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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
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Free Ipod here
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.
>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?