ONI on Stadia

[Craigjw]

This isn't a solution, this is a press release.

[blash365]

14 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

No. It's exactly the same as Steam. You buy a license for the game.

Alright, so google has two business models: subscription and single purchasing (which limits you to "normal" streaming quality unless you add a subscription). That might be acceptable to some. But when it comes to ONI, i have already bought the game. And i expect it to work in the way that i purchased it. I wouldnt buy it on a different plattform just to have a better chance for decent frames.

If it doesnt work for me i can either accept it, improve my hardware or post proper feedback so that klei can fix the problem for everyone (or publicly endorse stadia as their intended solution, which they wont).

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You argued that streaming would be necessarily mean more privacy issues. There's nothing to suggest that. I see it the other way, and that it would involve much less privacy issues.

Hm. So sending all my inputs over the web, processing them elsewhere and sending all the outputs back to me over the web bears less privacy issues than using a software on my local hardware and sending information based on a proper communication protocol? Ever heard of the security principle of least privileges?

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PCs require no more or less infrastructure than streaming service because the infrastructure will be there regardless, so you don't have an argument on that point.

So streaming with 1080p or more (35 Mbit/s for 4k) uses the same infrastructure as not streaming anything (apart from an initial download, synchronizing steam data etc.)? You might want to take a second thought on that argument, buddy.

[Saturnus]

24 minutes ago, blash365 said:

You might want to take a second thought on that argument, buddy.

No. You think about it again, mate. The infrastructure will be there regardless.

You're thinking of a world in a vacuum where nothing else exists. Where no cell phones exist. Where no people anywhere demand a decent internet connection to watch netflix or lousy HBO shows.

24 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Alright, so google has two business models: subscription and single purchasing (which limits you to "normal" streaming quality unless you add a subscription).

The problem here is that many people, like you initially, argue from a point of ignorance. They haven't actually read what Stadia is, and what it offers but rely on hear-say, and their own opinions.

[blash365]

7 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

No. You think about it again, mate. The infrastructure will be there regardless.

You're thinking of a world in a vacuum where nothing else exists. Where no cell phones exist. Where no people anywhere demand a decent internet connection to watch netflix or lousy HBO shows.

Believe it or not. But the infrastructure does not exist yet. There are regions where you can be happy to get 3Mb/s even in western countries. And there are regions in the world, which still exist "in a vacuum" as you put it.

And even if there is demand for or streaming services, stadia would be an additional demand, requiring additional infrastructure. You need more switches, more cables, more transmitters and even then, you will have those nice occasions where many people have the same demand at once (e.g. new year, world soccer championship, etc.) and even the lowest demands cannot be met by your infrastructure anymore. Then you will realize that it is not already there. It is simply layed out to serve more or less the average demand. Increasing the average demand also increases the need for more infrastructure. Simple.

 

7 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

The problem here is that many people, like you initially, argue from a point of ignorance. They haven't actually read what Stadia is, and what it offers but rely on hear-say, and their own opinions.

Sorry, i was too busy driving my tesla through an underground tunnel while managing bitcoins in oculus connect. I might have lost track of the latest trend.

[Saturnus]

2 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Increasing the average demand also increases the need for more infrastructure. Simple.

That is inevitable regardless if game streaming takes off or not. Not an argument for or against Stadia but against progress in general.

4 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Believe it or not. But the infrastructure does not exist yet. There are regions where you can be happy to get 3Mb/s even in western countries.

And Stadia won't be offered in those countries before there is the infrastructure to support it. Game streaming services is not a driving force for infrastructure investment but a benefactor of it.

Where I live you have to search long and hard to even find an ISP that offers a 10Mbit connection, and then only at a premium. The minimum usually sold is a 20Mbit connection and even that isn't much cheaper than a 50Mbit connection.

[blash365]

8 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

That is inevitable regardless if game streaming takes off or not. Not an argument for or against Stadia but against progress in general.

It's not an argument against progress in general. It's an argument for asking whether the progress is actually worth the cost. Which is a question everybody has to answer for themselves. You are the one trying to answer it for others.

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And Stadia won't be offered in those countries before there is the infrastructure to support it. Game streaming services is not a driving force for infrastructure investment but a benefactor of it.

Where I live you have to search long and hard to even find an ISP that offers a 10Mbit connection, and then only at a premium. The minimum usually sold is a 20Mbit connection and even that isn't much cheaper than a 50Mbit connection.

Where i live (and i think we are both from european countries - if not the same), myself and many others in rural areas can be happy to have the minimum bandwidth that is being sold by their ISP. I am buying 6Mb/s and what arrives at my home is less than 3Mb/s. There are even blindspots in some areas, because our biggest ISP does not cover non-lucrative areas (understandable from a business point of view).

Still it should make you aware that you are speaking from a privileged perspective even in a western country.

[Nightinggale]

12 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

No. You think about it again, mate. The infrastructure will be there regardless.

You're thinking of a world in a vacuum where nothing else exists. Where no cell phones exist. Where no people anywhere demand a decent internet connection to watch netflix or lousy HBO shows.

There are a few major flaws in this statement.

1. assuming the infrastructure is the same regardless of the need
2. assuming the infrastructure consumes the same power when idle as when fully loaded
3. assuming Stadia won't use more power than your home computer even at a higher resolution with more graphics features enabled

The infrastructure will always be there if you are talking about the internet. However if you suddenly decide to put twice as much data on the internet, the infrastructure is expanded. The infrastructure of the internet isn't a constant size. The same goes for the power usage. The more data it handles, the more power it consumes even without changing the hardware.

Also if you have a GPU, which can't handle more than 720p and medium settings, streaming with high settings and 1080p or 4k from Stadia means there is hardware, which needs to generate that 1080p or 4k image. It will consume power regardless of if it is in a private home or in a server room.

3 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Believe it or not. But the infrastructure does not exist yet. There are regions where you can be happy to get 3Mb/s even in western countries. And there are regions in the world, which still exist "in a vacuum" as you put it.

I know somebody living in a place where the best you can get is around 10-11 Mb/s of filetransfer, but it's supposed to be 15 Mb/s and the loss is due to packet loss. This means it's unsuitable for any streaming and that's despite the fact that it's in a city which is normally considered high end for internet speed. It doesn't matter how fast your connection is when you have a packet loss of that magnitude, you just can't stream anything, not even video.

1 minute ago, Saturnus said:

And Stadia won't be offered in those countries before there is the infrastructure to support it.

And I just gave an example to counter that because said location is on the list of countries in the Stadia press release. Just because a country has x% of high speed internet connections doesn't mean 100% can gain access to them. High speed internet has a tendency to be very unevenly distributed. Where I live there is the fast and the slow ends of the same road because only half the road is within range of the fiber optic box. This isn't even a technical limit, it's a financial limit because the cable owner decided it would be too expensive to dig more to reach the rest of the houses.

[Saturnus]

17 minutes ago, blash365 said:

It's not an argument against progress in general. It's an argument for asking whether the progress is actually worth the cost. Which is a question everybody has to answer for themselves. You are the one trying to answer it for others.

No. I'm not. That would be a political debate, and I don't get involved in those. Especially not on a game forum.

Let's remind ourselves that the OP asked what we thought about the possibility of having ONI on Stadia when it becomes a subscription free service next year. I'm all for it, and have a genuine use for it as it would increase my game performance and lessen my privacy concerns greatly.

I have not argued against ONI continuing to be available through other existing platforms. All I have argued is that game streaming services, like Stadia is the future of gaming. Not the immediate future but an inevitable future.

Oh, and no, we're not from or live in the same country. Not that I think that really matters one way or the other.

[blash365]

And i argued that investing your hopes in a technology that is not here yet and might/will have huge cutbacks on multiple other fronts, is not the most constructive way to proceed.

Try to post proper feedback so that klei has a chance to identify the reason of the fps drops. If you have a high end system, post the stats, so that they can see that there is a problem even on that high end system. Or maybe some helpful person on the forum might actually find a flaw that you can easily fix by replacing a piece of hardware or driver. Or - ideally - klei finds a flaw in ONI and fixes it solving the problem for everyone.

[beowulf2010]

47 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Where I live you have to search long and hard to even find an ISP that offers a 10Mbit connection, and then only at a premium. The minimum usually sold is a 20Mbit connection and even that isn't much cheaper than a 50Mbit connection.

Not arguing or invalidating any of the rest of your points (I actually agree with you on most of them), but out here in non-metropolitan-land, we're lucky to actually get the full 5Mbps that's the max we can get without some sort of prohibitively expensive 4G/satellite internet connection. (I averaged around a 300 kilobytes per second over the 2 days it took to download the 24 GB Fallout 4)

So, I hope you're wrong about Stadia and it's successors cause I already can't use Netflix and have trouble with lag playing Diablo 3 on 2 computers at the same time. 

And if there's something downloading? Yeah, good luck with anything more than reading forums or recipes. 

Moral of the story? Some areas of even bleeding edge industrialized countries will never have the infrastructure that other areas take for granted. 

Ah well, at least it's beautiful here in the Columbia Gorge. 

[Nightinggale]

8 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

out here in non-metropolitan-land, we're lucky to actually get the full 5Mbps

Assuming internet connection speed to be based on population density is a myth. What it is actually based on is the cost of connecting each customer. Sure in the city the distance between customers is very short, but at the same time digging means getting a permit to block the road, sidewalk and such, including plan for traffic flow while working and all sorts of other stuff like that. While digging, they have to watch out of all sorts of other cables, pipes (water and sewer) and whatever else fun stuff the city has hidden away. Once done, the road and sidewalk has to be restored to previous condition, meaning it's pavement and stuff.

Meanwhile in a rural farming community the permit is mostly just saying "I want to dig" and you are allowed to do so. You dig in the dirt next to the road, put down the cable and cover it up. Whatever plants was there will restore itself free of charge.

The result is that farming communities can actually be better served by optic fiber than the cities because the cable length matters much less than the price of digging each hole.

The result is that drawing a map of max available internet speed becomes a very dotted map with much less respect to population density than you might think. If there is a trend, then optic fiber favors somewhat densely populated farming areas (multiple close dots of 10-20 houses with fields in between) while mobile internet (like 4G) has the best coverage in major cities.

One thing nobody has mentioned so far is that Japan and South Korea have the best internet speeds, like gigabit internet is widely available. However Stadia doesn't cover Asia.

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Nightinggale said:

The result is that drawing a map of max available internet speed becomes a very dotted map with much less respect to population density than you might think. If there is a trend, then optic fiber favors somewhat densely populated farming areas (multiple close dots of 10-20 houses with fields in between) while mobile internet (like 4G) has the best coverage in major cities.

I don't know about you, but I consider paying $30k+ per mile for laying fiber optic cable as being more prohibitively expensive than satellite.. 

[Nightinggale]

21 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

I don't know about you, but I consider paying $30k+ per mile for laying fiber optic cable as being more prohibitively expensive than satellite.. 

I paid $260 USD to get connected. Looking at cost per mile, that's around 4% of what you mentioned and my connection price included 6 months of 30/30 with no datacap. Admittedly it was a cheap offer, but the real question is why is internet access in the US insanely expensive and very slow? You can't answer with geography because then the same prices and speeds would apply in Canada and that's not the case. If you watch the Linux Tech Tips video where Louis Rossmann visits them, then he said something like he thought he uploaded the wrong file because it uploaded nearly instantly and it turned out it's the difference between New York and Vancouver. To top it off, the connection in NY turned out to be like 10 times as expensive (this was before Linus upgraded his internet speed). They had a talk on the topic, but I don't feel like searching for a video from "a while ago" from somebody who uploads new videos daily.

On the other hand, it's much easier to google the UK farmers building their own ISP. The £150 connection fee mentioned is $191 and then £30 ($38) each month for gigabit access.

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but corporate America is ripping you off.

[beowulf2010]

31 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but corporate America is ripping you off.

No worries at all. That's not news to me.

But at the same time, I doubt anyone anywhere in the world would dig a 4 mile (or longer) trench, lay fiber optic and rebury it for $270.

When I say rural, I mean I live in a 3,500 population city. The closest town with more than 10k people is 40 miles away and the closest city with 100k+ is 120 miles away. 

The closest building with an existing cable line to it is 3 miles away. Heck, the power lines are above ground on the main highway I live off of. 

[Nightinggale]

10 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

Heck, the power lines are above ground on the main highway I live off of. 

In that case I have great news for you. You don't even have to dig to gain optic fiber. Somebody has kindly supplied you with poles where you can attach it. Japan has people who have optic fiber connections through the air. Alternatively if somebody gets the bright idea to bury the power lines, do convince them that the same digging work should also add optic fiber. That approach has also been seen elsewhere.

The number of people and distances you mention doesn't make it unrealistic to get fiber. Even the Icelandic ring road has optic fiber and that's 828 miles serving 130k people (country's population - capital population).

You don't have a problem with geography or population. You have a problem with greedy companies paying the government for exclusive rights to certain areas. I read about that once and it's a US only problem. This means you can't start a new ISP and provide reasonable prices to people because the only way to know if there is such an exclusive right for an area is to try starting your ISP and see if you get sued. You can't contact any government worker that way ensure the government haven't issued any exclusive rights.

Writing about this, I start to wonder about this vs net neutrality. The core of the net neutrality question is a neutral internet is a utility while not having a neutral internet makes it a service. Maybe part of the problem is exclusive rights for utilities while services can't gain exclusive rights. I can't tell for certain because it's kind of hard to get reliable information net neutrality because it has turned into "the other party is evil" and "government is evil".

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 6/7/2019 at 5:25 AM, jhohan29 said:

Hi to all. We have all experienced late game fps drop. Seems like the only solution is to have the latest and most expensive cpu/gpu combination to maintain a playable late game experience.

The problem is not GPU related at all.  The problem is that there are a lot of math algorithms in this simulation.  You've got heat transfer, liquid flow, gas flow, dupe and critter pathing, pipe pathing, power networking, etc.  And these get run for every exposed cell on the map.  Most of the game is not optimized for parallel computing (using multiple cores simultaneously), so each calculation has to wait for the previous one to finish.  

Some of the systems that are running this game best are older systems, which have high single-core CPU performance.  The latest CPUs are all designed to focus on multi-process computing and appear to under-perform with ONI.

[jhohan29]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

The problem is not GPU related at all.  The problem is that there are a lot of math algorithms in this simulation.  You've got heat transfer, liquid flow, gas flow, dupe and critter pathing, pipe pathing, power networking, etc.  And these get run for every exposed cell on the map.  Most of the game is not optimized for parallel computing (using multiple cores simultaneously), so each calculation has to wait for the previous one to finish.  

Some of the systems that are running this game best are older systems, which have high single-core CPU performance.  The latest CPUs are all designed to focus on multi-process computing and appear to under-perform with ONI.

Yeah, imagine all those elements interacting with all those around them all the time.

I use and AMD APU A10-???? (forgot the other number) without any GPU. It serves my computing needs fine except for this game (which is the only game I'm playing on my PC). 

1. Solution that others can do: Klei optimizes for full multicore execution

2. Solution that I can do: I upgrade my computer and get those expensive 5ghz per core.

3. Possible solutions: use Google's servers since latency is not really important for this game.

Out these solutions, I'm leaning towards #3, unless my current rig breakdown.

PS Google already have all your data. I might as well get the most out of them.

 

 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

56 minutes ago, jhohan29 said:

2. Solution that I can do: I upgrade my computer and get those expensive 5ghz per core.

I run an old i5-4690s at 3.2ghz and I've had very respectable FPS even end-game.  There have been a few games that others have complained about that I have tried -- 1600-2k cycles with the entire map opened -- and I'm still getting a respectable 30fps.  

[blash365]

7 hours ago, jhohan29 said:

PS Google already have all your data. I might as well get the most out of them.

That's not an argument. It's an excuse to not listen to an argument.

[Saturnus]

8 hours ago, jhohan29 said:

Yeah, imagine all those elements interacting with all those around them all the time.

I use and AMD APU A10-???? (forgot the other number) without any GPU. It serves my computing needs fine except for this game (which is the only game I'm playing on my PC). 

1. Solution that others can do: Klei optimizes for full multicore execution

2. Solution that I can do: I upgrade my computer and get those expensive 5ghz per core.

3. Possible solutions: use Google's servers since latency is not really important for this game.

Out these solutions, I'm leaning towards #3, unless my current rig breakdown.

PS Google already have all your data. I might as well get the most out of them.

I already remote desktop my workstation to my laptop which isn't a potato itself as it's an i7 6700HQ with 32GB ram but it's simply not good enough to run this game without thermal throttling like crazy, being loud as hell, and having a battery life less than 2½ hours.

When I remote desktop my workstation I have no issues apart from the occasionally noticeable latency. The laptop stays cool and quiet, and having a battery life that exceed 11 hours (it's at 30% after 11 hours, I haven't actually tested how long it could last).

The problem is that security concerns and privacy issues has made me uninstall all games from my workstation, so Stadia is the perfect solution for me as it will allow me to use my laptop exactly as I intend it to be used; ie., a portable dumb remote terminal that can do off-line work if need be without the privacy and security concerns of mixing work related data with private data.

[Nightinggale]

8 hours ago, jhohan29 said:

1. Solution that others can do: Klei optimizes for full multicore execution

Here we go again with the multicore buzzword. The problem is they share memory and memory access.

Imagine buildings running on power from a battery and we have one building on each core. One wants to take some joules from the battery. It will then state "I want to use the battery. Is anybody using it?" and then wait for an answer. If the answer is no, then it can use it to take the energy. If yes, then it waits for the current user to finish. Just using without asking will cause a race condition bug where the power drain is set incorrectly.

Now imagine running all the buildings from one core. There is no need to ask if anybody use the battery and there is never any waiting time. Just use it.

Now the big question: which is faster? Well it depends on the CPU, the code, the current game and possibly other factors as well. The waiting time can be so dominating that it slows down everything overall. Because of this, adding multicore support means careful consideration of what the code is doing. For instance the same example would be to have one CPU core handle all buildings attached to one battery and then another core could do the buildings attached to another battery. That way they won't have to ask each other for each battery access and since they can do stuff in parallel, they will hopefully be faster.

Keep in mind that all the time spend on working on this could be spend on optimizing the code to make the single core operation faster. Using more cores will use more power, hence hotter CPU and higher battery drain while using one core and reducing the load on that core will drop the power usage and temperature.

Ideally we should get a mix of single and multi core optimization. Requesting multi core support shows you don't have a clue to what the problem is about. Optimizing code is a very complex task. In a lot of cases optimizing code is more tricky than writing code in the first place.

9 hours ago, jhohan29 said:

2. Solution that I can do: I upgrade my computer and get those expensive 5ghz per core.

Investing in hardware to gain the most FPS for the buck, you should get an Intel 4790k. I just checked on ebay and they are available at a totally different price than what you are referring to, yet that CPU is in the top 3 in the benchmark thread. That's fairly good for a 4 year old CPU.

[KittenIsAGeek]

3 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

Here we go again with the multicore buzzword. The problem is they share memory and memory access.

Correct.  It isn't simply just one core vs multiple cores working at once.  There's too much data for it all to be cached in the processors, so there's a continual back-and-forth between the CPU and the memory for each iteration.  Like you said, while one CPU is accessing the memory, the others have to wait.  As was shown in another thread, increasing the RAM speed also improved performance greatly.

[melquiades]

People that believe they own their games on steam are delusional.

If you have to ask permission to use something that is supposed to be yours (to Steam through its platform), it is in fact not yours.

As simple as that.

Stadia could be something similar to that. A license to stream a game.

[Technoincubus]

A QUICK REMINDER

[camelot]

While privacy, ownership, environmental are actually valid concerns (even if IMO it's not radically different than current options) but I'm pretty sure that most of the players won't care about those

As a normal player, I mostly care about

• Subscription price. Free for Base?
• Game price. I expect to be the same or lower than Steam
• Title availability. The biggest concern
• Internet speed and cost. I'm currently paying 65mbps connection with $15/month. The nearest Stadia datacenter is Singapore with ping around 50ms. So it should be fine

So if my favorite games are available on Stadia, I'll buy them. Simple.