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Handhelds Role Playing (Games) The Internet Games Apple Hardware

WoW On an iPad Via Gaikai 121

Posted by Soulskill from the that-doesn't-even-look-like-english dept.
Gametap writes "If cloud gaming works for enough genres, it can't help but find popularity. Even just a game like WoW might be enough to make it happen, and Gaikai's Dave Perry posted a picture of doing just that on an iPad. So is it the future or not? Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform? Will it change the mobile, PC, console, and TV world as we know it? Lots of questions, lots of skepticism, lots of players and money being invested — but one thing is for sure: it will be very interesting to see how this evolves."
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WoW On an iPad Via Gaikai More

WoW On an iPad Via Gaikai

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  • Input (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Barny ( 103770 ) on Thursday May 06, 2010 @03:35AM (#32108804) Journal

    Is ever the problem with such systems, the only two mmog I have ever been able to play reasonably well with just touch pad is EVE-Online and City of Heroes/Villains (and that in a limited capacity, requiring a lot of macros).

    Without commenting on the whole "which MMOG is bigger/better" thing, I would hazard to guess that for this to work, the games would HAVE to be built for it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dragonshed ( 206590 )

      I totally agree.

      The ipad puts alot of design constraints on apps. Most games turn part of the touch screen into a controller input that plays similar to a portable console (think gameboy). Doesn't work for a game like WoW, or Blizzard would've ported it to consoles long ago.

      -ds

      • As far as WoW is concerned, I'd say that movement would be tricky. There's click-to-move so that should work, but it's a bit clunky. Chatting too. But combat, just clicking buttons... That'd work better than a keyboard.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tattood ( 855883 )

          But combat, just clicking buttons... That'd work better than a keyboard.

          That works fine for the bosses where you can stand still and fight. Many of the encounters require you to move around to avoid things, boss repositioning, etc. Now, since the iPad does have Bluetooth, so you could pair it with a wireless mouse and keyboard that would make it a lot easier to play. But at that point, you might as well just buy a laptop and get the keyboard and mouse all built in.

      • Re:Input (Score:4, Funny)

        by Jurily ( 900488 ) <jurily&gmail,com> on Thursday May 06, 2010 @06:55AM (#32109518)

        Doesn't work for a game like WoW

        Some people have ideas [penny-arcade.com] though.

      • The iPad is bluetooth enabled, though, so having better input is just a matter of pairing it with a kb/mouse.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by joebok ( 457904 )

          Yes on the keyboard for the iPad, but a mouse is useless since there isn't any cursor to control with it.

    • For better or worse EVE Online was designed to be played completely with the mouse.

      In fact the devs have made it impossible to play with just the keyboard.

      So thats why it can most likley be played with a tablet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

        Hmm, interesting, but I pretty much gave up on playing EVE with just the mouse, it always felt much faster and more natural to mash the F1-F8 keys and other hotkeys to activate weapons and devices. Plus many of those control elements are pretty small at any usable resolution. Though I think they did succeed at exposing interface elements to noobs by following that philosophy.

        There is a class of games that I've grown accustomed to playing only on a PDA touchscreen and couldn't imagine going back to a mouse

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Barny ( 103770 )

          Throw in world of goo as a good one for stylus touch screen ;)

          And yes, any of the popcap games run reasonably well with touch screen.

    • I would hazard to guess that for this to work, the games would HAVE to be built for it.

      This is true of all apps, just more obviously and thoroughly with games. That's why all those touchscreen tablets that were running normal OSes flopped--if you wanted to use them in any meaningful way, you had to dance around the fact they were designed for use with a mouse and keyboard. Yet somehow this tablet that everyone thought was so worthy of scorn for not being a full OS does well because it forces the programmers to deal with that question before they get put in the marketplace.

    • Without commenting on the whole "which MMOG is bigger/better" thing

      Everquest.

      Ooookay, back to work...

      • You forgot the 2 in the second line... :p

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Barny ( 103770 )

          Yeah, the old favourites are always the best. Back to playing Dark age of Camelot myself, mainly because of all the MMOGs it has the sort of PvP I like :)

        • So I've never played EQ2 and I've only seen WoW played by someone else. I played EQ for about 2 years, Dark Age of Camelot for about 2 months.

          EQ had 3D swimming, racial night vision, different running speeds (potions, spells, bards, etc), the ability to flee a battle, etc. The new games seem so...balanced...and that sort of takes the fun out of some things. There was something cool about my level 50 monk friend jumping through a hole in the ice with his water-breathing spell to go fight some underwater c

  • Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DryGrian ( 1775520 )
    I can't even get a good framerate with Quake 3 on my netbook. Gaming requires powerful video hardware which requires bigger power supplies than tiny mobile devices can deliver; at least, that's the explanation I accepted.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tnok85 ( 1434319 )
      The whole point of this 'cloud gaming' thing is that you don't need a powerful graphics card to run games. It's essentially a streaming video of the game from a server that does have the hardware to run the game. Sort of like OnLive.<p>

      Although I agree nothing is going to come of this, I'm pretty sure there have been a dozen "WoW on the iPhone!" stories too.

      • It's essentially a streaming video of the game from a server that does have the hardware to run the game.

        That sounds like a quick way to die in Team Fortress.

        • The round trip to the server is always the issue with these systems and nobody has come up with a solution, in fact it's hard to see how they could (there's only so much you can do on the software side to compensate, and even then the video is likely to be horribly compressed to get around bandwidth constraints, in which case you might be able to just squeeze the juice out of the device to run the game locally at a very low framerate for a better experience). Might be okay for games that don't require quick

      • But latency will be major problem.
        Currently on a PC client, the video you see is produced live as your client recieve the (minimal) data from the server.

        With such a system, there's additional latency steps introduced by the need to compress, send and decompress the video stream over the network. This might work perfectly OK for games which aren't that much time-critical (some strategy, specially turn-based) but will have a catastrophic impact on anything with fast paced action (no FPS, nor MMORPG with real-

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by linj ( 891019 )
      Quake 3 (Arena) works fine one tier up, though. Runs playable (50+fps) on a (clocked down) 800MHz C2D with that GMA X3100. (:

      At this rate, mobile phone performance is likely to surpass the platform I'm on very soon. Just recently, Intel demo'd a 100fps Q3A on their prototype mobile phone [geek.com].
      • Zounds! *flings disposable netbook in general direction of TV* Closest I'm getting to a 'playable FPS' on this thing anytime soon...

  • Gaming platform (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Thursday May 06, 2010 @03:38AM (#32108818)

    Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform?

    It depends on your definition of "Good gaming platform".

    From the top of my head, I could certainly play Go, Civ, Galciv, BB, and just about anything that's turn based.

    I wouldn't try playing anything with direct action, to avoid the frustration of high ping and lag spikes.

  • If it sounds like hot air, and feels like hot air, it is definitely hot air. Lot of people are looking to iPad not as next gen tech, but as repeat of iPhone app gold rush. Therefore lot of hype, promises and noise too. Most people who have bought iPad for now are techies and geeks. I really doubt common crowd will buy into it.

    Duh, of course, I keep my chance to be very wrong about this :)

  • Tablet PC's can already do this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ziekheid ( 1427027 ) on Thursday May 06, 2010 @03:46AM (#32108852)

    Wouldn't any Tablet PC with a Windows OS installed on it just run WoW for years already? Am I missing something here?

    • Re:Tablet PC's can already do this? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ziekheid ( 1427027 ) on Thursday May 06, 2010 @03:49AM (#32108864)

      Oh and also, since this seems to be about streamed gaming, wouldn't any Tablet PC.. what am I saying.. any device with a compatible browser be able to do so?

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes but then you cannot make an iNews out of it. Slashdot has essentially become an Apple news site. They have to meet their 2 iNews per day quota.

      Quick question: Which company got its own working slashdot subdomain? (Hint: it's Apple)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mdwh2 ( 535323 )

        Indeed - but if only it was still only the Apple section. Now the thrice-daily iStories show up in all sorts of sections, such as Games, Mobile.

    • How to do it properly (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Macka ( 9388 )

      Yes, you're missing a mouse. Applications (games specifically) need to be modified to make use of accelerometer and touch input to be useful on a tablet device. The better games exploit this by adding gestures and multi-touch input to enhance game interaction. You can see this for yourself: there's a 1:28 demo of the iPad version of N.O.V.A [youtube.com] where they show all this stuff off.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by cynyr ( 703126 )

        nope, just make the accelerometer send out mouse signals, or an app to translate the data that way, why would games need to be modified for touch? an FPS tilting the tablet would send WASD key presses.

        But the game you linked did nothing with the accelerometer. What would be cool is http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/77ba/ [thinkgeek.com] but as a multitouch surface with on screen buttons, and palm rejection. I wonder how hard it would be to set up one of those displaylink monitors to do that.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

        I'm picturing all the characters falling over as the tablets move.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wovel ( 964431 )

      Indeed, and yet nobody cares. Should tell you something.

    • I'm pretty sure that a Table PC does not meet the minimum system requirements for WoW, hardware wise. OS wise I assume that Table PCs run Windows CE, which is not a supported operating system for WoW. Now if there is a virtual desktop application for Windows CE, then yes, they could essentially do what this developer did.

      On why WoW was choose? I assume it is a combination of:
      1. Too high system requirements to play directly on the iPad (Civ 4 would play great with iPad controls, its not avialable for it, but

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ukyoCE ( 106879 )

      Likewise any of the modified Macbook tablets that have been sold for years.

      It's still interesting to have PC gaming transmitted to a low-powered thin client.

  • Sum of the parts (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform?

    Anymore that you could take random car parts and weld them together and drive your kids to school in it.

  • Latency. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zencyde ( 850968 )
    Does no one else get offended at the suggestion of real-time cloud gaming due to obvious latency issues? It's bad enough having my network ping at 100ms, I don't need it to take 100ms for a screen refresh. Or is there something about the implementation I'm missing?

    • I was thinking of the same. Firstoff you'd need a stable (and I guess a fast) connection or your framerate would drop and/or you'd be just missing frames.
      As for the latency. Let's imagine you're playing a multiplayer FPS. Beside the time it takes for you to communicate with the streaming platform it also takes time for the streaming platform to communicate with yet another server which is hosting the game. Unless this server is hosted on the same network as the streaming platform the time packets with e.g.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cbope ( 130292 )

      Exactly. Hardcore and even mainstream gamers are fighting over a few milliseconds of LCD input lag or response time, how exactly is cloud computing going to address latency when the actual screen rendering is going to be done hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away, all the while passing these packets through a crappy home router built to a low-price point?

      I'm sorry, but the infrastructure to support this just doesn't exist today and I really don't see it happening in the near future, unless some radi

      • I'm sorry, but the infrastructure to support this just doesn't exist today and I really don't see it happening in the near future,

        I agree, and when it does get here, we will be to the point where this technology can achieve what local gaming could do 30 years earlier. Sometimes you just have solutions looking for a problem. Computer power good enough to run these games locally isn't THAT expensive now. It will likely continue to drop. My guess is that by the time this would become feasible, the processing power in dumb terminals would be sufficient for gaming.

        Besides - IMHO, the main thing that the "cloud" is great for - offsite d

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bluesatin ( 1350681 )

      I'd imagine this screen-refresh issue would be solved if the rendering was done at home with your desktop PC and was then streamed to you sitting in your living room onto your tablet of choice. I've always wondered if it would be a cool idea to have a 'home server' that just ran dummy machines at the end to just completely run off the server, it'd mean you could use nearly any device and have all the same interface.

      Mind you I'm currently in a flat with 5 people in it, so I'd imagine that's really the minimu

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Zencyde ( 850968 )
        Unfortunately, that doesn't actually solve anything and we have the software to do what you're talking about already. This is about leveraging the power of the Internet and using their servers. I don't really see this working even if they have servers everywhere.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cynyr ( 703126 )
        sounds like thin clients. boot a small linux kernel and X, ssh to remote machine and launch gnome, profit.
  • So we have a picture, and we can see that it works. Heck it may even be playable to some extent but that is hardly the point. We're at a stage where gamers will spend $100+ on a cabled mouse and buy the most perfect friction free mousepad they can find to go with it to reduce lag in their gameplay. Here we have exactly the opposite. The game may have been "pictured" but did the guy manage to get anywhere in a team raid?
  • If I (or other more-than-casual WoW players) can't use the UI enhancements which improve on the basics Blizzard provide, it'll never take off with any more than the casual player. However, the casual player won't pay a second subscription to a gaming site, just to play when away from home...
    • In this specific case we're talking about people who have bought iPads. Odds are most of them would.

  • PC only MMO? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by flimflammer ( 956759 )

    FTA: "Famed developer David Perry has posted an image on his blog of an employee playing the PC-only MMO World of Warcraft on the Apple iPad."

    Huhwha?

    • Yes. PC only. Because you can only play it on a personal computer running Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, GNU/Linux, and maybe various BSDs.
      But you cannot play it on a Sony PS3, Microsoft XBox360 or Nintento Wii.

    • That distinction was stupid but understandable in the PowerPC times. Now that Macs only run on x86 it doesn't make sense.

      • The only way to parse "PC-Only" in the original context (without stipulating that TFA's author is a flaming moron) is that it means "Real PCs, not tablet devices". In other words, "this plays on computers, but not tablets".

        Which is not entirely true; a full Windows tablet would probably run WoW. (A OS X tablet too, but those don't exist. Not in any meaningful sense. The iPad may be OS X under its bondage-and-domination wrappings, but unless you jailbreak and install full OS capabilities like application-lev

  • hardly a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Cederic ( 9623 ) on Thursday May 06, 2010 @04:38AM (#32109040) Journal

    I had WoW playable on my T-Mobile G1 (an Android phone) via VNC over a year ago. With the added bonus of a hardware keyboard for text input..

    That a more modern device with a better processor and bigger screen can also do something like this isn't a surprise at all.

    For me the form factor of the iPad precludes its use for serious online interactive gaming. It's a sleek elegant device with diabolical gaming inputs. Why bother?

    Now, getting WoW to run natively on my n900.. that's a fun and worthy achievement. It still wont be a viable replacement for a 1920x1200 screen with full sized keyboard attached.

  • THIS IS ASTONISHING! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Thursday May 06, 2010 @05:12AM (#32109148) Homepage

    But surely the title should be: Fully Featured MacOS Computer Runs Game That Already Runs on MacOS Computers

    No, wait, I have a better one: Expensive Fully Featured MacOS Computer Runs Game That Already Runs on Any Cheap-Ass Commodity Windows Computer

    A little verbose, but I think accuracy is important in journalism.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by Rogerborg ( 306625 )

        Aw, that's just so cute that you believe an iPad doesn't have the hardware and OS to run WoW. When you grow up, you may learn to check your facts before making a silly idiot of yourself, although I'm guessing not.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Azureflare ( 645778 )

      I know it's fashionable to not read the article on Slashdot, but you really should.

      It may be possible for WoW to be re-compiled to run on the iPad, but that's not what happened here. They are using Gaikai, a cloud computing server which is still in beta. Gaikai is designed as a service to play games on hosted servers and stream to your client which essentially acts as a dumb terminal. This would essentially remove the requirement to have a 3D graphics accelerator on your computer.

      It's a very interesting con

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BitZtream ( 692029 )

      But surely the title should be: Fully Featured MacOS Computer Runs Game That Already Runs on MacOS Computers

      Too bad thats not whats happening. The iPad is only displaying and taking input, the game runs elsewhere. That is why this story exists. Its roughly like playing the game via RDP or VNC. Do you think that RDP or VNC some how magically transport the code and data for the application to your local machine to run it?

      No, wait, I have a better one: Expensive Fully Featured MacOS Computer Runs Game That

      • Your impotent anger is like sweet mana from heaven. Tell me again how much the iPad sucks, fanboi. Feeeed meeeeee.

  • No good for action gaming due to latency? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AC-x ( 735297 ) on Thursday May 06, 2010 @08:13AM (#32109874)

    I can't see how this streaming service could be practical for any game with action in it.

    Anyone remember playing the original Quake online (not Quake World)? It didn't have motion prediction so before your player reacted to controls it needed a complete server round trip. That means there would be lag between when you pressed a key and your player react.

    All network games these days move your player in real time then compensate on the server, but if the server is handling the display this becomes impossible. Sure internet connections have got much faster since then but extra delay would be introduced with the video encoding / decoding.

    We put up with network lag back in the day but I can't imagine anyone putting up with it these days. It's a nice idea but I wouldn't put much hope in it catching on.

  • That's a great idea and all, until you run into the problem of latency and the fact that to play WoW even slightly competently you need to perform actions in a split second (easy with a keyboard, not with a touch screen). High latency gaming AND low response time from the user? Yeah I won't be grouping with anyone using an iPad...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by idontgno ( 624372 )
      "Damn raid wiped repeatedly because main raid healer was running WoW through his iPad. So we kicked him out of the guild."

  • Ooh, the irony... (Score:3, Funny)

    by RinkSpringer ( 518787 ) <.rink. .at. .rink.nu.> on Thursday May 06, 2010 @11:51AM (#32112018) Homepage Journal

    From http://www.gaikai.com/streaming-worlds/ [gaikai.com]:

    "All you need is a broadband internet connection, a web browser, and the latest Adobe Flash player (which you almost certainly already have)."

  • TFA describes WoW as "PC-only". I think he might have meant "PC hardware-only", since the game's been available for Macintosh since launch.

  • haha, I share some more ipad games go to this "Featured Free iPad Games" and "10 Best iPad Games We Can't Wait to Play" http://www.ifunia.com/ipad-column/index.html [ifunia.com]

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