Lucid Nonsense


Looks like magic...

Thursday, 26 March 2009

Sounds like magic. Walks like magic.

There has been a lot of hype surrounding OnLive over the past few days and it looks great. It looks, frankly, impossible. I like to think I’m reasonably competent with networks (not a specialist but enough to get by) and there is absolutely no way I can imagine that this can either be usable on “normal” connections, or be realistically scalable. I would be concerned about more than a few people running this on an everyday 100Mb LAN, let alone over the average DSL connection. This is especially so when you take into account the fact that most ADSL services use bandwidth shared between multiple users, often up to 50 (generally advertised by “contention ratios” of 50:1). Everytime I look at the service the word “latency” springs readily to mind, and there just isn’t a simple way to work around that.

Despite all the logical reasoning that it can’t happen, I’m an undying optimist and sadly I still have a glimmer of hope that it can. I hope there are magicians out there who can make latency disappear. Having the option of playing newly released games, without having to install Windows, would be a welcome change for me (I’m a lapsed gamer at heart). This isn’t a particularly fanatical standpoint it’s just that I haven’t used anything other than a Mac in about 10 years, and I would barely know where to start with XP or Vista; even with VMWare/Parallels as an option I just don’t want to get involved. With OnLive I would finally be able to play some of the games that never make it to the Mac, or for new games not have to wait 12 months for a port. It also would remove another barrier of entry for switching to OS X, and make even the lowest end MacBook a top gaming machine.

There’s no way it can be real.

But, here’s hoping…


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