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I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game r

I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This was specifically a problem when playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would say something like "Go to the * lag * and meet * lag *" and then I had no idea what I had to do next. Lag was still a rare thing during my experience. It's just that when it occurred the timing was unfortunate.

dragontamer 8y ago
Thanks for explaining your experience! There's a lot of us out here who are curious how this thing works and the design tradeoffs.
- molecules 8y ago
  I also was a participant. It was pretty cool. I did a wireshark and they are using Google's QUIC protocol. In my experience the game would drop graphics before I would experience input lag. There were a handful of times that I did experience input lag. This was on a wired connection 100mbs down 20mbs up through Xfinity. I did notice in the Google demo, that when the person was using the game pad, he experienced input lag when he was trying to jump up on top of that steeple on top of the building.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    Hmm, I think I like those design choices. A dropped frame or two isn't a big deal in my experience, while a delayed input is a far bigger detriment to the gaming experience. QUIC (and UDP in general) seems about right for the technology backend. I'm still of the opinion that Google shot themselves in the foot here by having a bunch of wireless controllers in one room. Its like they've never talked to a Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament organizer before: Wii Nunchuks over 2.4GHz Bluetooth have dropped packets / dropped input issues when you get to ~20+ participants. Don't do mass wireless in one room. It always ends poorly. I'd expect that local wireless in a typical living-room setting would be a better experience actually. After all: the major issue is whether or not the wired-connection / fiber backbone of the typical city is up to spec for this kind of thing. (A typical living room user probably doesn't have to worry about clogged 2.4GHz connections unless they're in an apartment I guess...)
- gcbw2 8y ago
  > tradeoffs lag is the least of your worries. Encoding artifacts will get to you and completely ruin the experience on anything that is not a simple puzzle game.
  - jsight 8y ago
    So basically the same issues as onlive then? I remember thinking that it was pretty good for a while. Then I tried the same game on a decent PC immediately after using the service. It was night and day, both in terms of latency and graphics quality. I don't have high hopes for this service.
    - jotm 8y ago
      It worked great, in my experience. The most awesome thing about it was playing Dirt Rally 3 I believe, on a Motorola Droid/Milestone. A full PC game on a smartphone, pretty mind blowing at the time, and it was quite good even over 3G.
    - mikepurvis 8y ago
      I feel similarly. I've tried in-home streaming from PS4 to a MacBook— obviously the encoding of the video signal isn't going to be as optimized or speedy as Google's backend, but still, the overall ping is sub-10ms and it's still a way worse experience than playing the same game on the TV, even for relatively slow paced action-adventure titles like HZD or RDR2. I can't imagine trying to play something like a fighting game this way.
markdog12 8y ago
> Lag was still a rare thing during my experience Anything more specific than that, i.e. lag would occur every 10 mins on avg?
- dragontamer 8y ago
  In my experience, 2.4 GHz is congested. An entire room of wireless controllers at 2.4GHz (ex: Super Smash Bros. Setups with Wiimotes) would cause these "dropped packet" issues, even with local WiFi / Wireless. 2.4GHz shares Bluetooth, 802.11n, and many other protocols. If this were an entire room of WiFi controllers hitting the same WiFi frequencies all at the same time, it could have been a local problem. All in all, we can't read too much into the demo-conditions. There are too many variables at play here.
- on_and_off 8y ago
  fwiw No lag at all on my end. I am in the USA, so I have a solid but not amazing connection. I should note that I have only played for half an hour because AssCreed was extremely boring. The tech itself was very solid in my experience. I tried to catch some streaming artifacts, like parts of the screen not updating or a visible lag, but I could not see anything. In a blind test, I doubt I would have been able to differentiate this from running the game on my home console.
  - programd 8y ago
    I'll second that. Standard Xfinity cable connection, decent PC, and wired ethernet to the router. Occasionally in the evening during prime time when I assume everybody in my building was watching Netflix the stream would kick into lower quality graphics, but would recover quickly. No control input lag that I could detect. I put about 30 hours into the game and enjoyed myself (Awsome environment design and a vast, vast map to explore. All that fighting is repetitive and tedious, but story mode and running around exploring, taking in the views and the history is quite fun). In any event I think that if you are a casual gamer and want to get off the graphics card upgrade train every couple of years, then this is a no brainer. It probably would not be a good match for multiplayer shooters, but for solo games, even AAA titles, it's a great option. My feedback was that if they paired up with Steam they'd have a killer product. They might still have a killer product if they convince all those developers on Steam to also put their games on this service.
derefr 8y ago
How do you picture your hypothetical vision of things working on the server side? Naively using buffering would make the input stream desync from the output stream. "Input prediction" works well enough when a game supports it, but lag would reappear for titles where the game doesn't. A general solution (for games with no input prediction) would require you to run the game in an x86 emulator with save-state + rewind support, such that network stutter could be translated to micro-rewinds of the game's VM; and even that wouldn't work if the game was multiplayer. I could see games being able to signal "there is no input during this cutscene, so it can be buffered at the client." But for everything besides cutscenes, game streaming essentially has to work like a VoIP call (hard-realtime), doesn't it?
- justfor1comment 8y ago
  I think you pretty much explained the solution. You need buffering plus real time VM suspend+resume. I was thinking the client could keep sending last shown frame data back to the server and if a hiccup is detected the server stops the clock cycles on the VM and resumes the clock as soon as the buffer is empty. This may lead the user to see a loader for a short time.
- iandanforth 8y ago
  When you're talking to someone on Skype and you notice the other person has stopped moving, you stop talking. They may already be doing something similar (halt rendering on congestion) but when this kind of lag happened to me it felt like the rendering had continued without pause on their end.
- r00fus 8y ago
  For a tangential example, Zoom conferencing increases the replay rate after a cutout. I can tell that someone goes to say, 1.25x and they still sound ok, but you usually don't lose much this way. It happens occasionally when I drive (bad LTE zones). On bad days (ie, if I'm tethering at hotel to join a conf or using airport wifi), I sometimes hear "robot voice" as the tool attempts to deal with signal attenuation. This may not work as well in video games, but I would like the option.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
dmitriid 8y ago
It’s the same experience in all other forerunners in the field. In essence, you need a fat cable to a datacenter very nearby for shooters/fast action games. Regular wi-fi is more or less sufficient for everything less (you might get video degradation from time to time). OnLive was the first and it was just insanely awesome. Too bad it was shattered. I also tried LiquidSky, and it was insanely awesome. At one point you ended up having a virtual PC where you could install and play any game from your Steam library. Too bad they’ve changed the service and monetisation a few times, and it’s unclear if yhey are alive. Haven’t tried others.
esalman 8y ago
That's interesting. I remember now that I signed up for the beta. However I never received an invite :(
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
> This was specifically a problem when playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would say something like "Go to the lag * and meet * lag " and then I had no idea what I had to do next. That's annoying. Now, as a technicality specific to ACO, the goals should still appear in the mission's description, no matter whether you hear the NPCs stating those goals or not.
lgregg 8y ago
What were the frame rates like? I tried cloud gaming once but the frames being transmitted were low quality at best on a 70 mbps download.
- rasz 8y ago
  Oddysey was streamed at 60fps, but the game itself ran at 30
kerng 8y ago
Google could show ads during the lags - that might help increase revenue numbers.
- scep12 8y ago
  Unrealistic for what seems like obvious reasons; no one would use the service if it was lagging enough to make that time profitable by way of ads. If your comment was tongue-in-cheek, which I hope it was, I'd urge you to contribute more substance and originality in these comments. After all, this isn't Reddit.
  - kerng 8y ago
    Do you think these things are not considered. There is an army of people at Google that try to figure out how to show us more relevant ads. It's the perfect scenario for upselling. Slow connection speed? Run these tests, etc. Or, switch to a faster more secure browser. Sound familiar?
    - kerng 8y ago
      HN is particularly Google friendly and criticizing usually gets downvotes. Google was just today fined 1.49 billion Euros for their ad strategy - this is reality: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228
      - 0xfffff 8y ago
        Yeah, that's not unusual.
boltzmann_brain 8y ago
What about image quality? Everyone is talking about latency issues, which are of course the biggest problem, but no one seem to be bothered by compression? Personally when I play a game I want a crisp image. Streaming videos is very different to playing games, because you can buffer frames ahead so their compression levels can adjust to very high quality, but with games, I control the input and you cannot buffer the next frame ahead of time.

dragontamer 8y ago

Thanks for explaining your experience! There's a lot of us out here who are curious how this thing works and the design tradeoffs.

molecules 8y ago
I also was a participant. It was pretty cool. I did a wireshark and they are using Google's QUIC protocol. In my experience the game would drop graphics before I would experience input lag. There were a handful of times that I did experience input lag. This was on a wired connection 100mbs down 20mbs up through Xfinity. I did notice in the Google demo, that when the person was using the game pad, he experienced input lag when he was trying to jump up on top of that steeple on top of the building.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  Hmm, I think I like those design choices. A dropped frame or two isn't a big deal in my experience, while a delayed input is a far bigger detriment to the gaming experience. QUIC (and UDP in general) seems about right for the technology backend. I'm still of the opinion that Google shot themselves in the foot here by having a bunch of wireless controllers in one room. Its like they've never talked to a Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament organizer before: Wii Nunchuks over 2.4GHz Bluetooth have dropped packets / dropped input issues when you get to ~20+ participants. Don't do mass wireless in one room. It always ends poorly. I'd expect that local wireless in a typical living-room setting would be a better experience actually. After all: the major issue is whether or not the wired-connection / fiber backbone of the typical city is up to spec for this kind of thing. (A typical living room user probably doesn't have to worry about clogged 2.4GHz connections unless they're in an apartment I guess...)
gcbw2 8y ago
> tradeoffs lag is the least of your worries. Encoding artifacts will get to you and completely ruin the experience on anything that is not a simple puzzle game.
- jsight 8y ago
  So basically the same issues as onlive then? I remember thinking that it was pretty good for a while. Then I tried the same game on a decent PC immediately after using the service. It was night and day, both in terms of latency and graphics quality. I don't have high hopes for this service.
  - jotm 8y ago
    It worked great, in my experience. The most awesome thing about it was playing Dirt Rally 3 I believe, on a Motorola Droid/Milestone. A full PC game on a smartphone, pretty mind blowing at the time, and it was quite good even over 3G.
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    I feel similarly. I've tried in-home streaming from PS4 to a MacBook— obviously the encoding of the video signal isn't going to be as optimized or speedy as Google's backend, but still, the overall ping is sub-10ms and it's still a way worse experience than playing the same game on the TV, even for relatively slow paced action-adventure titles like HZD or RDR2. I can't imagine trying to play something like a fighting game this way.

markdog12 8y ago

> Lag was still a rare thing during my experience Anything more specific than that, i.e. lag would occur every 10 mins on avg?

dragontamer 8y ago
In my experience, 2.4 GHz is congested. An entire room of wireless controllers at 2.4GHz (ex: Super Smash Bros. Setups with Wiimotes) would cause these "dropped packet" issues, even with local WiFi / Wireless. 2.4GHz shares Bluetooth, 802.11n, and many other protocols. If this were an entire room of WiFi controllers hitting the same WiFi frequencies all at the same time, it could have been a local problem. All in all, we can't read too much into the demo-conditions. There are too many variables at play here.
on_and_off 8y ago
fwiw No lag at all on my end. I am in the USA, so I have a solid but not amazing connection. I should note that I have only played for half an hour because AssCreed was extremely boring. The tech itself was very solid in my experience. I tried to catch some streaming artifacts, like parts of the screen not updating or a visible lag, but I could not see anything. In a blind test, I doubt I would have been able to differentiate this from running the game on my home console.
- programd 8y ago
  I'll second that. Standard Xfinity cable connection, decent PC, and wired ethernet to the router. Occasionally in the evening during prime time when I assume everybody in my building was watching Netflix the stream would kick into lower quality graphics, but would recover quickly. No control input lag that I could detect. I put about 30 hours into the game and enjoyed myself (Awsome environment design and a vast, vast map to explore. All that fighting is repetitive and tedious, but story mode and running around exploring, taking in the views and the history is quite fun). In any event I think that if you are a casual gamer and want to get off the graphics card upgrade train every couple of years, then this is a no brainer. It probably would not be a good match for multiplayer shooters, but for solo games, even AAA titles, it's a great option. My feedback was that if they paired up with Steam they'd have a killer product. They might still have a killer product if they convince all those developers on Steam to also put their games on this service.

derefr 8y ago

How do you picture your hypothetical vision of things working on the server side? Naively using buffering would make the input stream desync from the output stream. "Input prediction" works well enough when a game supports it, but lag would reappear for titles where the game doesn't. A general solution (for games with no input prediction) would require you to run the game in an x86 emulator with save-state + rewind support, such that network stutter could be translated to micro-rewinds of the game's VM; and even that wouldn't work if the game was multiplayer. I could see games being able to signal "there is no input during this cutscene, so it can be buffered at the client." But for everything besides cutscenes, game streaming essentially has to work like a VoIP call (hard-realtime), doesn't it?

justfor1comment 8y ago
I think you pretty much explained the solution. You need buffering plus real time VM suspend+resume. I was thinking the client could keep sending last shown frame data back to the server and if a hiccup is detected the server stops the clock cycles on the VM and resumes the clock as soon as the buffer is empty. This may lead the user to see a loader for a short time.
iandanforth 8y ago
When you're talking to someone on Skype and you notice the other person has stopped moving, you stop talking. They may already be doing something similar (halt rendering on congestion) but when this kind of lag happened to me it felt like the rendering had continued without pause on their end.
r00fus 8y ago
For a tangential example, Zoom conferencing increases the replay rate after a cutout. I can tell that someone goes to say, 1.25x and they still sound ok, but you usually don't lose much this way. It happens occasionally when I drive (bad LTE zones). On bad days (ie, if I'm tethering at hotel to join a conf or using airport wifi), I sometimes hear "robot voice" as the tool attempts to deal with signal attenuation. This may not work as well in video games, but I would like the option.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago

dmitriid 8y ago

It’s the same experience in all other forerunners in the field. In essence, you need a fat cable to a datacenter very nearby for shooters/fast action games. Regular wi-fi is more or less sufficient for everything less (you might get video degradation from time to time). OnLive was the first and it was just insanely awesome. Too bad it was shattered. I also tried LiquidSky, and it was insanely awesome. At one point you ended up having a virtual PC where you could install and play any game from your Steam library. Too bad they’ve changed the service and monetisation a few times, and it’s unclear if yhey are alive. Haven’t tried others.

esalman 8y ago

That's interesting. I remember now that I signed up for the beta. However I never received an invite :(

Florin_Andrei 8y ago

> This was specifically a problem when playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would say something like "Go to the lag * and meet * lag " and then I had no idea what I had to do next. That's annoying. Now, as a technicality specific to ACO, the goals should still appear in the mission's description, no matter whether you hear the NPCs stating those goals or not.

lgregg 8y ago

What were the frame rates like? I tried cloud gaming once but the frames being transmitted were low quality at best on a 70 mbps download.

rasz 8y ago
Oddysey was streamed at 60fps, but the game itself ran at 30

kerng 8y ago

Google could show ads during the lags - that might help increase revenue numbers.

scep12 8y ago
Unrealistic for what seems like obvious reasons; no one would use the service if it was lagging enough to make that time profitable by way of ads. If your comment was tongue-in-cheek, which I hope it was, I'd urge you to contribute more substance and originality in these comments. After all, this isn't Reddit.
- kerng 8y ago
  Do you think these things are not considered. There is an army of people at Google that try to figure out how to show us more relevant ads. It's the perfect scenario for upselling. Slow connection speed? Run these tests, etc. Or, switch to a faster more secure browser. Sound familiar?
  - kerng 8y ago
    HN is particularly Google friendly and criticizing usually gets downvotes. Google was just today fined 1.49 billion Euros for their ad strategy - this is reality: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228
    - 0xfffff 8y ago
      Yeah, that's not unusual.

boltzmann_brain 8y ago

What about image quality? Everyone is talking about latency issues, which are of course the biggest problem, but no one seem to be bothered by compression? Personally when I play a game I want a crisp image. Streaming videos is very different to playing games, because you can buffer frames ahead so their compression levels can adjust to very high quality, but with games, I control the input and you cannot buffer the next frame ahead of time.