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Comment by monkeywork | Hacker News Reader

Not affiliated with this project but it looks to be incredibly cool - very small team. I hope this shows up as a Linux / Steamdeck option in the near future as well.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ

TL;DW: Mounts a virtual filesystem that on-demands downloads game content to your local drive in the form of a cache. Start playing games instantly without downloading the entire game.

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I am little skeptical since a game needs to load one file and then another file and then another file and this could add up to an awful lot of waiting in an uncontrolled manner. Although big downloads are slow in my rural area I feel included by them because I can play the game in the end whereas streaming is not a good option at all.

Yep, you even had to account for this on spinning media(i.e. DVDs) where you'd want "seek-free" loading since you'd hitch/stall of you ended up bouncing all over the disk.

I worked on a title where this was particularly problematic from a game design perspective(limited ram, large assets), we ended up designing in "slow" sequences to mask the disk load.

They say they're planning to implement prediction, so learning from previous play of a game to learn what's going to be requested next and fetch it.

Not sure how well it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ

This video shows a good demo of it with Halo on Steam.

Thanks for the link. As they say in the video though, latency issues depend on the game's implementation. From [1]: "If the game does like a read-wait-read-wait pattern, then it's bottlenecked by the latency... and that can become a problem."

Halo presumably has a solid streaming foundation, so it's a good fit for the service.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ&t=591s

You could just push files to the client in advanced of request based on basic statistics.

"Server Side Prediction: Via servers are constantly learning from repeat access patterns of players. This let's us make high quality predictions for what content you'll need, before you need it."

Nice

I wouldn't be surprised if the demo didn't increase latency and only throttled the download speed.

You know if it also took the time to utilize the bandwidth while it has it. Like via shouldn't stop downloading if a game doesn't request the files.

They might even be able to integrated a bit of brains into it and keep a record of which files tend to be historically requested next for a game. In the background you're slowly grabbing those, and those threads pause for direct requests. I guess this is simpler but it feels like using via is costing you by inducing longer load times for the whole game.

The page implies they learn from user's download patterns to do this and predict which files the user will need before they need them.

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