[zealog]

While I think latency will still be an issue to some degree, it's probably not nearly to the level people are imagining due to current experience since this is quite different.

With current gaming systems, everyone's computer/console is rendering a version of the game with all known info. As a player acts, that info is sent to the server and distributed to other participants. If one user is experiencing (or intentionally causing) latency with this exchange of data, there can be what amounts to a "collision" in the state of the game. These problems are solved in various ways (i.e. jumping locations) that affect game play.

In this system, there is one central computer that is managing all happenings in the game and rendering out a unique view for each player. There will be no "collisions" of conflicting information because there are not multiple entities creating and modifying game actions.

I imagine any lag would primarily be experienced as your character responding to your actions in a delayed manner or a drop of video signal. Both would definitely inhibit game play, but they should ONLY be apparent to the user experiencing the lag. A lagged user would just be a sitting duck for any other player, but not change the game play for anyone else. THAT would be a huge improvement.

[jerf]

You've got it backwards with lag. With local rendering power, minor lag can be magicked away as the local machine applies prediction algorithms to make a decent guess as to what the game state will be in the next .25 seconds. With this system, every minor lag blip for more than one frame, which I will be generous and assume will be 30fps and thus 33ms (rather than 60fps) will manifest as total game freeze, because every minor lag blip is logically equivalent to walking up to your real-life XBox and just disconnecting the video cable, assuming a TV that would then hold the previous frame instead of dropping the picture.

There's no way in hell this thing is going to play FPSs. Think "Bejeweled". With no animations, or very choppy ones.

It's a terrible, terrible design suited solely for extracting investment money from credulous investors. If you are a credulous investor doing due diligence on this product and you've encountered this message, if they're promising anything other than casual, graphically-unimpressive games, this is your cue to run.