Because I see some serious drawbacks, this is honestly more of a thought experiment than something I actually intend on deploying but I am curious if there are ways around the drawbacks or if I just misunderstand.

I know you can use moonlight and sunshine to self host a cloud gaming solution. But AFAICT it is only intended for someone playing their own games on their own computer

What I’m interested in is allowing friends to play their games that they have purchased on my computer, which runs windows.

The drawbacks I see are I can’t play games on my computer while they’re playing, requiring trust that my friends and I don’t mess with each others game accounts, and a constant need to log in and out of accounts

If I install and run sunshine on my main user account, then anybody who I set up with a sunshine account will be able to play as me any game I already own. They could log me out of their steam/ubisoft/whatever, and then log into their own account. If they forget to log out after they’re done, then I could potentially play as them (not that I intend to)

If I create a separate windows account per sunshine account, then they could avoid having to log in and out of their game accounts. But then I would have to manually log into the windows account for them. And ultimately I could still play the game as them

Are there any other solutions? I know there’s no way to get around me not being able to play if they’re playing. And ultimately I don’t see how anything would be able to prevent me from playing games as my friends if they leave themselves sign in, since I have admin privileges on my computer. But is there any way to avoid having to constantly log in and out?

Are there other self hosted cloud gaming solutions that would work better for this?

  • Squid_At_Work@alien.topB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    So I am going to treat this as a thought experiment and not something you are actually going to make an effort to do.

    Utilizing enterprise hardware and software you could standup a GPU accelerated Virtual desktop environment. Lookup VMWare Horizon View. About 10 years ago we tested a new VDI server by playing a CS:GO lan game on a clients server that was 100ish miles from us in a datacenter. It let eight players all run over 100fps with no noticable latency. We accessed them via Teradici zero clients.

    • AnxietyBytes@alien.topB
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      CS:GO uses Source engine which is more CPU dependent than GPU though. It’ll depend on what games OP plans to host. I think this is more along the lines of what OP is after though.