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JohnZoidberg's Posts

Hello @tjohnson314  If you're asking whether you need a cable TV subscription, then the answer is no. You will need an internet service subscription, though, including a home WiFi network, and idea... See more...
Hello @tjohnson314  If you're asking whether you need a cable TV subscription, then the answer is no. You will need an internet service subscription, though, including a home WiFi network, and ideally an Ethernet connection to the Chromecast Ultra's power adapter.
Any improvements to the Stadia game node hardware should continue to support the existing Chromecast Ultra installed base. I see no reason why a more powerful GPU would change how the encoder+streamer... See more...
Any improvements to the Stadia game node hardware should continue to support the existing Chromecast Ultra installed base. I see no reason why a more powerful GPU would change how the encoder+streamer would work.
Hello @Django  Unfortunately, built-in Chromecast features are not supported for Stadia at this time. A Stadia Premier bundle will include a Chromecast Ultra along with a controller.
I've never run into that issue in a browser. But, I also have a fairly strict policy of using one Chrome profile for each account. You might try creating a new Chrome profile just for the account you... See more...
I've never run into that issue in a browser. But, I also have a fairly strict policy of using one Chrome profile for each account. You might try creating a new Chrome profile just for the account you use for Stadia (even if you also log in to that account from one of the other Chrome profiles). Then, you can set that profile up to have only the set of extensions you want to use for Stadia (e.g, no adblockers, etc.). If you set that profile up to restore the set of tabs you were using before, and that's just the Stadia tab, then it should just always open directly into Stadia when you select it.
Hello @Erndog2910  I believe the CCU generates 5.1 in PCM format. If I recall correctly, ARC passthrough may only support certain formats, and varies from one TV to another. I don't believe ARC sup... See more...
Hello @Erndog2910  I believe the CCU generates 5.1 in PCM format. If I recall correctly, ARC passthrough may only support certain formats, and varies from one TV to another. I don't believe ARC supports PCM. ARC is just "S/PDIF over HDMI", so similar limitations would apply. Here's an article with more details: https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/5-1-surround-audio-passthrough 
There appears to be an issue with Division 2 servers that is affecting all platforms.
Most of the other answers so far have been on point regarding things like DRM, or the fact that any multiplayer game today relies on a multiplayer server still being available. But, I wanted to add on... See more...
Most of the other answers so far have been on point regarding things like DRM, or the fact that any multiplayer game today relies on a multiplayer server still being available. But, I wanted to add on a different aspect. Stadia games will increasingly not be built in the same way as other systems. Cross-platform games are more likely to be self-contained, but we will see more and more Stadia games built in a more distributed fashion, relying on components spread out across multiple services. Even if you could download just the portion that runs on the Stadia client node, it wouldn't run properly on a computer in your home, since it wouldn't be "near" the rest of the pieces – and the rest of those pieces still need to be running in the network in order for the game to work at all. This distributed nature of game design is so different that the idea of downloading a Stadia game just doesn't make sense, except for the sorts of traditional cross-platform games you can already buy and download elsewhere. The value proposition of Stadia does not include the ability to download games at all. Supporting cross-platform games is a nice thing to have, but the real promise of Stadia is in the games that can't be done on other platforms.
I don't think I have the creativity to come up with novel game ideas, but as a computer engineer with a few decades of experience, I can at least comment on a few of the technical capabilities that a... See more...
I don't think I have the creativity to come up with novel game ideas, but as a computer engineer with a few decades of experience, I can at least comment on a few of the technical capabilities that are available. The big one is proximity. Let's start with single-player to begin with. When a single-player game is running on a console or PC, it's like a small island. The game can only use what it has available locally. Trying to use cloud services is like relying on things that are on other islands that are fairly far away – we can't get a message to another island and back quickly enough to have it impact game state within a single frame. We might be able to rely on getting that response within a few frames, but that limits the kinds of things we could reasonably consider "off loading" to another "island". The result is a more limited scale and scope of the game. Not so much the rendering, but the game logic itself (e.g., how many enemies are on screen depends on how much CPU we can spend on their behavior code – things like path-finding, etc.). When we start running the game code in the cloud, it's suddenly within a few milliseconds of other servers. The other "islands" are practically touching each other. Now, we can start offloading a lot more interesting parts of the game's code to those other islands (servers/services in the cloud) and be more confident we'll get responses back in time to apply them to the game state update we're currently working on. That does two good things: 1) It let's us expand the scale and scope of the game (more NPCs, for example); and 2) It leaves more CPU capacity available on the local game client node which can be used to feed the GPU, etc. For example, let's say you can manage to support 100 NPCs in your game on a standalone system. But, by using a cloud server in close proximity, you can offload all NPC processing and support 1000 NPCs while reducing the game client CPU load to around what 10 NPCs would have cost. This is basically a form of elasticity – we aren't trying to gang multiple game client nodes together, though. Just using cloud servers to offload parts of the game that otherwise would have to be done in the game client. Note that we don't need to dedicate a whole server to each game instance. The functions we're offloading may be "stateless" (meaning each request contains all the information needed to produce a response), which means we can have a pool of server instances providing those services to all of the currently running instances of that game – and we can dynamically scale the number of service instances based on the current load. This "statistical multiplexing" lets us more efficiently use the hardware that's available. Now, let's start thinking about multiplayer games. Today, those games require a server. But, that server is relatively far away. So, it has to process all of the game client state changes (the inputs their players are making) and produce a new consistent set of shared state that gets pushed back out to all of the clients. The latency in doing that is what results in things like rubber-banding, or thinking you hit someone only to have the game say you were the one that got hit first. Multiplayer game servers have a "tick rate", which is sort of like a frame rate, but is typically lower. It's how many times per second they collect all of the inputs and generate a new consistent state. Some multiplayer games only run with a 20Hz tick rate, and this really shows in the resulting game play (more rubberbanding, more confusion). But, when the game clients and the multiplayer game server are very close to each other, we can start running that game server with a higher tick rate – maybe even as high as the game's rendering frame rate. At that point, rubberbanding disappears. There's still a delay between pressing an input and seeing the result. But, that result is more likely to be consistent with what you thought. We can also take advantage of all of the game clients being close to each other. They can share state directly with each other and use distributed consensus protocols to get consistent state changes without going through a multiplayer game server. That sort of thing isn't really an option when the game clients are far apart. I know this has mostly boiled down to performance, but the thing is, the difference in proximity really is significant – an order of magnitude difference in latency really does make some new things possible. Beyond proximity, we can move up a layer to think about what some of those off-loaded services might look like. Some of those services might be game-specific (e.g,. NPC behavior), but some could be reusable across multiple games (e.g., water physics). There are other Stadia features that fall into this bucket as well – the stadia.dev web site has a lot of great material on things like State Share, Crowd Choice, and others. This is getting long, but hopefully it provokes some thinking.
Apple's latest guidelines actually say quite clearly that using a browser is an alternative to following their App Store submission requirements. That's how Luna works, and Apple has no issue with it.... See more...
Apple's latest guidelines actually say quite clearly that using a browser is an alternative to following their App Store submission requirements. That's how Luna works, and Apple has no issue with it. BTW, Stadia supports both VP9 and H.264 codecs (the latter being one that Apple has supported for a long time). More recent versions of Safari/Webkit do support VP9, as well (iOS 14 does, and macOS 11 will). However, the technology that is most likely making the difference here is support for the QUIC protocol, which is what Stadia uses to transport the video stream. That was only recently added to Safari/Webkit.
I haven't tried this myself (no BT controller available). But, don't be afraid to post this in the more general forum where more people are likely to see it than just the Founders in here.
Hello @mist3rious  I don't have that projector, but from a quick look at the specs, it appears to have to HDMI 2.0 ports, which would allow a Chromecast Ultra to be connected directly. Whether you c... See more...
Hello @mist3rious  I don't have that projector, but from a quick look at the specs, it appears to have to HDMI 2.0 ports, which would allow a Chromecast Ultra to be connected directly. Whether you can connect a laptop and get 4K output from it really depends more on the laptop. If the laptop has an HDMI output, it may be able to drive an external 4K monitor/TV/projector – or it may not, depending on the video hardware in the machine.
I see that as a two-edged sword. It certainly helps get more existing games onto their platform quickly. But, it means those games aren't really any different than they would be on a PC. The Stadia p... See more...
I see that as a two-edged sword. It certainly helps get more existing games onto their platform quickly. But, it means those games aren't really any different than they would be on a PC. The Stadia platform as a whole is more work to support, but enables some things that can't be done with a traditional platform – even one that's been lifted into the cloud, since those games still need to work on traditional systems. We've only had glimpses of those capabilities so far (e.g., Stream Connect), because of the lead time in developing new games. In short, Stadia is a long-term play while Luna is intended to make a bigger short term splash. There's room for both in the market.
He didn't say there wasn't a plan. He said there's no public roadmap. Google has detailed plans for lots of things. But, they tend to keep most of their plans secret until they're closer to releasing... See more...
He didn't say there wasn't a plan. He said there's no public roadmap. Google has detailed plans for lots of things. But, they tend to keep most of their plans secret until they're closer to releasing a feature. That said, Stadia requires a lot of physical infrastructure to be built in each region, and they'll have to do the math to be confident that investment will pay off. They can't do that everywhere all at once.
Hello @Tempalca  Your save-game progress is retained (essentially) forever. It doesn't require you to have a Pro subscription. So, it will still be there when you cancel the Pro trial and purchase t... See more...
Hello @Tempalca  Your save-game progress is retained (essentially) forever. It doesn't require you to have a Pro subscription. So, it will still be there when you cancel the Pro trial and purchase the game.
@sulphurtx  Dang. I don't normally help with Chromecast issues, and it looks like ambient mode can't be disabled. The best you can do is turn down the update frequency to 10 minutes. I suspect the H... See more...
@sulphurtx  Dang. I don't normally help with Chromecast issues, and it looks like ambient mode can't be disabled. The best you can do is turn down the update frequency to 10 minutes. I suspect the HDMI output being on all the time is a source of at least some of the heat, though, and that isn't going to get better with a lower update frequency.
Hello @sulphurtx  The Chromecast Ultra does run hot. When it isn't doing anything else, it will (by default) be in "Ambient" mode, which you can configure from the Google Home app. You could try dis... See more...
Hello @sulphurtx  The Chromecast Ultra does run hot. When it isn't doing anything else, it will (by default) be in "Ambient" mode, which you can configure from the Google Home app. You could try disabling it entirely, or just change the slideshow speed to 10 minutes instead of something faster. Just a note, though, that if you disable Ambient mode entirely, you may lose the Stadia Controller linking code display, which would be problematic for you as a Stadia user. So, you may need to leave Ambient mode enabled. It's also possible your slideshow frequency is already set to 10 minutes. All of that said, as long as it's driving the HDMI output, it will be "on" and warm to the touch.
The game will go live on Stadia at 12pm ET / 5pm BST on Friday, 21 August.  This is the normal game release time for Stadia games. It would have been nice to at least communicate that instead of let... See more...
The game will go live on Stadia at 12pm ET / 5pm BST on Friday, 21 August.  This is the normal game release time for Stadia games. It would have been nice to at least communicate that instead of letting people assume it would be at the earlier time.
It will be interesting to see what Chrome says is possible, but at least from this table: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix it looks like the 980Ti can't do VP9 deco... See more...
It will be interesting to see what Chrome says is possible, but at least from this table: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix it looks like the 980Ti can't do VP9 decode. It also looks like the i7-6700k is Skylake, which, according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding also does not support VP9 decode. Looks like you just missed it on both your CPU and GPU. Might be time for a GPU upgrade – I have an even older CPU, but put a 1060 in my machine a couple years ago so it can do VP9 (albeit at 8-bit only). I don't try to do 4K, though.
Hello @SSSJDanny  First, 4K support requires a GPU that can do VP9 decoding in hardware in addition to a 4K display. Are you sure your system can do VP9 in hardware? Next, you mention attaching a T... See more...
Hello @SSSJDanny  First, 4K support requires a GPU that can do VP9 decoding in hardware in addition to a 4K display. Are you sure your system can do VP9 in hardware? Next, you mention attaching a TV. Is this the only display attached, or is there also a monitor? I have seen reports of issues with playing 4K on systems that have two monitors attached when one of them isn't 4K. You may be able to get Stadia to recognize the 4K display by making it the primary display if it's currently a secondary. If that doesn't work, you may want to try having the TV be the only display connected.
The Stadia controller has Bluetooth hardware, but it's only used for initial setup and configuration. It's really designed to connect via WiFi, but also supports USB. It may be possible to make it wo... See more...
The Stadia controller has Bluetooth hardware, but it's only used for initial setup and configuration. It's really designed to connect via WiFi, but also supports USB. It may be possible to make it work via Bluetooth, but I don't expect it's a high priority when there are two alternative methods already. Just get a short USB cable and connect it directly.