Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Tray And Play Unveiled
Gamespot has a look at Microsoft's upcoming plans for PC gaming. In addition to a definite gaming perspective for the Longhorn OS and a commitment to the XNA studios package, they have word that someday we may be loading PC games much like console games. From the article: "Tray and Play is exactly what it sounds like - dropping a game disc into an optical drive and loading it up immediately, rather than having to install it to a hard drive. True to form, the game itself cut straight to a start-up screen in less than a minute (including the game's own built-in load time)."
Honestly, this shouldn't have taken this long to come to fruitation.
Microsoft has chosen a feature that not only makes sense, but saves time, hd space, and hopefully hastle.
Dropping a game disc into an optical drive and loading it up immediately, rather than having to install it to a hard drive
As I understand, Microsoft is going to release games on a Knoppix LiveCD?
This exact idea of directly loading off the disk has been around for so long, yet M$ is the first to push the idea to the forefront by making such a statement.
No bloody wonder they are sitting with all that $$$$ in the bank.
Havin' it large, livin' the life, Welcome to the land of the rising sun.
I'd been wondering how long this would take...
Although many people have said, over the last couple of years, that Microsoft intends to kill off the PC as a gaming platform, in the hopes of transporting users over to its own X-Box, I've never believed that this is true. Windows' status as the "gaming OS" is almost certainly a factor in keeping it installed on any number of home PCs. However, there's no denying that PC gaming has had a difficult time of late (although perhaps not so difficult in the second half of 2004, when it finally got some big exclusive releases) and it desperately needs to be more competative with the console market. With keyboard and mouse support in games likely to be more common in the next console generation, this is more urgent than ever.
Now, I used to be a die-hard PC gamer. I've been gaming on the PC since the days when buying a new game meant an hour tweaking config.sys, autoexec.bat and playing with memmaker just to get the right memory configuration for the damned thing to run. When I finally overcame my long-standing aversion to consoles a couple of years ago and bought a PS2, I was amazed by how much simpler and lower-hassle the whole process is on a console. Even today, playing a PC game involves checking that your system meets the specification, sitting through an install process which could take anywhere from a couple of minutes through to half an hour, depending on the game and your system, determining the settings which will give you the best balance between appearance and performance and then quite often searching for patches to fix the bug that makes the game crash every 5 minutes on your hardware configuration. That this puts people off is hardly a surprise.
Microsoft's move here is, at least, a first step towards remedying this situation.
Much like consoles though, I'm sure the modding community that most every game has is going to be quite upset with this new development. Most people, including me, like to tweak, mod, screw around, and mainly just play with stuff... which is why I personally never liked consoles. This might turn into a piracy problem too, because now it's going to be easier to redistribute games.
Half the point of cracks (the legal half) is so you don't *need* to go rooting around for the CD just so you can play a game. Besides, if I'd wanted a console game system, I'd have bought one.
So why exactly is it such a bad idea? First off most PC games still come on CD because more people have a CD player then a DVD player. Going to DVD only games would be easier but so far no game company wants to take the risk of upsetting the non-dvd owners.
Second is do you really trust microsoft to choose the most optimal installation place for your games? Not everyone of us have just one partition.
Third you can say goodbay to editing your game files if they are on a read only media. Many PC games have a happy modding community that is unique to PC gaming. But this works only if you can modify the game files.
Fourth many people who buy their games in the shop still use no-cd fixes because it allows them to play the game they want without first searching for the CD. I am even worse as my gaming PC is a monster wich makes a lot of noise so I put it in another room two doors away. Going back to the days of searching through a stack of CD's before I can play is not a step forward.
Fifth is that no matter how much more advanced DVD players become they will always be lagging behind the speed of a HD.
Sixth wich problem does it really solve? People who think installing a game is to nerdie won't be using a PC for gaming in the first place.
But most important this is microsoft trying to be smart. I love the "Close Combat" series of games but it was a microsoft game and so unlike every other game of that era it required me to manaually set the color depth from 32 to 16 to play the game. Yes a microsoft game was not able to use directx to simply do that for me. If MS wants to make games easier then they should start with their own games. MS flight simulator playing from a readonly media? It would ruin the game.
Perhaps MS should do a test to see how many windows users have got the autoplay feature they added turned off.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't think so! Astonishing how quickly they ripped off my idea!
Will we have an option to install to the HD? I don't know about you, but I don't want to hear my optical drive going "raaaar-rrrrAAAARRR-RRRRRRRRAAAARRRR!!!" every time I start a game or change levels. (Yeah, it's a cheap drive. So sue me.)
What kind of copy protection will be used? Is this really just a scheme to prevent people from playing with duped cds, or installing a game and passing the cd on to a friend?
What about patches? Do they really expect every game to be perfect when it goes gold? I think that'd be a pretty tough sell for most publishers and developers right now...
Finally, this *is* 2005, not 1995. Hard disks are big. There's no reason not to install to the hard disk. The only thing that I can see frustrating consumers right now is multiple-disc installs. (Publishers, please use a frickin' dvd instead of two, three, or more cds.)
Installing an average game does take a few minutes, but the payoff is much, much shorter load times. Given the choice of spending five or ten minutes installing a game or having load times "under a minute" (read: up to 59 seconds) every time its played, I think consumers would choose to install it.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
First I would like to see Microsoft deliver, and then I when they don't it won't be much of a surprise. They should stick with what they now, to bad that is nothing. Best wishes you want-to-be magicians. Take on a task you can accomplish, maybe develop a solid OS.
This actually makes sense. This brings PC gaming inline with the Xbox, which is something that Microsoft wants to do. It simplifies the interface from "Put in in, select your install folder, install the application, find the installed shortcut, Run the game" to "put it in." You can't argue with the elegance of that interface.
And yes, the first thing I'll do is create a library of virtual DVD's so that I don't have to keep looking for wherever it is that I'm keeping my games these days. But for those people who don't find physical media to be a pain (considering I'm swimming in a pile of physical media right now), this could be really good. Drop it in, and it works.
Of course, his brushing over issues of patching doesn't instill much confidence, but... eh. Too bad they don't include a re-writable section of the disk that the patch can, well, patch.
The ______ Agenda
Where'd this spaz attack come from? It has nothing to do with the problem or the solution.
To people worrying about patches and mods: The Xbox handles this just fine, it's not like they're asking you to remove your hard drive in the process. Seriously, why waste 4GB+ of space on every game? The only thing this is hurting is hard drive manufacturers. As far as I'm aware PC game sales are on the decline - piracy is far too easy, so maybe this will make things a little easier for the publishers to stay in business?
This exact idea of directly loading off the disk has been around for so long
Of course I didn't RTFA, but how do they plan to handle the inevitable updating of PC games? Read-only medium works reasonably well with console games since the developers know exactly with what kind of hardware the consumers are going to play the game so they can optimize and overcome the known quirks of the platform. On PCs however, there's infinite combination of processors, video cards and other peripherals. While things like OpenGL and DirectX deal with the majority of technical problems that existed in gaming in DOS era, you still can't get it always right. So besides game logic etc. updates, you often need to release purely technical compatibility patches in order to make your product available with enjoyable experience to as many consumers as possible. How's this supposed to be done if PC games are distributed on read-only media, too?
I'd never have figured out what it does based on its name alone.
With the incredibly large hard drives you can get these days, this seems a very illogical step. With most consoles, granted, there's less hard drive space available, and you're used to swapping CDs when you want to swap games.
I don't want to attempt counting how many games I have. They're all installed on my hard drive, and I can access each one with 3 keypresses (thanks to a nifty app called iKey); I don't want to rootle around in the geeky mess that is my room trying to find the single disc I need to be able to play a game. That's what hard drives are *for* - to fill up with Stuff.
Also, having playable discs means there isn't the available space for larger or more files (graphics, sounds - all the small things that help make up a game) - installers and compression mean you can get lots of data on your HD from less data on the disc. More files means more beautiful.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Tray and Play is exactly what it sounds like
Sliding down stairs at high speeds?
This doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. What's wrong with installing the files on the fly when you put the disc in?
In any case, I don't see what's necessary from the OS side of things - this sort of thing has been possible since Autorun in Windows 95 - it's game developers that need to implement this, not Microsoft.
After all the above debate, Microsoft still doesn't care one way or the other what we think. :-)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
PC Games already take long enought to load from harddisk... on removeable media they'll be horribly slow to load. Another problem with PC games on a CD, how do you install drivers and what not due to no 2 pcs being identical hardware wise. Easiest answer... force everyone to have the same hardware (thus a console) PC games are good at what they're good at, imo booting from CD isn't going to be one of those.
Tim (http://tim.igoe.me.uk)
Computers are like Air-con, open windows and they stop working!
I don't see the problem with this, as I've wished for ages that they did this.
I remember when the first CD-ROM games came out. The total installation size was about 1 mb because it read everything from the CD. And I had a speedy Quad-speed CD-ROM drive so I had no problem.
Now they have 52+x CD-ROM drives, yet the only time it reads from the CD is to grab a 1 gb chunk off of it to throw it on your poor hard drive. I'd like to at least have a CHOICE to play it from the CD-ROM drive because otherwise why do we have speedy CD-ROM drives? To make installation faster?
Besides, people will still mod the games... and we'll still have no-CD cracks. What do you think people will just say "oh, LiveCDs! (throw hands in air) I guess that means I can't make a no-CD crack!" Do you think Microsoft will successfully make an uncrackable system? I think not!
Of course you can patch and mod the game, just look at the Xbox. For Games like Ninja Gaiden you can add new content and change/improve other things like the camera.
The patch/mod whatever is stored on the HD and the game knows to check the HD for this, this also handles the whole save game file issue. So technically it most likely installs a game folder on your HD where your save game files and modifications can be placed and then is referenced by the game when it's loaded.
I mean seriously, for such an apparent tech savvy site, a lot of you seem to be clueless or did the initials MS throw most of you off?'scuze the redundancy, but there's one negative point people haven't made clear here:
The point of putting stuff on the hard drive is the access time. An open xbox is a great example: play Halo from the CD. Observe the loading times. Now copy it to the hard drive. Observe the new loading times.
It's TEN TIMES faster to load from the hard drive. (heh, remember loading times on the PS1?)
Also, observe the sound difference...
Of course, the difference is subject to the speed of the cd drive, but the CD (DVD) will remain much slower than the HD.
However, a good result of this initiative will be to normalize/freeze the libraries the game needs. How often did you install a game lately without it asking you to install the latest version of directX or whatnot?
The advantage of consoles is that they're ALL THE SAME (within a type of course, I'm not saying PS2 = Gamecube), or at least sufficiently so that the game doesn't need to adapt anything.
If this would allow an API freeze of game support libraries, great!
However, knowing Microsoft, I'm expecting a "you cannot launch this game in Tray and Play mode with this version. Please upgrade"
Finally, I have to point out that computer games are different from console games in (at least) their memory usage. How much data does UT2k4 load into memory for a typical level again? 200+ Mb? 400? Wanna load all that from your CD drive? Every Time? Maybe this will push developpers to minimize reload times (reinit only some variables, like player positions, mobile level objects etc.. instead of reloading everything)
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
From the article:
- This new feature allegedly won't be exclusive to Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn Windows platform and could theoretically be put into games today, provided it gets planned for in development early on.
Exactly. We already have auto-run. Games can do this already if they want to. But they haven't chosen to.To me, the big advantage of storing games to HD has always been not having to deal with the discs. I don't know what your desk looks like, but mine is a minefield for discs. I want to be able to load a game onto my drive, put the disc back in it's box, and never see it again. I don't want to have to switch discs, look for their little boxes and expose them to dust, moisture, Pepsi, whatever, inbetween gaming sessions.
I thought we were moving towards a "just purchase the license, now download the game" model. This seems like a small step backwards, or sideways from the inevitable elimination of physical media as a distribution model. One of my favourite gaming experiences recently was playing the Open Beta of WoW, and going to the store to buy my reserved copy, entering in the serial number, not even removing the discs from their case (thanks for the backups, Blizzard) and playing the game. I see the evolution of that model as being a lot more productive in the long run.
But the name must change. It's just seems like a big type - tray and pay. It sounds like a bad anti-piracy slogan. Please try and pay for your games. ;D
Is that with games getting bigger and biggger..
(example: the matrix online beta test - which hard locks my computer, btw, and has for the past 3 weeks despite bug reports and patches, so I don't plan on purchasing it - is a 7GB install)
Pretty soon, they aren't going to fit on just one DVD anymore. And with 'tray and play,' I'm going to have to swap out DVDs? What about games that are completely fluid, with no loading (one continent of WoW, for example)? How are they going to facilitate disk-swapping for these titles?
Will there be an OPTION to play from your hard drive?
Also-
CD/DVD speeds aren't quite up to hard drive speeds. There has yet to be a SATA DVD player, from my knowledge. I can't imagine FURTHERING the bandwidth bottleneck.
At first glance, it may make sense, but then you take a look at all the new technology Microsoft is going to have to pioneer to accomplish it - and it scares the living crap out of me. It'll get to the point where the only difference between computers is whether or not it has a Dell brand or an Alienware brand slapped onto it - the CPU and motherboard may be intel or AMD, but it will be locked down to only work a specific way with palladium. Sound may be all digital, straight out to your speakers - but then I can't use my vacuum tube amplifier 4-point system, which sounds better than these newfangled systems.
I can see how Microsoft is really excited about it.
I don't see how any reasonably intelligent person can be excited about it.
Lots of people sounding off about how this is a bad idea, but there's nothing in TFA that indicates anyone will be forced into using this with games they develop. Those concerned about games like hl2 and such with modding communities, well, I'm pretty sure we will see Valve not using the T&P philosophy, relying on normal method of installing the software to the drive (through physical media or downloads). That's just one example of course.
I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of games that will benefit from T&P's ease. Games like Myst for example need not install much to the drive at all to function, and T&P would work very well there. Personally I think Microsoft and consumers would see the most benefit from this technology if you had the CHOICE to either play a game with T&P or go through conventional install processes.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Mod me down, -1 pro microsoft statement.
SAILING MISHAP
2. What do we do for Multi CD games? I'd love it if everything were on DVD, but the fact is, publishers have been saying they'[d do this for literally years, and yet they still have the audacity to ship 5-6 cd games without even the OPTION to get them on DVD. Oh, yeah - I want load times like FFIX on the PS again - Please!?!?!?!
3. I don't care how you optimize the system - my CD drive reads data slower than my HDD, and cant store temp files and config settings. Im guessing that this miracle will use some sort of configured software on the PC - and it will still be slower. Come on, with SATA HDD's getting cheaper, while M$'s solution will clearly take rediculous system resources - whats it going to do, cache it to RAM? - this is for console players who want to use a mouse. Great marketing, poor technology - please remember the Disable button.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
My copies of Pirates!, Kings Quest I, and Shogun all booted straight from the 5 1/4 drive. Back then it was called "Insert Floppy, Wait 5 Minutes For Loading, And Play." It was awesome. Those 5 minutes gave you ample time to try to understand the copy protection scheme.
To me, this seems like a BAD solution to the technical problem of "how can we get a better loading experience" but a GREAT solution to the problem of "how can we make games less likely to be pirated".
The key word was 'binary'. This is a Gentoo zealot who's addicted to a windows-only game.
Makes me hurt, just thinking about the internal conflicts.
"True to form, the game itself cut straight to a start-up screen in less than a minute"
It looks like they forgot to include the OS boot time in their calculations. Throw that in and I'm sure it's still up around 3 minutes at least. Real consoles can go from power-on to title screen in less time than it took this tray-and-play to finish throwing up splash screens.
Of course, more interestingly, considering all the DRM crap we've had snuck on us thanks to AutoRun, why do I forsee myself turning this "feature" off for security reasons?
Love it or hate it, Tray and Play is actually a good idea. As others have already mentioned, it effectively turns the PC into a console with the same ease of use. And it should also stem some of the piracy headache on the PC, at least the casual pirates. If Microsoft can pull this off, then they are freakin' geniuses! Why? Because there are so many PC configurations out there, that getting this to work on most of them will be a real challenge, not to mention defeating various hacks. But heck, if they can get Tray and Play to work on the Best Buy and WalMart PCs that people are buying these days, then that may be good enough. Will this save PC gaming? I don't know. PC gaming will never die, but this could actually make casual players think of the PC again instead of just consoles. And anything that helps PC sales can only help Microsoft. From a development point of view, Tray and Play looks more like a way to make Xbox to PC ports easier.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
My games on CD-ROM have always worked this way and they are 5 years old.
http://www.lilgames.com/store.shtml
What do they mean by "Booting" ? Does this mean I could have a PC running Linux (having no Windows Installed as I do now) yet buy one of these Innovative discs and run from a cold start directly off CD?
It would be awesome if this happens because it would make PC games much more Operating System agnostic. I dont run any windows boxes/ partitions at all - but id sure like to have a bit more of the Gaming pie!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I don't want to have to switch discs, look for their little boxes and expose them to dust, moisture, Pepsi, whatever, inbetween gaming sessions.
So I take it you don't watch DVDs, huh?
Games-kept-on-cd were done back in the DOS world, in the early 90s when the specs were all different. They usually kept a tiny directory of saves or configs and left it at that. It was great.
.Net/Mono or Parrot. Performance? Only an issue for top-tier megagames - leave them out in the cold and let the teams of 1000 deal with that problem, as there's a massive world of games that can be done with our current systems. Flexibility? Assuming it's a language-independent bytecode like the above ones, you can use whatever languages are implemented and build your engine from scratch within the safe confines of the VM. File access and saving abilities would have to be carefully thought out, but are not insurmountable problems. All libraries would be statically compiled, of course, to unify the final package.
But it didn't solve the real problem of PC gaming - which is that it was still in many cases troublesome to get the game working.
The only way to really solve the problem is through making games 100% data and running them into a unified VM - a "mega-emulator" if you will. This VM would build in all the functionality of APIs like SDL and OpenGL, in effect maximizing hardware accessibility. Games would then run in bytecode like that of
Turning games into pure data increases their flexibility by orders of magnitude - and it goes all the way to Joe Consumer, who can get the VM preinstalled and never once worry about the games he runs. In fact, the VM could be integrated into a media player! How's that for convenience?
I've always thought a PC would make the best gaming console the only thing holding it back is the OS. Your standard desktop pc has more HP than most consoles, is easily upgradeable. The problem is (no suprise to most /. readers) the OS (windows) is way to bloated. If the games booted up their own streamlined OS and the pc makes it move closer to the high definition tv, why bother with a PS3 or xbox2? Really any controller you want to use should be usb pluggable.
t hreshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=211&mode=thread&cid=1 1883536
Really this is the answer to http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141803&
made in an earlier thread/article.
Unlike most of the /. crowd, I spend my time actually using my computer rather than tweaking it. I imagine that my opinion probably represents a greater majorty of the consumer market.
I am quite a fan of Console games because of the "tray and play" concept they have enjoyed for over 20 years. I can load a game, play it, and then be done with it. There is no config.sys tweaking, no worrying that it'll crash my hard drive or screw up some other game. I don't have to download the newest driver, or patches. I can play right away.
Further, I can loan it to a friend (without copyright issues) or borrow/rent it. I can also sell it when I'm done and I don't have BSA on my back.
Many of you have made arguements that you don't want to fish for your CD when you want to play. Millions of PS2/XBox users don't really complain about this.
Many of you argued that the CD/DVD is a poor choice for media because it's read-only. There's nothing in this format that says data can't go on the HD. I expect it will have to. PS2 stores data on those little cards, XBox on the hard drive. I doubt they'd overlook this.
And many of you argue that games aren't released perfect and require updates and patches. This, I think, is the most important part of "tray and play":
CONSOLE GAMES AREN'T BUGGY
Manufacturers manage to release non-buggy games for the console market, and they are 10x more enjoyable because of it. I realize it's a lot easier to write for a console than a PC with thousands of different types of components. But, if this concept can help game companies release a stable game correct without needing patches, then that makes this a Good Thing.
-David
Not generally on my computer. I generally only watch DVDs the PS2 in the living room. Netflix or free rentals from my friend's video store compose 99% of the DVDs that I watch, so I don't own many DVDs. So, I'm not really concerned about the longevity of my property when it comes to DVD's.
I'd rather have digital distribution of films as well.
Actually, it's more like this:
First run:
Install: "Find the disc, put in in, select your install folder, install the application, find the installed shortcut, run the game, wait while it loads."
T&P:"Find the disc, wait longer while it loads, every time it loads because the disc has to spin up while sounding like a vacuum cleaner."
Following runs:
Install:"Click Icon, wait while the game loads."
T&P:"Find the disc, wait longer while it loads, every time it loads because the disc has to spin up while sounding like a vacuum cleaner."
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
As a consumer, what is the advantage for me of using Tray and Pray? I have a degree in CS, but my six year old cousin can accomplish the install process on most major computer game releases -- put in disk, hit enter four times, click "play" on the screen that pops up every time she puts the disk in. Is it THAT difficult to deal with the hazards of configuring a Windows product which is designed to sell to upwards of 100,000 15-25 year olds?
As a developer, what is my incentive for using this? It means, from my very first brainstorming session, I have to design my game around loading from optical media. Yay. So instead of using a resource which is cheap and abundant to me (other people's disk space), I get to use a really expensive resource (programmer and designer time) trying to figure out how to re-invent simple wheels like "How do I load the 64 MB textures for an expansive level in under 15 seconds?" (Traditional answer: cache them, you fool, not spend months of dev time trying to make sure level geometry restricts the local set of resources enough that I can stream all the ones I need off the disk as we play, a trick that VERY few games manage to get right). Does it make it less likely for my game to get pirated/more likely for me to collect my royalty-check? Come on, I'm an intelligent computer professional, I know there will be a CD image which uses the load code which I have sweat blood for to boostrap the game off an arbitrary bit of optical media within two weeks, and probably two days, of release (if I manage to not lose any late-betas to the slimeball journalists I send them to). Does it discourage the casual "share the game with a friend" pirate? Not much more than the current "force people to play with CD in the drive until they do a google search" method does. Whee, the circumvention isn't going to be "Run crack.exe", its going to be "Run crack.exe, and then follow the next instructions to burn your own disc/boot from the hard drive".
As a publisher, what is my incentive to use this technology? Its not a bullet point I can tout. Motion-captured video is a bullet-point I can tout. NBA players names is a bullet-point I can tout. Bullet-time, a movie tie-in, that fabled beast called "gameplay", all of these I can hype. Who will pay me money to get to put their CD in and play GeeWhiz2005 instantly who wouldn't play GeeWhiz2005 already? Nobody.
This technology is capable in the status quo. Nobody uses it, because nobody has an incentive to. MS backing it won't change that.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Remember when carts were the game storage medium of choice, and there were no load times?
Why don't we go back to carts, in the form of self-contained hard drives, like teh Jaz drive.
Faster load times. Only problem would be the jump in price of the game, becuase of the hugely more expensive media.