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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' ?"
"Provided the hardware detection routines were up to scratch"
Hardware, ESPECICALLY gaming hardware changes so frequently, that it would be difficult to support you gam ein a few years, it would possibly be unplayable on newer hardware.
FP
Because most games don't even fit on a single CD for one OS, let alone a Win/*nix/Mac combo setup... even a DVD is probably too small.
Plus I don't wanna reboot my system to play games.
...and that's all there is to it.
What about game saves? Sure, it could possibly include drivers for the current filesystems (of course, NTFS r/w was/is still pretty sketchy under Linux last time I checked), and the boot process could seek out the current drives. Of course, they'd also need to be able to support all the ways people connect drives to their systems. If I'm saving my progress in a PC game right now, it doesn't matter whether I'm saving it to an IDE drive, SCSI, USB, Firewire, network share (Samba, NFS, Netware, etc.), or even battery-backed RAM disk.
But, even assuming they could manage to handle all the currently supported filesystem types and all the ways of connecting them that already exist, what happens when new FS types come along? "Sorry, sir, but your machine is too new for our game to be able to provide you the ability to save your progress." I don't think that will cut it.
What happens when there is an exploit in something like the TCP stack that is used by the kernel that the bootable cd is using? Then your machine is exploitable everytime you want to play your game. The game company isn't going to want to press another edition that fixes the exploit and replace the old copies on the shelf with it so that your machine will be safe.
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>as well as the OS they have to include.... but with no OS
That's nonsensical. The whole point is that it does include the OS, and even you agree to that.
>drivers for the all the hardware
That is impractical. Including almost every driver that a Windows install cd does would be more sensible. I think Knoppix is already at that stage, but I haven't tried it. You can always play in your existing OS installation if it doesn't have the drivers you need.
>how about all the libraries. DirectX et al is not tiny, as well as the OS they have to include.
Last I checked, most Windows games ship with a copy of DirectX, so that library isn't much of a problem. The CD has to have all the drivers, the kernel, OpenGL, X, SDL, etc. but thankfully doesn't need a desktop environment or most of the misc. apps that typical distro has. How large would it be? I'd say less than 50 MB, but who knows. The gentoo game cd is, what, a 130 MB download including the UT2k3 demo? Compressing it on CD is always an option.
>Games frequently use swap
Knoppix can use existing swap partitions (or format its own). In most cases, the user probably has enough ram to run the game, though, so swap isn't a huge deal. If not, they'd need swap no matter where they boot from.
>some kind of ramdisk for multidisk games
What of it?
The OS could, on boot, read update information off a directory on the hard drive. For that matter, if it were done cleverly, it might even be able to load its kernel image from it.
The advantage of having control over the environment the game runs in is enormous. Of course, it also means the machine would be useless for background tasks, and no one could interrupt you with something more important...
Aaah, who am I kidding; nothing's more important than the game! ph34r m3 l4m3rz! d13!
>>as well as the OS they have to include.... but with no OS
.5% of game players who have Linux, but the rest of the world doesn't have a Swap partition. I know you CAN in Windows, but it isn't required, and as such rarelly gets made.
>That's nonsensical. The whole point is that it does include the OS, and even you agree to that.
Yah, let's go ahead and show the whole quote now, shall we?
"Games frequently use swap, but with no OS, they have no facilities to make their swap files."
He meens an OS to handle the file system. I'd like to see you put a swap file onto a CD-ROM. What's ROM stand for again?
>>drivers for the all the hardware
>That is impractical. Including almost every driver that a Windows install cd does would be more sensible. I think Knoppix is already at that stage, but I haven't tried it. You can always play in your existing OS installation if it doesn't have the drivers you need.
You know what's impractical? Expecting everyone who's ever going to play your game to have hardware who's drivers are on that disc. Hardware is constantly being created; tomarrow ATI will come out with a new graphics card, the next day Creative will release a new sound board, and the next we'll get a new nVida card. You are right, most people can get video with drivers out of the box from Windows. They get 640x480 with 16 colors and a *BEEP* from the PC Speaker for sound.
>>how about all the libraries. DirectX et al is not tiny, as well as the OS they have to include.
>Last I checked, most Windows games ship with a copy of DirectX, so that library isn't much of a problem. The CD has to have all the drivers, the kernel, OpenGL, X, SDL, etc. but thankfully doesn't need a desktop environment or most of the misc. apps that typical distro has. How large would it be? I'd say less than 50 MB, but who knows. The gentoo game cd is, what, a 130 MB download including the UT2k3 demo? Compressing it on CD is always an option.
Most Windows games do NOT have DirectX on them. Most Windows games DO have the DirectX INSTALLER on them. Big difference in size, and in functionality. Most games already take a full CD or more... cramming more shit including a whole OS isn't going to work unless you want to release Pong 2K4 to the world.
>>Games frequently use swap
>Knoppix can use existing swap partitions (or format its own). In most cases, the user probably has enough ram to run the game, though, so swap isn't a huge deal. If not, they'd need swap no matter where they boot from.
I never play games... but a friend of mine told me he needs to upgrade his RAM, because he's under his new games REQUIRED MINIMUM of 512 FUGIN MB. I wanted to hit him with a keyboard and confiscate his mouse for putting up with it... but it's a fact. Games require more and more, and it's unlikelly they are going to be happy with your RAM enough to not want a lil swappin' on the side.
And as for the Swap partition... that would be wonderful for the
Oh, and I'd LOVE to see people's reaction when to play a SINGLE game, the 'installer' has to format your drive. "Please wait while your existing partition is resized and a new one created... if you had any data you wanted, you should have most likelly backed it up".
>>some kind of ramdisk for multidisk games
>What of it?
Meh.