WildTangent CEO Expresses Concerns over Gaming on Vista

[WILL]

The founder and CEO of popular online gaming company WildTangent, Alex St. John expresses his concerns about the future of gaming on the new Windows Vista operating system in an article at Gamasutra.

Among the greatest of those concerns by many people is the seemingly excessive Security measurements that Microsoft has put into Vista. These are said to be extremely restrictive and a handful for the independent developer.

Such issues future game developers will have to consider when supporting Vista will such things as Game Explorer implementation where you will need to supply an ESRB rating or get shunned by the parental controls.


Read the full article over at Gamasutra: 'Vista Casts A Pall On PC Gaming (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12314)'

[noeska]

In short if we want let our users play our games trouble free (as we do not want it to rated unknown), and annoy the playen with lots of warnings. whe should shell out money for codesigning: http://www.instantssl.com/code-signing/code-signing.html
Luckely this can be done free aswel, but i doubt vista will allow this one:
http://www.ascertia.com/onlineCA/issuer/default.aspx?linkID=40


ps i think this is the case already with xp sp2 already. Download a game or any program and you are asked every time if you trust the program, even after unzipping.

[chronozphere]

Holy crap.. :shock: Do we have to pay to make our games work properly on vista??

My opinion about vista wasn't very positive because of the 'over-securedness' and the High system requirements of the operating system.
Such articles only make me think more negative about Vista and also more positive about Vista's competitors (Mac OS, linux etc).

I must admit.. i haven't installed Vista yet. So i might be wrong about all this. ;)

I like to hear some opinions about vista. Is it an improvement or a step backwards?? :think:

[czar]

I have only used Vista for a few days to test out our software. As a developer I found it to be a handful.

I spent much of my time clicking away popups. These security popups were so frequent that you quickly stop reading them and clicking ok - sort of defeating the purpose of them.

I got the impression that as a developer we will end up forking out money to make our software work correctly. For example ESRB and also for a certificate so that Windows sees your product as a trusted application.

I might look at the status of vista in 12 months. At the moment I would be wary of dumping XP for vista.

[WILL]

I would not be surprised to see Vista do very badly in sales. It could be a wakeup call for Microsoft.

People aren't going to buy something that performs about the same to be able to do a few things nicely and everything else is a royal pain to work with. I think they are going to see very small margin of success with DirectX 10 (though if I really want next gen games as the sacrifice of my computer, I'll get an XBox 360 or PS3), the new Parental controls (keeping your kid from accessing anything other than what you want on the next is a big thing now-a-days, as unrealistic as it is.) and a distant 3rd being the new Aero-glass GUI.

[Grendelus]

Wait, this means the game will not work properly if I set it up using an installer?

[czar]

From what I understand it will still work but not within the "game Folder" - similar to say a my pictures folder. The game folder provides easy access to game including screen shot and esrb ratings etc

[Grendelus]

And they require a signature on our executable for including our games in there?

[Clootie]

Let's start here (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms687245.aspx).

[WILL]

Can someone elaborate a bit more on the whole restricted file write access issue?

If for example, my game installs to the folder C:\Program Files\Garland\ when it tries to write to the accompanying file C:\Program Files\Garland\Profile.dat it will give deny write access to this file?


I'd love to hear what Microsoft has to say about indie-developers supporting Vista after that rousing "developers, developers, developers" speech CEO Steve Balmer gave a year ago. (Ref. video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSIMeRtVebM))

[czar]

Correct.

Even the admin does not have "admin" rights all the time.

If you want to write to "c:\program files\MyGame\My Game data.txt" then the user will either get a message saying your program is about to access this file and requires access. Or it will not in fact write to that file but in

c:\users\your user name\...\My Game data.txt which gets kind of confusing when you are trying to work out why the data hasn't been updated.

I don't have Vista installed anymore. So I can't elaborate. All I know for sure is that I changed my project so that any files that need to be changed (e.g. database file) are stored in "my Documents\My Project" folder

I had problems with registry keys in local machine because they contained copy protection information. If a user entered the unlock codes they weren't being written to local machine anymore but to "local user" registry key. That means that information was not available to other users of the computer. So that for other users on the system the product had not infact been unlocked at all.

That was a right confusing mess.

[tux]

to the people saying microsoft will fail with Vista:

I think you are all forgetting that most, if not nearly all of the windows sales are through OEM channels and not the retail market. Vista will be a huge success because companies like dell, hp, etc will sell it with their new machines

[Clootie]

And I hope everybody news that "C:\Uses\User Name\" should not be assumed, but queried via SHGetSpecialFolderLocation() function. :roll:
Cos it's default location changed between XP and Vista...

[Damot]

Ugh. I just can't see how this is going to work at all.

Does that mean if I have a large 10mb data file for my game that I what to modify at run time, each user will have to install a copy of this file in their individual user folder? Christ.

[Clootie]

There is "All users" folder. Still not sure is it possible to freely access it from any program...

[Nitrogen]

From what my friend told me of the beta version, it's a bunch of crap (popups, restrictions) until you turn off a simple checkbox in the control panel, and everything goes back to normal...

But I dont know if they've changed things since then or what...

[JSoftware]

From what my friend told me of the beta version, it's a bunch of crap (popups, restrictions) until you turn off a simple checkbox in the control panel, and everything goes back to normal...


In the short time i had it I didn't manage to find it :roll:

[Damot]

I'm confused. I downloaded and installed a beta version last night RC2 build 5744 (off a torrent site).

My programs all install and run correctly, creating and modifying files within the c:\program files\myprog folder. I didn't get any security warnings or anything,

Is this just because it's an old beta?

[Clootie]

Let's start studying Game Development in Vista:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173459.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb147259.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb147379.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb206295.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb206359.aspx
8)

[Traveler]

I've been following the thread on gamedev for a bit and the more I read about it (through comments and links such as the ones clootie posted) the more I get the feeling that it really isn't as bad as the article lets us believe it is.

[cairnswm]

[quote="Traveler"]I've been following the thread on gamedev for a bit and the more I read about it (through comments and ]

<sarcasm>
I agree - it might actually be as bad as when XP came out, or even when XP SP2 came out!
</sarcasm>

:)

[Damot]

Those links were very helpful Clootie thanks.