For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.
any of that going to change?
Oh -- I see, it's for creative teams to share their design work? sketches, models, etc?
https://twitter.com/ParsecTeam/status/1425206344467034113
The Parsec folks are good people but I'm still a little worried.
On the client side at least a lot of what Parsec was leveraging seemed to be built on webrtc, so there's a lot of potential for similar things to come along I think.
More details: https://support.parsec.app/hc/en-us/articles/360045797752-Re...
I looked and there didn't seem to be much at all that didn't rely on just one vendor's as-buggy encoding stack - such as NVIDIA Experience software instead of just their drivers, and it's sad to see the closest tech to this this be part of some acquisition instead now by a company that seems uninterested in open sourcing anything even if it doesn't endanger any of their commercial market (e.g. Unity and their Burst LLVM compiler thing)... I don't even need all the matchmaking and team sharing stuff, I just want NVENC/etc.-based desktop streaming that doesn't bomb itself over the slightest system anomaly.
However, there is an alternative to Nvidia's closed source backend, called Sunshine (argh, the pun): https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine
I haven't tried it yet, as I do run Windows /w Nvidia GPU on my desktop, but it apparently uses nvenc correctly (I'm on a Turing, Turing and Ampere have that fancy low latency mode for their encoder; something Steam still doesn't engage for in home streaming, yet uses the nvenc API directly), but also can support multimonitor (has a shortcut key to cycle through monitors).
Looks like they just pivoted towards business users instead.
Anyway, congrats to the team!
They got quite a few business clients that needed high fidelity and low latency Remote Desktop client including ironically enough many game dev studios that needed a better solution than to ship heavy and expensive dev workstation to their employees homes, they also got quite a few proviz users onboard that also needed to be able to leverage their existing hardware remotely.
I’m guessing that Unity can offer now a remote development workstation solution for game development and visualization.
Shameless plug, my startup is working on exactly this at the moment but for Unreal Engine 4, but we have plans to bring this tooling to Unity as well. The web has the opportunity to become the #1 distribution platform of choice for real time 3D developers, and it's the path to the decentralized metaverse.
When Unity do streaming, it wont be through a browser, it will be a dedicated app that users trust. (like Netflix).
The value proposition of streaming is not that its on the web, it's that you don't need expensive hardware.
Today, most large game companies do many of these things in-house — by offering services to solve some of these challenges Unity is hoping to lower the barrier to entry for smaller developers to compete and convince the larger ones that they would be better off using managed services instead.
I wouldn't bet on a technology stack frozen in 2012 hardware capabilities, where I cannot be certain if the users can use my 3D renderings at all if they are misfortune enough to be on a mix of hardware, OS or GPGPU whose browser decided the best thing to do for user's safety was to switch to 3D software rendering.
As electricity prices go up we need to get closer to the metal, OpenGL might not be good but it's the best tool we have and probably will ever have. Vulkan might replace the middleware but the OpenGL API will survive.
As for the metaverse it does not depend on one implementation, but a bunch of file formats and network protocols, I'm pretty sure this protocol will prevail: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse
I've been playing around with similar ideas in the space. For instance, instead of delivering full frame buffers to your clients, send them instructions on what to draw based on their current viewport dimensions (e.g. webgl). This is more constrained and requires the application to target a specific UI framework - although I can support arbitrary 3d scenes of modest mesh and texture complexity now. The headline advantage here being the amount of data going across the wire is almost trivial in comparison for most use cases.
I think there is still a lot more to go in the area of server-side application delivery tech. Our networks are getting faster and our compute is getting denser.
The next generation of shardless MMO would depend on something like this. Getting to 1 million concurrent players will probably look a lot like a stock exchange.
It would definitely be great to see archive.org use something like it stream old software/games/media without having to distribute it.
I wonder what the odds are of parsec opening their code / protocol, making their money from renting out servers...
Microsoft has this service already and its called Remote Rendering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR1iaCcZPrU
With the quest I can stream from PC over wi-fi today. But yeah, doing it over the internet seems far fetched.
Now I think you're thinking of running the vr application that's doing all the rendering remotely and strraming thst to the headset, it would definitely run into issues because of the latency.
Seems like Unity is looking to build a similar stack with Parsec at the helm, but I guess we'll see...
Idk if they'll get into game streaming, but for their existing business it makes a lot of sense already.
Edit: Somehow they got $460m revenue. Voila for Remote Desktop app. I would never thought they can make half a billion of dollars in revenue.
(i am looking at you Zoom)
from the press release
"Parsec has become a go-to solution for hybrid work models among gaming companies such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Square Enix and is integrated in many of the industry verticals where Unity sells solutions, including media and entertainment, architecture and design, and more. Together, Unity sees an opportunity to drive shared momentum with these customers through targeted cross-selling and bundled solutions."
Used to be that the client was free and you paid for the machine.
Both are impressive but the tech must be somewhat standard no?
Also Shadow runs its own datacenters which seems far more impressive team wise.
Can anyone shed some light on why this technology is worth so much in that context?
Parsec is more like TeamViewer, VNC or AnyDesk in that you uses your own hardware to both connect to and from, albeit with a latency that's low enough to play games, and color fidelity that's good enough to do graphics. It is much valuable to businesses that wants to levrage their own powerful hardware but no be limited by teleworking employee.
Good for the Parsec guys though!
Unity has this high level plan to be in the business of hosting things, assets in source control, cloud builds, metrics. I'm sure they will have workstations you can rent, same as MS is doing.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a service where developers can provide streaming test builds to end users. (Much safer than sending end users builds in a world where DRM is mostly useless)
