Live CD for PC Games?

Onion asks: "Can anyone inform me why games developers don't put out games on a 'Knoppix' style live CD? This would negate coding the games for different PC platforms. Provided the hardware detection routines were up to scratch, the game could be coded using GNU/Linux for development and would run on any PC machine, regardless of OS. Only major drawback I can see would be the need to 'reboot' each time to play. Any thoughts or views on 'why not' ?"

Comments

Because it's hard?

[squiggleslash]

You answered your own question really:

Provided the hardware detection routines were up to scratch

They're not. Microsoft is only able to get Windows to be as universal as it is because they're actively helped by every hardware manufacturer out there. But games manufacturers can't redistribute Windows, so, as you suggest, they'd have to base the CD on Linux (or some other free OS.) This in turn is a problem because Linux's hardware support is not universal, XFree86 generally needs some tweaking to get "just right", and generally the only reason distros tend to find some way of getting a screen up is to assume VESA and then do what configuration can be done afterwards.

It's a bugger. Most games developers have enough to think about without having to build an OS "installer" too. So for now, expect most games to be primarily developed for specific OS platforms.

Drawbacks

[artios]

Rebooting -- that is kind of a big one -- but people who have dual boot partitions do it all the time.

Hardware Detection: We are talking about some serious driver databases here. Especially if you want to enable all the whistles available in each piece of hardware.

There is a reason why we install an OS. So that every program/game doesn't have to redo what has already been done.

If game developers were going to put that much effort into a game, they might as well just port their stuff to Linux and MacOs, and be done.

Eventually, I think that is what will happen.