Ps4 "Net-based"

I recently read this article:

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Media_Centres/Industry/R8W6V6L6

Obviously saying it's 18 months away seems like a bit of an exaggeration, and making a reference to "Technical advantages of the XBOX 360" makes it pretty clear that the writer is either a very uninformed person or a Microsoft fanboy, but this part here seems pretty reasonable:

"Ken Kutaragi, the retiring chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment said in an interview last week that he clearly understands how the PlayStation game consoles should evolve in the next three generations, or fifteen to twenty years from now. He also said that in future it will be possible to create fully Internet-based game consoles.

'As a matter of course, I have the vision of PlayStation 4, 5 and 6, which will merge into the network,' Mr. Kutaragi said. Earlier this year when Kazuo Hirai became the second president of SCEI and chief operating officer, some analysts said that Sony may not launch yet another game console and the PlayStation 3 may become the last one. On this Mr. Kutaragi, who is also known as "the father of PlayStation", says that future consoles may be network-based, which automatically reduces the cost to build such machines.

'The design concept of the Cell processor is the network processor," Mr. Kutaragi said. "When the PS3 was introduced last year, the network environment was not ready for a net-based game console. Now it has become possible, so why not enter?' "

So cheaper, and network based? Err, I'm sorry for the ignorance but what does Network based mean exactly? Only MMOs?

Not gonna happen. With the size of games, 30 - 40gb of space if they use that on Blu Ray would take a while to download. I would rather go to the store and buy it.Vasichko

Yeah, it doesn't seem like it'd be a good idea. But then, who knows what'll happen a few years from now.

I'm still not sure that's what they mean though. Network based seems like a term for MMOs only, which is literally the WORST IDEA in the world.

[QUOTE="Vasichko"]Not gonna happen. With the size of games, 30 - 40gb of space if they use that on Blu Ray would take a while to download. I would rather go to the store and buy it.Licazinha

Yeah, it doesn't seem like it'd be a good idea. But then, who knows what'll happen a few years from now.

I'm still not sure that's what they mean though. Network based seems like a term for MMOs only, which is literally the WORST IDEA in the world.

I'm not positive, but I believe when they say net-based games, they mean fully net based. There will be practically nothing to the hardware you buy, no hard drive, no video cards, nothing but what is required to plug into a T.V. The games will be stored on a server and played through the companies hardware. The easiest thing to compare it to is Remote Play using the PSP and PS3. The PSP's hardware isn't running the game, it's the PS3, but you control everything, and see everything through the PSP. I'm sure I did a terrible job of explaining my take on it, but oh well.Wonderboy2790

That makes a lot of sense actually, and it sounds quite good too.

[QUOTE="Wonderboy2790"]I'm not positive, but I believe when they say net-based games, they mean fully net based. There will be practically nothing to the hardware you buy, no hard drive, no video cards, nothing but what is required to plug into a T.V. The games will be stored on a server and played through the companies hardware. The easiest thing to compare it to is Remote Play using the PSP and PS3. The PSP's hardware isn't running the game, it's the PS3, but you control everything, and see everything through the PSP. I'm sure I did a terrible job of explaining my take on it, but oh well.Licazinha

That makes a lot of sense actually, and it sounds quite good too.

[QUOTE="Licazinha"]

[QUOTE="Wonderboy2790"]I'm not positive, but I believe when they say net-based games, they mean fully net based. There will be practically nothing to the hardware you buy, no hard drive, no video cards, nothing but what is required to plug into a T.V. The games will be stored on a server and played through the companies hardware. The easiest thing to compare it to is Remote Play using the PSP and PS3. The PSP's hardware isn't running the game, it's the PS3, but you control everything, and see everything through the PSP. I'm sure I did a terrible job of explaining my take on it, but oh well.solaris1979

That makes a lot of sense actually, and it sounds quite good too.

Well go drink some coffee and tell me why!

[QUOTE="solaris1979"][QUOTE="Licazinha"]

[QUOTE="Wonderboy2790"]I'm not positive, but I believe when they say net-based games, they mean fully net based. There will be practically nothing to the hardware you buy, no hard drive, no video cards, nothing but what is required to plug into a T.V. The games will be stored on a server and played through the companies hardware. The easiest thing to compare it to is Remote Play using the PSP and PS3. The PSP's hardware isn't running the game, it's the PS3, but you control everything, and see everything through the PSP. I'm sure I did a terrible job of explaining my take on it, but oh well.Licazinha

That makes a lot of sense actually, and it sounds quite good too.

Well go drink some coffee and tell me why!

Ill tell you why. Because this is OLD. The articles from Febuary 5th of LAST year, 15 months ago.

I think it means that we will get all our games and what not through the internet. So anyone with dial up is screwed.neovalkyr

I don't like the sound of this...Teh_Solid_Snack

[QUOTE="Licazinha"][QUOTE="solaris1979"][QUOTE="Licazinha"]

[QUOTE="Wonderboy2790"]I'm not positive, but I believe when they say net-based games, they mean fully net based. There will be practically nothing to the hardware you buy, no hard drive, no video cards, nothing but what is required to plug into a T.V. The games will be stored on a server and played through the companies hardware. The easiest thing to compare it to is Remote Play using the PSP and PS3. The PSP's hardware isn't running the game, it's the PS3, but you control everything, and see everything through the PSP. I'm sure I did a terrible job of explaining my take on it, but oh well.DZBricktop

That makes a lot of sense actually, and it sounds quite good too.

Well go drink some coffee and tell me why!

Ill tell you why. Because this is OLD. The articles from Febuary 5th of LAST year, 15 months ago.

Not my question, but since you've pressed that button... Well, I've only read it today and as far as I know there haven't been many updates for this particular subject. That article is the most detailed text about the Ps4 I found, and I was just curious to know what it was going to be like and what people thought about the net based thing which was something that hadn't pleased me so much. Read the article before? Well I'm sorry but I hadn't. Why don't you just move on to the next thread then?

I'm not positive, but I believe when they say net-based games, they mean fully net based. There will be practically nothing to the hardware you buy, no hard drive, no video cards, nothing but what is required to plug into a T.V. The games will be stored on a server and played through the companies hardware. The easiest thing to compare it to is Remote Play using the PSP and PS3. The PSP's hardware isn't running the game, it's the PS3, but you control everything, and see everything through the PSP. I'm sure I did a terrible job of explaining my take on it, but oh well.Wonderboy2790

Thats pretty much what they mean by network based so you explained it perfectly.

The problem is it could never work even in a few years when technology will improve, the world-wide internet capability would never be up to it. Games have enough trouble with lag and disconnections especially with with a lot of devs implement these stupid automated match making crap which mixes up people from around the world causing massive lag and time-outs.

Even way in the future when the network technology will be massively improved the technology involved in developing games will also, creating larger games and therefore more data will still have to transmitted.

[QUOTE="DZBricktop"][QUOTE="Licazinha"]

Well go drink some coffee and tell me why!

Licazinha

Ill tell you why. Because this is OLD. The articles from Febuary 5th of LAST year, 15 months ago.

Not my question, but since you've pressed that button... Well, I've only read it today and as far as I know there haven't been many updates for this particular subject. That article is the most detailed text about the Ps4 I found, and I was just curious to know what it was going to be like and what people thought about the net based thing which was something that hadn't pleased me so much. Read the article before? Well I'm sorry but I hadn't. Why don't you just move on to the next thread then?

This isn't really about how old the article is. But since your 'botton' is so easily pressed...

1)HD video over Internet.I bet it's safe to assume that you will want at least 720p, if not all the way up to 1080p or even higher. Let's go for low HD res, (RGB color w/o alpha channel) 3byte * 1280*720* 60 (fps) = 158 mb (1024 based). So in order to maintain 720p@60 fps for gaming, you will need a steady stream of 158mbps download speed. Let's see which ISP offer that kind of speed...

So maybe you say that they can encode that on the fly? Sure, Since we are talking about HD, let's use the norm encoding scheme H.264. According to the chart in wikipedia, you will need at least 20mbit/s, or about 2-3mb/s. Alright, much more manageable data set, and you can actually find ISP that offer that kind of speed without linking you directly to the internet backbone. Woot!

HOWEVER, H.264 decoding is a hard business, Core Duo @ 1.8GHz can barely handle the job by itself. So having not even decent setup @ client side is pretty much just a myth, or a rumor that get started from a forum post such as this. Not to mention that for sony to be able to send the pure H.264 stream your way means that Sony has to come up with some fancy hardware that can take a image on the fly, encode that to H.264 which it has to do in less than 1/60 of a second just so you can enjoy real-time gaming or even semi-impressive HD slide show. So instead of 1 high end system so you can play game at your house, we need bare minimum of 3 systems. 1 at your house, 1 plays game at Sony's server, and 1 super powerful (H.264 encoding on realtime, that will be some pretty impressive setup, mine 2.4Ghz AMD can barely do divx @ 480p realtime). This walk us straight into next topic:

2) Lag! Let's assume all the internet in the near feature would see at highest 10-50ms ping time for the round trip. Now, the game hardware first try to process your input then produce the output. well, all things considered, 1/60 of a second to produce the required image. Nice, now the image goes to the next system to be processed into image. alright, since that system kicks ass, let's say it will do another 1/60 of second to encode and feed it back to you. So that's 2/60 +10 seconds after you press something on the botton and for video to get back at you. Now, the hardware has to decode the video again on the fly. And since we can't really afford a super bad ass computer that Sony has to encode the video, I'd say it will require like another 1/60 of a second to decode the image and feed it to the screen.

Total time from input back to your TV? 3/60 +10 ms. so about .06 seconds later the picture finally get displayed. I don't know about you, but having my input lagged by 1/16 of a second seems pretty unreasonable. Played games on network and got frustrated by other people that sort of poping in and out of place? Well, you get to do that to yourself... Nice, this must be the next stage in gaming...

After all this, we still have not talked about how the server are supposed to send another important data, like sound, and maybe what would happen when the internet hiccup a second and you suddenly have break the HD video stream for a slight second.... Hopefully by now you'd realize just how bad the idea is. And that's not mentioning that Sony has to invest 3 different set of equipments just so that you can enjoy this ridiculous idea of gaming over internet..... per person.

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Feel free to come up with some counter points, But either way the only thing even remotely possible withoud disc is what they are doing with PSN right now, games will all be digitally distributed and we get to sit around for a few hours while waiting for the 100Gb game to be installed on the system on the whooping 500GB harddrive we have!.

It's a thing of future, but truth be told, I don't mind the install much, but having to delete a game and reinstall it to the system over internet when you want to play some old game probably will irk everybody's nerve just a bit.

And no, dont even think about remote gaming system.

I never said it was a good idea, i just tried to explain what they were implying by the phrase "Net-based games". And it did imply that Kutaragi meant 15-20 years from now, so don't even try to compare the issue with technology from the present.Wonderboy2790

I am not sure what will happen 20 years down the road, but at least it would not be possible on internet structure as we know it today. It's probably a easier task to ask Sony to build a time machine than to build a server that is capable to handle possible millions of HD video streaming and not have Sony bankrupted. Video game console will advance faster than what we are doing with internet bandwidth upgrade, even if everyone has fiber in their houses.

If sony can find someway to build servers thats capable of HD video transfer, I'd think it will be much more of a interest for them to head against youtube than to compete in video game market, just my 2 cents.

Not gonna happen. With the size of games, 30 - 40gb of space if they use that on Blu Ray would take a while to download. I would rather go to the store and buy it.Vasichko