OpenUru.org

I have not been keeping up on Cloud computing. I have paid a little attention to the idea of moving graphics procesing to the cloud and using light weight clients. NVidia has a whole graphics render project for just that.

From the games conference word has come that OnLive is offering the service for US$14.95/month. The first 25,000 signups get 3 months free. See: Chapter & Metaverse or OnLive Pre-Registration (link is time limited - Use OnLive after it expires)

I'm not sure how we will be hosting Open Uru shards in the future. Nor how well OU will work with OnLive. But, other games I would not expect to work with OnLive are there.

Perlman provided a remarkable demo, playing games like Crysis on a large screen TV, then continuing the game on his iPhone. Other features included streaming movies and what looked like Xbox Live community features.

Great to see that they are providing Mac support from launch.

We had some discussion about Steve Perlman's OnLive almost a year ago now:
viewtopic.php?p=1677#p1677

At that time we discovered that there were significant geographical limitations to the OnLive model. Things change, but at this point I'm still not sure that the real world practicalities stack up to the hype.

Given some of the things we're seeing happen in MOULagain just now, I think the jury's out on how well a large scale Uru works using a cloud server platform: Some of the questions that are being raised may be answered once someone can get a look at the server code, but I think other issues will need to be addressed in the server setup and can't easily be accommodated by standard cloud arrangements that are intended for providing web services rather than gaming. For example, a load balancer that only re-routes requests once the request latency reaches 4 seconds doesn't really sound like it's reactive enough to keep gameplay acceptably smooth, but that seems to be the way the Elastic LBs on the Amazon EC2 work. I guess it works the way it does to keep the number of dynamic server instances minimised and therefore keep costs down.

To that example a load balancer was tried and failed on MQO because of persistent connections. Load balancing in the cloud does not like persistent connections. Consequently, short-burst connections like web pages can more fully utilize such things. It means games with persistent connections have to handle it themselves on their end.

Ah! Which perhaps helps to explain a number of things I wasn't quite understanding - Thanks for that snippet JW