6 ms·

OnLive comes to Ouya, Controller Makes Full Frontal Debut

66 points by aiham 14y ago

illumin8 14y ago
This has been mentioned before, but by simply using colored circles for their controller buttons, they are ignoring the needs of a lot of color blind gamers. This is why every console manufacturer has symbols on the buttons. Color coding doesn't work so well when a significant percentage of your players can't differentiate between green and red. This could be solved very easily by picking some symbols to go along with the colors. Of course, our patent and trademark laws are ridiculous and it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B...
- randomdrake 14y ago
  Seems like a no-brainer to use: O, U, Y, A.
  - bdz 14y ago
    there will be letters. and yes, O, U, Y, A. http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/4547820/ouya2_gallery_post.jpg http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/4547820/ouya2_ga...
  - paulhodge 14y ago
    Funny story, an early version of the OnLive controller used the letters L,I,V,E, which spelled EVIL when read a certain way. http://9to5google.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/onlive_controller_front_labeled_full.png http://9to5google.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/onlive_control...
- aiham 14y ago
  They state at the bottom of the post: "P.S. We're still deciding on the buttons. For now, we've stuck with the colored circles as placeholders. But don't fret, we won't leave out colorblind gamers. :)"
- fhars 14y ago
  Not only has it been mentioned before, it is clearly described in the article as an interim solution that will be relaced by something accessible to coulorblind people in the final design.
- slantyyz 14y ago
  >> Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B.. Wouldn't Nintendo (Super Nintendo), Sega (Genesis and forward) et al. have prior art on this? Microsoft was far from the first to use those letters.
  - teamonkey 14y ago
    Designmarked, not patented I believe. So the green A, red B, blue X, yellow Y are owned by Microsoft. Sony have the circle, triangle, square and cross. In terms of patents, Nintendo have the cross-shaped D-pad, Sony have the segmented d-pad and Microsoft are left with the awful spongy rocker pad.
- arthurbrown 14y ago
  >> ... it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B... Nintendo and Sega have both used this scheme since SNES / Dreamcast respectively (as well as Nintendo DS).
- wreckimnaked 14y ago
  > This could be solved very easily by picking some symbols to go along with the colors. Of course, our patent and trademark laws are ridiculous and it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B... That'd be a shame. X, Y, A and B sounds more Super Nintendo than Xbox.
nemo1618 14y ago
Not going to lie, that controller is looking pretty ugly. Any word on if they'll support USB controllers? Obviously you'd lose the touch functionality...unless you plugged in a Wacom or something, lol
- slantyyz 14y ago
  Well, the system is open and hackable, I'm sure someone will write drivers to allow PS3, Wiimotes, 360 and generic USB controllers to be used.
  - zdw 14y ago
    PS3 and Wiimotes would be relatively easy, as both are just Bluetooth devices and the OUYA has that built in. Xbox 360 controllers would require either wired or the RF adapter that MS sells for PC use.
    - slantyyz 14y ago
      Actually there are also dedicated PS3 USB and Xbox USB controllers, most commonly used in tournament fight sticks.
onli 14y ago
This is where projects like this may fail brutally. Controller-design is hard. Mapping small fast movements to the screen, especially when playing 3D-games, needs a perfectly for the job designed hardware. Consoles lack a good input anyway, compared to the mouse. That is why kinect was so promising, though of course movement-controllers have their own set of issues. Their solution now is to cave. They didn't design their own controller. Instead, they oviously took the xbox and ps3 controller and merged them. Those controllers solved some issues when compared to the old controllers for the snes and such, with the circle-sticks (which unlike the one from the N64 aren't as high thin and probably therefore longer lasting) and the holdable form. So the controller is nothing special, but from the conept-side it at least won't be much worse than the ones from current consoles. Maybe using such a generic one was a smart move.
- pvidler 14y ago
  If their controller fails horribly, perhaps they could use the OnLive 'universal' controller -- the one that works with OnLive's console as well as all laptops and android/iOS devices. It's actually a really nice controller -- better than the PS3, slightly worse than the Xbox 360 (but without the battery pack issues).
  - needle0 14y ago
    Wait, how can the OnLive controller support iOS? AFAIK iOS only supports Bluetooth HID keyboards, not joysticks/gamepads.
    - Cushman 14y ago
      Maybe it pretends it's a keyboard. It's not like they're tied down to gamepad drivers.
      - slantyyz 14y ago
        That's how iCade's products work.
    - 14y ago
89a 14y ago
haha! ugly as sin
TheEzEzz 14y ago
The big news here isn't the controller, it's OnLive. With Google fiber rolling out, and eventually pushing the country toward gigabit, there will no longer be any reason why a cheap, weak box with an internet connection can't topple the console giants. Eventually this will spill over into general computing. There is a giant pie to be won here, and both OnLive and Google know how valuable it is.
- dguaraglia 14y ago
  Just pointing out: bandwidth isn't half as important as latency is in this context. We still don't know how good latency will be on Google Fiber.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Maybe the answer is to have local nodes. Think of it like a traditional video arcade, somewhere in your town is a small datacentre full of servers hosting various games.
    - forrestthewoods 14y ago
      And if that still isn't good enough then each gamer can have their own personal mini-datacenter in a box right by their TV or monitor! :)
      - corin_ 14y ago
        I presume you're joking and therefore don't need a proper reply to this, but figured I'd check..
        ralfn 14y ago
        Well, to be fair, there is a lot of spare sillicon in most households. One giant powerserver per family, is much more efficient and should provide more bang for your buck.
khangtoh 14y ago
The pipe is not going to be bottleneck in this case. It's the device's speed/processor/etc.
JL2010 14y ago
Honest question: is anyone here using onlive? How is the gaming experience? Are the visuals, performance and latency acceptable? How are they doing in terms of their sales/subscribers? I remember reading about it a long time ago thinking that it would be a sign of the future and something I would definitely want to try. It seems to have fallen off of my radar and I don't know anyone who uses their service, and I would consider myself and my friends "hardcore" gamers.
- scrame 14y ago
  I played through Arkham Asylum on the PC and Arkham City on the OnLive console, and found it ... adequate. I tried the beta and it didn't even work, but went back when AA was 99 cents and was impressed that they were even able to make a reality. I pre-ordered AC because it came with the console for free, and it was pretty slick. However, I subscribed to their "channel" and have been pretty disappointed, the games are mostly old or random indie titles that don't always fit the model, and a good number require a mouse/keyboard which you can make work with the console, but is much clunkier than the slick wireless controller (which is _very_ well done). There are 2 problems: 1) Anything even smelling like a dropped connection boots you entirely out of the game, and can take a few minutes to get back in. This includes just pausing and walking away for 5-10 minutes. 2) The batman games worked because they have a slower, more deliberate input system, and auto-save constantly. Otherwise it just won't be able to keep up. So, barring licensing, I just don't see it being able to play something that needs a good twitch response time, multi-player, or something that is hard to recover after an immediate drop. So, no diablo, CoD, real-time strategies, or MMOPRGs. Without those titles, it won't be able to get a lot of traction. Still, a really awesome technical achievement. The PC executeable is a couple of _megs_ and can then just stream anything, but a lot of gaming needs either fast response time (which you lose with the server round-trip), or the ability to just stop for a few minutes without losing everything you've got.
  - Olreich 14y ago
    MMOs have lots of potential actually. They are built to deal with lots of lag on input, and hide it well.
anateus 14y ago
One of the fun things I get from that is that OnLive are going to make an ARM build of OnLive. That means it should be Raspberry Pi compatible! (OnLive have released ARM builds of their desktop service to run on tablets which shouldn't be too far from the full on game product, but afaik this is the first time they've promised an ARM-targeted version of it).
- unwiredben 14y ago
  Maybe... Rasberry Pi has an older ARM core without the v7 instructions and a much simpler GPU than the Tegra 3 chip that's in the Ouya. I'd not expect it to work there.

66 points by aiham 14y ago

This has been mentioned before, but by simply using colored circles for their controller buttons, they are ignoring the needs of a lot of color blind gamers. This is why every console manufacturer has symbols on the buttons. Color coding doesn't work so well when a significant percentage of your players can't differentiate between green and red. This could be solved very easily by picking some symbols to go along with the colors. Of course, our patent and trademark laws are ridiculous and it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B...

randomdrake 14y ago
Seems like a no-brainer to use: O, U, Y, A.
- bdz 14y ago
  there will be letters. and yes, O, U, Y, A. http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/4547820/ouya2_gallery_post.jpg http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/4547820/ouya2_ga...
- paulhodge 14y ago
  Funny story, an early version of the OnLive controller used the letters L,I,V,E, which spelled EVIL when read a certain way. http://9to5google.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/onlive_controller_front_labeled_full.png http://9to5google.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/onlive_control...
aiham 14y ago
They state at the bottom of the post: "P.S. We're still deciding on the buttons. For now, we've stuck with the colored circles as placeholders. But don't fret, we won't leave out colorblind gamers. :)"
fhars 14y ago
Not only has it been mentioned before, it is clearly described in the article as an interim solution that will be relaced by something accessible to coulorblind people in the final design.
slantyyz 14y ago
>> Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B.. Wouldn't Nintendo (Super Nintendo), Sega (Genesis and forward) et al. have prior art on this? Microsoft was far from the first to use those letters.
- teamonkey 14y ago
  Designmarked, not patented I believe. So the green A, red B, blue X, yellow Y are owned by Microsoft. Sony have the circle, triangle, square and cross. In terms of patents, Nintendo have the cross-shaped D-pad, Sony have the segmented d-pad and Microsoft are left with the awful spongy rocker pad.
arthurbrown 14y ago
>> ... it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B... Nintendo and Sega have both used this scheme since SNES / Dreamcast respectively (as well as Nintendo DS).
wreckimnaked 14y ago
> This could be solved very easily by picking some symbols to go along with the colors. Of course, our patent and trademark laws are ridiculous and it's highly likely that Microsoft has already patented the letters X, Y, A, and B... That'd be a shame. X, Y, A and B sounds more Super Nintendo than Xbox.

nemo1618 14y ago

Not going to lie, that controller is looking pretty ugly. Any word on if they'll support USB controllers? Obviously you'd lose the touch functionality...unless you plugged in a Wacom or something, lol

slantyyz 14y ago
Well, the system is open and hackable, I'm sure someone will write drivers to allow PS3, Wiimotes, 360 and generic USB controllers to be used.
- zdw 14y ago
  PS3 and Wiimotes would be relatively easy, as both are just Bluetooth devices and the OUYA has that built in. Xbox 360 controllers would require either wired or the RF adapter that MS sells for PC use.
  - slantyyz 14y ago
    Actually there are also dedicated PS3 USB and Xbox USB controllers, most commonly used in tournament fight sticks.

onli 14y ago

This is where projects like this may fail brutally. Controller-design is hard. Mapping small fast movements to the screen, especially when playing 3D-games, needs a perfectly for the job designed hardware. Consoles lack a good input anyway, compared to the mouse. That is why kinect was so promising, though of course movement-controllers have their own set of issues. Their solution now is to cave. They didn't design their own controller. Instead, they oviously took the xbox and ps3 controller and merged them. Those controllers solved some issues when compared to the old controllers for the snes and such, with the circle-sticks (which unlike the one from the N64 aren't as high thin and probably therefore longer lasting) and the holdable form. So the controller is nothing special, but from the conept-side it at least won't be much worse than the ones from current consoles. Maybe using such a generic one was a smart move.

pvidler 14y ago
If their controller fails horribly, perhaps they could use the OnLive 'universal' controller -- the one that works with OnLive's console as well as all laptops and android/iOS devices. It's actually a really nice controller -- better than the PS3, slightly worse than the Xbox 360 (but without the battery pack issues).
- needle0 14y ago
  Wait, how can the OnLive controller support iOS? AFAIK iOS only supports Bluetooth HID keyboards, not joysticks/gamepads.
  - Cushman 14y ago
    Maybe it pretends it's a keyboard. It's not like they're tied down to gamepad drivers.
    - slantyyz 14y ago
      That's how iCade's products work.
  - 14y ago

89a 14y ago

haha! ugly as sin

TheEzEzz 14y ago

The big news here isn't the controller, it's OnLive. With Google fiber rolling out, and eventually pushing the country toward gigabit, there will no longer be any reason why a cheap, weak box with an internet connection can't topple the console giants. Eventually this will spill over into general computing. There is a giant pie to be won here, and both OnLive and Google know how valuable it is.

dguaraglia 14y ago
Just pointing out: bandwidth isn't half as important as latency is in this context. We still don't know how good latency will be on Google Fiber.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Maybe the answer is to have local nodes. Think of it like a traditional video arcade, somewhere in your town is a small datacentre full of servers hosting various games.
  - forrestthewoods 14y ago
    And if that still isn't good enough then each gamer can have their own personal mini-datacenter in a box right by their TV or monitor! :)
    - corin_ 14y ago
      I presume you're joking and therefore don't need a proper reply to this, but figured I'd check..
      - ralfn 14y ago
        Well, to be fair, there is a lot of spare sillicon in most households. One giant powerserver per family, is much more efficient and should provide more bang for your buck.

khangtoh 14y ago

The pipe is not going to be bottleneck in this case. It's the device's speed/processor/etc.

JL2010 14y ago

Honest question: is anyone here using onlive? How is the gaming experience? Are the visuals, performance and latency acceptable? How are they doing in terms of their sales/subscribers? I remember reading about it a long time ago thinking that it would be a sign of the future and something I would definitely want to try. It seems to have fallen off of my radar and I don't know anyone who uses their service, and I would consider myself and my friends "hardcore" gamers.

scrame 14y ago
I played through Arkham Asylum on the PC and Arkham City on the OnLive console, and found it ... adequate. I tried the beta and it didn't even work, but went back when AA was 99 cents and was impressed that they were even able to make a reality. I pre-ordered AC because it came with the console for free, and it was pretty slick. However, I subscribed to their "channel" and have been pretty disappointed, the games are mostly old or random indie titles that don't always fit the model, and a good number require a mouse/keyboard which you can make work with the console, but is much clunkier than the slick wireless controller (which is _very_ well done). There are 2 problems: 1) Anything even smelling like a dropped connection boots you entirely out of the game, and can take a few minutes to get back in. This includes just pausing and walking away for 5-10 minutes. 2) The batman games worked because they have a slower, more deliberate input system, and auto-save constantly. Otherwise it just won't be able to keep up. So, barring licensing, I just don't see it being able to play something that needs a good twitch response time, multi-player, or something that is hard to recover after an immediate drop. So, no diablo, CoD, real-time strategies, or MMOPRGs. Without those titles, it won't be able to get a lot of traction. Still, a really awesome technical achievement. The PC executeable is a couple of _megs_ and can then just stream anything, but a lot of gaming needs either fast response time (which you lose with the server round-trip), or the ability to just stop for a few minutes without losing everything you've got.
- Olreich 14y ago
  MMOs have lots of potential actually. They are built to deal with lots of lag on input, and hide it well.

anateus 14y ago

One of the fun things I get from that is that OnLive are going to make an ARM build of OnLive. That means it should be Raspberry Pi compatible! (OnLive have released ARM builds of their desktop service to run on tablets which shouldn't be too far from the full on game product, but afaik this is the first time they've promised an ARM-targeted version of it).

unwiredben 14y ago
Maybe... Rasberry Pi has an older ARM core without the v7 instructions and a much simpler GPU than the Tegra 3 chip that's in the Ouya. I'd not expect it to work there.