DPerry.com,
the homepage of Dave Perry, now features a video showing off Gaikai, the
cloud-based gaming service
announced earlier this year. The clip
shows off
Spore,
Mario Kart,
LEGO Star Wars II,
Need for
Speed ProStreet,
World of Warcraft,
EVE Online, as well as
Photoshop (to show non-gaming applications for the service), all running in a
browser with no client downloads. The clip is accompanied by more from Perry on
the project's background and goals, word that those interested in beta testing
should sign up at the
Gaikai Website, and this overview:
"We are not in competition with any other streaming company or technology, our
business model is entirely different. I will be talking about it more during my
up-coming speeches at video game conferences. (Develop this month, and GDC
Europe are the next two.)." Here is a list of points he makes about the planned
service and the video demonstration:
(1) No installing anything. (I'm
running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)
(2) This is a low-spec server, it's a very custom configuration, fully
virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of
Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.
(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that's
where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay
will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday,
but it's not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I
personally would get, the good news is I don't notice it anyway.)
(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center
in Freemont California. Also, I'm not cheating and using fiber connections for
our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.
(5) We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and
we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As
you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less. ;)
(6) We designed this for the real internet. The codecs change based on the need
of the application, and based on the hardware you have. (Like Photoshop must be
pixel perfect.)
(7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi,
works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)
(8) If you hear any clicks, they are coming from my wireless headset microphone.
I won't use that next time I promise. :)
(9) I made a few video cuts using Windows Movie maker to cut out dead air. Like
Need for Speed has far to many menus with loads & delays between them. So I
tried to keep the pace up so you see plenty of demos.