Game Streaming

Game Streaming

Another way to play City of Heroes in the same building/house/office is to use a game streaming setup. This works best with a tablet or phone paired with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. (Mouse support is broadly available since Android 9 and iPadOS 14.) You will also need to leave your gaming PC powered on during play, and the keyboard/mouse will be accessible to a bystander while streaming.

Commercial services like GeForce Now and Stadia are not going to work, as developer support is required before use. However, you can use the following on your own:

Hardware Methods

• NVidia -- Use Moonlight. This app has full support of NVEnc hardware encoding. Client support is VERY broad, however, including Raspberry Pi, Android, Apple TV, and even Steam Link boxes.
• Radeon -- AMD Link is available, which works on cards and integrated video using Adrenalin version 22.3.1 or later. Guest hardware includes iOS and Android devices.

For hardware solutions, the use of a USB and/or an HDMI dongle for simulated keyboard/mouse and monitor may be needed for a headless system (a PC with no KVM or Remote Desktop access only) to be useable (when using a spare system instead of a normal computer.) Both methods require proprietary software to be installed for each solution (AMD Link for Radeon, GeForce Experience for NVidia) and will not work without installation.

Software-Only

Full software solutions include Parsec, Kainy, Steam Link, and Rainway. Most have h264/h265 support as the basis of operation, which can be used by a wide swath of devices. Browser-based play is usually limited to Google Chrome, as streaming video support is not as broadly implemented on Firefox, Safari, or other browsers. (Steam Link doesn't directly support City of Heroes use, the client will need to use a trick to gain access to Windows desktop to start the game manually.)

Software Game Streaming apps may be able to take advantage of hardware encoding in certain circumstances, however, they will have a performance hit compared to using hardware encoding only and will rely more upon the strength of your network.

Network Considerations

Your house network must be capable of at least 5-10MBps of free bandwidth internally PER SESSION to permit game streaming in the same house (2 people streaming? At least 20Mbps available). This is NOT your Internet Speed, but your internal network speed between network hardware and computers.

• Wi-Fi: using AC or Wi-Fi 5 is recommended, with Wi-Fi Mesh equipment over a single router. A strong signal is needed to maintain 60fps video at any size. (Most online video and TVs are 30fps.)
• Ethernet: your NIC card, port on a laptop, and router must be at least 1Gbps. 100Mb Network hardware in a house with multiple devices may not have sufficient headroom for Game Streaming use.
• Use of 4K video will be extremely difficult at any capacity. It is strongly recommended to use a 2K resolution or lower while streaming.

As a generality, your home network is only as fast as your slowest device. If you cannot stream well, the following may help:

• replacing any switching or routing devices that can't exceed 100Mb,
• replacing 10/100 only NICs,
• switching older laptops and appliances from Ethernet to Wi-Fi only,
• replacing old cabling (use CAT-5E or CAT-6),
• finally, any Wi-Fi devices at 802.11b/g/n should also be removed if they can't be upgraded.

Playing remotely away from home

For play outside of your house your upload speed (not download) must exceed the actual bandwidth used to stream the game in your house. If it does not, game play will be jittery or fail to stream out. (Your download speed only matters to the client device outside your house.) To solve this, you'll need to turn your host resolution and frame rate lower until your upstream bandwidth is low enough for stable play.

While some services like Parsec can negotiate a connection outside of your home network, for zero-account software apps you may also need to configure your uplink device or router to allow traffic outside, which is a security precaution.