
Rainway takes a game running on one system and streams it to another device - andrewmd5
https://blog.rainway.io/play-overwatch-and-anything-else-in-your-browser-with-rainway-86798744bddb
======
sarreph
This looks cool, however it's very similar to a service I've been using for
the past month called Parsec[0].

I've successfully managed to play Fortnite (don't judge :)) on an AWS
g2.2xlarge (via Parsec) with an acceptable level of latency. Apart from the
occasional artefacting (most notably when starting), it's been an enjoyable
experience and a real insight into the potential power that cloud gaming
really could hold.

What's so great about Parsec is that they allow you (at a somewhat marked-up
rate so far as I can tell) to rent an AWS server directly from the client and
get started.

That being said, my Parsec credit is running a little low now so I might have
a go with Rainway :)

I would like to know what the difference — if any — between Parsec and Rainway
is? As far as I can tell, Parsec was first, so it'd be interesting to know if
their tech is superior.

[0] - [https://parsecgaming.com](https://parsecgaming.com)

~~~
andrewmd5
So I can only speak to the pros of Rainway and why we have so many people
adopting it as their go-to-solution.

We put your games first. We don' t believe in the traditional remote desktop
approach and want to remove all the friction from game streaming.
([https://blog.rainway.io/our-core-mission-games-
first-78671e4...](https://blog.rainway.io/our-core-mission-games-
first-78671e496201))

We're clientless, this means you can open any web browser like Chrome and
start playing on any number of devices -- both inside and outside your home.

We use common web traffic to prevent being blocked by most networks, this
allows us to have a higher chance of connecting even on lock downed networks
(schools, office).

We're really fast. You can play games like Destiny 2 on a Chromebook at 1080P
60
FPS.([https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009758915305730051](https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009758915305730051))

We are aiming to release on every major platform we can. Phones and game
consoles alike.

We constantly give back, through open source releases or community fixes -- we
really believe in the principle of supporting the community that supports us.

For the more technical questions, Rainway can run on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA
systems and we're highly optimized for all three and test on all ranges of
hardware from those providers. Our biggest weakness right now would be our
lack of native mobile apps, but that isn't slowing us down.
([https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009852188724625408](https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/1009852188724625408))

I'm the CEO of Rainway, so of course, I like our product and I'd encourage you
to join our discord ([https://rain.gg/discord](https://rain.gg/discord)) and
ask users for their opinion.

~~~
sarreph
Thanks for your feedback. I did find a verbatim copy of your response in a
reddit thread[0] while I was waiting — but I guess it serves me wrong for not
doing my research :)

As this is a canned response, it doesn't really do a great job, in my opinion,
of comparing Parsec and Rainway directly. I can look into the tech myself and
make a comparison that way.

For a more direct question: do you have any plans to sell customers cloud
rack-space directly through Rainway?

[0] -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/comments/8tntdt/parsec_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/comments/8tntdt/parsec_vs_rainway/)

~~~
andrewmd5
Currently, we have no short-term plans to offer cloud services -- we see more
than enough people installing Rainway on existing providers, so we are
focusing on building a solid consumer offering. There is no telling how that
changes down the line.

~~~
amaccuish
Thanks for the awesome software, I'll definitely be giving this a go. May I
ask, what's the plan for monetisation?

------
anotheryou
The obvious question: how is the latency? (both locally and via your servers)

\---

edit: should I be able to play from your server on play.rainway.io ? I only
got a "connection failed [...] Failed to connect to h1x1mlxi2uunv.cya.gg"

A demo without registration would be great (could even be limited to 1-5min
and some simple open source shooter).

\---

edit2: latency not looking good here
[https://youtu.be/0g-ah0epNpY?t=93](https://youtu.be/0g-ah0epNpY?t=93)

~~~
andrewmd5
Rainway is not cloud gaming, you utilize your computer, and it is entirely
P2P. We don't have servers that host games, you use your own.

~~~
kowdermeister
> Rainway is not cloud gaming

Then right on your homepage:

"Play Your Favorite Games on Any Device Rainway makes game streaming so easy
you'll be playing in just a few clicks. Download and join our beta today!"

I would make it way more obvious.

Also what's a good use case? I can play games on my powerful home PC from the
crappy laptop at the office?

~~~
tzs
> Also what's a good use case? I can play games on my powerful home PC from
> the crappy laptop at the office?

I'm interested because a 27" iMac is front and center on my desk, with a 24"
second monitor to the right. My gaming PC is hooked up to the second input of
the second monitor.

Playing a game either means turning my head to the right while the rest of my
body faces forward (to have good keyboard and mouse position), or turning my
whole body right, and then having to reach left for the keyboard and mouse.
Can't do whole body right with keyboard and mouse inf front of body, because
that would put the mouse in free space and the keyboard right side sticking
off the desk. Neither of these is comfortable.

Moving the gaming PC to its own space with its own monitor would take major
rearrangement of the living room.

Something that lets me use the Mac as a display for the games on my PC would
make things much much nicer.

~~~
falsedan
Steam in-home steaming sounds right up your alley…

~~~
kickopotomus
Is it just a steaming service? Or do they perma-press too? ;)

~~~
falsedan
I think making fun of other peopl's mistakes is the kind of dick move that is
only funny to jerks

~~~
kickopotomus
...Can't tell if trying to make a joke (peopl's) or serious...

~~~
falsedan
I'm sure you'll work out how to interact in polite society one day

~~~
kickopotomus
Oh wow you were serious... Social cues dude. If you can't spot light-hearted
humor idk how you make it through day-to-day life.

~~~
falsedan
recognising toxic behaviour and calling it out is no joking matter dewd

------
ralusek
I remember thinking OnLive's pitch of letting you stream games to low-end
hardware was a very good idea, but it never took off. I think nVidia SHIELD
offers a similar pitch, but I don't know how popular it is.

So, this is essentially those services, but allowing you to use a web browser
as a client, right? I would only find this valuable if there was any
performance gain in doing so, or if those services didn't make a client for
the device I wanted to game on, both of which seem unlikely.

Unless I drastically misunderstood what is happening, and the game is actually
running on your hardware in the browser, in which case that is very
impressive...but then I would have to question the performance.

~~~
andrewmd5
Rainway is fast and clientless. Our vision is all about letting you use your
existing hardware (home gaming PC, cloud provider) to enable the gameplay
experience. So you installed our software and then the web app takes care of
the rest.

We curate all of the games you have installed on your machine and enable a
click and play experience.

------
itsfatz
Ages ago I spun an aws instance w/ Grid, setup VPN and used Steam in-home
streaming to accomplish a similar result. Using spot-instances resulted in
something like $0.06/hr if memory serves (which it seldom does).

Biggest caveats at that time were setup time and latency; since I was too
cheap to preserve the instance volume and too lazy to split the steam save
folder to a smaller separate volume, and had yet to secure gigabit fiber.

It was more of a dalliance for me since I don't game often anymore, and if I'm
honest with myself I enjoyed setting up the infrastructure more than I did
playing Fallout 4. Please note this has more to do with how little fun I am in
my old age than any problems with the game.

~~~
013a
Pricing and capabilities have probably changed over the years. The cheapest
GPU spot instance you can get on AWS today is a p2.xlarge, which will run you
$0.45/hr. And also, p2-class instances run Tesla K80 GPUs, which are Kepler
cores, an architecture running on 6 years old now (think GTX 600/700). Fine
for 1080p60 most games, but I doubt many modern titles would hit the 60fps
mark.

Google Cloud can allow you to get the cost lower (closer to ~$0.15/hr) by cost
optimizing the instance CPU/Memory and attaching a GPU to it.

But you've got three problems with both of these setups:

\- Spot on AWS/Preemptible on GCP will kill your instance with about 2 minutes
of warning. I'm not sure what AWS's policy is on how often this happens, but
on GCP, its guaranteed to happen at least once every 24 hours. So that could
be annoying if you're in the middle of an intense game of Overwatch.

\- Storage costs. You're paying per hour for your instance, so you don't want
to have to download all your games every time you spin it up. But, then you
shift the cost to the SSD, which is _expensive_ and must be maintained
24/7/365 for that quick startup time. You could alternatively store it in
S3/GCS then hot-load it when the instance starts, which would be fast due to
the fiber interconnect all these datacenters are wired with. So, plan for this
bullet to add at least $10/mo/TB of storage.

\- Network costs. A 1080p60 stream is, conservatively, 10Mbps? Add on an extra
~$0.25 per hour you want to game, just in bandwidth.

------
sergiotapia
Can you explain what this does on the technical level?

nvidia has this similar product but the game runs on their servers, you have
to sign into your accounts on their machines. Playing Destiny you login into
battlenet using some kind of teamviewer app and then launch the game.

steam link just (poorly) pushes video from your PC to your living room.

Where in this spectrum does Rainway stand? Please be technical for us here

~~~
andrewmd5
Rainway is software you can install on your local gaming rig or cloud provider
of your choice. Once you've installed the Dashboard on your PC, we establish a
P2P connection between it and the connecting client.

Then we utilize your existing computer hardware and games, and you can play
them instantly inside of a browser via low latency, high fidelity stream.

~~~
k__
"low latency, high fidelity stream."

So this doesn't use browser technology for networking?

~~~
andrewmd5
We make use of a custom version of WebRTC (default)
([https://github.com/RainwayApp/spitfire](https://github.com/RainwayApp/spitfire))
and WebSockets as a fallback with low latency implementations.

------
wishinghand
Their site says:

Rainway will always be completely free to use with no hidden cost. You can
stream all your games, whenever you want, wherever you are, for as long as you
want.

/endquote

So where's their income coming from? The blog post from the OP mentions
they're hiring.

~~~
zimbatm
My own silly analysis: monetisation can come at a later stage. Since the
server is running on the customer's Window machine they won't have much
infrastructure costs to support even if they get very popular. If the main
product is free then revenue can be added through extensions like hosted
service or parnership (eg: integration with Twich or another video game
streaming service).

~~~
ramses0
"Play games you already own using your own hardware for $0.00 for the next 1
year."

"We've noticed frame drops while you're playing Skyrim, click here to upgrade
to a premium stream from a premium computer using your own cloud saves! (only
$1.99/mo!)" ...or pay $1000 for a new video card.

"We've noticed you don't own Skyrim, click here to instantly start playing
from our computers instead of your computer for $1.99/hour or $10/mo, or
$100/mo for unlimited access to all games, etc, etc.!"

------
orliesaurus
I use it, it's okay for casual singleplayer games but online it's unplayable!
EDIT: Unplayable for a competitive player like myself.

~~~
orliesaurus
I also use this with a little "hack" to watch movies from my desktop onto
another machine :D

~~~
TranquilMarmot
I use Plex for this; [https://www.plex.tv/](https://www.plex.tv/) It would
probably encode the audio/video better since it's made for it.

~~~
orliesaurus
You're right, will test, thanks for the URL

------
fcarraldo
[https://play.rainway.io](https://play.rainway.io) doesn't work. Console logs
a bunch of CORS errors for seemingly unnecessary services, but the site still
fails to load. Disabled PrivacyBadger/uBlock/HTTPS Everywhere but still no
luck. On Firefox 61.1/Mac OS X High Sierra.

Loading failed for the <script> with source
“[https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-13434394-1”](https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-13434394-1”).
play.rainway.io:1

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the
remote resource at
[https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js](https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js).
(Reason: CORS request did not succeed).

<script> source URI is not allowed in this document:
“[https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js”](https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.21.0/raven.min.js”).
play.rainway.io:8 [Show/hide message details.] ReferenceError: Raven is not
defined[Learn More] bundle.js:110:144069

Source map error: request failed with status 403 Resource URL:
[https://play.rainway.io/bundle.js](https://play.rainway.io/bundle.js) Source
Map URL: bundle.js.map[Learn More]

------
sinatra
Very cool! But, as others said, I'd want to look at the latency. Some
animations in Dark Souls 3 are 8-10 frames long (ie, about 300ms). Reacting to
such quick animations may completely fall apart depending on the latency
introduced by network. Are there any videos of action games being played on
this?

~~~
bpicolo
10ms meaning human reaction time + 10ms? 10ms is far faster than any human can
react to visual stimulus

~~~
sinatra
Sorry, I meant to say 10 frames (for 30 fps). Fixed.

------
ewzimm
Advertising Overwatch is an unfortunate choice and makes me think they haven't
fully done their homework. Blizzard recently changed their terms of service to
include a clause stating that they will ban any accounts that use cloud gaming
services like GeForce Now.

~~~
sargun
Do you know why?

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
I think it's because botters have taken to cloud gaming to more easily scale
up their bot networks.

------
jay_wild
An interesting alternative is Moonlight[0], an open source implementation of
nVidia's GameStream protocol. While it does require an nVidia graphics card,
it severely cuts down on latency as all the video encoding is done in hardware
on the host PC. Essentially it gets you P2P low-latency video streaming with
controller/keyboard+mouse input

[0] - [https://moonlight-stream.com/](https://moonlight-stream.com/)

~~~
andrewmd5
Rainway is P2P and works with all hardware (AMD, NVIDIA, Intel).

------
jboogie77
Just a heads up this guy has been known to do sketchy things in the past. A
simple reddit search of his previous products will bring up some questionable
practices

~~~
ghusbands
Do you mean the near-piracy of Aurous [1]? It looks like they didn't realise
that re-hosting publicly-available music makes them liable under copyright
law. Borderless gaming and Netflix Roulette don't seem sketchy. It's not clear
what else you might mean. Do you have examples?

[1]
[https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6723046/aurous-a...](https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6723046/aurous-
andrew-sampson-developer-explains)

~~~
jboogie77
No it wasn’t aurous. Check my other comment

------
andrewmcwatters
Wow. This is really big. Really, really big. Like NVIDIA GeForce Now
important. But...

Latency... Latency. Latency. Uh, latency. Numbers. Response time. Latency.
Latency.

I see nothing here that talks about _latency_. What type of FPS on the thin-
clients are we talking here? Bandwidth? Delays?

This is purely a numbers piece of software. When you talk about streaming
_real-time_ things, things that require input sequences on the order of <16ms,
these numbers are super important: they're literally make or break figures.

The experience could be almost great, but maybe just 5% of a perf hit might
kill the experience... I hope that as they mature Rainway can speak more to
these figures.

Very cool stuff here, and I _really_ like that a little of the tech is on
GitHub!

~~~
jaxtellerSoA
>Wow. This is really big. Really, really big

Not really. It is just a streaming service, you pretty much have to setup your
own server. If you want to access it from outside of your home you would need
to have a public IP (most ISP's will only give you a dynamic IP unless you get
a business account, which means your IP will randomly change on you), setup
and configure appropriate firewall rules. You have to leave the "server" up
all the time.

To me this seems like a pretty big hassle really.

~~~
caymanjim
Your IP address is unlikely to change that often. My personal experience with
Verizon, Spectrum, and Comcast is that it never changes. They're free to do
so, and if you completely disconnect for a few days, you'll probably lose your
DHCP lease, but I've never seen it happen. Of course it can, but it's not that
big a deal in reality. Use a dynamic DNS server and you'll never have to worry
about it.

------
standardout
Hitting this error:

Connection log Connecting over WebRTC first. Failed to connect with WebRTC
{"Error":1} Attempting to connect by socket. Failed to connect with socket.
Failed to connect to j3gv720k7hwez.cya.gg, please try restarting Rainway

------
cheunste
Is this still being planned for the Nintendo Switch?

------
tonyhb
Gaikai [0] had this in 2010 for free. You'd log on to their website and play —
in a browser — games on a remote server. They got bought in 2012 by Sony.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai)

------
tomxor
This is not going to be appropriate for fast reflex twitch gaming until the
internet has some fundamental technological shift that allows for super low
latency. Unhits are one thing but having your viewport affected by it will
just be awful.

------
LoSboccacc
Interesting. Since someone from rainway is in the thread:

what kind of game can you capture? does it work with non-dx games (i.e. dwarf
fortress)

how much is captured? what happens if someone on the pc alt+tabs into another
window or kicks the game out of full-screen?

------
enricozb
Could this be used on a local network? I have a pretty beefy PC but I like the
comfort of sitting outside with my chromebook. Is there any way to host this
service myself, so it doesn't have to go through any servers first?

------
leowoo91
Streaming games has been attempted several times (not sure if any of it
survived), but most likely this might stay as alternative to PSP at home.

------
drumttocs8
Is the goal to be bought out by Google? Plenty of whispers that they're
interested in providing this sort of service.

------
skate22
Does rainway support multiple client connections to the same game? Would be an
interesting way to collaborate

------
sigfubar
Is it possible to run the host/server software on an EC2 instance with gobs of
RAM and a GPU?

~~~
andrewmd5
It is. We test on Azure quite a lot and are working on getting an AMI created
for easy distribution.

~~~
barik
What is a recommended VM size on Azure to use?

------
beshrkayali
I get a "Raven is not defined" on play.rainway.io and a blank page.

------
Kagerjay
While this looks cool isn't latency going to be a big problem?

~~~
bmurphy1976
I've used Steam and PS4 Remote Play fairly extensively in my home so I have
some experience with the concept. I think it really it depends on the game.

Fallout 4: Works great.

Dark Souls 3: The latency is immediately obvious. You might as well be
torturing yourself, the game is already hard enough.

God of War: somewhere in the middle. It's playable, but it feels crisper
without the extra latency.

I don't see how this product will be any different.

------
amaccuish
andrewmd5, what made you go for C#? How do you see that playing out for
hosting on MacOS (if that's even in the pipeline)? :)

~~~
rocky1138
I think most people who need to stream games are those who have a Windows box
but run other operating systems for all of their other machines. I can't
imagine a scenario where you'd want to host on a Mac or a Linux machine for
games, only one where they are the client.

~~~
jetti
I don't own a personal Windows machine and have games on my Mac. I wouldn't be
able to use this service to play games through my browser at work or when not
at home

------
techsupporter
At the risk of detracting from the admittedly cool technology: Yay, yet
another freaking terms of service that's 8 miles long and includes a
mandatory, binding arbitration clause.

I'm getting so sick of these. It's to the point now where I actively seek out
companies based in the European Union or Canada since those countries' laws
don't permit such shenanigans.

(Also, at the risk of sounding bitter or hostile, if someone's about to reply
to me and say "well, everybody's doing it" or "the lawyers make us," save it.
If you're an executive in your company, you can make the choice to not have
one of these and you didn't. I genuinely don't care if you personally don't
like it.)

