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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

If all the players are in this service, it means lag is much easier to deal with for developers, since its only input lag. All the players actual compute/rendering would be on a very low latency network.

you no longer have to deal with all the other networking problems between the client software, and server software.

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My point is following: you have a character standing in a world. You click "w" - at which point character has to move. Right? On local machine that's what you will get. Not so much with the streaming - first you input goes to the google, being processed there, returns to you and only now you see that character is moving.

Yes, even with a Steam Link over Ethernet in my house there's a slight but noticable input lag. Most games are playable but it doesn't feel quite right.

It's one of those things that's fine for many games (especially games were you use a controller) such as rocket league, single player games, etc.

The moment we're talking about CSGO or any decently fast paced shooter and it's a no-go for sure.

Rocket League is still fun no matter what, even with a little input delay! Turn based games are fine of course. But the only game that has been unplayable for me was Hollow Knight. It requires you to react very quickly to attacks and I just can't get the timing right if I play on the Steam Link.

Surprisingly, a platformer that works decent on Steam Link is N++. It has more fluid controls than Hollow Knight though.

But the server knows which frame you pressed the 'w' on. So when it gets the 'w', it rewinds it's state machine X frames (hopefully X==1), applies your input, moves the state machine forward X+1 frames and displays that state.

So there might be a slight visual glitch but you won't be missing your targets.

> So there might be a slight visual glitch but you won't be missing your targets.

There will be a visual glitch every time you press a key.

That just results in weird laggy gameplay.

Actually I don't even think this will work properly at all. You can do some prediction, but latency still kills you.

(I think) RetroArch have already done something similar: https://www.retroarch.com/index.php?page=latency

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