Comment by alwaysinshade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwaysinshade | Hacker News Reader

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> Does anyone do anything that would greatly benefit from a connection like this

Replacing optical media with high speed lines would allow some funky new market mechanics like...

Games:

- Instead of downloading the full 12Gb+ game, simply load levels/textures as needed

- Distributed game session hosting where the players temporarily and reliably become the host of a shard

- Something like OnLive could be high res/low image compression/ultra low latency

- Download 12Gb+ games on a whim and pay as you go for playing it - stop playing/paying for it and the provider can cancel the game's certificate and it gets pulled from the system. Want it back? Download it again in a minute, save games and all

Movies:

- Make way for 4k video via net

- Make way for low compression 1080p video via net

- Make way for every person in the household streaming 1080p...while video chatting in 1080p, while playing an RTS on an OnLive-like service...while backing up their files to a remote server. Etc.

The future is going to need some big pipes.

> Instead of downloading the full 12Gb+ game, simply load levels/textures as needed

Blizzard has already executed this impressively for several of their titles. Starcraft II is an 8GB download, but after about 400MB you can actually start the game. It'll then continue downloading non-invasively in the background while loading needed data on demand. Same goes for World of Warcraft, and probably other titles as well.

Continuing on the game theme, I recall that Rage originally had hundreds of gigabytes of textures, and they pared it down to the point that it would fit on a BluRay. That would not be necessary with such a fat pipe. How many design decisions have been based on the space limitations of BluRays, or, worse yet, DVDs?

And 1080p is nothing. It's already outmatched by the retina display on a Macbook Pro. Right now the utility of higher resolution displays is limited by the lack of availability of media, since net connections are too slow and BluRay is the best you can do with optical media, but that bottleneck would go away with higher speeds.

"- Distributed game session hosting where the players temporarily and reliably become the host of a shard"

I think that's how Halo's online gameplay has worked for a while. http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Connection_Host

That's how most Xbox games work. There was a bit of a uproar about it when the service started. Players were miffed of paying to play games they already bought, and not even getting dedicated servers. That quickly died down.

That quickly died down.

Not really. Host advantage is still a thing that happens in a lot of multiplayer games, and peer-to-peer multiplayer has never come close to the same experience as a dedicated server.

Oh, it's definitely still bullshit. You're right, it can ruin games directly, and even indirectly as others may assume you have an advantage because you're the host and quit. Dedicated servers are indeed simply better on games with more than two players.

I just meant the outrage over it seems to be much less a thing now. Now it's just accepted that this is how it should be done. I think like afterburner suggested in the sister comment to this one, those who were seriously offput by it have left and that's that.

It died down because the players who cared left?

I think most people just swallowed it. Sure, some went exclusively PC/PS3, but I don't think that many quit because of it.

Personally, I dropped XBL years ago because I was tired of children eager to sling racial and homophobic slurs. Playing games online just wasn't fun to me. I went on to play a lot of TF2, but virtually no one there uses headphones mics either. That, to me, was the appeal of Xbox Live. Everyone had a mic. We were to communicate and make the games fun on a whole new level. Instead, well, no. That didn't happen.

Download 12Gb+ games on a whim...

Sort of. 12GB (I presume you meant GB) still takes a minute or two to move around locally- storage isn't fast enough to flush 12GB in seconds.

Now, if your device just had comical amounts of RAM, you could manage it.

How is ~12GB ram comical? It's a lot easier for the common consumer to get 16 gigabytes of RAM today that is to get the kind of network speeds we're talking about here.

16GB of RAM is only $55-$65 depending on the speed, and 64GB SSDs are around the same price. Compare that to the price of one of those 12GB games, and you can see that local storage bottlenecks need not be a problem for gamers.

The PC in front of me has 24GB - it should have had 32GB, but one of the modules was dodgy and I never got around to replacing it.

Pay-as-you go gaming is actually a really interesting idea.

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