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.

Used to be True..

[cybrthng]

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

Who's Encumbering my Access?

[twitter]

Gaming and computing are two different animals. ... Gaming demands high-end, near-to-the-hardware, unencumbered access. ... From what I've read, Microsoft has made some tough but I think "correct" choices for security in Vista.

A reasonable OS makes resources available, without compromising security. You don't have to be able to overwrite system files to gain access to video card functions. There's also no reason to restrict other programs, such as email or browsers when your OS has been designed to perform for customers rather than confuse competitors. The conundrum has been addressed and solved by X, which has had network transparency without significant security risks for decades.

Chilling effect, my ass.

[CDarklock]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[Cap'nPedro]

> It would also seem to mean that installers will have to create special cases for Vista, which seems pointless to me

Installed Halo, now a fairly old game, onto a Vista machine and BAM, straight into the games menu thingy.

OK, so it's published by Microsoft Game Studios, but still, it proves that a special installer may not be required.

Re:mandatory and inescapable.

[ambrosen]

Shift+click on the no. It's very poor UI, but it works.

Wrong

[rudy_wayne]

"In Vista, LUA's are mandatory and inescapable."

Wrong. Many sites already have instructions for turning off User Access Controls and giving you the ability to do anything you want. Vista sucks big time, but not because of Limuted Use Accounts.

Re:Hmm...

[Daltorak]

According to this article, though, it would seem that Microsoft is actually blocking games from running via any other means than the Game Explorer.

I assure you, as someone who's played a variety of games on Vista (Civ 4, Heroes of M&M 5, Eve Online, etc. etc.), that there are no such restrictions. I don't even remember the last time I saw Games Explorer... I run games in Vista exactly like I did in XP, and there's no problems other than the typical growing pains you'd expect from beta video drivers.

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.

Re:They just don't want to work with it.

[BinaryCodedDecimal]

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.

Re:gaming introduced early compromises

[Ucklak]

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.

Re:gaming introduced early compromises

[Goosey]

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.

Re:Not sure what consoles you are referring to.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Modern PCs are hardly fighting to catch up to the specs of the Xbox 360. I love when someone pulls out the "3 core" processor spec without mentioning that the processor has had key optimizations removed like out-of-order execution. The dual-core PC in my bedroom outdoes the 360.

On pc's they just patch patch patch and eventually get it right - consoles are heading that way now though.

The 360 is already at that point. You actually patch your games now. Thanks, Microsoft.

Re:Insightful?

[Swimport]

Ya I do remember Windows just prior to Directx. PC gaming didnt need saving, you had DOOM, DOOM 2, Duke Nukem, Mech Warrior 2, Grand Theft Auto 1, Tombraider, TIE fighter, and countless others. They ran in DOS, not Windows. They had access to a computers complete resources and ran better as a result. The only thing you needed to do was plug in your soundcard values. Getting games to run on any system can be a pain in the ass if your unlucky and the game doesnt like your hardware or drivers.

Ya Directx saved PC gaming all right...Who are you Bill Gates?

Re:So . . . password required then?

[delus10n0]

That's only if you're logged in under an Administrator account. If you're using a "Standard User" account, you must supply an administrator username/password to continue.

Re:They just don't want to work with it.

[BinaryCodedDecimal]

If you put a "run as" link on my desktop to give me admin access for a specific app, you might as well give me admin rights. The "run as" command is not secure.

So what you're saying is that it's better just to run with admin rights ALL the time?

I didn't think so.

Of course 'Run As' is exploitable (especially if you use the /savecred switch, but I've never heard of any malware taking advantage of it). But using it is a damn sight more secure than just running with admin rights.

Principle of least privilege. It's worked for me for the last 8 years - never had a virus. For a windows system, that's saying something.

Re:Insightful?

[Tim Browse]

Kidding, right? I well remember the hell of trying to get TIE Fighter to run in 640k. MSCDEX, extended/expanded memory, juggling config.sys files, etc.

And DirectX allowed a standardised interface to hardware, which allowed for the widespread rise of 3D accelerators. I for one am glad that games don't only word with 3dfx/glide etc any more (hello Tomb Raider, if we're sticking to your examples).

Even for 2D graphics, it was an improvement - the chipsets of the day had pretty awesome blitters (as demonstrated by the venerable FoxBear demo), but MS's research found that developers rarely used them because the blitters were all different and all had their own API/drivers. Remember, this was in the days when there were more players in the gfx card market than just ATI, nVidia and Intel. But even with just 3, who'd want to program to 3 different APIs/drivers?

Re:gaming introduced early compromises

[scot4875]

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

Re:gaming introduced early compromises

[shaneh0]

Not to mention the games themselves. I'm not a huge gamer, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm trying to imagine playing Doom circa 1995 at 1600x1200 and the way the game was designed, it seems impossible.

"you would have also had a $1,000 monitor."

In 1996 I bought a CTX 800x600 monitor for about $700. So you're probably talking considerably north of $1000.

It was a hyperbole that someone tried to defend as fact.

Re:Wild Tangent?

[rsclient]

Hi there everybody! Let me introduce myself as a very old WildTangent employee. But I'm not speaking for them; I just work there.

No, we aren't spyware. No, we aren't hard to remove (unless you have trouble with the concept of 'add/remove programs'). And no, we aren't on anyone's "spyware" list (we spent a lot of time getting off lists that we were incorectly on, though). (Bizzaro-world annecdote: some anti-spyware makers dinged us for having an auto-update feature. The same people, though, automatically updated their own products.)

More importantly, we make money by selling games. Sometimes we sell games directly to the end-user; sometimes to an advertiser; sometimes to a manufacturer. We don't make money selling personal information because

1. there's not much money it in
2. it would screw up our game sales
3. it would kill our reputation with all of the major OEMs (we ship on pretty much every major name-brand computer in America)
4. we don't have any personal information to sell (unless you buy a game from us -- then we obviously got a bit in order to charge your credit card)

We used to have a (fairly nifty) background auto-updating system similar to just about everybody's. Now we have a different (but still fairly nifter) non-background auto-updating system that is also similar to - just about everybody's. I was always surprised how a small number of people are vehemently against auto-update systems; this is especially true considering that pretty much every big package is updatable now.

I'm also one of the people at WildTangent that had to deal with Vista. My impression: they should (explitive) document their own (explitive) changes so that we can (explitive) figure out what's (explitive) going on. (explitive). And I'm not normally inclined to swearing.

Re:gaming introduced early compromises

[shaneh0]

Sorry, I call BS on your prices. Unless they were hot.

Check usenet for examples.

For instance, in this thread somebody asks the price of a monitor very similar to the one I purchased. Post was from May, 1995, and the price quoted at CDW was $640.

http://groups.google.com/group/misc.forsale.comput ers.monitors/browse_thread/thread/eb455bd15c9ddba6 /4d31b2e584112c96?lnk=st&q=&rnum=6#4d31b2e584112c9 6

There are a ton of examples like this. Set the date-range criteria in advanced groups search and type in: monitor price.

Scares me that a developer is this stupid...

[TheNetAvenger]

Scares me that a developer is this stupid...

#1. All MS has done is move the Vista security up to what every other major OS does. Does this developer NOT realize that a game on OSX or Linux would require the same 'privledges' if written as the developer suggests?

#2. If the person is pushing this argument based on 'demos' or download games, then they can code the freaking game with security in mind, so that it installs in the 'USER' area of the OS, and it WOULD NOT NEED to elevate privledges. This is pretty easy to do, as anyone that develops simples applications and demos for Windows with security in mind, or OSX or *nix with security in mind.

#3. This is one of the stupidest arguments I have seen in a long time. So what does the author of the article suggest? Have MS make Vista less secure so he doesn't have to learn about security and how to write an appliation that doesn't need administrative level access to run?

Maybe we should all go together and get this idiot a book on NT security so he can code his 'demos/games' so they don't install into an administrator area of the OS and then any Limited User Account can easily install or use them.

My mouth literally dropped open when I read this article, all the while I was thinking, nah, this has to be a gag, he can't really be this stupid about writing an application with NT security in mind.

No wonder MS left XP security open for program compatibility if this is the type of idiots that are STILL programming applications after Windows has moved over to NT for over 5 years now. Oh my gawd the horror, he might have to learn security APIs or learn what areas of the OS are off limits to idiot programmers...

Geesh....

Re:This is completely retarded...

[spitzak]

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.

Re:Not sure what consoles you are referring to.

[ravenshrike]

Um, no. The Cell capabilities are much greater than even the quadro, about double all else being equal. Unfortunately, limited memory and a relatively poor graphics proccessor mean that in order to properly access that power on the PS3 you will need very, very efficient code.

Re:They just don't want to work with it.

[AshmaDeva]

there was no way to perform super-user actions without logging out and logging back in

Not so.
runas /user:administrator "E:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE"

Enter "C:" in the path field and the drop down list gives internal sources (File System, Network, Control Panel, etc.)

Mandatory and inescapable?

[RavenofNi]

From TFA: "In Vista, LUA's are mandatory and inescapable." As part of my MSDN Sub. I run Vista now on my main pc...the pc I develop on, and nightly, the same PC I play WoW, EQ2, or Vanguard on. All without issue, all under my standard account with M$oft's 'sandbox' disabled.....what a non-starter.