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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.
Gaming and computing are two different animals. This is even more true for mult-user computing, a la Unix, OS X, XP, and now Vista. And, some of today's security problems in Microsoft's security model are directly related to and introduced by gaming requirements early on (circa 1992, 1993).
Gaming demands high-end, near-to-the-hardware, unencumbered access. Multi-user computing demands flexibility, equitable distribution of resources, and if properly done, capability of extremely high and granular security.
This puts the two activities at odds in deciding how to implement a "computer" -- probably one of the main reasons hardcore gaming usually is the domain of dedicated consoles and hardware.
In NT's early days (which eventually became Windows 2000 and Windows XP) Microsoft caved to requests for compromised access to "rings" of kernel security to give better (and acceptable) performance for game developers -- most notably there were some passthroughs for video hardware access. I don't know if there were other compromises but I suspect there were. These compromises contributed to security problems (but were not the cause of all of Microsoft's security headaches).
From what I've read, Microsoft has made some tough but I think "correct" choices for security in Vista... it should be very hard for limited users to do much more that use the machine. Unfortunately, gaming typically requires access to the machine that, under the covers, is much more than typical and casual access to the innards. This is probably why Microsoft has gotten into the game console market... they finally have hardware/software dedicated to and around gaming.
It's probably a tough pill to swallow for gamers and developers used to being able to pull it off in XP (and previous generation Windows), but it's probably a better security world on whole for general computing and Vista users.
I would think that the biggest advantage to the console is that you dont* need to scale back to fit lesser machines. A console might only have 512MB, but its guaranteed, and you know (like you mentioned) that you have full reign over it.
* (Lack of proper punctuation brought to you by Firefox grabbing all my apostrophes as "Fast Find" requests.)
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
How is this flamebait? He has a point (if rudely stated). WildTangent games have probably one of the worst interfaces I've ever had to deal with (far surpassing the annoying hoop of using nProtect on Korean MMORPGs*). I don't like having to install a third party launcher to run a game written by someone with absolutely no other ties.
*In Vista when you're going to full screen with a good deal of games, the OS switches you from Aero mode to Basic mode, which can take a boatload of time when you're also trying to load the game, and update nProtect all at the same time. nProtect has a penchant for running right as a game decides to go fullscreen.