 

[ZeroAi]

XCOM2 is going to take 20 hours to download!

And that's if I dont use the internet in the mean time. Which I will. I have Netflix stuff to watch tonight. I'll probably want to play Arma III, or Elite tomorrow.

I wish I could start playing XCOM 2 while it finishes downloading the rest... Lol

I really need better internoots....

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

Yeah, I was hoping OnLive or Gaikai would succeed, but Sony bought Gaikai and then OnLive went out of business with Sony buying many of their assets.

But I did try OnLive.com and it did stream games well. And Sony does offer PS Now on PC, but for PS games only it seams:

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/playstation-now/how-it-works/

Not sure how GameFLY's streaming works in pratice, but they seem serious:

https://www.gamefly.com/#!/streaming/how-it-works

And I also can't wait until we all have super high speed internet.

But then sometimes it's the game company server's are overloaded. When Halo MCC came out I downloaded it in about 30 minutes that afternoon, but it took all night for my friends who started after work :-(

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

But then sometimes it's the game company server's are overloaded. When Halo MCC came out I downloaded it in about 30 minutes that afternoon, but it took all night for my friends who started after work :-(

I remember when Half Life 2 was released. It was the only game I've ever brought on release day. (And my first ever steam game!)

I didn't get to play it for another 2 days.

That learned me good. Lol
I now will never preorder or buy a game on release day.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Chevy66]

I remember when Half Life 2 was released. It was the only game I've ever brought on release day. (And my first ever steam game!)

I didn't get to play it for another 2 days.

That learned me good. Lol
I now will never preorder or buy a game on release day.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

I remember that, Steam is quite useful these days, but back then installing Half Life 2 it was an abomination

 

[Kintch]

Having a look at Xenonauts now. Looks good! And probably runs on my Potato laptop.
CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

Yeah, that's another great thing about that game -- it runs fine on integrated GPUs (well, really old ones might have to apply community patch, but hey!).