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.

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?

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.

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.