Blarbus

"Onlive" Set for Release

Naysayer's and skeptics of the groundbreaking video game distribution service Onlive must be getting tired of feasting on their own words.

A recent announcement by the company's founder and CEO Steve Perlman has marked June 17th to be the day the service becomes available for residents of the 48 contiguous states, at which time subscribers will be able to open their single core laptops, download a simple browser plug-in and start playing Crysis at full quality within minutes.

How is this possible?  The magic lies in the fact that all of the actual game processing is happening in Onlive's data centers, which could very well be hundreds of miles away.  The gamer's computer is merely displaying a live video feed from these data centers, which, in turn, have received control inputs from the gamer and done all of the processing far away from where the game is actually being played (their website explains it a little more clearly).

 

Basically, Onlive allows gamers to play any game on any computer at full quality with no loading times, all for only fifteen bucks a month (not including game purchase costs).  If you compare this subscription fee to what it might cost to upgrade your computer every few years in order to keep up with the latest games, it's a fantastic deal.  Onlive upgrades their computers for you, so that you're always able to play the latest games with the latest hardware.

The implications are staggering.  As far as I'm concerned, this marks the death of all console systems, not to mention conventional digital distribution systems like Steam.

There's Always a Bigger Fish

My esteemed programming partner Adam Denny and I crafted this piece of software for our final project in Introduction to Computer Science.  More specifically, it was written in python, and it utilized a few very basic graphics modules our professor had created in order to be able to interface with OpenGL.

As you may or may not be able to tell from the video, the fish have been programmed to generate themselves randomly and detect collisions with the borders of the aquarium as well as with each other.  In the event of fish-on-fish action, the larger fish makes a feast out of the smaller fish, grows bigger, and slows down.  This vicious cycle continues until there is only one.  This last fish is often referred to in fish circles as "the one to rule them all," and as such tends to get all the fish ladies.

We had originally planned it so that an even bigger, ultimate fish comes in out of nowhere to eat each and every thing inside the program with one epic gulp, but in the end, this monster fish had to be thrown out the window in order to satisfy time constraints.

Expect to see more of this kind of thing in future posts.