Vista Casts A Pall On PC Gaming? 425
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 introduced early compromises (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, he makes a good point about the Game Explorer widget. Disclaimer: I have not, and probably will not for some time if at all, installed Vista on any of my computers yet. According to this article, though, it would seem that Microsoft is actually blocking games from running via any other means than the Game Explorer. This somewhat reminds me of Apple with iTunes in that using something else to sync an iPod takes more effort than most people would want to put forth. It would also seem to mean that installers will have to create special cases for Vista, which seems pointless to me. Admittedly, Microsoft could argue that limiting execution rights to the Game Explorer interface was necessary to enforce parental controls, but there are many other, less intrusive ways they could have gone about this (off the top of my head: deny execution rights to normal users, detect an attempted execution, if equal to or under parental ratings, run under a special Gaming account automagically, otherwise, ask for an escalation).
The obvious point is that Microsoft would seem to have a conflict of interest here; making PC gaming attractive may draw attention away from the X-box 360, something Microsoft would want to avoid at all costs. Are they making it difficult to run games in order to make the 360 seem much simpler by comparison? Maybe. I suppose I'd have to have both Vista and a 360 to find out, which I don't plan on having together for some time if at all.
Re:mandatory and inescapable. (Score:3, Interesting)
...which is the very first change I made in Vista -- it's my computer and I won't have the operating system disallow me from copying a backup of Firefox from the network to my machine when I'm an administrator (you cannot copy from a network share to Program Files. You must copy to your Documents folder and then move from there to Program Files). This and it constantly bringing up another dialog box to confirm that I actually meant "yes" when I clicked "yes" while I tried to delete a few shortcuts in my start menu. I like apple's approach: if necessary, ask for your password again, otherwise just make the damn change
What? (Score:0, Interesting)
Absolutely nothing in this paragraph addresses what the OP was talking about. Are you just jumbling together words to do a weird "plug" for X? Or is this a veiled "M$ sux" essay? I don't have anything against X, but anyone with an IQ higher than 70 knows it's not the hottest gaming platform in existence.
Care to try again?
Re:gaming introduced early compromises (Score:5, Interesting)
Once they make this 'Windows Game Profile 1.0' and they say you can do X, Y, and Z, but not A, B and C, we'll be in a lot better place.
It'll mean that games that meet the "Windows Game Profile 1.0" spec don't need to be tested against the riggors of installation, it'll just mean that during runtime, the application binaries are limited in what the system allows it to perform. All in all, this would mean a more stable OS, and a simpler install. The tradeoff is that developers will be restricted from using API's that they probably shouldn't be using anyways. (Anyone not following the spec/profile could just release games as they do today).
Of course, that would mean that Microsoft would have an immutable, simple, straight-forward API to implement games on Windows. Could they not implement this because it means that -alternative- Windows implementations (Wine) would have too easy of a time porting?
Re:So . . . password required then? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that's security, isn't it? It works everywhere else, right? No malicious webpages have installed anything anywhere after those warning dialogs were added to IE...
Re:Who's Encumbering my Access? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course the performance allowed by vanilla X is so godawful, that to get any decent performance at all requires "extensions" to X that basically ignore X architecture and are essentially hacks to provide high performance that wasn't even considered in the decade X was invented.
Exactly, and IMHO is primarily why Linux is yet to be taken seriously by anyone but fanboys on the desktop...
Re:The fucking game industry is one of the main... (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the key is in your statement "I'm sorry, but no game is important enough...". I'd tend to agree; online gaming should come with a prerequisite of basic networking knowledge. What's an IP address, firewall, router, port, and how does it apply to what I'm playing? Maybe if you can't answer that you should stick to one of the many single-player PC games, or buy a console that comes preconfigured to "just work" online. Let's face it, there's like two current titles left out there that only work on PC that haven't gone to X360 or PS3 yet.
I don't think Vista loses much by not being a first-rate gaming platform. My reading of the features says that it's a corporate OS anyway. What home user wants to deal with the DRM headaches with no obvious benefit to them?
mandelbr0t
Re:Not sure what consoles you are referring to. (Score:5, Interesting)
* (Lack of proper punctuation brought to you by Firefox grabbing all my apostrophes as "Fast Find" requests.)
Seems like bullshit to me (Score:3, Interesting)
- Mummy, better security makes it an infentisimal amount more challenging to hawk our products!
- Woah no! We don't like this game explorer concept!
- Waaaah, parental controls prevent kids who shouldn't be playing our games anyway from playing them!
- Boo hoo, trying to run a game from outside the game explorer results in strange behaviour (this is the only legitimate complaint)
It just sounds like a list of whiney bitching... because it is.I mean seriously, Microsoft have gone out of their way to improve gaming on Vista and all these guys can do is complain that kids are properly protected and that LUA makes pushing their product harder? I'm sorry, but I'll take an extra security dialog to get a demo if it results in fewer of the general internet-unsavvy users infecting themselves, and Microsoft are NOT your marketing company; it's not their concern that your strategy can't cope with a minor change.
Jesus christ.
What about all the work that's gone into DX10? All the consultations with game studios and hardware developers? The tightening of the requirements for cards to be certified as DX10 capable which is designed to make your jobs easier?
Quit the ungrateful highschool bitching and respond to change.
It's something that tends to happen in the real world, and it's for the better.
FUD (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
*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.
Re:gaming introduced early compromises (Score:5, Interesting)
OP:
Can anyone recommend a 21 inch monintor and video card to do 1600x1200 in
24 bit color. My guess is that I'd need 6 or 8 megs of video ram. The monitor
should be able to do 1600x1200 at 70hz.
Answer:
You will need 8 - 10 Mb of VRAM for that. Salient Systems Corporation has
a board called the AT3000 which supports up to 10Mb of VRAM. Our home
page is http:/www.salientsys.com. We have loads of customers, mostly in
medical imaging and image processing, who run this card at high res/high
color.
What application are you running?
[...]
I forgot to answer the monitor portion of your question. You will need a
monitor capable of about 200Mhz. Hitachi makes a really nice 21"
flat-screen which we use. The Accuvue HM-4521-D. It's really bueno and
can handle the bandwidth. Colors and images are sharp as well. The AT3000
will sync just about anything but Hitachi seems to have the edge on
big-screen monitors.
Viewsonic makes one also but I don't believe the quality is there. The
Hitachi costs around $2,200 I believe.
There you have it. That's about $2700 in 2006 dollars.
Re:Who's Encumbering my Access? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the desktop?
I wager that everyone who says "Linux isn't ready" knows full well what Linux is, and can name at least one reason why they don't recommend it to their clients/boss/relatives.
If Linux were ready, well, a free OS that's just as good as that new $300 MS thing is going to make a bigger dent than Linux has.
Re:gaming introduced early compromises (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you may have gotten ripped off. Unless it was some sort of flat-panel (LCD), in which case, go you!
Ross
Re:Used to be True.. (Score:3, Interesting)
How convenient for Microsoft...almost as if it's by design.
Games are pretty much the only thing keeping me from going 100% Linux, and I doubt I'm unique in that regard. Microsoft might fight a little dirty to keep its gaming dominance, and they've proven that antitrust lawsuits aren't going to slow them down.
What do you mean limted user accounts are unsable? (Score:4, Interesting)
I force myself to use them and my wife who uses the same machine
A few ACL changes make the games perfectly usuable install all games in c:\games and have that directory full control to all users
This means the total impact of a foolish action by a user can wipe out their account and all the games on the system. Much better than an admin account being compromised (ok ignoring priviledge ecalation attacks)
I recently had to remove a trojan from my wifes account - a fairly trival procedure given how limited her access to the system as a whole was. Reading up on the particular trojan I found that had it been able to get admin access it would have been much harder to remove.
Ok I'll concded on XP home without ACL controls its bloody hard to accomplish this. But if you have XP pro you really have no excuse.
(and to explain no I'm not a windows fan - I loathe the system especially as I frequently have to admin them in my work. I much prefer linux and am quite familiar with winex which I have work with extensively and created start up scripts for several games that would not work trvially out of the box. however I also know just how much of a pain it is to do this so stick to dual booting. not liking the OS is no excuse not to secure it properly)
Re:Not sure what consoles you are referring to. (Score:4, Interesting)
Second a $400 computer wont be able to keep up with your 360 but thats not how you should look at it. A computer is a multi-purpose system. Think of it this way. You spend $1000 for a computer that is no good for games but has a decent CPU and ram. $1000 is not an unreasonable price to get a computer that is up to the specs of a 360 not including the video card. So lets say you have this computer in your house and you want to play video games. Your options are spend $400 on a 360 or $400 on a video card for your computer. A $400 video card will be much faster that the video card in the 360. Also your computer will benefit in other ways from having a good video card.
I think your original comparison was kind of an apples and oranges arguement but when you consider the full cost of a 360 and the full benefit of a nice PC you can see why 360's are not that great.
Also i should mention that i used to work for microsoft on the 360. I have played almsot every game to ever be released for it and i can say that most are junk. The "best" games for consoles are the sports and racing games which are not something i enjoy. I much prefer RTS and FPS games which is where the PC blows consoles out of the water.
I think game selection should be the most important criteria in chosing a PC or console. As i stated above $400 will get you nearly the same PC or console gaming hardware (i think PC wins but not by very much). However if you are someone who is a big racing or sports fan and like to have friends come over and play Madden or Gran Turismo then a PC is something you shouldn't even consider.
Re:Used to be True.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless you can provide a citation, I'd say you're pulling that out of your ass. The wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] makes absolutely no mention of of Direct X. Nor does the official games for windows page [gamesforwindows.com]. Thanks for the pointless rant.
Potential Problem with Admin Passwords (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's cut to the chase (Score:3, Interesting)
They have lots to gain from the death of PC gaming.
Why support it?
Re:Multiple customers at play here (Score:3, Interesting)
> but will now need to do some extra work to
> get their applications to work on Vista in
> the first place.
I'm going to tell a story about that.
Several years ago, the MFC libraries were updated with a minor change: developers were no longer permitted to combine window styles and control bar styles in the same bit vector. Suddenly, upon installation of this update, many applications lost their toolbars; the control bar constructor was failing, so no control bar was created.
At the time, I worked for a company which produced three products that needed to be fixed as a result. We had all these requests. We tracked down the problem. We found that it was the MFC update causing it. And the response of my development team was that Microsoft had screwed up the MFC update, so we would have to wait for them to patch it.
Meanwhile, I went and looked at MSDN, where I found this little blurb in the documentation for the control bar styles: don't combine them with window styles. Curious, and something of a pack rat, I started going through my back catalog of MSDN CDs. It turns out that this rule had been in the documentation ever since the introduction of the control bar in the first place. For years, our applications had been breaking the rules and getting away with it.
And as soon as the rules changed, we blamed Microsoft. But when I dug into the MFC header files, I discovered something: in this release, for the first time, there was a bit flag that had meaning as both a control bar style and a window style. Previously, the styles had been assigned from opposite ends of the spectrum, delaying the intersection as long as possible - but we had, at last, intersected. The rules had changed because they needed to change. There was no choice.
The fix was easy; literally two lines. Where we used to have "int style = [cbrs flags] | [ws flags]", I simply edited it to "int style = [ws flags]" and added the later line "style = [cbrs flags]" between window and control bar initialisation. Since it was an internal library function, all three of our applications were fixed. We shipped an update.
But meanwhile, rather than track down the real issue, my developers had been telling customers that Microsoft was the problem and only they could fix it. It's very convenient and easy to blame Microsoft. A lot of people would rather do that than their work. I've watched people blame Microsoft to avoid work for fifteen years. I'm rather used to it.
But this? This isn't a developer trying to avoid debugging. This is the CEO and founder of a company trying to avoid running his business. I'm simply stunned.