

OnLive comes to Ouya, Controller Makes Full Frontal Debut - aiham
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console/posts/275869

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onli
This is where projects like this may fail brutally.

Controller-design is hard. Mapping small fast movements to the screen,
especially when playing 3D-games, needs a perfectly for the job designed
hardware. Consoles lack a good input anyway, compared to the mouse. That is
why kinect was so promising, though of course movement-controllers have their
own set of issues.

Their solution now is to cave. They didn't design their own controller.
Instead, they oviously took the xbox and ps3 controller and merged them. Those
controllers solved some issues when compared to the old controllers for the
snes and such, with the circle-sticks (which unlike the one from the N64
aren't as high thin and probably therefore longer lasting) and the holdable
form.

So the controller is nothing special, but from the conept-side it at least
won't be much worse than the ones from current consoles. Maybe using such a
generic one was a smart move.

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adam-a
>> That is why kinect was so promising

Perhaps it was promising, but it is fairly terrible in practice. Except for a
few dance and fitness games. The thing about traditional controllers is they
are both precise and abstracted. Button presses are clear, and work well with
the complexity of most games. The analogue features give a higher degree of
control but are still very discrete. As for their abstracted nature, one of
the distinguishing features of humans vs animals is our ability to use tools,
devices which are one step abstracted from direct action. This is why
controllers, mice, keyboards, etc work. Why not embrace it instead of trying
to work around it with immature technology like the Kinect?

>> Their solution now is to cave. They didn't design their own controller

So why do you think they need to revolutionise the controller? The original
XBox had a mild stab at something new but they quickly reverted to a design
much more similar to the Playstation Dual Shock. The target market for Ouya is
XBLA and PSN players, people who want a cheaper, more open living room
console. They are sensible not to try to reinvent the wheel when they don't
have the resources to do it well and their audience likes the existing wheel.

~~~
cube13
>So why do you think they need to revolutionise the controller? The original
XBox had a mild stab at something new but they quickly reverted to a design
much more similar to the Playstation Dual Shock.

There weren't really that many changes from the original XBox controller to
the 360's controller. The face buttons and the stick positions didn't really
change. In terms of buttons, the only major change was the removal of the
black/white buttons from the original XBox, and the addition of the RB and LB
bumpers to the 360.

The major change was that the side grip rails were made smaller.

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TheEzEzz
The big news here isn't the controller, it's OnLive. With Google fiber rolling
out, and eventually pushing the country toward gigabit, there will no longer
be any reason why a cheap, weak box with an internet connection can't topple
the console giants. Eventually this will spill over into general computing.
There is a giant pie to be won here, and both OnLive and Google know how
valuable it is.

~~~
dguaraglia
Just pointing out: bandwidth isn't half as important as latency is in this
context. We still don't know how good latency will be on Google Fiber.

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jiggy2011
Maybe the answer is to have local nodes. Think of it like a traditional video
arcade, somewhere in your town is a small datacentre full of servers hosting
various games.

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forrestthewoods
And if that still isn't good enough then each gamer can have their own
personal mini-datacenter in a box right by their TV or monitor! :)

~~~
corin_
I presume you're joking and therefore don't need a proper reply to this, but
figured I'd check..

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ralfn
Well, to be fair, there is a lot of spare sillicon in most households. One
giant powerserver per family, is much more efficient and should provide more
bang for your buck.

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corin_
If everyone has the processing power to run the games in their own home it
sort of removes the point of OnLive..

~~~
ralfn
Agreed. But the combined sillicon of the xbox, desktop, ps3, mediacenter and
multiple laptops in my house, had a seriously high price attached, but using
all that sillicon to do one task fast, isnt even an option.

We need an open standard to share spare cpu cycles within the local network.
Imagine updating the performance of all your appliances at once, just by
pluggin a server in your home network.

But yes, it kind of defeats the purpose of OnLive as a closed product. On the
other hand, local ISP can start selling not just bandwidth, but also cpu
cycles with low latency. (they could hook up the servers straight in your
neighbourhood)

The problem with OnLive is that its not a standard, and its focus is not width
enough. They get to choose what kind of computation i want to do.

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JL2010
Honest question: is anyone here using onlive? How is the gaming experience?
Are the visuals, performance and latency acceptable? How are they doing in
terms of their sales/subscribers?

I remember reading about it a long time ago thinking that it would be a sign
of the future and something I would definitely want to try. It seems to have
fallen off of my radar and I don't know anyone who uses their service, and I
would consider myself and my friends "hardcore" gamers.

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scrame
I played through Arkham Asylum on the PC and Arkham City on the OnLive
console, and found it ... adequate.

I tried the beta and it didn't even work, but went back when AA was 99 cents
and was impressed that they were even able to make a reality. I pre-ordered AC
because it came with the console for free, and it was pretty slick.

However, I subscribed to their "channel" and have been pretty disappointed,
the games are mostly old or random indie titles that don't always fit the
model, and a good number require a mouse/keyboard which you can make work with
the console, but is much clunkier than the slick wireless controller (which is
_very_ well done).

There are 2 problems: 1) Anything even smelling like a dropped connection
boots you entirely out of the game, and can take a few minutes to get back in.
This includes just pausing and walking away for 5-10 minutes.

2) The batman games worked because they have a slower, more deliberate input
system, and auto-save constantly. Otherwise it just won't be able to keep up.

So, barring licensing, I just don't see it being able to play something that
needs a good twitch response time, multi-player, or something that is hard to
recover after an immediate drop. So, no diablo, CoD, real-time strategies, or
MMOPRGs.

Without those titles, it won't be able to get a lot of traction.

Still, a really awesome technical achievement. The PC executeable is a couple
of _megs_ and can then just stream anything, but a lot of gaming needs either
fast response time (which you lose with the server round-trip), or the ability
to just stop for a few minutes without losing everything you've got.

~~~
Olreich
MMOs have lots of potential actually. They are built to deal with lots of lag
on input, and hide it well.

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scrame
Right, except that the problem is the client drops and you have to jump
through a ton of hoops to get back to the service, which terminates the
connection as soon as you drop. Its not really an issue of 'lag' as it is 'not
recovering'

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Olreich
Yes, but in the context of OnLive, connection drops aren't any more horrible
than they would be on a regular MMO client. In fact, since the whole problem
with MMOs is the distributed nature of them and unpredictable latency to the
clients, services like OnLive that put many clients very close to one another
in latency could actually improve MMO lag issues.

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nemo1618
Not going to lie, that controller is looking pretty ugly. Any word on if
they'll support USB controllers? Obviously you'd lose the touch
functionality...unless you plugged in a Wacom or something, lol

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slantyyz
Well, the system is open and hackable, I'm sure someone will write drivers to
allow PS3, Wiimotes, 360 and generic USB controllers to be used.

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zdw
PS3 and Wiimotes would be relatively easy, as both are just Bluetooth devices
and the OUYA has that built in.

Xbox 360 controllers would require either wired or the RF adapter that MS
sells for PC use.

~~~
slantyyz
Actually there are also dedicated PS3 USB and Xbox USB controllers, most
commonly used in tournament fight sticks.

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anateus
One of the fun things I get from that is that OnLive are going to make an ARM
build of OnLive. That means it should be Raspberry Pi compatible! (OnLive have
released ARM builds of their desktop service to run on tablets which shouldn't
be too far from the full on game product, but afaik this is the first time
they've promised an ARM-targeted version of it).

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unwiredben
Maybe... Rasberry Pi has an older ARM core without the v7 instructions and a
much simpler GPU than the Tegra 3 chip that's in the Ouya. I'd not expect it
to work there.

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illumin8
This has been mentioned before, but by simply using colored circles for their
controller buttons, they are ignoring the needs of a lot of color blind
gamers. This is why every console manufacturer has symbols on the buttons.
Color coding doesn't work so well when a significant percentage of your
players can't differentiate between green and red.

This could be solved very easily by picking some symbols to go along with the
colors. Of course, our patent and trademark laws are ridiculous and it's
highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and
B...

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randomdrake
Seems like a no-brainer to use: O, U, Y, A.

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bdz
there will be letters. and yes, O, U, Y, A.
[http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/4547820/ouya2_ga...](http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/4547820/ouya2_gallery_post.jpg)

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khangtoh
The pipe is not going to be bottleneck in this case. It's the device's
speed/processor/etc.

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89a
haha! ugly as sin

