NYMag, intelligencer; Chris Roberts on the Future of Gaming

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Ooooh, wow I've had a thought....

Nothing is stopping AWS from making a Stadia/Shadow style tech, but one that only uses the Virtual Machine when its needed: flying a trade route, collecting fuel from a gas giant, salvaging a wreck or mining? Don't need a server-side minimal lag machine , can happily run on client as lag won't matter who are you interacting with?

Going into a dogfight, running in a race, flying somewhere with a lot of player traffic or just get jumped by some pirates, switch over to the low-lag virtual machines. Not enough intergrated virtual machines available, no worries, just keep it client side until there is one available as any play is better than no play.

 

[Bambooza]

There is a kind of equalizer built into this process. Players who aren't using a cloud based client are also impacted by the same latency. You can't escape it.

The benefit of using a cloud based client is not that it reduces the latency that you experience, but it reduces the amount of processing your device needs to do. that processing does not occur at the speed of light either, so there is a benefit to having a cloud based client, if you have a weak processor or a slower than normal network (which is a big problem around the world.)

Ooooh, wow I've had a thought....

Nothing is stopping AWS from making a Stadia/Shadow style tech, but one that only uses the Virtual Machine when its needed: flying a trade route, collecting fuel from a gas giant, salvaging a wreck or mining? Don't need a server-side minimal lag machine , can happily run on client as lag won't matter who are you interacting with?

Going into a dogfight, running in a race, flying somewhere with a lot of player traffic or just get jumped by some pirates, switch over to the low-lag virtual machines. Not enough intergrated virtual machines available, no worries, just keep it client side until there is one available as any play is better than no play.

Sort of. While it is true that ones computer only processes a scene so fast (often as fast as the fps) the network updates are on a tick rate (often limited to 10 ticks a second form server 30 ticks a second to server due to console limitations , CS is so good due to it often using 60 ticks per second and only keeping 3 past ticks) the software itself has lots of predictions built in to smooth actor movements between tick updates. The other aspect is the server also tends to store multiple ticks to allow for slow client updates to still be able to update their actions based on their gameworld state and not the current server game state. (leads to the wonderful being shot after your back in cover)

The client-side input does not have any sort of prediction algorithms due to the typical delay from input devices being so small as to be insignificant. But this changes drastically with cloud base gaming due to the fact that you are introducing delays on what you see and input commands to the client state. This means when you have your crosshairs over a moving target you need to anticipate where they will be based upon the idea what you are seeing is not the current game state and when you input a command it is delayed. If your connection to the cloud is under 50m/s and is smooth then this would not be terrible given the 25m/s delay on-screen updates and 25m/s delay on command inputs. Move that up to a typical 100m/s ping and a typical ping fluctuation of 5% and you'll find fps becomes frustrating at any competitive levels.