Quoting: ShmerlGood points there about how they were bitten by too much reliance on HLSL and MS tools. And of course, despite releasing it for Stadia, there is still no desktop Linux version.

They still use HLSL and don't seem to have had particular problems with it. For the rest, there was just a highlighting of the fact that where DX12 and Vulkan differ in architecture, you need to design to somehow cater for both, regardless of which you start with. This is roughly in line with other developers have said.

Also worth noting is that having a Stadia/Linux version for a single hardware target is more like having a console version than a desktop version - quality and framerate are fixed. They may be working on completing the Linux support for arbitrary hardware, but personally, I doubt it. The presenter's early comments suggest Ubisoft may be thinking of swapping PC support for Streaming services support.

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Quoting: Guesthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I1KvNvUkO4

Just for an interesting perspective from Ubisoft.

--edit: about 11 minutes in, yes, they ported to "Linux" (I assume GNU/Linux) internally when first getting ready for Stadia.

Thanks, that was interesting to watch. Yes, I would say they ported all the CPU code to Linux, or obtained/ported the Linux version of middle-ware they used.

They still use the DirectX shader language, as I would expect most established studios to keep doing for the foreseeable future, but that is host-independent anyway, and can be compiled to any intermediate language.

One notable thing was the start of the talk, which is aimed at developers rather than gamers, where he confirmed what we all suspect, that large parts of the developer community see streaming as the perfect solution to what they consider to be the problem of piracy.

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I would guess that all the weirdness of the past year like new online game-stores popping up and offering supply-side inducements, Microsoft embarking on a shopping spree for studios, and now Google announcing Stadia, are the dance of a major re-alignment in gaming.

A major upheaval has been predicted for a long time, these are probably just the first indications that it is arriving. I'm still not convinced how many people will want to jump to Games as a Service, or how practical it is yet, but the ball is rolling downhill now, so it is probably not going to stop.

We now have at least NVidia, Sony, Blade Shadow, Jump, and Google with known GaaS-like offerings, and rumours about Valve, Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, EA, Apple, and Comcast. It's logical to assume that anyone with a strong existing subscriber or customer base in a relevant industry - i.e. Phones, Tablets, PCs, TVs, Cable service, Cellular Service, Landline Telephony service - is related to one of these potential gaming services, or is thinking of providing their own.

I know Tim Sweeney is put on the "naughty step" a lot lately over the practices used to promote Epic Games Store, and further back over taking investment from Tencent, but seen in the light of the potential alternatives lining up to enter the market, his decisions are more easily understood. The company he founded has survived when so many others have not, because he found ways to finance it's survival and navigate the threats.

I don't approve of Epic's behaviour, but I can see the threat of disruption in the industry, and I'm pretty sure there will be a lot more things to dislike, from all quarters, in the coming year or so.

Consoles may be under more threat in the short term than "Open" PC platforms, because the draw XBox and PS have for attracting developers to their big markets has the potential to evaporate under pressure to develop for more interesting and potentially profitable markets. I can also see a portion of the console players just not buy new consoles if services like Stadia provide a better experience at an acceptable cost.

I think the PC player base is probably less likely to shift to streaming in the short term, but I can see the Linux Native market actually being ignored more in terms of internally developed game releases in favour of the streaming services which are huge potential markets.

But I can also see that if you just want to be able to use your Linux PC to play games, are not riddled with FSF and EFF principles, have a good network connection and don't mind not "owning" games, that the choice available to you could become very wide. The biggest problem might be the number of streaming services you need to use if they start competing by buying studios and negotiating exclusive agreements.

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: yöliskoYou should remember that Google is mainly an advertisement company, and you are their product.

I would be really scared about how detailed a personal profile they can build by learning all your gaming habits and how much they will learn about you by all the choices you make in the games.

All the possibility in the data mining and profiling with these added details of personality through gaming.

And as all the games would be streamed, you are not able to block the data mining by firewalls or by going offline.

Google provides the option not to do personalized advertising if you opt out. You can also download your data to see what's collected, or choose to delete them. You don't need a firewall for that, as there are builtin options in your Google account itself. You are still their product and you get ads, but can choose not to be a subject of machine learning.

You can choose not to trust that Google says the truth. I honestly didn't prior to joining Google. But I can say with good confidence that they don't try to hide the truth (bugs and mistakes happen, which are sometimes mistaken for malicious intent)

"Mistakes", like sniffing everyone's wifi routers, border on, or are actually illegal in some jurisdictions. If Google management do not encourage poor behaviour ( per the motto ), then as a grown-up company they will need to do a lot more to restore trust in their attitude, and the competence of their hiring and management procedures.

Google moved from my "good" bucket to my "bad" bucket over issues like that, and they remain there. Not as bad as Microsoft, or Apple, but not that far from them either.

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Quoting: jensHaving thought about this and after reading lots of opinions this is my stance:
Googles game streaming service, Strada, seems cross platform. This is certainly a good thing, this offers another way of playing games on Linux. Since Strada uses Linux underneath in their infrastructure I'm pretty sure that this will further improve the quality of the Linux graphics Stack and further strengthen Vulkan.

I'm seeing Strada as a way of playing games _next_ to other means of playing games on Linux, certainly not as a replacement for Steam and other stores. Similar like Netflix it is targeted for the causal (not that much interested in highest quality) consumer and not a replacement for a Blu Ray collection for a Cinematic. So I don't think that Strada will be the end of the way we are playing games now. Though a shift will most likely happen, similar like Netflix grabbed much share of the BluRay market.

Will this improve gaming on Linux in the sense of bringing gaming experience on Linux closer to the experience on Windows? This could go either way. Having games on Strada would make a Linux release technically kind of easy/easier and might be a motivation to just do it. On the other hand publishers might refrain from directly releasing on Linux due to e.g. support reasons and might just refer to Strada, similar like some studios refer to Proton now. Actually I think the latter will happen. It may even worse the situation for real gamers since Linux would only get the low quality Strada game version but not a full Desktop version of a certain game. Though in the long term this could strengthen the Linux market share overall, a similar effect I hope from Proton due to overall having more games on Linux. A higher market share overall could then attract more "native" Linux release. Another thought would be at in the long term, e.g. over 10 years, we wont see differences anymore between Desktop vs streaming and the whole discussion mutes. Thus to conclude: I think Strada will improve gaming on Linux for the causal gamer, but not for "real" gamers, at least not in the short term. No idea what the situation in the long term could yield.

Let's also further see what Valve is doing. I'm still convinced that having Proton/SteamPlay on Linux is mostly just the public Beta test of the groundwork for Valves streaming service.

PS: About the DRM discussion here, Stadia is a service for, lets put it extreme, streaming an interactive movie. Strada is not a platform for buying games/goods thus having a Strada game DRM free does not apply here. And even if they would offer a kind of offline mode (like available in Netflix or Spotify) the DRM people would start a shitstorm anyway because game assets would not be usable outside of a (technically needed) offline Strada client. A Strada game is not a Desktop game.

Edit: Removed a kind of joke that could be take offensive..

Seems like a reasonable summary. We can't really know yet, of course, because Google have declined to discuss any commercial details, possibly because they need to assess reactions, improve streaming to increase the size of the addressable market, increase the game quantity and quality etc.

The end-result of their deliberation may well be that it must be aimed at casual gamers/low quality for financial success, but I get the sense that they would prefer to aim for originality and quality. With appropriate game design, I think their data-centre architecture could surpass the performance and image quality of any PC you could build today. Scalability ( in terms of the number of GPUs contributing to a game instance ) is essentially limited only by the need to move and share data between GPUs.

They also seem to implicitly acknowledge that developers have a high dependency on a Windows workflow, since they support Visual Studio and DirectX shaders. But, I'm sure some benefits for Linux will eventally accrue.

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Quoting: yöliskoYou should remember that Google is mainly an advertisement company, and you are their product.

I would be really scared about how detailed a personal profile they can build by learning all your gaming habits and how much they will learn about you by all the choices you make in the games.

All the possibility in the data mining and profiling with these added details of personality through gaming.

And as all the games would be streamed, you are not able to block the data mining by firewalls or by going offline.

They would certainly acquire the practical information that, for example, MMO owners learn about the way their games are played, and stores/sites like Steam learn about their players preferences. I'm not sure that is particularly different to the current situation with sales/marketing in general.

I suspect that using in-game decisions as the basis of building profile data would probably be counter-productive. Games are, in part, an escape or fantasy that you interact with in a way that does not reflect what you would do in real life. I certainly don't play games with any sense of rationality or consistency, which tends to confuse the pattern-identification at the heart of many profiling algorithms.

They would definitely also learn that I'm not very good at most games, but I could live with that :D

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: etonbearsThe discussion in the US, concerning how the Internet is constructed managed and used, seems to have become intensely partisan and thus narrow because the participants simply assault each other with their best dogmatic assertions and withdraw.

Not really. It's quite artificially partisan for no good reason besides corruption and sides trying to use a hot topic to their advantage. Outside of politics, net neutrality is quite a non controversial and generally accepted concept.

I suppose the reason it became partisan in politics was a ploy by monopolists to thwart its adoption as a functional law. They often use legislative power dysfunction and partisan bickering to derail good ideas that actually could prevent monopoly abuse.

Shmerl, I take my hat off to you. Your posts truly do provide great entertainment value.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: etonbearsYou are adopting the narrow view of "network neutrality as monopolist tool" popular in the United States. I mean it in the wider sense of equality/restriction for any purpose.

You probably meant anti-monopolist tool, which net neutrality in part is. However I don't see this being very widely differently defined, given the author of the term is Tim Wu [External Link] who is a law professor in Columbia University. I'm pretty much using his original definition.

Quite right, I did mean an "anti-monopolist" in there. And of course quite right that Tim Wu initiated the network neutrality debate. But like most debates and discussions, particularly online, the original theme expands and morphs to encompass different contexts, especially when considered by those in different societies operating under different jurisdictions and regulatory conditions.

While I spend quite a few weeks every year in the US, I do not live there, and I do not usually consider it as my context for discussion unless I say so. The discussion in the US, concerning how the Internet is constructed managed and used, seems to have become intensely partisan and thus narrow because the participants simply assault each other with their best dogmatic assertions and withdraw.

You may not yourself be a US resident, but the tone with which you offered your "correction" to my "misunderstanding" certainly suggests that narrow partisan mindset.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: etonbearsWhich is one argument against net neutrality - you can't guarantee the quality of service you think you are paying for.

Network congestion due to load is not an argument against net neutrality. Net neutrality is about preventing deliberate traffic discrimination (such as for anti-competitive purposes). Managing the network due to congestion is fine according to the concept of net neutrality. Mind you, something like data caps is not a network management tool, it's users fleecing, anti-competitive trash. Limiting bandwidth when network is overloaded though is a legitimate network managing technique.

You are adopting the narrow view of "network neutrality as monopolist tool" popular in the United States.

Debate and discussion of the term as used by Shmerl has been extremely widespread for a number of years. Even if it's used differently elsewhere, it's probably not used nearly as much your way overall because your sense is more technical and less controversial in its implications, so probably just less talked about. So you shouldn't be surprised if Shmerl's is the sense people expect. And if you think it's going to stay limited to the US, well, maybe, but I've sure noticed that nasty practices often start in the US and are then exported to much of the rest of the world through trade agreements and by the same interests elsewhere latching onto the American example to make their greed respectable.

I do think that public provision would be a good idea. The internet is infrastructure; infrastructure works well public.

Perhaps, but it seems like more like Political ( big P ) footballs that are being kicked around in the wrong Stadia ( OK, I'll stop that :) ).

It's unlikely that countries in the European Union would be "infected" by bad network practices of the sort some Americans fear, as the Competition Commission has a good record at acting on complaints concerning poor behaviour. Most countries here also have regulatory frameworks that work, more or less in the general interest of everyone.

Even the UK, which is much closer that any other EU country to American Ideals, really isn't all that similar. We have our own brands of loonies trying to impose their ill-informed worldviews on us, like most countries, but they don't really resonate with US groups.

I'd have to say that in Canada, neither BC nor Quebec ( the provinces I have visited ) seemed much aligned with US values, and your current administration doesn't exactly seem to idolise its US counterpart; but I suppose Canada might be the most likely domino because of co-location and economic pressure, so I can see your concerns might be more aligned with US sentiments.

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Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: MohandevirIs it TCP/IP, UDP or something I haven't heard of? Isn't UDP faster but prone to packet loss thus reducing the quality of the stream?

TCP includes the control mechanism to deal with packet loss (detection and resending). For UDP it is up to the application to decide whether to detect it and what to do if something is lost.

And still be faster than TCP? Or is it better to go with TCP, in that case?

I might imagine that in a game, (as etonbears points out, without buffering, everything happening in real time) by the time lost packets get re-sent they'd be irrelevant, so it would be better to just ignore them and leave a little fuzz in the picture than to, like, refuse to show the image until it's all complete. That might suggest this UDP thing. But I don't know anything about this, I'm just trying to do logic from too little data.

Yeap, TCP has way too much overhead for an application that requires very low latency (the way this stream works is very similar on how tv broadcasting works). Also, in the Google backbone for this service they may be using other less known optimization in order to reduce the latency (Jumbo frames!)

I don't see any direct reference to their stream formats, but would guess that Google are using HTTP3 for the Stadia data protocol, as it is only currently implemented in Chrome and runs over UDP rather than TCP. Using UDP brings much lower latency because it does not block on errors or waste time acknowledging packets, and it allows the seamless connection migration between different devices shown in their demo. It implements TLS security by default and uses Forward Error Correction to ensure the receiver has enough redundant information to resolve errors from occasional missed packets, so HTTP3, or a custom version of it seems a good candidate.

Not quite sure where Jumbo Frames would fit in though. I only know it as an Ethernet optimisation that is rarely worth enabling.

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