Citrix uses

[BriGy86]

Does anyone have an idea as to how well Citrix would do at hosting games. I'm thinking more along the lines of early childhood games like livingbooks or maybe even games like Lego Star Wars.

 

[imagoon]

Last I checked, Citrix had 0 support for directx. Limiting you only games that use the original windows frame buffers. Also the amount of data generated from full speed video would often take a network to its knees with enough people on it.

 

[BriGy86]

Originally posted by: imagoon
Last I checked, Citrix had 0 support for directx. Limiting you only games that use the original windows frame buffers. Also the amount of data generated from full speed video would often take a network to its knees with enough people on it.

ok thanks, this helps a lot. I think the most active sessions at once would be 30. I'll check their site for directx support.

*EDIT*
I found this
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114582

Looks like it may be supported but only in 16-bit color.

 

[imagoon]

30 users running directx based games may still be asking quite a bit though. 640 x 480 @ 16 bit per pixel is 614400 bytes per frame @ 30 frames per second mean in theory you need to move 18,432,000 bytes a second. 60 doubles that. At those rates you have already exceeded a 100mbit connections max theoretical speed of just over 12 MB a second with one session. Video compression takes time so expect there to be lag and high CPU load (unrelated to the games own load).

 

[dphantom]

Originally posted by: BriGy86
Does anyone have an idea as to how well Citrix would do at hosting games. I'm thinking more along the lines of early childhood games like livingbooks or maybe even games like Lego Star Wars.

Very badly. I have direct experience and in almost all cases, the responsiveness of the game was very poor, even with just a few users on a server. This is especially true of the children's games you mentioned. My team and I must have tested 50-60 different ones, tried about a dozen and after much tweaking, finally gave up.

 

[BriGy86]

Originally posted by: dphantom

Originally posted by: BriGy86
Does anyone have an idea as to how well Citrix would do at hosting games. I'm thinking more along the lines of early childhood games like livingbooks or maybe even games like Lego Star Wars.

Very badly. I have direct experience and in almost all cases, the responsiveness of the game was very poor, even with just a few users on a server. This is especially true of the children's games you mentioned. My team and I must have tested 50-60 different ones, tried about a dozen and after much tweaking, finally gave up.

Thanks for all the responses. I'll look into a different a different solution.

 

[dphantom]

Originally posted by: BriGy86

Originally posted by: dphantom

Originally posted by: BriGy86
Does anyone have an idea as to how well Citrix would do at hosting games. I'm thinking more along the lines of early childhood games like livingbooks or maybe even games like Lego Star Wars.

Very badly. I have direct experience and in almost all cases, the responsiveness of the game was very poor, even with just a few users on a server. This is especially true of the children's games you mentioned. My team and I must have tested 50-60 different ones, tried about a dozen and after much tweaking, finally gave up.

Thanks for all the responses. I'll look into a different a different solution.

What we ended up doing is buying some CD Jukeboxes, uploading the games and playing them from that on the network. That worked really well. The units we purchased had the ability to upload the CD image and store on an internal hard drive. We then installed as normal on the jukebox and the game could access the cd image without having to have multiple CD-ROM drives. Nothing was installed on the actual PC except for an icon to launch the game from the jukebox.

A bit expensive, but we could remotely load and manage the units and load up a ton of games, encyclopedias and other stuff. And if you were looking at Citrix anyway, then it wasn't any more expensive than that. I think it was around $2500/unit back in 2005/6 time frame. These were lower end units more than sufficient for our needs.

 

[BriGy86]

Originally posted by: dphantom

Originally posted by: BriGy86

Originally posted by: dphantom

Originally posted by: BriGy86
Does anyone have an idea as to how well Citrix would do at hosting games. I'm thinking more along the lines of early childhood games like livingbooks or maybe even games like Lego Star Wars.

Very badly. I have direct experience and in almost all cases, the responsiveness of the game was very poor, even with just a few users on a server. This is especially true of the children's games you mentioned. My team and I must have tested 50-60 different ones, tried about a dozen and after much tweaking, finally gave up.

Thanks for all the responses. I'll look into a different a different solution.

What we ended up doing is buying some CD Jukeboxes, uploading the games and playing them from that on the network. That worked really well. The units we purchased had the ability to upload the CD image and store on an internal hard drive. We then installed as normal on the jukebox and the game could access the cd image without having to have multiple CD-ROM drives. Nothing was installed on the actual PC except for an icon to launch the game from the jukebox.

A bit expensive, but we could remotely load and manage the units and load up a ton of games, encyclopedias and other stuff. And if you were looking at Citrix anyway, then it wasn't any more expensive than that. I think it was around $2500/unit back in 2005/6 time frame. These were lower end units more than sufficient for our needs.

Thanks, I think right now we're going with a virtual drive software.