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.
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.
>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.
>So why do you think they need to revolutionise the controller?
I don't. I wanted to point out that they copied an existing, working design. Which is probably a smart thing to do for such a project.
>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.
Careful with such claims ;) Even birds can learn that.
>> Consoles lack a good input anyway, compared to the mouse.
I don't get why some people think that gaming is all about FPS's and RTS games.
Why on earth would I want to use a mouse on a game like Street Fighter IV, Tetris, Bust-A-Move, Pac Man, Mario, Virtua Fighter, Tekken, etc. I can name a lot of games that work better with a traditional D-Pad type of controller than they would with a keyboard or mouse.
The D-pad setup has a serious limitation in that it forces you to use your thumbs. I have ten fingers; with a keyboard, I can have instantaneous command over ten actions (though eight or nine is more usual). With a console controller, it's two. (Four if we count triggers, but console games tend not to have fully-reconfigurable controls.)
I ran into this playing the Tony Hawk games, which I loved on the PC; on the console, executing complex combos feels like a thumb workout.
Obviously it is still a stylistic choice; the keyboard enables faster, more focused play, while the controller encourages a more laid-back playstyle which still feels competitive. But it does that by deliberately crippling the control you have, and you should embrace that.
>> The D-pad setup has a serious limitation in that it forces you to use your thumbs.
O RLY?
I have been using D-pads with my right hand "piano style" for over a decade. I don't use my right thumb at all. Anyone who's been exposed to a fighting game on a console knows that for many moves, you need to press multiple buttons simultaneously.
That you wouldn't think to hold the controller differently is kinda mind boggling.
Okay, well, that's kind of the point. Why are you holding a device designed to fit the human hand a particular way in a different way to get around its design limitations while claiming it's superior to another device designed without those limitations? The PHP hammer springs to mind.
It's not a design limitation. Gamepads are designed to handle multiple use cases, not just one. That's why the analog joystick works as a substitute for the D-pad for many games.
To presume that there's only one way to hold it is just narrow thinking.
Hell, this guy (Brolylegs) was a top bracket player in Street Fighter in EVO and he uses his face on a gamepad to play a game that requires directional control and six buttons to play properly.
I'd like to use a keyboard to play street fighter and super mario.
The reason I think keyboard is superior is that when using a keyboard, I can have few fingers on top of keys at the same time. Whereas when using the controller, I just use two thumbs. My thumb has to jump between buttons in order to switch different moves. That is slow.
I've tried it. It doesn't work well. It's easier to play those games with controllers.
The problem with those two games is that you're supposed to be pressing only one or two directional buttons at any given time in both of those games.
Directional inputs are single direction at any given time. It doesn't make sense to be using multiple fingers, because when you're switching direction from moving left to right with wasd controls(for example), you need to release the a key after starting to press the d key. There are two movements you need to do:
1. (while pressing a)Press d
2. Release a.
That's two separate finger motions, compared to just shifting the stick to from the left to the right, or shifting your thumb from left to right.
This is especially compounded with fighters like Street Fighter, where directional stick movements are important. For example, to do Ken's Hadoken, the motion is a quarter circle forward(down, down-right, right) then punch. With a d-pad or fighting stick, this is fairly easy to do. Thumb/hand moves down, then shifts right and up. The other hand then presses the punch button.
For a keyboard, it's:
1. Press s.
2. While holding down s, press d.
3. Release s.
4. While holding d, press the punch key.
So 4 discrete finger motions with 3 different fingers. Again, compared to a fighting stick, which is two motions with your hand(down, and basically move hand to the right, following the side guide), and punch. That's 1 less motion, and 1 less finger to care about. While it's certainly possible to train your muscle memory to do it, it's much easier to just use the proper controller.
Fortunately Street Fighter has gotten more forgiving in inputs with each release, but to do a 360, super, old school dragon knee or shoryuken, you really have to be nimble with your fingers.
There seems to be a consenous(ish) among players of Super Meat Boy (a mario-like, very hard, platformer) that using a controller is slightly easier.
Certainly I have tried playing street fighter with a keyboard and found it extremely hard.
Also, I couldn't imagine how you would play a 2d platformer which used an analogue stick. You lose the analogue if you map to the keyboard, and it doesn't really map easily to a mouse (as you can't keep moving your mouse in one direction forever).
You should try using a stick with Street Fighter. I can't pull SF moves off very well with a pad, but with the stick (especially if it has an octagonal gate), it's super easy.
There is something called a "Hitbox", which is a fighting controller that is all buttons: http://www.hitboxarcade.com/
Personal opinion about game controllers aside, I'm worried about infringement. Game controllers are heavily patented and designmarked and their design is as much about avoiding legal pitfalls as making a good input device.
Similarly, doesn't their console UI look dangerously close to the current Xbox dashboard? Surely this infringes on Metro in a big way?
Metro is a design philosophy, not anything that can be infringed. Microsoft is actually heavily evangelizing Metro, and would probably be pleased to see the competition playing catch-up for once. That said, individual interactions can be patented, and OUYA would definitely have to steer clear of this. I would say the biggest issue might be the colored button graphics representing the actions to perform; this looks and feels like Xbox, and would probably be a grey area for sure.
If their controller fails horribly, perhaps they could use the OnLive 'universal' controller -- the one that works with OnLive's console as well as all laptops and android/iOS devices. It's actually a really nice controller -- better than the PS3, slightly worse than the Xbox 360 (but without the battery pack issues).
According to this page the external accessory framework can only be used if the accessory developer is participating in the MFi program. I couldn't find any "Made for iPad" logos on OnLive's page.
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.
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.
There's no fundamental reason that things should play out either way (consolidation in a data center, or personal hardware). It will come down to economics, performance and convenience. Up until now performance (latency) has favored personal hardware, but it appears that may soon change, at which point the economies of scale of data centers, and the convenience of not needing to upgrade/store/maintain/move personal hardware, could very easily sway things in favor of consolidation.
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.
OnLive do have many centers spread out around the US (and a few international ones I think? I'm not sure) and their software tells you if you're too far from one (I think they limit at 1000 miles). I can tell you that about 15 miles from one (I assume they have one at or near their HQ and that's how far I am from it) the experience over a reasonably beefy cable connection (20Mbps) is pretty dang smooth.
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.
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.
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'
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.
As a gamer - I was excited to use the beta as soon as I got access, was keen to order the box as soon as possible (ended up getting sent one so didn't need to buy it, but I definitely would have), and I think the entire concept is incredibly cool. Truthfully I've hardly played it and the box is mostly gathering dust in between showing friends "look how cool this is", but then I haven't played any games for a few months, and even when I do play games I'm a PC guy, so take my thoughts with a pinch of salt. For me the performance wasn't quite good enough - could be my internet, might not be, I'm not sure - but it was good enough that it made me think that at some point it will be good enough. (And I have pretty high standards when it comes to FPS and latency.)
As someone who's talked to the company a fair bit through work - I don't have any figures to give you (not that I could say if I knew them, but I don't know them), all I can say is that I haven't heard of any problems or any negative news from them. As far as I'm aware they're doing pretty well so far.
I absolutely love it. Two player Harry Potter was glitchy, but other experiences (ie. Borderlands, DarkSiders) all performed perfectly. One of the big bonuses was the fact that it's almost device agnostic -- you can play certain games on touch screen, PCs, Macs, and on the OnLive device itself.
OnLive has been amazing to me. I've bought a few games on it and rented a handful. I live in San Francisco, so my internet was fast enough for good graphics. When I bought Borderlands, there were plenty of other people to multiplayer with.
I'm kind of hoping to never build a gaming PC again.
The compression quality is typically rather poor (meaning you get artifacts). The graphical quality as of a few months ago was also poor in comparison to your own rig. It's also got latency issues. They get 80ms or higher on average. So, for fast-paced gameplay, that can be an issue. Also, the stream is only 720p, not 1080p or higher. It's amazing for what it does, and I'm sure that some budget-restricted gamers/families use it, but it's not a replacement for powerful hardware 2-3 feet away from you.
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
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).
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.
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...
"P.S. We're still deciding on the buttons. For now, we've stuck with the colored circles as placeholders. But don't fret, we won't leave out colorblind gamers. :)"
Not only has it been mentioned before, it is clearly described in the article as an interim solution that will be relaced by something accessible to coulorblind people in the final design.
Designmarked, not patented I believe. So the green A, red B, blue X, yellow Y are owned by Microsoft. Sony have the circle, triangle, square and cross.
In terms of patents, Nintendo have the cross-shaped D-pad, Sony have the segmented d-pad and Microsoft are left with the awful spongy rocker pad.
> 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...
That'd be a shame. X, Y, A and B sounds more Super Nintendo than Xbox.
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.