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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?
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.
A few of the very early CD-ROM games basically ran like this, making only a very minimal install to store their save-games in. I remember titles such as Rebel Assault being like that. However, on the CD drives available at the time, this inevitably meant extremely long load times and quite often a good bit of stuttering during play.
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.
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
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
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?Just becaue the game doesn't "install" to the harddrive doesn't mean it doesn't use the harddrive.
For instance: the game loader could check the computer for "override" directories and use binaries/data from there before using the ones on the DVD.
See? Trivial. Some games already do this.
'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.
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.
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!
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".
You'll just be seeing the install time moved to level loading times.
"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
Actually, your point brings up a different, interesting point.
What about expansion packs that PCs are notorious for? Diablo, WC, Starcraft, all of the C&C and RA games.. Consoles don't even bother with these things, but PC games do them quite a bit, how are they going to handle those?