Ok, I’ve watched it now. I think my statements above still stand, but here are a few items specific to this video:
This technique is currently only applicable to general computing tasks. He uses the phrase “pretty fast” several times to describe the experience, but it’s not suitable to anything that is frame or latency sensitive, like games.
At one point, he loads up the Movies and TV app, but I’m skeptical that video playback would be smooth enough for most people.
He mentions a setting for automatically turning off the VM at a certain time every day.
It’s possible that this is oversimplified in the UI, but there is (was?) a distinct difference in Azure between a VM that is turned off and one that is deallocated. If I remember correctly, there is no difference in billing rate between a VM that is on vs. off, and the only price advantage comes when it is deallocated. Hopefully this setting takes care of that.
It’s also worth mentioning that I’m not aware of a setting to automatically turn the VM back on later. allocating a VM is relatively fast, but it’s not instant. I’ve seen it take around 20 minutes.
The VM he creates in the demo would cost ~$100 CAD to run 24/7 per month. He correctly points out that it’s only cost effective if you keep if off (deallocated) most of the time. This is an additional responsibility that doesn’t exist for a local PC.
It’s also worth noting that the SKU he used is fairly low-spec (2 cpus, 7GiB RAM), so consider that a more robust configuration would cost more, possibly significantly.
Even when a VM is deallocated, the storage remains, and has a cost associated with it. Storage is significantly cheaper than compute, but it’s not free.
He glosses over many of the details of actually setting up the VM. There are a couple that stood out to me.
He checks a box about Windows licensing. If I understood it correctly, by checking it, you’re affirming that you have a volume license agreement with Microsoft. This makes perfect sense in a corporate environment, but I’m not sure how licensing would be handled for an individual. This is a potential cost and legal issue that shouldn’t be ignored.
By opening up the RDP port, it should be understood that you are exposing this VM to the Internet. That is a very different scenario to how most (I hope) people’s home computers are set up, with them being behind a router, so there’s at least one layer of indirection. It’s possible to better secure your connection to the VM, but it’s certainly more complicated than the average user is comfortable with.
The Azure products and user interface are not designed with the average user in mind. This is not a consumer product, so I wouldn’t recommend someone go down this path without at least some research and study. Maybe there will be a more consumer-level product created under the Office365 brand at some point. I do think there’s an opportunity there. If they were to bundle it with their cloud gaming product and price it appropriately, they could have a useful and valuable product on their hands.
A very minor quibble: He makes an off-hand remark about how using a cloud VM to skirt around regional video restrictions is illegalTHIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE: This seems suspiciously broad, and could be misinterpreting against the TOS as illegal. It’s also a weird thing to bring up, because I don’t think this would even be a very good way to do that.
I just gave this (well, the Oz subsidiary, anyway) a try.
The queue to get a game was around twenty minutes (Saturday, midday, free tier; allegedly ~30 seconds if you pay) but once it was going it ran perfectly.
I hadn’t been able to play any graphics-intensive games (i.e. basically anything except for Clausewitz-engine strategy games such as Stellaris and Crusader Kings) since my old PC died; the replacement I managed to get has no room for a graphics card.
With this thingie, Mechwarrior V was running better than it did even when I did have a graphics card.
After reading that (thank you!) and checking them out, I think the GeForce Now is probably closest to right for me. Mostly because it can use my existing games and not make me re-buy them all.
I’ll likely try that. But with a cranky starting opinion. Not sure it’s worth yet another subscription fee just to play games I already own. But if it does work well and give me value, then I’ll be all for it.
May have to run an ethernet line from the internet ingress point to my office. Wifi is good enough, but maybe not for that. Or maybe it is. It can directly feed music and full video. Why wouldn’t it be good enough, if it can do that?
Maybe I’m getting old, don’t understand why the stuff that can do previously-unthinkable things and now does them routinely isn’t good enough anymore. Yeah, reading that, I must be getting old.
I had the paid service for a month, which was long enough for me to finish the Mechwarrior V story campaign and then burn through a non-story mercenary runthrough with the Heroes of the Inner Sphere DLC. The cloud gaming thingie was completely satisfactory throughout.
However, I cancelled it after that. I can’t justify $30/month for a pure luxury on my income.
But, if an interesting new game is released, I might pay for another month. It’s certainly cheaper than trying to maintain an up-to-date gaming PC.
—
In other news, I ordered myself a birthday present:
…which is mostly just so I can paint the miniatures. I’d have very little chance of finding any local players even if there weren’t a plague on.
There’s a weekly games club in Launceston that might have some willing opponents, but going to that would require riding home in the dark for an hour over heavily wallaby-laden forest roads, which is basically suicidal.
But my brother’s coming to visit in a few months, so I might get some games in then.
After months of delays from other stuff, I finally played through Life is Strange: True Colors. I absolutely loved the first game (and I gushed about it mightily at TOP). The general gist of the games they are narrative choice-driven stories involving young people with supernatural abilities, and naturally a bunch of really bad shit goes down. (Deep themes like racism, queerness, death, depression, suicide, etc run throughout as well - usually walking that thin line of not being exploitative.)
The second mainline LiS game was good, but the story didn’t really hit the same for me. A cross-country adventure with two brothers trying to escape the law just didn’t hit quite the same, I guess. (And it didn’t help that the player character in 2 wasn’t actually the person with the supernatural abilities - just more of a proxy.) It was still a good game and worth playing, but other than a couple very memorable moments I really don’t remember much about it.
I was excited for the third when it seemed to get back to its roots but this time with a slightly older character with a lot more baggage.
Anyway, it was pretty fucking good. Some really intense moments, great storytelling, and many paths to follow. As always, you are often faced with terrible choices and the one that feels “right” can often have consequences just as awful as doing the “wrong” thing. You can only try to do the best you can knowing there’s often no good outcomes. There’s 6 different endings but after getting my ending I didn’t feel a need to go back and play the others. (I watched the others but in the end they were 3 different variations on two major choices.)
I don’t want to give away too much because it’s really something best experienced blind so I will say if you’re into heavily story-focused games with a very deliberate pace and interesting characters it’s well worth it. A full play through will be 10-12 hours if you take your time to experience everything. It’s free to play with Xbox Game Pass, or can be purchased from the various services. It can be a bit pricey at its full $60 MSRP (especially given it’s short playtime and relative lack of replay value) but it’s often on sale for less.
I have a mate in Brisbane who I’ve managed to tempt into buying a copy for himself. Once that arrives, I might be able to get a remote game happening.
In the meantime, I’ve had a couple of short games against myself to refamilarise with the rules.
In tonight’s battle, we had a scenario where one big mech (Battlemaster) was trying to get across the map while three smaller mechs (Locust, Commando, Wolverine) tried to stop it.
The Battlemaster was doing well, largely by half-ignoring the attackers and just plowing on regardless [1]. In desperation, I sent the Wolverine in for a charge, hoping to slow the big mech by knocking it down.
The charge connected, did lotsa damage, and took out several of the Battlemaster’s weapons with a lucky critical. But, really, the whole point was to knock it down. However, the big mech made its piloting roll and remained standing.
Not so for the smaller attacker, which lost its footing and landed on its head, doing significant damage to the pilot. Who just barely held onto consciousness as the Battlemaster casually strolled off the end of the map to win.
Same old Battletech.
.
[1] With hindsight, the smaller mechs needed to stick one of their number in front as a roadblock; just harrying from behind wasn’t enough. Next time.
On turn two, both teams landed some solid hits, including a lucky shot to the Awesome’s head from the Thunderbolt’s LRMs. But now several of the red team mechs are beginning to overheat…
Turn three and it’s looking ugly for Team Red. Their Thunderbolt was knocked on its arse after eating two PPC bolts to the chest, while their Locust not only fell over, it then suffered the indignity of being stomped on by the Catapult, snapping a leg off.
I have never played the tabletop version, or almost any version in general, but I have fond memories of playing Mechwarrior 2 on PC. I specifically remember building/configuring a mech that was stripped down to almost nothing and then loaded with as many PPCs as would fit. It would start overheating after only one or two shots, but if they connected, it would pretty much destroy the enemy. I seem to remember that it only worked well in one of the two game modes. Either it worked well in single-player but was absolute garbage in multi-player, or the other way around. Fun times.
The Awesome is the classic Battletech PPC boat, but it also carries plenty of armour and enough cooling to cope.
There was a Mechwarrior Online meme build called the Direstar, that carried so many PPCs that it would shut down with every shot and destroy itself via overheating damage after a few volleys. But anything it hit was instantly vaporised.
