11 ms·

Rainway takes a game running on one system and streams it to another device

188 points by andrewmd5 8y ago

anotheryou 8y ago
The obvious question: how is the latency? (both locally and via your servers) --- edit: should I be able to play from your server on play.rainway.io ? I only got a "connection failed [...] Failed to connect to h1x1mlxi2uunv.cya.gg" A demo without registration would be great (could even be limited to 1-5min and some simple open source shooter). --- edit2: latency not looking good here https://youtu.be/0g-ah0epNpY?t=93 https://youtu.be/0g-ah0epNpY?t=93
- kbumsik 8y ago
  I tried this a few month ago and I got similar connection error. I ended up with giving up. Not sure if they resolved these kinds of error.
  - andrewmd5 8y ago
    You need to install the Rainway server on your computer.
    - kowdermeister 8y ago
      That would make a great error message :D
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  Rainway is not cloud gaming, you utilize your computer, and it is entirely P2P. We don't have servers that host games, you use your own.
  - anotheryou 8y ago
    thanks for the answer, that should be stated somewhere :)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - wyldfire 8y ago
    > Rainway is not cloud gaming ... > And yes, even Overwatch in the browser on whatever system you’d like. "On whatever system you'd like" versus "you use your own" seems to fly in the face of meeting system requirements. Lots of other requests for more info here. This is a "Show HN" after all. How does it work? Are you translating the binary into wasm? Whatever it is, how you did it is more of your secret sauce than what you did. Please share.
    - andrewmd5 8y ago
      Rainway is game streaming. We take the game running on one system (say your home PC) and stream it to the other device. You can read about the tech here: https://rainway.io/technology/ https://rainway.io/technology/
      - wyldfire 8y ago
        Awesome, thanks, this is much clearer! BTW latency still matters here, so an even awesomer future "Show HN" might include some great analysis on how you got your product from X ms peak latency down to Y ms peak latency.
      - jonny_eh 8y ago
        So it's just like Steam Link or Nvidia Geforce Now?
        chupasaurus 8y ago
        Steam In-Home Streaming to be exact, Link is a hardware device. edit: fixed a mistake.
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
Wow. This is really big. Really, really big. Like NVIDIA GeForce Now important. But... Latency... Latency. Latency. Uh, latency. Numbers. Response time. Latency. Latency. I see nothing here that talks about latency. What type of FPS on the thin-clients are we talking here? Bandwidth? Delays? This is purely a numbers piece of software. When you talk about streaming real-time things, things that require input sequences on the order of <16ms, these numbers are super important: they're literally make or break figures. The experience could be almost great, but maybe just 5% of a perf hit might kill the experience... I hope that as they mature Rainway can speak more to these figures. Very cool stuff here, and I really like that a little of the tech is on GitHub!
- evilturnip 8y ago
  There's a few of other similar services: Parsec/Paperspace and Shadow Latency with a good connection is usually sub 20ms roundtrip. I use Parsec/Paperspace to game until Shadow gets unveiled on my region soon. I play Paladins (team-based multiplayer shooter) semi-competitively and I have no issues.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    Yeah. The reality is that latency on the order of 50ms doesn't matter in games like Overwatch or Paladins until the very highest levels. Even Top 500 players suffer 80ms RTT to the server and they're still better than the other 30 million players. The game smooths over the latency by agreeing with your client when the state has diverged too much. Console players play fine at 30fps, even though "the pros" (often sponsored by manufacturers of gaming hardware) say that you will lose unless you get a 240fps and the PC to run that. I personally think it's all pseudoscience. You can absolutely see that 60fps looks like a slideshow, but if you showed a game at 250fps and just used interpolation that didn't understand the game state, I bet the pros wouldn't even notice. For some reason, the monitor manufacturers aren't running those tests, though, so I can only speculate ;) How this ties back into game streaming... yes, you will be supplying input based on the game state two frames ago. You'll be fine.
    - 8y ago
sergiotapia 8y ago
Can you explain what this does on the technical level? nvidia has this similar product but the game runs on their servers, you have to sign into your accounts on their machines. Playing Destiny you login into battlenet using some kind of teamviewer app and then launch the game. steam link just (poorly) pushes video from your PC to your living room. Where in this spectrum does Rainway stand? Please be technical for us here
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  Rainway is software you can install on your local gaming rig or cloud provider of your choice. Once you've installed the Dashboard on your PC, we establish a P2P connection between it and the connecting client. Then we utilize your existing computer hardware and games, and you can play them instantly inside of a browser via low latency, high fidelity stream.
  - k__ 8y ago
    "low latency, high fidelity stream." So this doesn't use browser technology for networking?
    - andrewmd5 8y ago
      We make use of a custom version of WebRTC (default) (https://github.com/RainwayApp/spitfire https://github.com/RainwayApp/spitfire) and WebSockets as a fallback with low latency implementations.
sinatra 8y ago
Very cool! But, as others said, I'd want to look at the latency. Some animations in Dark Souls 3 are 8-10 frames long (ie, about 300ms). Reacting to such quick animations may completely fall apart depending on the latency introduced by network. Are there any videos of action games being played on this?
- bpicolo 8y ago
  10ms meaning human reaction time + 10ms? 10ms is far faster than any human can react to visual stimulus
  - extrapickles 8y ago
    You generally get some kind of cue that the window is about to open, but the window is only 10ms wide.
  - sinatra 8y ago
    Sorry, I meant to say 10 frames (for 30 fps). Fixed.
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  We have had multiple users clear Dark Souls 3 from start to finish using Rainway -- it will actually be the focus of our new series coming up. You can see a ton remote demos here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlMq-3hmm5Y&list=PLaVZpLEYEQNz34jHAiPcHTZ8ANr7Vkn3T https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlMq-3hmm5Y&list=PLaVZpLEYEQ... And some more here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Ei3hsEvCA&list=PLaVZpLEYEQNx4tht_Qx0PSwro4rasDPat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Ei3hsEvCA&list=PLaVZpLEYEQ...
ralusek 8y ago
I remember thinking OnLive's pitch of letting you stream games to low-end hardware was a very good idea, but it never took off. I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is. So, this is essentially those services, but allowing you to use a web browser as a client, right? I would only find this valuable if there was any performance gain in doing so, or if those services didn't make a client for the device I wanted to game on, both of which seem unlikely. Unless I drastically misunderstood what is happening, and the game is actually running on your hardware in the browser, in which case that is very impressive...but then I would have to question the performance.
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  Rainway is fast and clientless. Our vision is all about letting you use your existing hardware (home gaming PC, cloud provider) to enable the gameplay experience. So you installed our software and then the web app takes care of the rest. We curate all of the games you have installed on your machine and enable a click and play experience.
- gh02t 8y ago
  > I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is. The Shield itself has been fairly successful from what I know, especially if you consider its fairly high price compared to other Android TV boxes. I have one and can say I really like it, Nvidia has been really committed and provided constant updates on top of a pretty stable hardware platform. Game streaming on it works pretty well and has been moderately successful. It works smoothly and latency is low enough to play all but the twitchiest of games. The biggest advantage is that for all the games I've seen you can play them as long as you already own them on Steam, you don't have to purchase them twice (in addition to supporting native Steam in-home streaming now I think). The selection of games available to play on Nvidia's streaming service isn't colossal, but they have a constant trickle of popular games so there's plenty of things you'd actually want to play (and you get a pretty generous range of older-but-good games to play for free with the Shield). I bought mine as a media player, but the game streaming is a very nice perk.
- georgeecollins 8y ago
standardout 8y ago
Hitting this error: Connection log Connecting over WebRTC first. Failed to connect with WebRTC {"Error":1} Attempting to connect by socket. Failed to connect with socket. Failed to connect to j3gv720k7hwez.cya.gg, please try restarting Rainway
cheunste 8y ago
Is this still being planned for the Nintendo Switch?
wishinghand 8y ago
Their site says: Rainway will always be completely free to use with no hidden cost. You can stream all your games, whenever you want, wherever you are, for as long as you want. /endquote So where's their income coming from? The blog post from the OP mentions they're hiring.
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  We recently just raised our seed round: https://blog.rainway.io/we-just-raised-our-seed-round-982fb0567329 https://blog.rainway.io/we-just-raised-our-seed-round-982fb0...
  - driverdan 8y ago
    That's great but it doesn't answer the question. Investment is not income.
    - andrewmd5 8y ago
      We are in beta and not willing to charge for an unfinished product. We have plans for some premium offerings down the line.
      - polyomino 8y ago
        Perhaps you could buy and resell time on nearby machines peer to peer.
      - breakingcups 8y ago
        What about a finished product? You currently say "Rainway will always be completely free to use with no hidden cost."
- zimbatm 8y ago
  My own silly analysis: monetisation can come at a later stage. Since the server is running on the customer's Window machine they won't have much infrastructure costs to support even if they get very popular. If the main product is free then revenue can be added through extensions like hosted service or parnership (eg: integration with Twich or another video game streaming service).
ewzimm 8y ago
Advertising Overwatch is an unfortunate choice and makes me think they haven't fully done their homework. Blizzard recently changed their terms of service to include a clause stating that they will ban any accounts that use cloud gaming services like GeForce Now.
- sargun 8y ago
  Do you know why?
  - ewzimm 8y ago
    They didn't give any reason for doing so that I'm aware of. Maybe they have ambitions of their own for streaming thier games as a paid service and don't want competition.
  - irascible 8y ago
    Because then suddenly you start getting bug reports about your multi million dollar fps not working well over someone else's streaming service/scheme. Not to mention how this fucks up anticheat detection..
  - KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
    I think it's because botters have taken to cloud gaming to more easily scale up their bot networks.
  - vkou 8y ago
    No reason given.
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  Rainway is not cloud gaming, it utilizes your computer hardware and is one of the most played games on the platform. None of our users have reported issues, and we've been tracking it for weeks.
  - ewzimm 8y ago
    That's good to hear! If it doesn't use any third party servers, then it might be good to even advertise it as an alternative to people who foermerly used the banned services.
sigfubar 8y ago
Is it possible to run the host/server software on an EC2 instance with gobs of RAM and a GPU?
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  It is. We test on Azure quite a lot and are working on getting an AMI created for easy distribution.
  - barik 8y ago
    What is a recommended VM size on Azure to use?
orliesaurus 8y ago
I use it, it's okay for casual singleplayer games but online it's unplayable! EDIT: Unplayable for a competitive player like myself.
- orliesaurus 8y ago
  I also use this with a little "hack" to watch movies from my desktop onto another machine :D
  - TranquilMarmot 8y ago
    I use Plex for this; https://www.plex.tv/ https://www.plex.tv/ It would probably encode the audio/video better since it's made for it.
    - orliesaurus 8y ago
      You're right, will test, thanks for the URL
sarreph 8y ago
This looks cool, however it's very similar to a service I've been using for the past month called Parsec[0]. I've successfully managed to play Fortnite (don't judge :)) on an AWS g2.2xlarge (via Parsec) with an acceptable level of latency. Apart from the occasional artefacting (most notably when starting), it's been an enjoyable experience and a real insight into the potential power that cloud gaming really could hold. What's so great about Parsec is that they allow you (at a somewhat marked-up rate so far as I can tell) to rent an AWS server directly from the client and get started. That being said, my Parsec credit is running a little low now so I might have a go with Rainway :) I would like to know what the difference — if any — between Parsec and Rainway is? As far as I can tell, Parsec was first, so it'd be interesting to know if their tech is superior. [0] - https://parsecgaming.com https://parsecgaming.com
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  So I can only speak to the pros of Rainway and why we have so many people adopting it as their go-to-solution. We put your games first. We don' t believe in the traditional remote desktop approach and want to remove all the friction from game streaming. (https://blog.rainway.io/our-core-mission-games-first-78671e496201 https://blog.rainway.io/our-core-mission-games-first-78671e4...) We're clientless, this means you can open any web browser like Chrome and start playing on any number of devices -- both inside and outside your home. We use common web traffic to prevent being blocked by most networks, this allows us to have a higher chance of connecting even on lock downed networks (schools, office). We're really fast. You can play games like Destiny 2 on a Chromebook at 1080P 60 FPS.(https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009758915305730051 https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009758915305730051) We are aiming to release on every major platform we can. Phones and game consoles alike. We constantly give back, through open source releases or community fixes -- we really believe in the principle of supporting the community that supports us. For the more technical questions, Rainway can run on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA systems and we're highly optimized for all three and test on all ranges of hardware from those providers. Our biggest weakness right now would be our lack of native mobile apps, but that isn't slowing us down. (https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009852188724625408 https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009852188724625408) I'm the CEO of Rainway, so of course, I like our product and I'd encourage you to join our discord (https://rain.gg/discord https://rain.gg/discord) and ask users for their opinion.
itsfatz 8y ago
Ages ago I spun an aws instance w/ Grid, setup VPN and used Steam in-home streaming to accomplish a similar result. Using spot-instances resulted in something like $0.06/hr if memory serves (which it seldom does). Biggest caveats at that time were setup time and latency; since I was too cheap to preserve the instance volume and too lazy to split the steam save folder to a smaller separate volume, and had yet to secure gigabit fiber. It was more of a dalliance for me since I don't game often anymore, and if I'm honest with myself I enjoyed setting up the infrastructure more than I did playing Fallout 4. Please note this has more to do with how little fun I am in my old age than any problems with the game.
- 013a 8y ago
  Pricing and capabilities have probably changed over the years. The cheapest GPU spot instance you can get on AWS today is a p2.xlarge, which will run you $0.45/hr. And also, p2-class instances run Tesla K80 GPUs, which are Kepler cores, an architecture running on 6 years old now (think GTX 600/700). Fine for 1080p60 most games, but I doubt many modern titles would hit the 60fps mark. Google Cloud can allow you to get the cost lower (closer to ~$0.15/hr) by cost optimizing the instance CPU/Memory and attaching a GPU to it. But you've got three problems with both of these setups: - Spot on AWS/Preemptible on GCP will kill your instance with about 2 minutes of warning. I'm not sure what AWS's policy is on how often this happens, but on GCP, its guaranteed to happen at least once every 24 hours. So that could be annoying if you're in the middle of an intense game of Overwatch. - Storage costs. You're paying per hour for your instance, so you don't want to have to download all your games every time you spin it up. But, then you shift the cost to the SSD, which is expensive and must be maintained 24/7/365 for that quick startup time. You could alternatively store it in S3/GCS then hot-load it when the instance starts, which would be fast due to the fiber interconnect all these datacenters are wired with. So, plan for this bullet to add at least $10/mo/TB of storage. - Network costs. A 1080p60 stream is, conservatively, 10Mbps? Add on an extra ~$0.25 per hour you want to game, just in bandwidth.
- rco8786 8y ago
  It was closer to 0.50 an hour fwiw. And in practice that wasn’t realistic as the gpu spot prices would often spike to tens of dollars per hour, presumably as someone else ran some really large jobs. A friend and I tried to systematize/automate this exact thing. And we were relatively successful in building it. But it turns out that spot prices are incredibly volatile and steam streaming is still pretty buggy so we abandoned it.
techsupporter 8y ago
At the risk of detracting from the admittedly cool technology: Yay, yet another freaking terms of service that's 8 miles long and includes a mandatory, binding arbitration clause. I'm getting so sick of these. It's to the point now where I actively seek out companies based in the European Union or Canada since those countries' laws don't permit such shenanigans. (Also, at the risk of sounding bitter or hostile, if someone's about to reply to me and say "well, everybody's doing it" or "the lawyers make us," save it. If you're an executive in your company, you can make the choice to not have one of these and you didn't. I genuinely don't care if you personally don't like it.)
drumttocs8 8y ago
Is the goal to be bought out by Google? Plenty of whispers that they're interested in providing this sort of service.
Kagerjay 8y ago
While this looks cool isn't latency going to be a big problem?
- bmurphy1976 8y ago
  I've used Steam and PS4 Remote Play fairly extensively in my home so I have some experience with the concept. I think it really it depends on the game. Fallout 4: Works great. Dark Souls 3: The latency is immediately obvious. You might as well be torturing yourself, the game is already hard enough. God of War: somewhere in the middle. It's playable, but it feels crisper without the extra latency. I don't see how this product will be any different.
dmadams28 8y ago
Hell yeah, go Andrew!
tomxor 8y ago
This is not going to be appropriate for fast reflex twitch gaming until the internet has some fundamental technological shift that allows for super low latency. Unhits are one thing but having your viewport affected by it will just be awful.
jay_wild 8y ago
An interesting alternative is Moonlight[0], an open source implementation of nVidia's GameStream protocol. While it does require an nVidia graphics card, it severely cuts down on latency as all the video encoding is done in hardware on the host PC. Essentially it gets you P2P low-latency video streaming with controller/keyboard+mouse input [0] - https://moonlight-stream.com/ https://moonlight-stream.com/
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  Rainway is P2P and works with all hardware (AMD, NVIDIA, Intel).
amaccuish 8y ago
andrewmd5, what made you go for C#? How do you see that playing out for hosting on MacOS (if that's even in the pipeline)? :)
- rocky1138 8y ago
  I think most people who need to stream games are those who have a Windows box but run other operating systems for all of their other machines. I can't imagine a scenario where you'd want to host on a Mac or a Linux machine for games, only one where they are the client.
  - jetti 8y ago
    I don't own a personal Windows machine and have games on my Mac. I wouldn't be able to use this service to play games through my browser at work or when not at home
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  Our stack is HTML5 (React/Typescript), C# and C++ for the most part. A lot of our cloud is also written in .NET Core. It is just a powerful language that we can build highly optimized systems for.
tonyhb 8y ago
Gaikai [0] had this in 2010 for free. You'd log on to their website and play — in a browser — games on a remote server. They got bought in 2012 by Sony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai
jboogie77 8y ago
Just a heads up this guy has been known to do sketchy things in the past. A simple reddit search of his previous products will bring up some questionable practices
- senatorobama 8y ago
  Example?
  - jboogie77 8y ago
    I believe it was either borderless gaming or his steam cleaner program. Tried to put adware into it and got called out hard
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- ghusbands 8y ago
  Do you mean the near-piracy of Aurous [1]? It looks like they didn't realise that re-hosting publicly-available music makes them liable under copyright law. Borderless gaming and Netflix Roulette don't seem sketchy. It's not clear what else you might mean. Do you have examples? [1] https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6723046/aurous-andrew-sampson-developer-explains https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6723046/aurous-a...
  - jboogie77 8y ago
    No it wasn’t aurous. Check my other comment
enricozb 8y ago
Could this be used on a local network? I have a pretty beefy PC but I like the comfort of sitting outside with my chromebook. Is there any way to host this service myself, so it doesn't have to go through any servers first?
fcarraldo 8y ago
https://play.rainway.io https://play.rainway.io doesn't work. Console logs a bunch of CORS errors for seemingly unnecessary services, but the site still fails to load. Disabled PrivacyBadger/uBlock/HTTPS Everywhere but still no luck. On Firefox 61.1/Mac OS X High Sierra. Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-13434394-1” https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-13434394-1”. play.rainway.io:1 Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). <script> source URI is not allowed in this document: “https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js” https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js”. play.rainway.io:8 [Show/hide message details.] ReferenceError: Raven is not defined[Learn More] bundle.js:110:144069 Source map error: request failed with status 403 Resource URL: https://play.rainway.io/bundle.js https://play.rainway.io/bundle.js Source Map URL: bundle.js.map[Learn More]
beshrkayali 8y ago
I get a "Raven is not defined" on play.rainway.io and a blank page.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
Interesting. Since someone from rainway is in the thread: what kind of game can you capture? does it work with non-dx games (i.e. dwarf fortress) how much is captured? what happens if someone on the pc alt+tabs into another window or kicks the game out of full-screen?
leowoo91 8y ago
Streaming games has been attempted several times (not sure if any of it survived), but most likely this might stay as alternative to PSP at home.
skate22 8y ago
Does rainway support multiple client connections to the same game? Would be an interesting way to collaborate

188 points by andrewmd5 8y ago

The obvious question: how is the latency? (both locally and via your servers) --- edit: should I be able to play from your server on play.rainway.io ? I only got a "connection failed [...] Failed to connect to h1x1mlxi2uunv.cya.gg" A demo without registration would be great (could even be limited to 1-5min and some simple open source shooter). --- edit2: latency not looking good here https://youtu.be/0g-ah0epNpY?t=93 https://youtu.be/0g-ah0epNpY?t=93

kbumsik 8y ago
I tried this a few month ago and I got similar connection error. I ended up with giving up. Not sure if they resolved these kinds of error.
- andrewmd5 8y ago
  You need to install the Rainway server on your computer.
  - kowdermeister 8y ago
    That would make a great error message :D
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
andrewmd5 8y ago
Rainway is not cloud gaming, you utilize your computer, and it is entirely P2P. We don't have servers that host games, you use your own.
- anotheryou 8y ago
  thanks for the answer, that should be stated somewhere :)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wyldfire 8y ago
  > Rainway is not cloud gaming ... > And yes, even Overwatch in the browser on whatever system you’d like. "On whatever system you'd like" versus "you use your own" seems to fly in the face of meeting system requirements. Lots of other requests for more info here. This is a "Show HN" after all. How does it work? Are you translating the binary into wasm? Whatever it is, how you did it is more of your secret sauce than what you did. Please share.
  - andrewmd5 8y ago
    Rainway is game streaming. We take the game running on one system (say your home PC) and stream it to the other device. You can read about the tech here: https://rainway.io/technology/ https://rainway.io/technology/
    - wyldfire 8y ago
      Awesome, thanks, this is much clearer! BTW latency still matters here, so an even awesomer future "Show HN" might include some great analysis on how you got your product from X ms peak latency down to Y ms peak latency.
    - jonny_eh 8y ago
      So it's just like Steam Link or Nvidia Geforce Now?
      - chupasaurus 8y ago
        Steam In-Home Streaming to be exact, Link is a hardware device. edit: fixed a mistake.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

Wow. This is really big. Really, really big. Like NVIDIA GeForce Now important. But... Latency... Latency. Latency. Uh, latency. Numbers. Response time. Latency. Latency. I see nothing here that talks about latency. What type of FPS on the thin-clients are we talking here? Bandwidth? Delays? This is purely a numbers piece of software. When you talk about streaming real-time things, things that require input sequences on the order of <16ms, these numbers are super important: they're literally make or break figures. The experience could be almost great, but maybe just 5% of a perf hit might kill the experience... I hope that as they mature Rainway can speak more to these figures. Very cool stuff here, and I really like that a little of the tech is on GitHub!

evilturnip 8y ago
There's a few of other similar services: Parsec/Paperspace and Shadow Latency with a good connection is usually sub 20ms roundtrip. I use Parsec/Paperspace to game until Shadow gets unveiled on my region soon. I play Paladins (team-based multiplayer shooter) semi-competitively and I have no issues.
- jrockway 8y ago
  Yeah. The reality is that latency on the order of 50ms doesn't matter in games like Overwatch or Paladins until the very highest levels. Even Top 500 players suffer 80ms RTT to the server and they're still better than the other 30 million players. The game smooths over the latency by agreeing with your client when the state has diverged too much. Console players play fine at 30fps, even though "the pros" (often sponsored by manufacturers of gaming hardware) say that you will lose unless you get a 240fps and the PC to run that. I personally think it's all pseudoscience. You can absolutely see that 60fps looks like a slideshow, but if you showed a game at 250fps and just used interpolation that didn't understand the game state, I bet the pros wouldn't even notice. For some reason, the monitor manufacturers aren't running those tests, though, so I can only speculate ;) How this ties back into game streaming... yes, you will be supplying input based on the game state two frames ago. You'll be fine.
  - 8y ago

sergiotapia 8y ago

Can you explain what this does on the technical level? nvidia has this similar product but the game runs on their servers, you have to sign into your accounts on their machines. Playing Destiny you login into battlenet using some kind of teamviewer app and then launch the game. steam link just (poorly) pushes video from your PC to your living room. Where in this spectrum does Rainway stand? Please be technical for us here

andrewmd5 8y ago
Rainway is software you can install on your local gaming rig or cloud provider of your choice. Once you've installed the Dashboard on your PC, we establish a P2P connection between it and the connecting client. Then we utilize your existing computer hardware and games, and you can play them instantly inside of a browser via low latency, high fidelity stream.
- k__ 8y ago
  "low latency, high fidelity stream." So this doesn't use browser technology for networking?
  - andrewmd5 8y ago
    We make use of a custom version of WebRTC (default) (https://github.com/RainwayApp/spitfire https://github.com/RainwayApp/spitfire) and WebSockets as a fallback with low latency implementations.

sinatra 8y ago

Very cool! But, as others said, I'd want to look at the latency. Some animations in Dark Souls 3 are 8-10 frames long (ie, about 300ms). Reacting to such quick animations may completely fall apart depending on the latency introduced by network. Are there any videos of action games being played on this?

bpicolo 8y ago
10ms meaning human reaction time + 10ms? 10ms is far faster than any human can react to visual stimulus
- extrapickles 8y ago
  You generally get some kind of cue that the window is about to open, but the window is only 10ms wide.
- sinatra 8y ago
  Sorry, I meant to say 10 frames (for 30 fps). Fixed.
andrewmd5 8y ago
We have had multiple users clear Dark Souls 3 from start to finish using Rainway -- it will actually be the focus of our new series coming up. You can see a ton remote demos here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlMq-3hmm5Y&list=PLaVZpLEYEQNz34jHAiPcHTZ8ANr7Vkn3T https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlMq-3hmm5Y&list=PLaVZpLEYEQ... And some more here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Ei3hsEvCA&list=PLaVZpLEYEQNx4tht_Qx0PSwro4rasDPat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Ei3hsEvCA&list=PLaVZpLEYEQ...

ralusek 8y ago

I remember thinking OnLive's pitch of letting you stream games to low-end hardware was a very good idea, but it never took off. I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is. So, this is essentially those services, but allowing you to use a web browser as a client, right? I would only find this valuable if there was any performance gain in doing so, or if those services didn't make a client for the device I wanted to game on, both of which seem unlikely. Unless I drastically misunderstood what is happening, and the game is actually running on your hardware in the browser, in which case that is very impressive...but then I would have to question the performance.

andrewmd5 8y ago
Rainway is fast and clientless. Our vision is all about letting you use your existing hardware (home gaming PC, cloud provider) to enable the gameplay experience. So you installed our software and then the web app takes care of the rest. We curate all of the games you have installed on your machine and enable a click and play experience.
gh02t 8y ago
> I think nVidia SHIELD offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is. The Shield itself has been fairly successful from what I know, especially if you consider its fairly high price compared to other Android TV boxes. I have one and can say I really like it, Nvidia has been really committed and provided constant updates on top of a pretty stable hardware platform. Game streaming on it works pretty well and has been moderately successful. It works smoothly and latency is low enough to play all but the twitchiest of games. The biggest advantage is that for all the games I've seen you can play them as long as you already own them on Steam, you don't have to purchase them twice (in addition to supporting native Steam in-home streaming now I think). The selection of games available to play on Nvidia's streaming service isn't colossal, but they have a constant trickle of popular games so there's plenty of things you'd actually want to play (and you get a pretty generous range of older-but-good games to play for free with the Shield). I bought mine as a media player, but the game streaming is a very nice perk.
georgeecollins 8y ago

standardout 8y ago

Hitting this error: Connection log Connecting over WebRTC first. Failed to connect with WebRTC {"Error":1} Attempting to connect by socket. Failed to connect with socket. Failed to connect to j3gv720k7hwez.cya.gg, please try restarting Rainway

cheunste 8y ago

Is this still being planned for the Nintendo Switch?

wishinghand 8y ago

Their site says: Rainway will always be completely free to use with no hidden cost. You can stream all your games, whenever you want, wherever you are, for as long as you want. /endquote So where's their income coming from? The blog post from the OP mentions they're hiring.

andrewmd5 8y ago
We recently just raised our seed round: https://blog.rainway.io/we-just-raised-our-seed-round-982fb0567329 https://blog.rainway.io/we-just-raised-our-seed-round-982fb0...
- driverdan 8y ago
  That's great but it doesn't answer the question. Investment is not income.
  - andrewmd5 8y ago
    We are in beta and not willing to charge for an unfinished product. We have plans for some premium offerings down the line.
    - polyomino 8y ago
      Perhaps you could buy and resell time on nearby machines peer to peer.
    - breakingcups 8y ago
      What about a finished product? You currently say "Rainway will always be completely free to use with no hidden cost."
zimbatm 8y ago
My own silly analysis: monetisation can come at a later stage. Since the server is running on the customer's Window machine they won't have much infrastructure costs to support even if they get very popular. If the main product is free then revenue can be added through extensions like hosted service or parnership (eg: integration with Twich or another video game streaming service).

ewzimm 8y ago

Advertising Overwatch is an unfortunate choice and makes me think they haven't fully done their homework. Blizzard recently changed their terms of service to include a clause stating that they will ban any accounts that use cloud gaming services like GeForce Now.

sargun 8y ago
Do you know why?
- ewzimm 8y ago
  They didn't give any reason for doing so that I'm aware of. Maybe they have ambitions of their own for streaming thier games as a paid service and don't want competition.
- irascible 8y ago
  Because then suddenly you start getting bug reports about your multi million dollar fps not working well over someone else's streaming service/scheme. Not to mention how this fucks up anticheat detection..
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  I think it's because botters have taken to cloud gaming to more easily scale up their bot networks.
- vkou 8y ago
  No reason given.
andrewmd5 8y ago
Rainway is not cloud gaming, it utilizes your computer hardware and is one of the most played games on the platform. None of our users have reported issues, and we've been tracking it for weeks.
- ewzimm 8y ago
  That's good to hear! If it doesn't use any third party servers, then it might be good to even advertise it as an alternative to people who foermerly used the banned services.

sigfubar 8y ago

Is it possible to run the host/server software on an EC2 instance with gobs of RAM and a GPU?

andrewmd5 8y ago
It is. We test on Azure quite a lot and are working on getting an AMI created for easy distribution.
- barik 8y ago
  What is a recommended VM size on Azure to use?

orliesaurus 8y ago

I use it, it's okay for casual singleplayer games but online it's unplayable! EDIT: Unplayable for a competitive player like myself.

orliesaurus 8y ago
I also use this with a little "hack" to watch movies from my desktop onto another machine :D
- TranquilMarmot 8y ago
  I use Plex for this; https://www.plex.tv/ https://www.plex.tv/ It would probably encode the audio/video better since it's made for it.
  - orliesaurus 8y ago
    You're right, will test, thanks for the URL

sarreph 8y ago

This looks cool, however it's very similar to a service I've been using for the past month called Parsec[0]. I've successfully managed to play Fortnite (don't judge :)) on an AWS g2.2xlarge (via Parsec) with an acceptable level of latency. Apart from the occasional artefacting (most notably when starting), it's been an enjoyable experience and a real insight into the potential power that cloud gaming really could hold. What's so great about Parsec is that they allow you (at a somewhat marked-up rate so far as I can tell) to rent an AWS server directly from the client and get started. That being said, my Parsec credit is running a little low now so I might have a go with Rainway :) I would like to know what the difference — if any — between Parsec and Rainway is? As far as I can tell, Parsec was first, so it'd be interesting to know if their tech is superior. [0] - https://parsecgaming.com https://parsecgaming.com

andrewmd5 8y ago
So I can only speak to the pros of Rainway and why we have so many people adopting it as their go-to-solution. We put your games first. We don' t believe in the traditional remote desktop approach and want to remove all the friction from game streaming. (https://blog.rainway.io/our-core-mission-games-first-78671e496201 https://blog.rainway.io/our-core-mission-games-first-78671e4...) We're clientless, this means you can open any web browser like Chrome and start playing on any number of devices -- both inside and outside your home. We use common web traffic to prevent being blocked by most networks, this allows us to have a higher chance of connecting even on lock downed networks (schools, office). We're really fast. You can play games like Destiny 2 on a Chromebook at 1080P 60 FPS.(https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009758915305730051 https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009758915305730051) We are aiming to release on every major platform we can. Phones and game consoles alike. We constantly give back, through open source releases or community fixes -- we really believe in the principle of supporting the community that supports us. For the more technical questions, Rainway can run on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA systems and we're highly optimized for all three and test on all ranges of hardware from those providers. Our biggest weakness right now would be our lack of native mobile apps, but that isn't slowing us down. (https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009852188724625408 https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009852188724625408) I'm the CEO of Rainway, so of course, I like our product and I'd encourage you to join our discord (https://rain.gg/discord https://rain.gg/discord) and ask users for their opinion.

itsfatz 8y ago

Ages ago I spun an aws instance w/ Grid, setup VPN and used Steam in-home streaming to accomplish a similar result. Using spot-instances resulted in something like $0.06/hr if memory serves (which it seldom does). Biggest caveats at that time were setup time and latency; since I was too cheap to preserve the instance volume and too lazy to split the steam save folder to a smaller separate volume, and had yet to secure gigabit fiber. It was more of a dalliance for me since I don't game often anymore, and if I'm honest with myself I enjoyed setting up the infrastructure more than I did playing Fallout 4. Please note this has more to do with how little fun I am in my old age than any problems with the game.

013a 8y ago
Pricing and capabilities have probably changed over the years. The cheapest GPU spot instance you can get on AWS today is a p2.xlarge, which will run you $0.45/hr. And also, p2-class instances run Tesla K80 GPUs, which are Kepler cores, an architecture running on 6 years old now (think GTX 600/700). Fine for 1080p60 most games, but I doubt many modern titles would hit the 60fps mark. Google Cloud can allow you to get the cost lower (closer to ~$0.15/hr) by cost optimizing the instance CPU/Memory and attaching a GPU to it. But you've got three problems with both of these setups: - Spot on AWS/Preemptible on GCP will kill your instance with about 2 minutes of warning. I'm not sure what AWS's policy is on how often this happens, but on GCP, its guaranteed to happen at least once every 24 hours. So that could be annoying if you're in the middle of an intense game of Overwatch. - Storage costs. You're paying per hour for your instance, so you don't want to have to download all your games every time you spin it up. But, then you shift the cost to the SSD, which is expensive and must be maintained 24/7/365 for that quick startup time. You could alternatively store it in S3/GCS then hot-load it when the instance starts, which would be fast due to the fiber interconnect all these datacenters are wired with. So, plan for this bullet to add at least $10/mo/TB of storage. - Network costs. A 1080p60 stream is, conservatively, 10Mbps? Add on an extra ~$0.25 per hour you want to game, just in bandwidth.
rco8786 8y ago
It was closer to 0.50 an hour fwiw. And in practice that wasn’t realistic as the gpu spot prices would often spike to tens of dollars per hour, presumably as someone else ran some really large jobs. A friend and I tried to systematize/automate this exact thing. And we were relatively successful in building it. But it turns out that spot prices are incredibly volatile and steam streaming is still pretty buggy so we abandoned it.

techsupporter 8y ago

At the risk of detracting from the admittedly cool technology: Yay, yet another freaking terms of service that's 8 miles long and includes a mandatory, binding arbitration clause. I'm getting so sick of these. It's to the point now where I actively seek out companies based in the European Union or Canada since those countries' laws don't permit such shenanigans. (Also, at the risk of sounding bitter or hostile, if someone's about to reply to me and say "well, everybody's doing it" or "the lawyers make us," save it. If you're an executive in your company, you can make the choice to not have one of these and you didn't. I genuinely don't care if you personally don't like it.)

drumttocs8 8y ago

Is the goal to be bought out by Google? Plenty of whispers that they're interested in providing this sort of service.

Kagerjay 8y ago

While this looks cool isn't latency going to be a big problem?

bmurphy1976 8y ago
I've used Steam and PS4 Remote Play fairly extensively in my home so I have some experience with the concept. I think it really it depends on the game. Fallout 4: Works great. Dark Souls 3: The latency is immediately obvious. You might as well be torturing yourself, the game is already hard enough. God of War: somewhere in the middle. It's playable, but it feels crisper without the extra latency. I don't see how this product will be any different.

dmadams28 8y ago

Hell yeah, go Andrew!

tomxor 8y ago

This is not going to be appropriate for fast reflex twitch gaming until the internet has some fundamental technological shift that allows for super low latency. Unhits are one thing but having your viewport affected by it will just be awful.

jay_wild 8y ago

An interesting alternative is Moonlight[0], an open source implementation of nVidia's GameStream protocol. While it does require an nVidia graphics card, it severely cuts down on latency as all the video encoding is done in hardware on the host PC. Essentially it gets you P2P low-latency video streaming with controller/keyboard+mouse input [0] - https://moonlight-stream.com/ https://moonlight-stream.com/

andrewmd5 8y ago
Rainway is P2P and works with all hardware (AMD, NVIDIA, Intel).

amaccuish 8y ago

andrewmd5, what made you go for C#? How do you see that playing out for hosting on MacOS (if that's even in the pipeline)? :)

rocky1138 8y ago
I think most people who need to stream games are those who have a Windows box but run other operating systems for all of their other machines. I can't imagine a scenario where you'd want to host on a Mac or a Linux machine for games, only one where they are the client.
- jetti 8y ago
  I don't own a personal Windows machine and have games on my Mac. I wouldn't be able to use this service to play games through my browser at work or when not at home
andrewmd5 8y ago
Our stack is HTML5 (React/Typescript), C# and C++ for the most part. A lot of our cloud is also written in .NET Core. It is just a powerful language that we can build highly optimized systems for.

tonyhb 8y ago

Gaikai [0] had this in 2010 for free. You'd log on to their website and play — in a browser — games on a remote server. They got bought in 2012 by Sony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai

jboogie77 8y ago

Just a heads up this guy has been known to do sketchy things in the past. A simple reddit search of his previous products will bring up some questionable practices

senatorobama 8y ago
Example?
- jboogie77 8y ago
  I believe it was either borderless gaming or his steam cleaner program. Tried to put adware into it and got called out hard
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
ghusbands 8y ago
Do you mean the near-piracy of Aurous [1]? It looks like they didn't realise that re-hosting publicly-available music makes them liable under copyright law. Borderless gaming and Netflix Roulette don't seem sketchy. It's not clear what else you might mean. Do you have examples? [1] https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6723046/aurous-andrew-sampson-developer-explains https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6723046/aurous-a...
- jboogie77 8y ago
  No it wasn’t aurous. Check my other comment

enricozb 8y ago

Could this be used on a local network? I have a pretty beefy PC but I like the comfort of sitting outside with my chromebook. Is there any way to host this service myself, so it doesn't have to go through any servers first?

fcarraldo 8y ago

https://play.rainway.io https://play.rainway.io doesn't work. Console logs a bunch of CORS errors for seemingly unnecessary services, but the site still fails to load. Disabled PrivacyBadger/uBlock/HTTPS Everywhere but still no luck. On Firefox 61.1/Mac OS X High Sierra. Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-13434394-1” https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-13434394-1”. play.rainway.io:1 Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). <script> source URI is not allowed in this document: “https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js” https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js”. play.rainway.io:8 [Show/hide message details.] ReferenceError: Raven is not defined[Learn More] bundle.js:110:144069 Source map error: request failed with status 403 Resource URL: https://play.rainway.io/bundle.js https://play.rainway.io/bundle.js Source Map URL: bundle.js.map[Learn More]

beshrkayali 8y ago

I get a "Raven is not defined" on play.rainway.io and a blank page.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

Interesting. Since someone from rainway is in the thread: what kind of game can you capture? does it work with non-dx games (i.e. dwarf fortress) how much is captured? what happens if someone on the pc alt+tabs into another window or kicks the game out of full-screen?

leowoo91 8y ago

Streaming games has been attempted several times (not sure if any of it survived), but most likely this might stay as alternative to PSP at home.

skate22 8y ago

Does rainway support multiple client connections to the same game? Would be an interesting way to collaborate