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

Here's the catch

[xagon7]

"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

Re:Here's the catch

[0x0d0a]

im starting to get tired of having to buy all new hardware every few months.

So don't.

The good games that were produced a couple of years ago haven't lost any of their goodness. If you want to sit on the bleeding edge and deal with expensive hardware, issues with new systems coming out, and constantly upgrade, and "beta test" all new games coming out. The only reason to sit right on the edge is because marketing is forcing you ("August 28th, the world will fear...Warcraft IV!") to do so. Just ignore it.

It's better to view the PC market as a system where the current set of games is a beta test for what you *will* be playing in a year or so, at the earliest. That way, all the bugs (savegame corruption, random crashes, getting stuck) are ironed out, frequently expansions get bundled with the main game for free, there are good strategy resources out, the hardware is cheaper, and you don't spend all your time on the bleeding edge. It's called "bleeding" for a reason.

Taking this to a probably more extreme extent than most would be willing, I just played Star Control 2 (via Ur-Quan Masters) and Majesty on Linux for the first time in the last month. Both tons of fun, and for both my PIII is a ridiculous powerhouse.

You can play Half Life (great fun) and the expansions very smoothly on systems that people are throwing in the trash.

It's just a difference between the PC and the console market. The console approach has everyone buy hardware, and then sit there for a couple years while the hardware stagnates. The PC approach is to make games with scalable effects, let people buy hardware when they want -- but make the games available overly early. Only the most fanatical of must-have-it-before-everyone-else gamers should purchase games at release date. Everyone else should just walk the path that they blaze.

Re:Here's the catch

[kinnell]

Hardware, ESPECIALLY gaming hardware changes so frequently, that it would be difficult to support your game in a few years, it would possibly be unplayable on newer hardware

In other words, this would only be feasible if there was a gaming PC with standardised hardware which couldn't be upgraded

why?

[nuggetman]

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.

Re:why?

[Wolfrider]

--Why you spoiled little--!

--Where were you when DOS 5.x was around, and you HAD to reboot to play games? That was the only way to get all the memory optimizations and your sound card working!

--Where were you when Win95 came out, and you had to boot INTO DOS to play most games?

--Where were you when Win98 came out, and you had to reboot AFTER playing Solitaire??

--Where were you when OS/2 came out, and you could format a floppy while looking around for nonexistent drivers for your hypothetical games?

--Why back in the day all I had was 640K and two 360K 5 1/4" floppies, IBM Pee-Cee Dos 2.1 and WE LIKED IT!! ...Mod +1, Mostly True

Hardware detection routines

[Ondo]

The hardware detection routines wouldn't be up to scratch. Most notably, detecting hardware that hasn't been made yet is a bit difficult.

Many reasons.

[NotoriousQ]

• they would have to include drivers for the all the hardware, games need to run on.
• how about all the libraries. DirectX et al is not tiny, as well as the OS they have to include.
• Games frequently use swap, but with no OS, they have no facilities to make their swap files.
• There is a part of the game that needs to be accessible at all times. (AKA binaries, dlls) Those will need to be placed into some kind of ramdisk for multidisk games

Do you think the OS is there for nothing?

Re:Many reasons.

[n.wegner]

>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?

Re:Many reasons.

[MattCohn.com]

>>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.

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 .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.
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.

Re:Many reasons.

[n.wegner]

>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.

My Windows XP CD has drivers for most of the common motherboards, graphics cards, and sound cards. I've never had a problem with it finding them, and it even recognized a card that I couldn't. As I said, if you need other drivers you could just boot your normal OS installation.

>Most Windows games DO have the DirectX INSTALLER
>on them. Big difference in size

The installer has all the files needed to run it, they're just compressed. The data on the CD could be compressed, too. Loading a compressed file would probably be faster than loading the uncompressed one, too. I doubt it's really all that big when installed, either.

>that would be wonderful for the .5% of game players who have Linux

I think Linux can use swap files stored on a filesystem.

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.

Gentoo Games

[_iris]

They do. Look into Gentoo Games

Multi tasking

[gehrehmee]

Say goodbye to your msn/icq/aim/yahoo in the background... Unless of course the game developers started building in support for open-ended protocols like jabber, in which case a remote server could be handling things like providing legacy IM services and native jabber im.

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.

They already do

[squant0]

Its called a console ;)
You should really check them out, full blown computers made just for playing games.

But seriously, because of the licencing on windows / directx and such, I think that unless many / all game developers decided to start using (what some may consider lower quality) open source / free drivers, that this isn't going to happen any time soon.
Also, gamespy type 3rd party software wouldn't work, and irc clients for finding games may not be included either...

I think a completely new OS, build from teh ground up for gaming would be needed to be developed, and be very very modular to support all the different hardware with quality graphics and sound. Think shared memory software rendering for every mobo sold in the last 4 years...

Good idea though...

Hardware support.

[Vector7]

Why not? Sure "why not". The reason is hardware support (obviously) - trying to support everything in people's computers now would be an almost impossible task (Linux has a hard enough time doing this, imagine every little game developer having to attempt it..). And assuming you COULD manage that half, the major thing would be that you wouldn't work on any new hardware released after the game shipped, unless it tried real real hard to be compatible with older hardware at a low level. In the age of the "legacy free PC", the industry is moving in exactly the opposite direction.

I think we've certainly lost something since the days of Amigas, Atari, and even older PCs (with 99% compatible hardware), where you had basically a fixed hardware platform and to get new features you crammed in extensions (rather than building something totally different and just writing new drivers). I wouldn't argue that either approach is better, but it's certainly lowers the barrier to entry for fun things like fringe operating systems, and, oh, say, games that boot off CD. Ages ago, there were actually a few PC games that booted off disk and bypassed MSDOS entirely.

Now you could agree upon some conventions and standards for drivers, how to arrange things on the disk so your self-booting software could find them, and you'd already be most of the way toward having an operating system. You'd then probably have a pile of CDs with utilities for configuring your hardware, managing files on the disk, etc, etc.. and eventually they'd start getting distributed together, coupled tighter and tighter, until you ended up with something indistinguishable from the operating systems we know today (reminds me somehow of the way business try to merge vertically until they encompass every aspect of their market, just to shave off a few percent of overhead each step of the way).

I think this is pretty much how the industry evolved to start with.

reboot?!

[akudoi]

Okay, lets say that the hardware dectection was there. I really don't think people want to reboot every time they want to play a game.

Plus you couldn't multi-task you're games anymore either. granted, a lot of games you dont need too. however there were times where i would play counter-strike in window mode and multi-task back to a word doc or the net while i waited for the next round to start. as well as letting you run say, winamp in the background and mute ingame music.

and just as im typing this. how would save games be handeled? you cant assume they have a HD if its a live cd.

it sounds brilliant at first. but quickly falls apart imo.

Obvious Reason #53

[highcaffeine]

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.

Defeats the Point of the Platform

[Prien715]

Two issues (other than HW support):

1) I don't know about any of the other slashdot gamers out there, but I'm seldom only doing one thing at a time. I'm usually on some sort of IM client and if the game I'm playing isn't networked, I may download something at the same time or may even play an mp3. If I wanted to check my e-mail every 15 minutes, that'd mean a reboot every 15 minutes. No thanks.

2) Patches. One of the unique parts of the PC platform is that if there's a bug, you can patch it. Buring a CD multiple times is a pain. If the game is even remotely network capable, it's a must to be able to patch to help prevent extensive cheating/hacking.

Game Consol.

[mohhomad]

Why not use the idea of a liveCD and somehow work it into a game consol. You don't have to worry about hardware support because the hardware is standard, but you get the benefit of having better versions or tweaked versions of the linux kernel for each game and an easy environment to design games in rather than specialized hardware or software that has a steep learning curve. As a sidenote this would allow you to play games from independant studios that might not have money for licencing fees or development hardware.

Security also a concern

[SpaFF]

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.

Not such a great idea

[Anonvmous Coward]

I appreciate the sentiment here, but what about forward compatibility? How would a game made today talk to the video card I buy in a year?

I think that point has been established already. Another one that's been covered heavily is the reboot issue. I don't want to reboot just to play a game. I have consoles for that. If it's really that imperative to make a game like that, then why not make it under a virtual machine? Why not use something like VM-Ware or MAME? Make a game for MAME, and you're golden. Okay, there are limitations, but it works on everything down to a PocketPC.

Gotta ask, though, why not just develop the games in Java?

One reason: Networked Multiplayer

[iCEBaLM]

Reconfiguring your network connection everytime you go to boot a game cause you can't save settings on a CD? that sucks...

read updates off the HD

[TheSHAD0W]

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!

Reason? SPEED

[Joff_NZ]

One major problem: CD-ROM drives are waay slower than harddisks.

Remember when people used to do "minimal" installs of games to harddisk and have most of the game content on the CD?

Doesn't really happen much anymore because the loading times are unbearable.

They have done this. Where have you been?

[vasqzr]

You don't remember the Gentoo/Unreal Live CD?

Unreal Tournament 2003 Gentoo Live CD

Posted on 16th September 2002 by drobbins

Epic Games' much-anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is now available on a self-booting Gentoo Linux-based LiveCD, allowing you to play the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo using any modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 2 or greater graphics card and a CD-ROM drive. Full networking, OSS sound and Creative Soundblaster Live! and Audigy support included, allowing for the full gaming experience including LAN/Internet play, EAX environmental audio and of course 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics. The CD also serves as a fully-functional Gentoo Linux installation CD. You can download the CD using this link.

Re:They have done this. Where have you been?

[Wolfrider]

--That was disappointing as hell, I wanted to run it on my Riva TNT2 card. :( Didn't know about the fancy Geforce requirement until just now when I read your quote.

--Plus the layout of the CD wasn't exactly intuitive; I think the game itself was in /opt somewhere.

Spawn

[_iris]

I could definitely see games that are written for Linux offering this as a "spawn" copy (ala Diablo). Select the basic hardware configuration (e.g. IDE/SCSI, CPU type, video card) and it would create an ISO image to be burned to a CD/DVD. These would be awesome for LAN parties.

Of course, there are many of them...

[teknico]

...here is one about MAME:

http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/cd-readme.html

There are links to other similar projects at the end of the page.

Easy

[drsmithy]

Can anyone inform me why games developers don't put out games on a 'Knoppix' style live CD?

Because it's a daft idea. The only advantages it would offer would be to a tiny minority of people who aren't prepared to spend $50 on an OS (but are probably prepared to spend $LOTS on the latest and greatest hardware every year) while everyone else would suffer because of the disadvantages.

This would negate coding the games for different PC platforms.

No, it would not. It would merely negate writing a code for supporting a tiny portion of customers and substitute the much more difficult task of coding for the umpty-um million different combinations of PC hardware out there.

A platform includes the software _and_ the hardware.

Yep, I'd be chomping at the bit to return to the bad old days of wondering whether or not a flash new game was going to support my particular hardware combo.

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.

No, it would almost certainly only run on the PCs that particular distro of Linux happened to support *at the time of the games release*.

And, given that support of cutting-edge hardware favoured by gamers tends to be spotty under Linux at best, I think that would be a bloody stupid move on behalf of game developers.

Only major drawback I can see would be the need to 'reboot' each time to play. Any thoughts or views on 'why not' ?"

Oh, there's many more drawbacks than that. Having to reboot is relatively a minor one.

Hardware support. Your game-on-a-CD is probably going to have huge problems with hardware released after it is.

From the developers perspective, support would be an utter nightmare, largely because of the hardware support issues.

No guarantee of convenient writable media - where are the saved games going to go ?

Memory constraints. No guarantee of available swap space.

Size constraints. Most games these days don't fit on a single CD.

Having to reboot the machine to play games. That'll be *really* popular in a house where several people share the one machine.

You basically want us to go back to the early 90s, when playing games meant having appropriately "compatible" hardware and having a custom boot disk for each game.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

If you want a console, buy a console. If you don't want to use Windows, be it for financial or philosophical reasons then accept the fact that this decision brings with it the consequence of a limited selection.

What a bunch of MS shills!!!

[mabhatter654]

I thought this was /.? I must be on ZDNet with all the worthless & unimaginative drones on the board!

OK, let's start again!

Let's start with Morphix/Knoppix as a base module. They are consistant and fairly stable in development. Next, lets set up the drives with stored configs, persistant home, and swap file...[note to self, may need winXP script to set up files in NT systems. As long as the file size is exactly the same Knoppix doesn't have a problem] Now adding an SDK for compatibility....Let's see both Morphix and Knoppix now support the idea of modules...precompiled & zipped up add-ons keyed to working with the disc. These would be useful for the SDK, and for the games. Again, they could sit on ANY file system. You could download new SDK modules to your HDD when you get new hardware! Knoppix is based on Debian which has execllent forward & backward compatiblity built in!! Knoppix suports External everything out of the box, USB keys, memory cards, external drives...storage of game saves is a moot point.

WE have forward and backward compatiblity, removable storage, extensability of the game & OS. The only things missing are a few key bits of software. One would need to establish a very strict API [SDL perhaps] and carefully guide it for this purpose. There would need to be work done on the game end to optimize for varied requirememts/ best play.

Overall, it's doable RIGHT NOW! So stop bitchin' about it! Try offering some constructive soulutions instead!!