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I built my own GeForce Now / Google Stadia clone for up to 8 gamepads to connect to the same instance. It's GPU-accelerated, UDP-based and all C++. It works we

I built my own GeForce Now / Google Stadia clone for up to 8 gamepads to connect to the same instance. It's GPU-accelerated, UDP-based and all C++. It works well and I still use it with friends and family to play games together. I even designed a logo, registered it for an EU trademark, and made t-shirts. But when Steam Remote Play Together was announced, I decided that there wasn't a market for it anymore, so instead I switched to building real-time AI tools in C++. My next idea, funny Webcam filters for desktop, was then pre-empted by Snap Camera coming to desktop. With so many FAANG-scale companies releasing free tools, it has become really tricky to find financially viable niches.

navane 4y ago
Doesn't Stream Remote Play Together show there _is_ a market? Competition means the market exist?
- voakbasda 4y ago
  When a deeply entrenched player gets into the game, small players do not stand much of a chance. I think few people have the necessary David in them to go up against such Goliaths. OP made the personal choice to walk away from an uphill battle, and I don’t blame them one bit.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Yes, the market surely exists. But I can't build a bootstrapped business around competing with FREE. Steam has other ways to monetize user engagement, but I would have needed to charge users for the service.
badtension 4y ago
That sounds very cool! Maybe a similar project could take off: sharing console instances. Flat community of 50 apartments would buy 5 consoles and share them with each other (you keep them all in a storage room and just connect with TV via ethernet). One major problem is that console manufacturers would probably need to be a part of this and I think they would rather sell 10 consoles individually than 5 for sharing.
- toast0 4y ago
  > One major problem is that console manufacturers would probably need to be a part of this and I think they would rather sell 10 consoles individually than 5 for sharing. It would certainly work better with manufacturer involvement, but you could use HDMI capture to source the video, and USB to provide the inputs, so the console doesn't know any better. There's some licensing rigamorole and content management as well. You could probably do a forced log out between users and rely on cloud saves, but that's kind of ugh... Would work better if you can trust the people you share the console(s) with.
  - badtension 4y ago
    Yes, in principle you could do that (apart from all the legal troubles...) In practice we like things customized and only want to see our own savegames available on the list so this is a real issue that could break this especially if large number of strangers were to use it. Another issue is waste - what if you want to play some game but it was installed on another console that is currently playing something completely different? Installing all games on all consoles seems crazy. Maybe have a large NAS with multiple games preinstalled? If we could add another type of game licensing which would allow for playing the same game on 5 different hardware consoles simultaneously that would be perfect. Resources would be used to their maximum potential.
    - toast0 4y ago
      Scheduling around game installs would be tricky yeah. I don't know how the various console do with having their storage swapped... I know the switch can store downloaded games to SD cards, but I don't know if it lets you put that SD card into another console and play the games if a licensed user is logged in... Or if it needs to be downloaded by that specific console. I think the current xbox and playstations also have user replacable storage, but again, it may be specialized per console? I know the platforms already have code to check for licensed user on a downloaded game when the game is downloaded to a console not deemed the 'home' console for a user. If you can swap storage, you can build around NAS connected storage emulators. Otherwise, yeah, big storage and guessing about what should go where. Like Netflix CDN nodes, but with more black boxes.
als0 4y ago
How much does it cost for a GPU accelerated VM in the cloud? It would be great if there was an automated way to spin up a VM, install your software and then destroy the VM when you're done. After all, GeForce Now and Google Play don't let you play your full Steam library.
- tryauuum 4y ago
  I wonder if there even are a lot of clouds that provide consumer GPUs. I heard GPUs designed for computation doesn't perform as well in games
  - mirker 4y ago
    The dealbreaker is that consumer GPUs (and their drivers) have a terms of use prohibiting various aspects of datacenter usage.
    - archi42 4y ago
      The vGPU feature can be unlocked for several Nvidia GPUs: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock I did not yet try it myself (maybe it doesn't even work anymore?), and it might not be an option for businesses.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  About $0.5 per hour for a 3080 equivalent. And yes, I have an image that I can spin up on-demand.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    This seems to be a neat setup. I've found this script a couple days ago: https://github.com/gcloudrig/gcloudrig https://github.com/gcloudrig/gcloudrig (haven't given it a try just yet but surely looking forward to)
    - fxtentacle 4y ago
fanick 4y ago
This interesting for me from the standpoint of shared controllers. What is the general idea behind this? Did you write a driver that would fake these controllers on the 'server'? What platforms have you covered? I'm into massively local multiplayer game and was always toying with ideas on how to reliably connect as much controllers as possible into a game.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  I didn't build it, but there's ViGEm for creating virtual Xbox 360 controllers: https://github.com/ViGEm/ViGEmClient https://github.com/ViGEm/ViGEmClient So each client polls the local controller using the DX APIs, streams the state to the server and then the server creates virtual gamepads to send the input to the game.
shiftpgdn 4y ago
There is a tremendous market for low cost reliable remote viz software.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  What is "viz software" here? Visualization? e.g. Fusion 360?

navane 4y ago

Doesn't Stream Remote Play Together show there _is_ a market? Competition means the market exist?

voakbasda 4y ago
When a deeply entrenched player gets into the game, small players do not stand much of a chance. I think few people have the necessary David in them to go up against such Goliaths. OP made the personal choice to walk away from an uphill battle, and I don’t blame them one bit.
fxtentacle 4y ago
Yes, the market surely exists. But I can't build a bootstrapped business around competing with FREE. Steam has other ways to monetize user engagement, but I would have needed to charge users for the service.

badtension 4y ago

That sounds very cool! Maybe a similar project could take off: sharing console instances. Flat community of 50 apartments would buy 5 consoles and share them with each other (you keep them all in a storage room and just connect with TV via ethernet). One major problem is that console manufacturers would probably need to be a part of this and I think they would rather sell 10 consoles individually than 5 for sharing.

toast0 4y ago
> One major problem is that console manufacturers would probably need to be a part of this and I think they would rather sell 10 consoles individually than 5 for sharing. It would certainly work better with manufacturer involvement, but you could use HDMI capture to source the video, and USB to provide the inputs, so the console doesn't know any better. There's some licensing rigamorole and content management as well. You could probably do a forced log out between users and rely on cloud saves, but that's kind of ugh... Would work better if you can trust the people you share the console(s) with.
- badtension 4y ago
  Yes, in principle you could do that (apart from all the legal troubles...) In practice we like things customized and only want to see our own savegames available on the list so this is a real issue that could break this especially if large number of strangers were to use it. Another issue is waste - what if you want to play some game but it was installed on another console that is currently playing something completely different? Installing all games on all consoles seems crazy. Maybe have a large NAS with multiple games preinstalled? If we could add another type of game licensing which would allow for playing the same game on 5 different hardware consoles simultaneously that would be perfect. Resources would be used to their maximum potential.
  - toast0 4y ago
    Scheduling around game installs would be tricky yeah. I don't know how the various console do with having their storage swapped... I know the switch can store downloaded games to SD cards, but I don't know if it lets you put that SD card into another console and play the games if a licensed user is logged in... Or if it needs to be downloaded by that specific console. I think the current xbox and playstations also have user replacable storage, but again, it may be specialized per console? I know the platforms already have code to check for licensed user on a downloaded game when the game is downloaded to a console not deemed the 'home' console for a user. If you can swap storage, you can build around NAS connected storage emulators. Otherwise, yeah, big storage and guessing about what should go where. Like Netflix CDN nodes, but with more black boxes.

als0 4y ago

How much does it cost for a GPU accelerated VM in the cloud? It would be great if there was an automated way to spin up a VM, install your software and then destroy the VM when you're done. After all, GeForce Now and Google Play don't let you play your full Steam library.

tryauuum 4y ago
I wonder if there even are a lot of clouds that provide consumer GPUs. I heard GPUs designed for computation doesn't perform as well in games
- mirker 4y ago
  The dealbreaker is that consumer GPUs (and their drivers) have a terms of use prohibiting various aspects of datacenter usage.
  - archi42 4y ago
    The vGPU feature can be unlocked for several Nvidia GPUs: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock I did not yet try it myself (maybe it doesn't even work anymore?), and it might not be an option for businesses.
fxtentacle 4y ago
About $0.5 per hour for a 3080 equivalent. And yes, I have an image that I can spin up on-demand.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  This seems to be a neat setup. I've found this script a couple days ago: https://github.com/gcloudrig/gcloudrig https://github.com/gcloudrig/gcloudrig (haven't given it a try just yet but surely looking forward to)
  - fxtentacle 4y ago

fanick 4y ago

This interesting for me from the standpoint of shared controllers. What is the general idea behind this? Did you write a driver that would fake these controllers on the 'server'? What platforms have you covered? I'm into massively local multiplayer game and was always toying with ideas on how to reliably connect as much controllers as possible into a game.

fxtentacle 4y ago
I didn't build it, but there's ViGEm for creating virtual Xbox 360 controllers: https://github.com/ViGEm/ViGEmClient https://github.com/ViGEm/ViGEmClient So each client polls the local controller using the DX APIs, streams the state to the server and then the server creates virtual gamepads to send the input to the game.

shiftpgdn 4y ago

There is a tremendous market for low cost reliable remote viz software.

fxtentacle 4y ago
What is "viz software" here? Visualization? e.g. Fusion 360?