Design Limbo

The future of gaming is finally here and it is called OnLive. When I got back from vacation I made it a point to check out this new service, which recently started offering a Founding Members Program which waves the monthly fee for the services for a full year, nice.

The service is interesting to me on a couple of points. First it’s all online delivery of the latest games. Unlike GameFly which uses the standard Netflix model of sending out physical media, OnLive is all online, streaming delivery. Now that’s the future!

I have a Netflix account, have for almost 2 years. I have never received a Netflix disk in the mail. I only use their Instant deliver (online streaming) and it rules, although Netflix could speed up adding things to it.

Personally I don’t like physical media, it can get damaged or lost and after a while just ends up taking up space and adding to the garbage pile. Which is why I kept an eye on OnLive for quite a while and signed up right after the E3 announcement. I believe the OnLive/Netflix Instant model is the future and I’m all for it.

After getting the OnLive client installed on my computer I fired it up and started browsing. I decided I would purchase the 3 day pass for Batman Arkham Asylum and try it out. I noticed no input delay, no lag or anything that would tell me I wasn’t playing this game on my local computer. The sound was crisp and everything was very fluid. It took a little bit to get the game started, but that didn’t bother me at all. From my few hours of game play experience OnLive works exactly as advertised. I could use my keyboard and mouse combo, or my Xbox 360 compatible controller for almost any game I wanted, which is good because I cannot play FPS or RTS games with a controller, so the game type and input options were refreshing.

OnLive don’t do a very good job of communicate this, but the monthly fee is just for your access to the service, not the games themselves. I’m currently not paying a monthly fee so that doesn’t bother me, but depending on the retail cost of the service that might be a stretch. So far there seems to be three methods and prices for playing games via OnLive:

1. 3 Day PlayPass ~$4.00
2. 5 Day PlayPass ~$8.00
3. Full PlayPass (Retail Price of the game)

So lets say your playing Final Fantasy 13 on OnLive, where it could take you 80 hours of game play to beat. Lets assume you can play for 4 hours a day on average, without taking a day off, that’s 20 days of play. Lets assume a 5 day PlayPass cost’s $6.95 and you need 5 of them, that’s a total of $34.75, not including your monthly subscription fee. I bought a 3 day PlayPass for the Batman Arkham Asylum game and only played 1 day of it, I think it’s most likely you won’t be able to all the days of your pass.

When you buy the full game on OnLive you get it until they remove the game from the service, some of the messages I read was that it would be available till 2013, so you get 3 years. If you can’t already tell I’m not 100% sold on the cost model for the service, if I GameFly Final Fantasy 13, I pay 15$ a month and can keep it until I’m done with it. I get 30 or so days at 15 dollars, compared to 20 at almost 35, not including the service fee. But I have to deal with the physical media and I have to have the console.

OnLive wants to bill itself as a service where you don’t need “top end hardware” to play games. But I think there missing the mark on this one. People already have Xboxes and decent computers. You can’t play RockBand on OnLive or have a Kinetic for the Xbox on OnLive, so people will have consoles anyways. OnLive should be focusing on instant access to the latest games and value, because they won’t replace a computer or console, but instead will be a supplement to it.

I’m truly excited about OnLive and if your even a little be into gaming you should give it a try, they have casual games like World of Goo to sports games like NBA 2K to FPS’s. I’m optimistic that the service will thrive and eventually find it’s place in the gaming ecosystem and give us consumers more of a choice, why pay the full price for a game you can beat in a night, buy a PlayPass and only spend $5.

Just a very quick post to make up for a glaring oversight on my part. One that I forgot that my coworker Staxmande just pointed out to me, that is absolutely essential, for your VS2010 installation is the Search References extension. I –HATE- the Add References dialog in VS2010 and for a company that is working toward a better UX experience seriously dropped the ball on that very critical part of the developer workflow.

So in addition to the ones I listed in my earlier post get Search References too, unless you like the hair rending experience of the current dialog.

Visual Studio 2010 is extremely powerful all on it’s own. But with the Extension Manager and the Visual Studio Gallery how can you not load of VS2010 with some great extensions. Of course my list isn’t limited to the Extension Manager itself nor just free products. One of the items in the list isn’t even VS2010, but lets keep that our little secret.

As a developer in the Microsoft space I spend the vast majority of my time inside Visual Studio and even more so now that they made The SQL Management Studio also leverage the VS IDE. So it’s important that you make your development experience as fluid and comfortable as possible. Given that there are a few Addins\Extensions that I can’t live without anymore.

1.) Resharper
    I can’t develop with my little green box in the upper right of my code window. Not only does it give me background compile error checking it also gives some very useful code cleanup suggestions. I’m no ReSharper keyboard ninja and only know a few keyboard commands, but there are plenty to get your Kata on. I’ve made liberal use of searching, refactoring, extraction and code generation capabilities of ReSharper that when it’s not installed I’m a little lost.

2.) PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010
     This is a must for anyone developing in Visual Studio. At first look the command set included is ‘meh’ until you need one, then a whole new world opens up. Undo Close saved me a few times and Format on Save keeps all my documents consistent without me having to Ctrl-K-D all the time. Open Containing Folder is my sacred cow of the command set and I found myself using it a lot.

3.) Regex Editor
     I rarely do any RegEx, but when I have to I hated it with a passion. I usually found a website where I could get RegEx help and had a way for me to test and refine my RegEx without having to go back and forth. Well now that functionality is in VS2010! If your doing any work with RegEx this is a must, with IntelliSense and testing.

4.) Spell Checker
      I recently had to do some Java development and I used the Eclipse development IDE. Eclipse has a built in spell checker that I found incredibly useful and was astounded by how many spelling mistakes were in my comments. I know I’m a bad speller but this was embarrassing. After that I searched around for one in VS2010 and found this addin. Works like a charm and keeps me embarrassed throughout the day.

5.) Solution Load Manager
      Have a large Visual Studio 2010 solution? Tired of waiting endlessly for it to load? I routinely have very large solutions, due to my flagrant misuse of the Onion pattern and separating almost everything into their separate DLL’s. As my solutions grow each project will take longer and longer to startup. So do I let VS2010 load times dictate how I architect my solutions? No! I softly whisper to myself that I don’t have a problem and got this extension.

6.) Visual Studio Tip of the Day Start Page
       I always like learning new little tips, and by gosh there is an extension for that! Every day when I open VS2010 I’m greeted with a new little tip.

7.) devColor
       If your working with Hex color this little addin draws a line under then with the color corresponding to the Hex value you typed in your code. It caught me making a mistake on my coloring that might have been hard to find otherwise.

8.) Team Foundation Server Power Tools
      If you ever had to administer a TFS server you will love this VS2010 extension. Although it only works with TFS 2010 when/if you upgrade make sure this is on your list for all your developers to install in their VS2010 environment.

Finally, not a Visual Studio addin, but something I’ve found very useful in my development lifecycle is SQL Prompt from Red-Gate. I –HATE- the IntelliSense in SQL Management Studio and SQL Prompt thankfully makes my SQL writing so much easier.