KI in Project X-cloud testing

Hey, I thought I’d let everyone know, just in case anyone wanted to try out KI on X-cloud.

I know with fighting games the latency could be a deal-breaker, but personally I’ve played MK11 and SF4 on Nvidia’s cloud service, and latency wasn’t that bad. I honestly couldn’t tell there was any. So if X-cloud’s infrastructure is on par with Nvidia’s (I’d wager even better) it should be a pretty smooth experience.

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Just saw this too and was rushing over to post! This is great news!

I’d love to try it but I don’t have an Android. And I don’t know if my controller is Bluetooth compatible

What is X-Cloud?

It’s what Microsoft is calling their game streaming service. Kinda similar to what Google’s doing with Stadia where they stream gameplay from their servers and you don’t have to have a dedicated console to play games on. The difference with X-cloud is you can still play games offline on Xbox as well, or you can even stream from your own Xbox, plus they have Gamepass.

So I can play a game without downloading it essentially? And if I’m at my brother’s place and want to play a game I own but he doesn’t, I could just sign in to my account and play from his system?

It’s a cool idea. I’m just kind of wary of all of these X-As-Service type things that are coming in vogue. I don’t like not having physical access to the things I buy, as EULA’s are generally structured to let company’s do whatever they want and stick you with the bill anyway when stuff doesn’t work as planned. I don’t even like Office 365 for that reason - I’ve got a valid Word, but it randomly desyncs itself sometimes, and when it does it completely shuts me out of a product that I bought because it doesn’t want to authenticate properly. Wound up having to do a bunch of writing in Notepad on my last US/Singapore trip because of that crap…

Plus, I’d kind of like to just buy things once for the most part. Subscription fees (especially for things that were standalone purchases previously) tend to make me angry :-p

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Yeah, I’m wary of what this might lead to in ten years.

But it’s not just “you can stream and play from someone else’s console.” It’s more like “You can stream and play from your phone, the LCD display on your coffee maker, your buddy’s iPad, a reflection in a pool of water etc.!”

I feel like it will never work for fighting games because who wants even an additional 5 ms delay in a fighting game? But it might work well for RPGs and single player action games that don’t require ms timing.

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The xCloud testing sounds extremely cool, but since I finally abandoned Windows Phone for an iPhone earlier this month, I won’t be able to try it for myself just yet. Here’s hoping that KI will come to iOS soon!

-Zenek :green_apple:

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So, I got an email earlier saying I got into the X-cloud preview, and…it’s ok? I’m not going to lie, it’s exactly what anyone bemoaning streaming is expecting. Latency is there, and I wouldn’t want to play anything competitive on it, but it works. I’ve only played 3 games on it so far…KI, Tekken 7, and Halo 5. When I first booted up KI I was met with a pretty lousy first impression. There was something weird going on with the inputs where it wouldn’t register 2 button presses at the same time, so throws and Shadow moves were super inconsistent. It cleared up after I tried booting the game up again later. The lag was definitely there, but I did test playing online, and it was low enough that I couldn’t tell if I was losing due to being rusty or due to the lag, so I guess that could give some sort of idea as to how it is.
I can’t say much about Tekken 7. I never played it before this, so…the video quality was good…
On Halo 5 I played a round of Swat against my son on our Xbox One. Same story there…aiming seemed kinda jerky, but it wasn’t bad enough to make the game unplayable.
But yeah, overall I’d say it’s fine if you’re looking for a casual experience, but I’d avoid it like the plague if you’re wanting to play competitively.

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Day 2: I played the first 2 missions of Halo 5’s campaign with my son, and it kinda got me scratching my head over the latency. While I was playing aiming was still super jerky, but I noticed the video and audio seemed to have no visible lag compared to my son’s game on our Xbox. So to me it seems like it’s more something that’s just out of whack that could get fixed easily before the full launch perhaps?

I don’t like the idea of game streaming. It’s one step further down the line of us not actually owning our games and the corporations being able to take them away whenever they want. It’s the same problem I have with Netflix. And why I still buy physical copies of shows and movies i like.

That’s fine, and certainly understandable. Having games pulled from digital stores sucks enough. I only learned Afterburner Climax existed after it was pulled due to their licenses for the jets they used running out, so I had to resort to PS3 emulation to play it for myself. And I know other games, such as Scott Pilgrim vs the World that have suffered the same fate, and that’s not even touching the problem with online games or games with online multiplayer that go away whether you have a physical copy of the game or not.
Right now though, I think Xbox seems like it’s going to handle it well…it’s just a supplemental service to add to Xbox’s other features. I mean yeah…maybe in the future it’ll lead to nobody owning anything…but then again even with all the different video streaming services out there you can still buy physical movies, or rent, or stream, so there’s that…

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