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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.
He's just upset that his company's spyware and crap won't be able to be installed on people's computers without them knowing it anymore? Damn, this might just be an MS Vista advertisement in disguise.
I think this guy is full of shit. When I go on the internet, if i know i'm going to download something, I'll be fine pressing "yes" as i'll soon be selecting where it goes so i'm ready for a prompt. If something is going to download without me saying it can, then it can very well get the hell out of my computer. The security dialogs in Vista dont require you to put in a username and password every time you try to acess a flash game on the web, and this article clearly is full of it. Wild Tangent games often appear on my computer when i did not ask for them, and i really hope that the vista security will help me keep their crap off my computer in the future.
The problem is consoles do not have high end hardware by the time they make it to the shelves, and sometimes don't even have high end hardware in design, depending on the market the manufacturer is after.
Put another way: Consoles are finally running close to the resolutions that I was on my PC in 1996, because of hardware limitations that they were not able to free themselves from (using a tv instead of a dedicated display, like a computer monitor).
The Cell CPU was great while the PS3 was still on paper. Now its being outdone by mid-range PCs.
Bleeding edge, high end gaming will be the PC for quite a while to come, because PCs are upgradeable without a 5+ year wait for the next "generation" of boxes.
It's perhaps ironic that I run my own online game publishing company now and have become a dependent customer of the platform and technologies I once worked to create. Some of you might call it "justice" -- if it is, I wish it for my successors working on Vista.
Yep, he helped Microsoft shove Directx down all our throats now hes complaining, and surprised, they're trying to shove something else down our throats.
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, even if you the person have greater privileges than the account you have logged in with. I do believe Vista has fixed this. The other problem is that lazy application developers chronically write software that assumes unnecessary super-user privileges. Now Microsoft has (finally) chosen to curtail their reckless practices, and they would rather complain than get with the program.
I may be wrong, but doesn't Wild Tangent have a rep for being pseudo spyware? It certainly gets fladded on my system constantly. I know it comes bundled with AIM and some other applications, so I don't really consider it nefarious, but I still don't think highly of it.
It doesn't sound surprising to me that a company that sets of security flags as is, would be concerned about new security features. I'd be more interested in what the developers at ID, SOE, or EA have to say about how the features will affect the ability of them to develop games, in particular online offerings.
There are multiple customers at play here. Yes, Wild Tangent (and other developers) are in a sense a customer, since they develop on Windows/Vista/etc. However, don't forget that your end-user consumer is also a customer, and the extra security on Vista is targeted towards them.
I work with a lot of customers who NEED the extra security, because frankly, they don't really know how to properly secure their computer. They're the ones who install every toolbar/screensaver/gadget because it's cool, yet don't understand why their computer is so slow, and why all these windows keep popping up. On one hand, it's tempting to fault them, because they're making bad decisions. On the other hand, the OS can do a better job of hand-holding these consumers and making the right choices for them. (Does Grandma really need to learn how to secure her computer? She just wants to use the Internet to play Hearts and send e-mail to her grandkids)
Unfortunately, catering to one customer base (the enormously large novice user-base), tends to piss off a few others, most notably power users (who already know how to secure our systems, and don't need to be prompted every single time), and developers. Some of these developers, are the evil spyware/adware-writing kind, which are customers that we don't really want in the first place. Other developers do have legitimate needs, but will now need to do some extra work to get their applications to work on Vista in the first place.
I'm fine with that. At MS, our own developers have to conform to the extra security requirements in Vista. Yes, it means more work, but I see that as a good thing. Our hope is that FEWER of our end-user customers will come in with support problems, which are ultimately tied to not our code, but spyware on their machine.
Remember the days when it was dead-easy to get anyone to install an ActiveX control? That was the worst. Similar complaints were lodged against MS when WinXP SP2 came out, since in small ways, it limited how easy it was to install controls.
-- jchenx
Why does it matter how 'high end' the hardware your game is running on is? Are PC games are just glorified benchmark demos? This is exactly the reason why I gave up on PC games. I don't want game developers deciding when I should upgrade my PC. Is that new graphics card going to make my wordprocessor process words faster?
Two of the real strengths of PC gaming are online play and user created content. We are going to start seeing that on consoles this generation. That's a far bigger threat to PC gaming than Vista.
I spent countless hours pulling my hair out editing files like this...
device=c:\dos\himem.sys
device=c:\dos\emm386.exe ram
device=c:\mouse\mouse.sys
files=30
buffers=40
dos=high,umb
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Obviously, they are struggling to keep up at the $400 price point. Plus, my reasonably decent gaming pc can't run games at settings that Gears of War appears to run at.