Second life on onlive or similar?

[Suki Theas]

Will SL ever be coming to a service like onlive? Id be more than happy to pay the onlive monthly fee to be able to use SL anywhere.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

This Onlive?  About a year ago Linden Lab experimented with an online version of Second Life.  It didn't go over very well, apparently.  From what I gather it was separate from the real SL so, though, it was Second Life in a sense, it didn't allow for users of the cloud version to interact with the users of the server delivered Second Life.  Not sure how well user created content worked either.  I don't see a version like that working very well........not the way SL is built right now anyway.  People want access to everything in SL and not only the stuff in the version they are running.

[Suki Theas]

Yes, i remember trying the beta for that, it was almost completely useless! I think they partnered with gaikai for it. It would only ever be worth it if it was the full sl running.

I dont see why something like online couldnt offer Sl along with all the other games they currently provide, maybe theres a technical reason they cant, but it seems more like a licensing issue?

[leliel Mirihi]

There's no technical reason Onlive couldn't do it. It would, however, cost them more money to run than a normal game because sl is a bandwidth hog itself. They may have just not thought of it, try asking them.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I think there are some technical reasons why they couldn't do it.  As you well know, practically everything anyone sees in SL is the result of user created content (sky, stars, moon sun, many trees, and most of the terrain is Linden Lab made........just about all the remaining is user created).  That makes for some rather unique problems if one wants a cloud delivered game......not least of which is the constantly changing texture/object data that is very seldom optimized for loading and/or performance.  The storage requirements for all that data is huge and ever growing.....I really don't think a cloud provider like Onlive would even let Second Life on their servers.  It's not just bandwidth, it's storage (or the networking necessary to get the data from remote servers linked to the Onlive servers.........then that old problem of querying servers for data to be sent, sending the data, then delivering the data.  Only this time there's another potential slow down with all that happening and then the user has to get it sent to their computers).  The only way I can see a cloud version of Second Life is that if LL were the provider........and they attempted that about a year ago (if obviously didn't work very well since the dropped the project pretty quickly).

 

With the dynamic content and the ever growing data base for all the content that SL has, that "I'm sure they could do it" gets a little involved.  Yeah, nothing's impossible (or so they say) but some things are not feasible or just won't work like everyone wants it to work.  An infinitely available financial base may not even be enough..........just too technically complicated to do with very little useful return for the efforts.  Maybe  someday........but, as I see it, not anything soon.

[Suki Theas]

Ah ok, i wasnt sure if there would be some issues holding it back. would be nice to be able to use sl on my ipad tho!

[leliel Mirihi]

Some of what you say doesn't apply, the rest are economic reasons Onlive wouldn't do it, not technical. Anyway I see cloud rendering as a solution that's behind its time. It just barely makes financial sense to do it now, after most hardware is fast enough already. I think cloud rendering is on it's way out before it even got started.