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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?
yeah.. but how are you going to apply patches?
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.
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
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.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
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.
After the Creation, the cruel god Moloch rebelled against the authority of Marduk the Creator. Moloch stole from Marduk the most powerful of all the artifacts of the gods, the Amulet of Yendor, and he hid it in the dark cavities of Gehennom, the Under World, where he now lurks, and bides his time.
Once I find the amulet and complete Nethack, I might take a look at those other games. I've heard about this thing called PacMan that seems to be quite popular with the young crowd...
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!
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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.
For great justice.
...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.
No sig for you!!
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
You never know...
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.
NO CARRIER
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.
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.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
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.
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?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
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.
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.
May we never see th
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
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
"1) The operating system would take up a significant amount of space on the disc."
:p
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!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
There are alternatives to rebooting if you want to play.Javagaming
LWJGL
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
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.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
They're are called "board" games
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.