Apple: Group FaceTime allows up to 32 people! Skype: Hold my beer It has been a bumper week at Microsoft with new builds, bigger meetings and streaming software. 50 people walk into a Skype meeting It's taken a while, but Skype has finally leapfrogged FaceTime in the group meeting stakes, bumping the maximum participants in a group call from 25 to 50. Apple trumpeted a mere 32 back when it …
FPS, maybe not until they invent a way to get you updates faster than a local screen refresh +ping but I can see it working for things that don't need the quickest updates. RTS, puzzlers non twitch FPS's.
Others have tried though and you never hear anything about them now.
Sheer latency kills FPS gameplay, nothing to do with how fast the updates are.
The latency of process input, send over Internet connection, process input into game, render, compress, send back over Internet connection, etc. means that unless you are literally sitting next to the computer it fast becomes unplayable.
OnLive found this out and went bust trying to prove otherwise.
You don't notice 100ms "lag" between pressing pause and your movie resuming. You do notice 100ms lag between your mouse and your viewpoint turning.
And it's not related to "how fast" they render or how many machines they throw at it. It's literally what's the latency of the path. You can get a gigabit line that can transfer 1Gbit/s to everyone you contact, but the latency will not be 1ms between you and the entire rest of the planet.
For me now, on a non-shared leased line, it's 8ms to Google DNS. 34ms to Facebook. 3ms to Cloudflare DNS. Now insert a, say, randomly fluctuating 10ms buffer between your super-duper 9600dpi gaming mouse and the USB cable it plugs into. Not the computer, not the screen, but your input device and the input to the game itself. Just that is enough to hurt your play more than anything to do with what FPS you get or whether you have AA/VSync/HDR turned on or off, let alone the MPEG-compression at their end, de-compression at your end, and display to the screen. 60fps gives you 16.67ms to draw it on the screen. Your local computer is capable of that. A remote computer over the Internet is not... you'll skip frames, lag behind on vision and input, and you will find frame updates delayed even more if they cross that magic 16.67ms barrier until the NEXT 16.67ms vsync. The game will read "120fps" because it's running on their server which is getting that. Your actual vision of that remote terminal could easily be a quarter of that even on the best home Internet connection in the world.
Over wifi, it's worse. On home connections it's worse. On a home connection that's also streaming HD footage of the game back simultaneously, it's even worse (poor QoS is the killer in everyone's connection, not the actual technical capability of the line - if you think your Internet is slow or your girlfriend on Facebook kills your gaming ping, buy a router with QoS control and "wifi QoS", e.g. Draytek Airtime Fair Sharing, and watch those problems disappear).
Streaming games might happen at some point in the future, but at that point we'll be expecting transfer of full 3D voxelised VR imagery or somesuch, and the problem will rear its head again even worse.
Latency is a difficult-to-understand problem, and is strangely pretty unrelated to frames-per-second, connection speed, or how much you do to the data along the route.
No problem.
The other thing that occurs...
Your remote computer receives your (delayed) input. It then renders a frame. That frame probably waits for a VSync until it's considered "complete" by the game and pushed to the graphics memory (I doubt they are encoding video progressively literally as each pixel/row is drawn, most modern protocols don't work like that and use previous/following rows to encode against to save space). That then would trigger the video-encoding hardware, presumably, whether internal or via an external cable to another device. That would then read that whole frame, encode it, difference it to the previous frame and push it out as an entire "frame" update to the client. Which then receives it, decodes it, renders it to the graphics memory, and probably has to wait for a VSync (if it wants to avoid tearing) before it actually displays it.
Just that alone, to me, suggests you could be waiting for anywhere from 2-4 VSync's before you actually see what your input generated, before you even add in the latency on your input going up to the cloud. And that's 2 in the absolute-ideal, best-case, you just happen to be totally in sync with their random computer on the other side of the world, at exactly the transit latency down to the very last nanosecond by sheer chance.
At best, you're getting half the effective "framerate" (really latency) of the game, or tearing. Sure, they could run at 240fps to combat that and push 120fps down to you, which would give them... 4.1ms or 8.2ms to do everything in. i.e. probably not even in the realm of a local, cabled back-and-forth-while-encoding-and-decoding-video-on-a-10Gbit-network, most likely. Let alone home use over wifi.
I can see it working for things that don't need the quickest updates. RTS, puzzlers non twitch FPS's.
Nintendo couldn't even make it work when they online multiplayered their classic NES games on the Switch, although they've never been one to push the boat out with their infrastructure.
Farmville gets boring after a while.
Latency matters in any game where timing matters. Which is any FPS. Anything timed. Which knocks out party games, etc. Anything requiring actions to be timely predictable (e.g. making a jump in Super Mario). Anything fast-moving (e.g. racing games). Anything VR. Anything that, basically, isn't a turn-based or idle game. I wouldn't be able to play most of my Steam library like that - maybe Goblins Inc. (a boardgame). But I couldn't play Hoard, even, or Trine, or Factorio, or Dirt 2, or GTA V, or .... Maybe I'd get a good going at Prison Architect, but not once a riot starts and I have to corrale the people to the right places in a rush.
Pretty much, that doesn't match with anything multiplayer either. Hell, since the days of Doom and Quake a laggy opponent or comrade is a pain in the butt. Certainly nowadays where most of the games are online-multiplayer-only.
And, to be honest, the kind of people who are happy playing Sudoku, Farmville and the like, aren't likely to make any rapid movements, etc. are extremely unlikely to sign up to a pay-monthly game streaming service of any kind, especially if they "lose" all their games if they *ever* stop paying.
I know I played some modern FPS Space Hulk game via OnLive because it was on a special deal to show off their tech. I played one level on it, liked it. Immediately cancelled it before it cost me any money and then bought the game on Steam, because I could tell the online streaming thing would drive me mad. It did lag. It was in a tiny, blocky window way below what my own laptop could present, and it blurred out whenever there was network congestion to the point you couldn't read the text or play the game properly at all. And that was a very basic, not even really twitch shooter, kind of game where I spent half the game just walking forward.
If you couldn't play that game over VNC or Steam Link across your local network now, you certainly won't be able to play it via a game streaming service. Sure, you could have a stab at Chu Chu Rocket and Tetris, but no way are you going to be loading up the latest Assassin's Creed that you can't afford the gaming PC for but hope the streaming service will have the hardware to run it for you.
Our companies version of skype can barely reliably connect 2 people long enough to have a conversation.
I think 250 would cause our DC to implode and cause a China crisis.
Mind you Webex and the Horror that is webex teams is the same...
But does it identify who's making his phone do 'funny' noises, or the one snoring, or the other one talking to someone else, or...?
(edit: although I was joking, on second thoughts I really just hate group calls!)
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