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Vista Casts A Pall On PC Gaming?
simoniker writes "In an opinion piece, casual game publisher WildTangent's CEO Alex St. John (himself a Microsoft veteran and one of the DirectX creators) has sharply criticized some of Windows Vista's features as they related to video game creation, noting: 'We have found many of the security changes planned for Vista alarming and likely to present sweeping challenges for PC gaming, especially for online distributed games. The central change that impacts all downloadable applications in Vista is the introduction of Limited User Accounts. LUA's can already be found in Windows XP, but nobody uses them because of the onerous restrictions they place on usability. In Vista, LUA's are mandatory and inescapable.'" Meanwhile, the word has also come down that games will be on the Zune by Summer of next year.
If game developers stick to OpenGL or DirectX 9 or 10 then thats all they need. Infact game developers should be DROOOLING over the tools available for them under vista.
Direct hardware access is so passe, now its about API's and how fast they can be accelerated between CPU/GPU and Physics accelerations.
Writing games on DOS/4GW and Win32s is a thing of the past. If you want to see a game, check out the DirectX 10 enabled games and then tell me vista isn't a gamers os.
blah
First, disclosure: I work on Vista at Microsoft.
The "problems" Alex St. John identifies are essentially that his business model doesn't work so great when people have to click a couple extra buttons and type a password, and that he would really prefer it if children could install his products without parental involvement.
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
The real problem here is that the world is changing and WildTangent has to change with it. Yes, that's difficult. Yes, it's inconvenient. Yes, it will cost money they didn't need to spend when they were targeting XP. And yes, they may actually need to give serious consideration to getting ESRB ratings. But these are the natural and normal cost of doing business in the modern world; if you can't evolve and grow and change with the rest of the planet, your business dies, and good riddance.
The whole article is just a bunch of FUD. Alex is basically claiming that Microsoft is trying to kill his business, because he doesn't know how to do business the way he needs to do it on Vista. He's afraid that consumers won't click two more buttons and enter a password to play his game. He's afraid that parents won't let their children play his games. But the answer to this problem isn't to reduce security, it's to make a better and more compelling game! Weren't you already trying to do that ANYWAY?
Don't get me wrong, I think there are still problems - the ESRB needs to better address the needs of casual game developers who produce fifty $10 games and generate about $200K in annual revenue. The current system is too heavily geared toward console and PC developers who have multi-million dollar budgets. But blaming Microsoft for everything is just a tired old excuse that invariably comes trotting out when someone is too damn lazy to read the direction of the wind and rig his sails accordingly.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
Shift+click on the no. It's very poor UI, but it works.
Where things have changed in Vista, is if you have an account that has Parental Controls applied to it to limit the kinds of games that can be run. Vista knows the ESRB (& other ratings boards) ratings for quite a large number of games, and can block access to them if the parents don't want their kids to play them... but that's not the default setting. You have to go out of your way to set it up.
The two big problems with LUAs have been that there was no way to perform super-user actions without logging out and logging back in
Uh, Run As? Been available since Windows 2000.
I've never ran with Admin rights permanently on any Windows box since I had the option of using a LUA. Never caused me any hassle. Any programs that needed admin rights (games, usually) would be given a new shortcut on the start menu to run it as a privileged user.
However, I've come across very few programs that can't be persuaded to run by relaxing filesystem and/or registry permissions. Much better than running with admin rights over everything. In my old job I used to build Windows OS images for a computing department at a university. The OS had to be locked down so that everyone had Guest privileges, but the 200+ pieces of software available still had to run correctly. Great challenge, I loved it. Took up two months of my working year.
Yes, I know it's not a solution for the average user. Just making a point that it's not entirely impossible.
You could run consumer grade graphics at 1600x1200 in 1995 with S3's graphics card.
Commercial graphic houses and CAD designers had 2048x1600 resolution back then.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Hate to say RTFA, since your points are valid, but the limitations your talking about are not what the article is referring to. These are download-able casual games, they don't need to-the-metal access for bleeding speed. The obstacles being presented revolve around user installation experiences (requiring admin account user/password and lots of 'scary warnings'). For casual game developers these are very real issues. The target audience does not know about access levels. They do not know about proper security procedures. They just see big scary warnings popping up making them question if they should really install this game. Many of them will not know the admin account information even if this is their own personal computer. These are real fears for the causal game developers, not the ones wanting bleeding edge hardware and ultra fast access to it.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
The 360 is already at that point. You actually patch your games now. Thanks, Microsoft.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Come on. I had a gaming computer in 1995 too.
You weren't running any games at 1600x1200 on that S3. You were mostly at 320x200. Your Windows resolution *might* have been 1600x1200, but then you would have also had a $1,000 monitor.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
You want to pretend that Slashdot is closed minded, but it appears you are. Did you actually read the comments, or are you just making assumptions about what they said? I would say you are making assumptions.
I did read the comments and I would say that virtually 100% accuse this guy of spreading FUD and wanting to be able to install spyware. About the only negative comments on MicroSoft were about them trying to lock games into their platform and Vista, which has nothing to do with what the original article was about, he absolutly does not care about the lock in.