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

what about patches?

[AresTheImpaler]

yeah.. but how are you going to apply patches?

Um. Please.

[PylonHead]

Autodetect hardware? A technical support nightmare. It's hard enough getting your game installed and working on the variety of hardware out there in the world, and thats with the operating system in place as an abstration layer between you and the different systems.

You don't want to be responsible for getting the Operating System to install as well. Madness!

Re:Off the top of my head...

[rusty0101]

Wouldn't this depend upon the game? UT2003 off the Gentoo build would check to see if there was sufficient memory, and if so it would load the entire game into memory and play from there. I know this worked with 512 Meg of memory.

Without knowing the specifics, I believe it created a virtual file system in memory, then copied over a compressed file system from the CD, which it then mounted, and you played from that.

I suspect that on other alternative would be to check the hard disk for swap memory space, then use that as a file store. This should work with Linux Swap partitions, Windows fat vfat and fat32 partitions, and possibly with the NTFS drivers that allow you to write to a file as long as you do not change it's size. (If the windows NTFS swap file isn't large enough, you probably aren't going to want to play on that system anyway.)

This could provide enough space for a game that needs more than a gig of memory, or several CD's for all of the maps, graphics, textures, etc.

Then again, what do I know, I don't game on my PC that often....

-Rusty

Red herrings.

[Inoshiro]

"1) The operating system would take up a significant amount of space on the disc."

Linux takes maybe 120-200mb. That's talking about a kernel (1mb) plus a basic set of OpenGL + X + X driver for cards. That's not much of a 4.5 or 9gb disc. It'd be even less if there was actual work on making it into a standard.

"2) A read-only filesystem makes saving preferences, screenshots, etc. difficult"

My PS2 and GameCube and PS1 and Dreamcast, etc, all seem to save fine. I can get a 16mb USB dongle for 16$ CDN. Why not have it save prefs to a USB dongle? Can you say memory card?

"3) Extreme variances in architectures and hardware would limit the playability."

That's why you have a standard, like MPC was supposed to be a standard about 14 years ago. If you have a set (Athlon/ATI disc, Pentium/ATI disc, etc), you'll be able to make that OS footprint smaller and allow better gaming. Serious gamers only have one of 4 possible combinations (nCr from Athlon or Pentium with ATI or NVidia). Shitty computers with same Cirrus logic bullshit won't be used for this kind of work anyways.

"4) Liscense violations against non-free components (nvidia)."

Whatever sells more video cards (Hey, games that have great OOB experiencies!) will change their distribution policy. Money talks.

"5) Slow load times."

If people will put up with PS2 load times, there is nothing to worry about with the much faster and easier to cache (PCs usually have more than 64mb of RAM, the amount of UMA RAM the Xbox has) PC memory and DVD-ROM technology.

"6) Game patches and updates would require the download of an entire new disc."

Hey, maybe PC game companies will start shipping games that aren't broken. I mean, 20 years of console games has taught me that it's easy to ship games that aren't bugshit. You just have to put in the QA effort.

"7) CD/DVDs deteriorate rapidly. Constant inserts/removals can lead to irreversible damage."

Right. That's exactly why I somehow can't play any of my Saturn and Dreamcast games anymore... wait a second! :p