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

It's because...

[timothv]

nobody wants to reboot their computer. Rebooting often takes a while because you have to save, close apps, and it can sometimes strain hardware such as harddrives.

Re:It's because...

[BladeMelbourne]

Most people save their work and close applications before starting a game for performance reasons (to free memory for example) and to reduce the possibility of data loss in the event of a crash.

Rebooting takes very little time, even on my [old] P3/450. Granted it takes longer to shut down Fedora than Win98, but not much longer.

I like the idea about bootable games, but intense FPS games require fast disk access, or gameplay can become jumpy. CD access can also be noisy compared to HD access.

Data persitance is another reason for not having bootable CD games. Where will you store your saved games? Your preferences? Do you need to manually enter the disk/partition location each time you want to play? (or is it automatically the first FAT breed of partition found by the bootable game?)

Offering games targeted at specific platforms (such as Windows) makes game development simpler. Microsoft provides layers such as DirectX - without it most games would need to code similar functionality themselves (increasing the cost).

A bootable CD would require the game developer to maintain the code for their bootable OS. Most FPS games also require more than one CD worth of data - changing CDs during play would be a hassel.

Re:It's because...

[Anonymous Coward]

And others of us have plenty of resources and like to keep our browser, email client, some bit torrents, gaim, networking, text editors, apache, postgresql, mp3 player and irc software up and running while we're playing a game. And we like to jump back and forth between the game and our work/gaim/whatever for certain types of games. And some people like to play in windowed mode (for RPGs especially) so they can multi-task.

Having a game bootable on disk would disconnect me from work, family, friends and everything else that I rely on having my 24x7 connection for.

Re:It's because...

[T-Ranger]

What planet are you living on that FPSs require fast disk access? They load the level into memory, and play from there. If your computer is hammering the disks durring game play, then something is messed up.

Re:It's because...

[Anonymous Coward]

They do require fast disk access. Do you really want to wait 2-5 minutes while a level loads from a CD?

Many FPS games today are much larger than 1 GB. This is a lot of data that needs to be read into RAM. Granted only one level at a time, but sprites, sounds, etc. need to be loaded. I guess it all depends upon how much RAM you have.

Re:It's because...

[fishfinger]

But if you are using an OS which doesn't need to load up a whole graphical environment which is irrelevent to the game then there will be much more RAM available for caching game data.

If the Gentoo live UT2003 CD detects that you have 512MB or more (very likely these days) it gives you the option of loading most of the game into memory/ramdisk!

Hmm...

[smoondog]

1) Rebooting == sux
2) To avoid graphics problems I advise sticking with zork
3) Can't save game or data
4) This would only work if we can get a general linux that always works with most video cards and most audio cards ...

Drivers?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The reason consoles do it so well is because one X-Box has the same everything as the next X-Box. This isn't so with computers.

Re:Drivers?

[smallfries]

Not to mention scalability. At the moment if you install an older game on some newer hardware then it can talk to it fine through DirectX or OpenGL and the game runs quicker. So that old game suddenly runs at a higher resolution than it used to.

If you freeze the version of DirectX/OpenGL by burning it onto the disk then this can't happen, and if you have a card newer than the game then chances are it won't be supported by the old drivers.

Re:Drivers?

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

I'm sure I've forgotten more than a few as I am just spouting the names from Cache RAM. The issue isn't wether they are supported, as Linux has quickly been gaining support for a lot of major hardware, but instead how big a DVD set would be required to support at boot all the possible combinations.

For example, one system I have has a NVidia GeForce MX400 video, ATI Radeon PCI second video, Creative PCI 512 Sound, NVidia AC97 Sound, 2 different USB Game controllers (Saitek and Microsoft), NVidia NForce chipset and IDE, and a new Belkin Wireless card. Everything except the Wireless is supported in Linux, but it takes me quite a while to teach Linux exactly what order to load the drivers to prevent crashing.

Now just imagine doing that with the variety of old and new and top of the line hardware in the average PC, for all possible combinations, or even a realistic subset.

That is the real challenge in a bootable CD. Not picking the software, but making it work across as many combinations as possible.

Drivers?

[schmink182]

I would think a large factor in the decision against making games on bootable CDs is that the companies would have to provide a lot of drivers: for video, sound, networking - you name it. Even with basic drivers, people couldn't use there gaming machines to their full capability without the installed drivers from nVidia and ATI. To the game publishers, it's much easier to release a game for PS2, GameCube, or XBox.

I was wondering too

[mnmn]

and then I realized, part of the issue is standard drivers are not bundled with bootable CDs for damn legal issues.

Knoppix is the best one for hardware detection, but uses the nv driver which is not accelerated, and nVidia for some reason wont allow redist of their nvidia drivers. Same is true of ATI and others. I dont know if there are binary drivers from creative and others for linux,

DirectX is still relevant. Too many companies have invested in DirectX rendering and cannot just move their sources to OpenGL. For now theyre stuck with win32 and XBox, but with enough games released using opengl under Linux, the momentum will weigh towards Linux. Right now we just have to line up and cuss at Sierra for refusing to release halflife linux binaries.

Re:I was wondering too

[Duty]

First of all, the open-source Radeon drivers only support the r100 and r200 chipsets, both ancient by gamer standards.

Second, have you ever tried them? the r100 driver is decent enough, but r200 (and also the official, closed-source ATI drivers, for that matter) are atrocious. A good portion of games are not playable at all, and the remainder suffer from severe graphics glitches or slowdown.

Why

[Hythlodaeus]

Why isn't it done? Because most people would feel inconvenienced by having to reboot, but only a few people become aroused at everything involving Linux.

I would think

[aztektum]

...the size of modern games keeps this from happening with CD's.

Consoles use DVD's or similar technologies to cram as much on a disc as possible, but with huge hard drives out there, you have the option of installing 3-4 GB of stuff and not using up all the space.

Still with DVD-ROMs being fairly common on new PC's it's more feasible. The only other downside I can see is longer load times. (Still probably not as bad as consoles)

One thing I just thought of, console games are written to one specific set of hardware. You'd have to cram an awful lot of drivers on there to support a wide enough array of hardware.

I can't see why it WOULDN'T work, or at least couldn't be made to.

Access to other stuff

[SteveX]

If I'm playing a game and someone sends me an instant message, I can pause the game and talk to them if I like..

If I receive an email, I can check on it and maybe respond if it warrants it.

Turning my PC into a console takes away my ability to do this stuff.

Because almost nobody would use them?

[Dark Nexus]

I can see this being a good idea for places like gaming cafes, but that's about it. For personal computers? There just isn't a big enough market for it.

I had a dual boot Linux/Windows system for the games that don't have Linux versions and don't play well with Wine, and just found myself booting to Windows ALL the time, because rebooting to play a game was too much hassle. I eventually removed Linux because I was always in Windows anyway.

Then you run into other problems, like perhiperal support. Neither my sound card, nor the 3d portion of my video card work out of the box with any distro I've tried. I've got common hardware on that front - SB Live and GeForce 4. Sure, neither took much work to get working properly, but if they don't work out of the box, they won't work for a bootable games. Then there's network cards - it was easier for me to switch network cards than to get the one that was already in my system working. Hardware support just is not bulletproof enough, and the large number of drivers needed to make sure all the necessary hardware works would be space restrictive. Bootable DVDs, maybe.

Then there's the issue of saving games, patching the software, downloadable content, etc. I'm sure there's ways around some of those issues, but they're big enough barriers for this to not make corporate sense.

Some good reasons.

[_aa_]

1) The operating system would take up a significant amount of space on the disc.
2) A read-only filesystem makes saving preferences, screenshots, etc. difficult
3) Extreme variances in architectures and hardware would limit the playability.
4) Liscense violations against non-free components (nvidia).
5) Slow load times.
6) Game patches and updates would require the download of an entire new disc.
7) CD/DVDs deteriorate rapidly. Constant inserts/removals can lead to irreversible damage.

Just to name a few.

Because it's a bad idea

[0x0d0a]

I can't figure out why so many Slashdotters seem stuck on the merits of this idea.

Here are a couple of reasons why this is a bad idea:

* Complete lack of forward-compatibility with hardware (huge -- effectively kills the idea, and the reason why this scheme works in the console world with a standard set of hardware but not in the computer world).

* Forced rebooting and no other apps running

* Poor access times

* No patches

Basically, even if you overcame all the obstacles, you'd have little more than an expensive console (abeit with a lot of RAM), but without the standardized hardware and input devices that benefit console developers.

The benefits of the PC are pretty much different from those of the console. Trying to turn a PC into a poor copy of a console is just a bad idea. Leverage the strengths of the PC -- more memory, big, fast writeable storage devices, keyboard and mouse input devices (many buttons, good text-input capabilities, rapid and precise aiming), very commonly available network access, forwards compatibility, patchability, game extensibility, good toolkits -- widget sets and the like -- for producing things like editors.

Re:Missing a few obvious faults

[molarmass192]

I only use Linux and I've never believed that a bootable game CD would fly. However, your point about being unable to patch games is one of the most convincing I've seen (I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere) so I'm adding it to my smack-down arsenal. It really should be #1 on your list. I also feel that people don't want to reboot. Sure it doesn't take long to do, but it's still a pain in the arse and because of that people will resist it.

Now, as for frame rates, when it comes to OpenGL on nVIDIA cards, the Linux rates are as good as comparable DirectX rates under Windows, at least for RTCW-ET and NWN. A lot of folks bitch about the closed nVIDIA drivers for Linux but they have done one hell of a bang up job getting those drivers cooking on Linux.

Supplanting DirectX? Now that's a whole other ball of wax. I think what could help is a merging of a bunch of the "popular" gaming APIs under Linux into a coherent project like a DirectX. Things like OpenAL, SDL, etc.

Then again, DirectX's lack of cross-platform availability may be the wiggle room that allows for a new "standard" to sneak in. I think that any new standardwould have to run across Windows, a few consoles, and Linux to have a real chance. Realistically, the only company in a position to dethrone DirectX is Sony. If Sony produced an open source gaming API for it's console and versions for Windows and Linux, DirectX may finally meet it's match. Don't think I'll hold my breath waiting on it though.

I have seen these!

[tolldog]

My friend has one.

Its called an xbox.

I really, really don't like rebooting my computer.
It bugs me that FFXI takes up my full screen.
I want to be able to multi-task.

If I want to reduce the usefullness of my desktop to a console system, I will just get a console and games. Its cheaper and I know they will work together.

Now if only these systems that booted into games plugged into normal household entertainment systems. I would love to be able to put this system in my living room, maybe get a few controllers, hook it up to my stereo and tv...

-Tim

OS independent does not imply reboot

[LarsWestergren]

There are alternatives to rebooting if you want to play.Javagaming
LWJGL

Answer is in the post if you look carefully.

[biglig2]

You answer it yourself in the post.

Basically, you mention only one reason why bootable CD games are a good thing; because it means "no Microsoft or Direct X".

Firstly, that's so not a comercial reason to do anything.

Secondly, look at Quake 3 for an example of how you can easily make a game that doesn't care about Microsoft (OpenGL, a Linux and a Mac client) without all the pain of making a console boot disk.

Re:what about patches?

[DA-MAN]

Hell it would just suck.

1) Game Patches, Extended Levels, and add ons would be gone
2) Saving Games, maybe network, still slow when I have a 120GB hd sitting around empty
3) Network Configuration for Dialup (WinModumb Support), PPPoE, 802.1x, Wireless (Drivers?), will be a hassle for playing games.
4) Ventrilo Support?!?! How am I gonna talk shit to my buddies when they snipe me?
5) Load Times... HD is way faster than CD/DVD
6) Drivers, even if you include all the drivers up until this point... what happens next year when you upgrade to the nVidia GeForce Ubberfast 6000 or the ATI Radeon 10,000,000? You're shit out of luck...
7) Always gotta have the CD/DVD on hand...

Well you get the idea, this would stink on a PC. XBox and PS2 can do it because they have one type of hardware that doesn't change. On a PC that would be a PITA.

Security?

[jubitzu]

The operating system provides some security for your data on your hard disk and other things (let's not start a windows security argument here). It would have to be a pretty damned trustworthy game developer for me to give them total access to my computer without any protection.