Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Dear CCP Devs and GM's,

In the last couple years we gamers have been introduced to cloud rendering and gaming.

First let's take a look at OnLive. OnLive was released in 2010. Starting out it wasn't the best, with some spotty connections and a lackluster library of games. Now, you can play Assassin's Creed Revelations, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and almost two hundred other games, on any tablet or PC with an internet connection >6MB/s. That's pretty incredible, considering these games have some steep performance requirements. Granted the quality of the games aren't high-end PC quality, and depending on your connection and latency you can expect some client burps.

Next, let's look at Gaikai. Gaikai is a work-in-progress that allows you to play Origin games from a cloud server. The quality is pretty nice, being able to play Crysis 2 on a cheap laptop is almost unheard of. Once again, there's burps and input lag, but they're in beta still. Gaikai is focusing on bringing video quality to the table as it's main attraction.

I have had a chance to actually sit and talk to the developers of the technologies in the past, as I used to write for a gaming news site (I digress, though). Between Gaikai and OnLive, we can expect to play almost every AAA title that will be coming out on any of our devices in the next 1-2 years, day one and with all DLC available as it comes out. That's pretty incredible, because what that means is that from that point onward, the main limiting factor that we gamers have been faced with, being the cost of disks/consoles and the price of upgrading computers, will be limited only to our internet speeds and the streaming services themselves. OnLive in particular does weekly specials on games, similar to how Steam does it. Last month there was a special where you could nab Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood for $5 each, a steal.

Now the question I am posing to you, CCP, is this: With the introduction of Tesselation at Fanfest last week, and the promise that within the next year or so there will be a big graphical improvement, as well as the ever-looming implementation of WiS, we people with low- to mid-end computers will be struggling to keep up with the pretty visuals that make EVE an eyecandy-fest. I for one bemoan the quality of my graphics every time I see a screengrab on Reddit of highres ships with engine trails flying in a fleet around a POS, waiting for a bridge.

In the future, say in the next year or two, would you guys ever consider setting up a parallel supercomputer that would allow us with lower-end specs to do some server-side rendering to supplement our client-side rendering? I would think that using this technology would be able to allow us to see the game it was meant to be seen.

Now I know the rest of the community is going to come in here and mention things like fleet battles, blobbing, server load, TiDi, etc., but things like that can be easily addressed. The server rendering can be automatically disabled as soon as TiDi kicks in or as soon as the grid starts to fill, like in the case of a sudden hotdrop or a fleet warp-in. Systems with a massive population like Jita could have cloud rendering disabled permanently in order to help as well.

This is merely a passing idea of mine, and in no way is it meant to be taken as an "OMG DO IT CCP PLZ!" like ~90% of the features and ideas posted on here. But I invite any of the CCP Devs to come in and give me their .02 ISK's worth.

Thanks,

Daionnis

I hate to rain on your hate parade, but nowhere did I mention anything about it being a full-ride game streaming mode.

It was supplemental rendering. Basically an overlay. No change in input latency.