OS Independent Games?

Jakyll asks: "Why aren't there [more] games for the PC that come on a BOOTABLE CD-ROM? Use Linux and autodetect the hardware - it would make DirectX and Microsoft irrelevant. Boot the disk just like your PC was a Playstation or an XBox - what is the main reason this isn't happening?" A few publications have been released like this: Gentoo has done this for UT 2003 and America's Army (they have their own site but it appears to be broken at this time); and there are the ScummVM Live CD ISOs, out there. Does anyone know if the major game studios have plans on doing something similar, or if not, the reasons why they aren't?

Comments

Horrible idea.

[Chester K]

it would make DirectX and Microsoft irrelevant
Does anyone if the major game studios have plans on doing something similar, or if not, the reasons why they aren't?

Why would they? DirectX is a very powerful set of APIs that there's no real equal to on Linux yet (it's more than just Direct3D, you know), and by including the entire OS as part of the game, you're hurting your forward compatibility for everyone except people technically savvy enough to recompile a new kernel and burn a new bootable CD with drivers for newer hardware.

You obviously never played a DOS game, did you?

[Quarters]

I remember when SVGA Air Warrior shipped, circa 1992 or 1993--first game I ever worked on. It was one of the very first SVGA games to come out. It shipped on quite a few 3.5" floppies. A lot of that space was eaten up by close to forty (40!) different video drivers and an equal number of sound card drivers. There was no auto-detection, so if you didn't know the exact hardware configuration of your machine you could easily screw up the install and end up with a game that either worked poorly or not at all. It was the Dark Ages of PC gaming. The Amiga was a far superior gaming platform because it was closed hardware and therefore developers could concentrate on the game and not on the spit and bailing wire to make the game work.

DirectX is extremely relevant. It puts a nice abstraction layer out there so that game developers no longer have to worry about supporting every freaking darned obscure piece of PC hardware that might exist. I honestly believe that if DirectX hadn't come along the driver situation would've spiraled out of control and PC gaming would've died a long long time ago. It'd be console gaming or nothing right now.

No user in there right mind wants to reboot their machine all of the time to play a game. Developer's don't want to be hamstrung with driver nightmare and only 650MBs (minus space for an OS and drivers) of space.

Missing a few obvious faults

[obeythefist]

You could quite conceivably do this. You could effectively turn a PC into a mediocre abnormal console by using a bootable CD to apply an O/S and then execute the game.

But just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea.

Here are the flaws:

1) This is advocating using Linux for gaming on a PC. Linux is a great O/S in that it's open, free, and functional. But it has never, ever exceeded Windows in terms of gaming performance, even for OpenGL games that have optimisations for Linux. Linux doesn't have any API's that get close to the tight HAL/driver/API system that Windows uses so smoothly. Ahh, you say, but a bootable linux CD would be streamlined to run the game! Less overhead! This is true. But you'd also have more overhead because, as you know, Knoppix doesn't run nearly as tight as a properly optimised Linux install because it needs to be robust rather than sleek for compatibility purposes.

2) The reboot factor that people have mentioned

3) Windows XP boot time on my system at home: ~15 seconds. Redhat boot time on my system at home: ~20-30 seconds. Knoppix CD boot time on my system at home: ~120 seconds.

4) The no-patching problem that people have mentioned

5) Hardware support. There was another thread recently that mentioned the good, but not excellent hardware support under Linux. It's always getting better, but it's still not perfect.

Having said all this, once Linux starts supporting DirectX, there will most likely be a full scale revolt amongst gamers against the beast of Redmond. It's good to dream, isn't it?

Re:I was wondering too

[floamy]

Not true. Gentoo's UT2003 and UT2004 gamecd uses the binary NVIDIA drivers. The license that came witht he drivers also specifically allows redistribution, even repackaging.