[cle]

My son plays about 6 hours of BeamNG and X-Plane a week. It’s much cheaper (and faster) for him to play on an EC2 instance with Parsec at $.50/hr than to invest the money and space in an equivalent gaming rig. And he can play it wherever we go.

Setup details: I use Paperspace since it has an image with everything already configured (doing this is surprisingly tricky, I was never able to get GPU drivers installed and configured myself after hours of trying and also trying various AMIs). It has auto-shutdown after an hour of inactivity. I use VirtualHere to forward a joystick to the host, and Parsec for streaming. It works great, and I pay $.50/hr plus $5/mo for storage. Over WiFi with the cheapest Comcast plan, the latency is about 30 ms, which is fine for those games.

[boxerbk]

Really happy to hear you and your son are getting a lot of value from Parsec's streaming tech. Let me know if you have any suggestions/ideas to improve the product. Thanks!

[cle]

Nice to see someone from Parsec here! USB forwarding like VirtualHere would be nice, so that I don’t have to fiddle with that every time I start the instance.

IIRC I tried the Parsec AMI but it was difficult to use and required a lot of fiddling. I can’t remember the details unfortunately, but I would have preferred to just use that instead of Paperspace (this might be a niche use case since I’m an engineer). If I could have figured that out, I would have written a CLI around it and open sourced it for others to use.

Also because I’m an engineer, I really wanted to read the source code to see how it worked. But I get that it’s your magic sauce :).

Thanks for the awesome tech!

[hedora]

I just set it up last night. Great stuff, but fix your manual.

Concretely, update the “solutions for cloud rented pc’s” section at this link: https://support.parsecgaming.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002601...

(Which the client points at)

On paperspace, you need to set up a paid public IP, or deal with higher latency. Now I know what ZeroTier is, but my network latency was 100ms under load vs 30 with the public IP...

It took me four hours to debug this. Also, why does the server send every other UDP packet to a mysterious port on startup? (According to tcpdump on my router)

Also, in the question about broken mouse cursors, the correct answer is to close the paperspace web tab displaying the desktop of the instance.

Cheers!

[boxerbk]

Thanks. We definitely fall behind once in awhile on the support articles. Fixing it now.

[hedora]

Overall, your documentation is excellent; otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered nit picking it.

I’ll definitely recommend parsec to friends. I got rid of my last windows box a while back, but I have a few windows-only steam titles that I’d like to play.

Moving forward, my gaming desktop is something like a 25% of the household electricity budget. I hate wasting all that power, so I really want to replace it with a thin client.

[hedora]

One other thing: Your onboarding flow at the paperspace blog still points to parsec.tv. It made me wonder if you went out of business until I found the new download links.

https://blog.paperspace.com/setting-up-your-cloud-gaming-rig...

[ineedasername]

$0.50 an hour only amounts to 200 hours of gaming for the price of a rig capable enough to play games at qualities that are going to be streamed. That plus $0 for Hamachi ($50/year if you need more than 5 computers on the network) works pretty well. I've tried Paperspace, and the performance was about the same. I will say that the Shadow streaming service I thought was superior to all other options I tried, but also far more expensive for not enough of a difference.

[cle]

It might make sense for some people, I'm not saying that everyone should do this.

My son's young enough that he still goes through phases. That and he leaves every summer to go to his grandparents'. Sticking with cloud gaming gives me the freedom to just throw everything away or stop using it for long periods of time without guilt.

Also, it honestly makes me feel better to know that I didn't buy a bunch of fancy hardware to to use 3.6% of the time. AWS rents the hardware out to somebody else when I'm not using it, and is strongly incentivized to get its utilization as close to 100% as possible.

[friedman23]

Have you tried alternatives like stadia and gefore now? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I have a gaming pc with a 4770k and a 1080ti. I was considering upgrading it with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation (this is the lie I tell myself) but with things like colab pro coming out I'm considering if the future (for my use case) will just be renting hardware.

[cle]

I did try GeForce Now, since it has BeamNG. From what I could tell, it was about the same as Paperspace, except I didn't have access to the underlying OS so I couldn't install mods outside of Steam. It doesn't have X-Plane. It's slightly cheaper and easier to use since you don't have to manage the lifecycle of a host.

And Stadia doesn't have either game.

If you run your own host, you can play whatever game you want, and mod it however you feel like. Otherwise, you're stuck with whatever curated stuff the platform provides.

[Aperocky]

> with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation

Ah, I see we're alike.

I'm glad I went ahead and got a gaming rig from best buy for $900. Because after playing legacy games at extremely high frame rate for about 2 weeks, I proceed to spend all my spare time on a random javascript game.

At this rate I'll get to my ML workstation and train my own GAN at 2035.

[ineedasername]

Stadia is a complete non-starter for me because of a highly limited selection and no ability to bring my Steam & GOG library into it.