I just had an idea how to solve the issue of how to stream a game.
First the pros and cons of streaming a game:
Pros:
Don’t need much hard drive space
Don’t need a fast processor
Cons:
Latency issues
The game is never on your device offline.
So here is my idea. What you do is have a device with say a 1GB SSD hard drive and powerful GPU. This saves money because hard drives are expensive. Then when you download a game, it downloads all the code and all the graphics for the first level or scene (using a dedicated CPU in the background). While you’re playing it downloads the graphics for linking scenes. And also deletes graphics for scenes that are far away to save hard drive space. It never downloads cut-scenes as these will always be streamed.
So this system will have not have a latency issue for single player games. Also, it will allow you to keep playing your level offline up to a point. (It might even just have temporary very low definition graphics to allow you to play the whole game).
The disadvantage of this method is you still need a fast CPU/GPU and compatible system. But it solves the latency issue with streaming just the game footage. But it will also cost more for the provider to stream the graphics files multiple times but this will get cheaper as broadband gets cheaper.
The advantage of this system too is that you could own thousands of games with a small SSD.
What do you think? Would you use a system like this?
Literally the only “advantage” of this is hard drive space.
And considering that you can get a 2 TB hard drive for 50 bucks at microcenter, 1/5th or 1/10th of the amount you’ll be spending on your CPU+GPU…I don’t see the benefit. If I can afford to spend $350 on a video card, I can afford to own a hard drive that gives me more than enough space to install every game I could ever play for years on my PC.
Additionally…can you load levels faster than the player plays through them? If you’re well connected sure, but that’s no guarantee when things are moving to higher and higher fidelity.
Additionally…what if the player’s playing an open-world game and fast travelling across the place? Or even just moving normally.
Additionally…what if I have a data cap?
I can already own thousands of games, and my 4 TB of storage is more than enough to hold all (or at least many) of them, certainly enough for me to not worry about running out of things to play (on the contrary, I have 100+ games staring back at me, making me feel guilty for feeling guilty playing them). Better yet, when I want to play a game I don’t have to wait for 30 minutes while the first level loads.
Game streaming has always seemed to me a solution looking for a problem rather than something that is about to catch on. You’re also requiring internet connectivity to play a single player game, which if the SimCity uproar from a couple years back says anything it is that the market will have none of that.
There are plenty of games on console that stream as you play, as well as pc titles like WoW. It’s not about HD space or CPU (neither are the problem) but about getting the player playing sooner which means money sooner and happy customer sooner.
Hmm… I guess you’re right there. I suppose the problem may be that the providers (like Steam) may not support such features. At least not to my knowledge. You have to download the entire game. Unless you have other content on your own server I suppose.
I would be interested to see a Unity tutorial about good ways to do this. But it may only be relevant if you’re making a massive game with 4k graphics.
Saying that 1TB drives do fill up quicker than you expect. It’s only 10 x 100GB games after all. (e.g. Forza Motorsport 7). It won’t be long before there is a game which is 1TB in size.
It WILL be long. Forza is a bad example. I wish I could find my post from a few weeks back, but the overwhelming majority of games are nowhere near that size. The latest Assassin’s Creed game, you know a massive open-world game with high-quality cutscenes and such, was 42.3 GB. Previous games were about the same size. The last COD game was about 50 GB.
The reason Forza is so big is because there are literally 700 high fidelity cars along with ~118 miles of race-track laser-scanned from the real world (went through this and counted only the unique names, this is apparently how I spend my weekends). I’m failing to find any sources on a typical file size for laser scanned tracks, but rest assured it’s not “cheap.”
You don’t need an expensive processor nor do you need an expensive graphics card. Below is a benchmarking video showing off the AMD Ryzen 3 2200G (4C/4T) with Vega 8 integrated graphics. It’s only $99.
A computer (AMD Ryzen 3 2200G, 8GB DDR4-3200, 256GB SSD) can be built for only about $400. While I completely agree with his choice of an SSD over an HDD you can easily swap out that 256GB SSD for a 3TB 7200RPM HDD.
I believe that almost all the web browser games stream! They use minimum Hard Drive and lots of ram. Even with a fast connection I have to wait before I can see what characters or monster look like. They put a place holder for it until it’s downloaded.