Google Reveals Stadia, their Instant Access Game Streaming Service

[grec]

Yeah I get that in super competitive environments that's meaningful but the fact is for most of us our reaction times have been going down hill for several years and for some several decades, the 200ms figure is pretty unreachable for all but like athletes if you're over 21.

I think often these laggy setups have firm triple figure latencies, with the say 50ms of a bad TV, on top of 33.3ms of the frame render time at 30fps, on top of say 25ms for a bad wireless controller and so on.

High bluetooth polling rates are just to make up for the inherently higher "flight time" of each packet/button press though, you're still looking at about 1 frames worth of additional latency from a DS4 over bluetooth, and that's obviously the best case scenario(The Rocket League community is actually a really exhaustive source of data for this kind of stuff):

 

[looz]

the 200ms figure is pretty unreachable for all but like athletes if you're over 21.

This is pretty far from the truth IMO, alertness plays a big role but you can test it here yourself. It doesn't even compensate for equipment lag. For the record, my average of 5 was 172ms and I'm everything but athletic and in my late 20s.

 

[grec]

Not at all comparable, that's an SRT(Simple response task), gaming is a CRT(choice). Obviously audio and touch reactions are also often sub-200, but we mostly game via our vision, and our games pretty much always involve making choices.
Here's some reading on the difference between the task above and say playing a game: https://www.psytoolkit.org/lessons/simple_choice_rts.html

When there is just one stimulus and one response, many people can respond well below 200 ms, that is less than 1/5th of a second! In choice response time tasks with 2 stimuli and 2 responses (that is the simplest possible choice response time task), responding within 250 ms is probably the fastest you can do, but more typically people have an average response somewhere between 350 and 450 ms.

Personally I rarely get much below 300ms on those SRT things and I'm 21, but I guess I've had a kinda spotty childhood regarding substance use that may have impacted that lolrip.

 

[Daiyus]

If you are a steam user you are already in that boat. You subscribe to the games, If steam disappeared off the planet (somehow) you would (legally speaking) never be able to play those games again. It is how Steam circumvents a lot of laws as you are not buying anything from them you are paying for a subscription.
Either way you are technically already doing this if you have games on steam, Origin, Uplay or Epic. The only one I am aware of that allows you to "buy" games is GOG.

Like I said, I may have to crack the files but if Steam, Uplay, Origin etc all shut down tomorrow I would have something on my system to work with. Legal? Maybe not, but I have something under my control that I can manipulate if needs be.

Moving from physical media to digital distribution was a hard pill for me to swallow, but I accepted it as long I had the files locally on my computer. I even keep every game I own installed so I always have a copy of everything I own.

I won't accept streaming only.

 

[looz]

Not at all comparable, that's an SRT(Simple response task), gaming is a CRT(choice). Obviously audio and touch reactions are also often sub-200, but we mostly game via our vision, and our games pretty much always involve making choices.
Here's some reading on the difference between the task above and say playing a game: https://www.psytoolkit.org/lessons/simple_choice_rts.html


Personally I rarely get much below 300ms on those SRT things and I'm 21, but I guess I've had a kinda spotty childhood regarding substance use that may have impacted that lolrip.

Interesting, now that I think about it in regards to CS in particular one of the goals is setting yourself up in a way that landing a frag essentially becomes as close to a single response task as possible. One example from arguably the best player in the world currently.

 

[SPS]

I'd love to be able to jump across multiple single player games no matter which device I'm using without having to download it or have it pre-installed. I welcome this an another option.

 

[Kleptobot]

seeing as google will be using AMD GPUs, this should mean a healthy amount of optimisation for AMD GPUs moving forward

 

[NeverBackDown]

I'd love to be able to jump across multiple single player games no matter which device I'm using without having to download it or have it pre-installed. I welcome this an another option.

That is how i view it as well. I am just hesitant on the latency/input lag and pricing structure.

 

[ET3D]

What a short-sighted way of looking at it, this means there's no possibility of lag compensation.

I wouldn't say there's no possibility. Google could certainly provide the game with latency figures. It would not be the same kind of compensation, but I think it would be viable.

Compensation by the game doesn't actually solve the lag problem (although it's certainly needed to create a more consistent result), which is why players still care a lot about lag. When playing on the cloud, players will have to get used to compensating a different way, which I agree initially will be a problem, but I think that players growing on cloud gaming will likely be able to compensate as well as people used to current network lag.

seeing as google will be using AMD GPUs, this should mean a healthy amount of optimisation for AMD GPUs moving forward

We already have a healthy amount of optimisation for AMD GPUs due to consoles. I don't think this would change the situation. What I do think will change is increased support for Linux. AAA games on Linux would be a major change for gaming. Google has the money to help make that happen.

 

[Pendragon]

Call me old fashioned, but I just don't think I'll ever buy into this games as a service thing. I like to know that should a company shut down I'll have the files on my computer. I may need to crack them to play them, but they're there just in case.


And yes, I do still buy CDs and Blu-rays. I even buy proper paper books.

I tend to agree but I like Netflix for the convenience, I also still buy real media!

Just to be able to play a game much in the way I watch Netflix. If they are expecting me to "buy" the games I want to play then no, that not so good. Rent them either by the hour or as part of a subscription bundle then great. I would not "Buy" a game I couldn't download and keep a backup of. Just in the same way I don't "Buy" movies from Google or other streaming sites. That's not buying, that long term renting.


As for real media, I recently got a BlueRay player in part because I wanted all of the extra content you don't get when you torrent the film. Also books, it doesn't matter how many books I download or get from Humblebundle I never read them. Real books get read. I also have a few audio CD's for the car and UK radio is crap. Better than my last car that only had a tape deck, I found myself listing to stuff I had back in the '80s!

 

[ET3D]

The reason I'm still buying some stuff on DVD is because it's not available to me on Netflix. But I did move away from physical to a large extent. I buy my music on iTunes instead of CDs, I buy audiobooks digitally, and of course buying a physical PC game would be rather silly.

And I do think it's old fashioned to go for physical media. A middle aged person like myself might stick to some physical media, but I can't imagine my kids even considering that. Music and video are things that you stream. Games are bought digitally, and, soon, also streamed. It's just the way things go.

 

[grec]

Yeah I know many in my generation(21/generation Z) me included view the value in media as only the enjoyment it will give you, so the only decision to make about what form it comes in is what form allows you to enjoy it on the most devices/most places/in the best way (Which for books is still often physical I'd say but not for much else, BluRays also since the file sizes for their level of quality are still impractical for digital storage often). Physical media is only really bought as a memento for many of us I guess, like for really special albums and stuff, with many games I think the ageing process of games vs other media often makes that less desirable. Besides that the convenience and sometimes community aspects of most digital services particularly now we often consume media from a device a fraction of the size of a CD case or whatever often makes digital a bit of a no brainer.

For me physical media is often just fragile clutter, there's just as much chance a company like Google or Valve is going to last longer than many physical objects can, theft is far from an uncommon experience for many of us and things like fires still exist. While given for the first time in a century pretty much all of us have no chance whatsoever of owning our own homes under the age of like 35 the idea of living semi nomadically with fewer physical possessions to move with us is often quite desirable.

 

[looz]

I wouldn't say there's no possibility. Google could certainly provide the game with latency figures. It would not be the same kind of compensation, but I think it would be viable.

Compensation by the game doesn't actually solve the lag problem (although it's certainly needed to create a more consistent result), which is why players still care a lot about lag. When playing on the cloud, players will have to get used to compensating a different way, which I agree initially will be a problem, but I think that players growing on cloud gaming will likely be able to compensate as well as people used to current network lag.

It's not meant to solve the lag problem, if you mean responsiveness. That can't be mended with anything but lowering the latency itself.


But what it does do is make games fair, as in players with worse latency aren't at a disadvantage. That isn't possible with a video stream unless players with better connection get artifically delayed to match the worst player's ping.

 

[grec]

I think it's still more than possible, you wouldn't have to touch the video stream, thinking of a couple of ways off my head the simplest would be for the game server to take each users ping and adjust their transmitted control inputs with an offset at each tick or two. The servers can just calculate actions/consequences with the offset added on to each users input.

(HighestPing - UserPing = UserOffset)

If this offsett is updated on each ttick, then in theory every users actions on the server ill have the same ish delay, which would make it "fair", it'd just need heavily ping based matchmaking to avoid 200ms offsets or something, and obviously a lot more fallbacks and hard limits to stop being gaming the system with a lag switch or something. At the end of the day, you only need to get it in the same region of fairness as you'd expect in variation between peoples setups.

Lag compensation isn't really entirely necessary on games with dedicated servers and ping based matchmaking nowadays, not nearly as much as it used to be in the days of consoles using P2P networking and 2MB broadband links anyway.

 

[ET3D]

I think that tgrech's point about ping matching is a good one. That largely solves the problem.

Still, I do think that a game can compensate for the lag between input and visual movement by using prediction, especially when using something slow and imprecise like a controller. I agree that for a mouse that could be more of an issue.

That would in general be something that games on streaming platforms will need to look into, but I think it's not impossible. There already tends to be a lot of aiming assist in controller based games, and that could be added to it.

It would perhaps not be as good as rendering locally, but it would be better than slowing everyone down.