Thanks for the reply, even if it is two years after the fact. Clearly based on the activity this is still an interesting topic to consider. I have to say that I hadn’t given the problem much thought after writing the post. I don’t even remember what triggered me to write it in the first place.

OTOY and OnLive are both interesting. They appear to have essentially solved the problem in the same way, by off loading all the processing to the server. It harkens back to the days of mainframes (which is just an observation – that is neither good nor bad). It is a more elegant solution than what I had thought up. I was too caught up in how games currently work that I didn’t think of their solution.

I also found it interesting, from reading the Forbes article you linked to, as well as several other articles that I looked up, that OTOY is using downtime in the GPU to have it perform calculations for other games, so the GPU is always running near 100% (if I understood things correctly). That is an ingenious use of resources that also helps to keep costs down. I wonder if it could be applied to other cloud software outside of games. Of course, it is possible it is overkill in all instances except for games.

Thanks for pointing this out Robert. It’s interesting information and I’ll have to keep an eye on OnLive and OTOY to see what they eventually release and how successful it is. It would be fascinating to get a glimpse at the software and hardware behind these companies.

In your setup, you try to push a currently working game server into the cloud. However, if you look at the current technology that is being translated to the cloud, the only thing being presented to the end user is the client. Let’s take a productivity software point of view. If I want to access a spreadsheet, I’m only able to view the spreadsheet client. I can load my files, edit and save out all of my progress. In reality, I don’t really care so much where my data is being stored, just as long as I’m able to reliably access it at a later point in time.

Now we can translate that into an MMO standard. The idea would be to have the client readily available to the end user without them having to have the latest and greatest desktop system. In this case we defer all of the networking and graphical processing needs to the cloud. In this way, the gaming servers stay the same in terms of how they’re being accessed. What has changed is how the end user loads their game client.

Two companies come to mind when thinking about playing games through the cloud. Currently OnLive ( http://www.onlive.com ) has implemented their own version, and has a fairly concrete plan in order to let players run their game on almost anything that has a screen and network capability. Unfortunately, they don’t specifically talk much about their technology, just what it will look like in the end. To learn more about the technology I turn to another company, OTOY ( http://www.otoy.com ), where they discuss the problem of streaming a game from the cloud across the net to your computer.

How does OTOY do it? Without getting too much into specifics, their method is to run the game application through the latest GPU chip sets and convert the 3D world of triangles into a purely 2D format, then transmit a compressed data set across the net to your screen (with all the latest and greatest shaders, of course). To read more on that, there’s an article on Forbes at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1102/technology-otoy-videogames-software-game-changer.html This is technology at its best right now!

How’s that for a more elegant solution?