Less a manifesto, and more a notverymanlyfesto, as this is very much a tech-centric list. If you want thoughtful game theory, you’ve got the wrong nitpicker.
The PC is the best gaming platform in the world – but it could be better still. While it’s great that the PC doesn’t have to suffer quite the same degree of standardisation as its locked-down console brethren, we have nevertheless fallen into certain patterns of how we game. There are things we take for granted and thus expect, like WASD controls in FPSes and patches for bad bugs. There are others still we should be able to take for granted, but can’t because the same damn-fool oversights happen again and again. Even outside of the more obvious annoyances like referring to Xbox controls or including ridiculously draconian DRM (which are both more a question of money than of thoughtlessness), a ton of stuff that any gamer could have told the developer was a glaring screw-up keeps on turning up in otherwise great games. Here are just 10 of the worst offenders, 10 things that every single modern PC game should get right and has no excuse not to. Please do suggest others in comments below.
1. Alt-tab support.
Perhaps the single greatest, but so often neglected, Must-have there is. Just having rudimentary task-switching support in there isn’t enough (hello-o Valve games) – it needs to be fairly quickly and smooth, and included in the original release of the game, not in a patch down the line. This should be as big a priority as graphics or sound. Don’t care if it’s a massive pain to code in. Don’t care if you have to re-start the entire game from scratch to put it in. Alt-tab is absolutely integral to the way we all use our PCs. Half of us essentially live at our computers – we need to be able to task-switch to an IM window or an inbox or even another game in moments, not be locked into one program. Frankly – if your game doesn’t alt-tab, it’s not really a PC game.
Possibly deserving an entry of its own, but in the name of keeping this list to 10 I’ll include it here – all PC games should be able to play in a window. I’ve missed social events because someone’s instant messaged me about going to the pub, but not bothered to phone or text when I don’t get back to them right away because I’m off in a game. One day, the girl of my dreams will magically message me, and by the time I’ve exited the game she’ll have got bored of waiting and declared her love for my arch-nemesis (I don’t actually have an arch-nemesis, but I’m working on it). Then I will hunt down and kill the developer of whichever unwindowable game I was playing at the time. They will appreciate why. Window play is also necessary for 2D games whose resolutions can’t be changed – 800×600 pixels of pretty hand-drawn art look like roadkill in toontown when they’re stretched over a 1680×1050 panel.
2. Use standardised install and savegame folders
Everything goes in Program Files by default, please (and, just as importantly, there needs to be an option to install anywhere the player would rather). Don’t have your game install itself into the root of C:\ or an obscure sub-folder, and when you do put it in Program Files don’t stick it inside [Publisher name]\[Developer name] – just stick a folder directly in there under the game’s name. Gamers want to be able to find their game files easily, not have to Google for everyone involved in its creation just so they can work out what folder it’s in.
This is doubly true of savegames. We need to be able to back those suckers up in case of disaster or a Windows reinstall. Know where STALKER hides its savegames in Vista? C:\Users\all users\documents\stalker-shoc, that’s where. Here’s where games whose developers aren’t crazy stick their saves on my PC – C:\Users\Alec\Documents\My Games. In other words, the standard My Games folder inside (My) Documents, a two-click, standard process to reach. To find STALKER’s saves, I have to dig through five separate sub-folders, in something I’d never otherwise look at. Who are these mythical ‘All Users’? They’re not me, that’s who.
Even our beloved World of Goo fails at this. The game goes into Program Files\World of Goo. The savegame – and the savegame alone – goes into C:\ProgramData\2DBoy\WorldOfGoo. ProgramData? Worse, that’s actually a hidden folder by default. Gah!
3. Automatically set themselves to your desktop screen resolution
Don’t default to something horrid and archaic like 640×480. The vast majority of PC gamers use flatpanel monitors, and games running at anything other than their native resolution tend to look horrible. Save us the hassle of changing the setting ourselves, but most of all save the less tech-savvy from having to work out what a resolution even is in the first place, or just putting up with a blurry screen because they’ve no idea how to fix it. Clearly, still allow the resolution to be easily changed to whatever the gamer wants, however: the game needs to support every res the monitor does.
4. Support widescreen resolutions.
Widescreen isn’t the future – it’s the present. Just look at the consoles for proof of that, or at the top hits for ‘monitor’ on Amazon. And expecting us to edit an ini file or type in command lines doesn’t count as widescreen support.
5. Uninstall in seconds.
Don’t have it laboriously check every single damn file before it has the grace to remove ‘em – just wipe the folder, pull the main hooks out of the registry and be done with it. I uninstalled the FIFA 09 demo today, and it all but locked up my PC for ten minutes while it did its ridiculous, disc-churning thing. Then I uninstalled the King’s Bounty: The Legend demo, and it was gone in the blink of an eye. That’s the way to do it. When I want someone to leave my house, I just want them gone – I don’t want them hanging around on the doorstep making tedious chit-chat for half an hour. Tied into this is installing neatly in the first place to ensure removal is simple – the game should all end up in one place, not explode tiny bits of itself all over the hard drive.
6. Don’t require the CD/DVD in the drive to play.
Again, we’re talking about a PC, a device with hundreds of gigabytes of storage. A game needing to look at a plastic disc entirely external to the game install folder whenever it runs is openly ludicrous. I know it’s for copy protection’s sake (and even so is of debatable effectiveness in this day and age), but the annoyance to legit customers surely outweighs a few extra lost sales before the inevitable no CD crack turns up anyway. Requiring PC gamers to scrabble through a vast pile of discs just to play the game they’ve already installed is contrary to the nature of the platform, and lures people towards less than legal solutions that may ultimately push them further towards piracy. And you wouldn’t want that, would you publishers?
7. Keep the quicksave and quickload keys far apart.
Accidents happen, whether it’s sausage-fingered gamer stereotypes or just furious keyboard-slapping in rage at another defeat. Hitting quicksave when you’re reaching for quickload is the worst thing in the world, including being licked to death by a pack of hobos. If you set quicksave and quickload to F5 and F6, you are not fit to be developing PC games. F6 and F9 are fine – that’s enough space to blame quicksaving just as you get killed on the player being stupid, not on developer thoughtlessness.
8. Escape means menu/pause
The button’s actually called ‘Escape’, for heaven’s sake. Why on Earth would a game ever bind a request to leave or pause the action to anything else? This needs to be standardised. No-one wants to be miserably jabbing at random buttons one-by-one because the phone’s ringing but they’ve got no idea what brings up the pause menu.
And, because I want to keep this list PC-centric rather than generalist to all games, I’ll mention cutscenes here rather than as a separate point. Pressing Escape during a cinematic means I want to end that cinematic. Literally, I want to escape this movie you are making me watch. Please respect that button’s purpose. Please respect your players – and if you make any of your cutscenes unskippable, you don’t.
9. Auto-backup quicksaves
Again, accidents happen. Excited gamers hit quicksave when they think they’re out of danger but a giganto-beast is just about to feast on their ankles. Files get corrupted. And then you’re screwed, with no option than to rewind potentially hours of progress. So whenever the player hits quicksave, the game should keep a copy of the last one in case of disaster. The last two, ideally. It’s just common sense, and surely an incredibly simple process.
10. Patches should fix, not break
If your patch renders savegames from previous versions of the game inoperable, it’s just not ready for release. If people have to restart a game from the very beginning because of this, they will hate and distrust you for it. If there’s honestly no way around this, because the under-the-hood changes really are that absolute, then the patch needs to say as much in giant red letters when it’s run: “INSTALLING THIS WILL BREAK YOUR SAVES. OK?” A footnote in the readme file is not enough. Better yet, the lead designer should show up at the door of anyone installing the patch with a box of chocolates and an apologetic hug.
Stepping away from savegames, if your patch introduces new problems then it’s hardly a patch, is it? Test it to death before you let it into the wild – remember that Eve update which deleted critical Windows files? Such a thing cannot be allowed to ever happen again.
Related Stories:
I’m not sure it’s fair to compare the uninstall time of a game that by rights should only be out next year to a demo of a game that probably fit on a floppy (if that’s the King’s Quest you mean).
“Also can you access My Documents programmatically, or do you have to hard code the path?”
yes you can get that one:
SHGetFolderPath(NULL,CSIDL_PERSONAL,NULL,SHGFP_TYPE_CURRENT,docspath);
Having spoken to some big name devs, it seems the ‘My Games’ thing is a bodge where everyone has copied each other. There doesn’t seem to be any standard or authorised way to do it.
I hate patches that break savegames too. Unforgivable. Write a savegame converter feck ye.
@RED_404 says:
99% of the time this works, but I have come across a few that somehow knew it wasnt a bik file and failed to start. Its safer to replace them with a 1 frame bik file, like I suggested above, but you can always try deleting them or renaming a blank file first.
@Bhlaab
Except for the original Xbox (if modded). If you backed up your game to the HD, you could FTP in and do the same! One more reason for mod chips…
Oh, one more thing: NO CHECKPOINTS.
I want to save whenever I want. Perhaps a 12 year old has all the time of the world to play and reach the following checkpoint, but I don’t, and if I have to do the same segment three times because either I died or I had to do some work, I will uninstall your game and never again buy another one from you.
PCs are not a console!. Checkpoints are a sign of lazy programming.
If you can ask where you want the game installed, you can ask where you want the saves to go. I really don’t see the difficulty.
Point 1 is absolutely essential for sneaking around the wife’s watchful eye.
Gap Gen: oops, I meant King’s Bounty, the remake (whose demo is 700Mb)
@rocketman71: re checkpoints – I’d argue the other way, actually. Checkpoints preserve game flow and immersion, while quicksave and quickload (or any other save/load anywhere system) simply reinforce the fact you’re playing a game and encourage the player to be ultra-conservative in the way they play – “whoops, I lost thirty health there, let’s quickload and try that encounter again” – rather than play the game fairly and actually learn how to play the game *better*. They also encourage the designer not to properly balance their game because they know that the player effectively has no penalty for dying, they can quickload and all they’ve lost is a minute or two.
Being able to save anywhere in a game has its uses (say if you’re interrupted by a phone call or the cat’s on fire, or something) but if you use quickload/quicksave as a method of making the game easier to play, (or worse, *have* to use it like that) then either the game’s difficulty curve is seriously flawed, or you really suck as a player.
Try playing Half-Life 2 without using the quicksave/quickload. On Medium difficulty you really shouldn’t be having to replay sections again and again. If you do, then that’s a sure sign that you’re using the quicksave as a crutch and not actually learning how to compete with the AI.
Mmm. As for everyone asking for skippable developer/publisher logos…. it’d be nice, but honestly there’s no real leverage for this to happen. DVDs these days often have up to minutes of unskippable stuff like copyright messages, logos, introduction animations to menus… it’s the same in games.
But. And this is important. When you make a menu screen, make it simple, clear, and quick to load. I go fucking spare whenever I see a load progress bar for a fucking menu screen. It’s unnecessary, it doesn’t impress and it it’s an extra delay before I can start playing. I don’t care for flashy graphics and 3D swirly things when I’m fiddling with game settings.
Sigh. there was a period, about 95/96 when Windows 95 was still new and exciting, when games actually used Windows standard buttons and menus. It was bliss. I still have Mission Force: Cyberstorm to remind me of these great days.
Oh, and I want to add my voice to the cutscene thing. When I press escape, I want to get an option to skip. This counts double for in-engine cutscenes (which most are these days). If it brings up a general menu to let me fiddle with other game options, so much the better. But at the very least it should say “Skip cutscene? [Ok] [Cancel]“.
And, and, and: RPGs with long, long and important conversations – please let me save halfway through if my choices are going to have important effects. If I screw up my whole game just because I accidentally called Galadriel a soulless whore I’d like to go back and rectify my mistake without having to sit through half an hour’s preamble.
@Bobsy: “DVDs these days often have up to minutes of unskippable stuff like copyright messages, logos, introduction animations to menus…”
This is why I watch DVDs through my soft-modded Xbox. I get to skip all that crap and go straight to the main menu. And it upscales the picture into 720p. Win-win.
I don’t know what number we is all at now but… 17) please you indie developers please support linux… not all of us put up with stupid windows file systems, a little love to your alternative operating system would be great.
Even if you just support one distrubution, people will get it to run on others it would be awesome. Or even show a litle love for Wine… test your game/program if it doesn’t work perhaps have a lookie at the debug data and aid the Wine dev teams… If I can install and run Ubuntu with Wine then any developer can.
Oh number 18) or whatever … Web based games must support all web browsers not just Internet Explorer.. come on… seesh.
Funny thing is, I never had a problem with the 11 step process of quitting assassin’s creed on the PC. As a matter of fact, I never actually quit once. I just waited for the damn thing to crash back to the desktop.
Another addendum to number 1: All games should have Alt+F4 support. If the game supports it, I almost always use it rather than a menu.
@Iain
ok Now I’m confused. I didn’t think you could softmod a 360 but I’m also pretty sure an original xbox can’t do 720p… which is it?
[quote]I don’t know what number we is all at now but… 17) please you indie developers please support linux… not all of us put up with stupid windows file systems, a little love to your alternative operating system would be great.[/quote]
Uh….. I think it’s safe to say that every, and I do mean every, PC gamer has Windows. They may also run Linux, but they certainly have a Windows installation, because…. otherwise 99% of all games won’t run, and if they don’t play 99% of all games, they’re not really gamers.
So what would they gain by “supporting” Linux? (Which, by the way, is fundamentally impossible unless you dedicate yourself to lifelong maintenance. There’s this little thing called backwards compatibility, and it’s brother, stable API’s, neither of whom are welcome in the Linux world. Kernel developers feel it’s their privilege to change things causing applications to break. And then the application developers have to fix their apps. How long can you afford to keep up with that as a game developer? And why should you go through the trouble? For the 8 people who intended to play the game on Linux? Or the 3 of them who’d be willing to pay for it?
Add to this that Linux is just fundamentally broken when it comes to game development:
http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364 (read the comments for lols)
I’m sorry, I think what you meant to say was “17: Please don’t waste your precious resources attempting to get your game running on Linux. I’d rather see a Windows-only game than a game that is never completed”.
@iain: ok, let me choose then. Do I want to use checkpoints or not?
Example of bad use of checkpoints: the one in COD4 in the sniper level, when all the baddies come in the end. You have a checkpoint with 6 or 7 minutes to go, and you die a lot. And then you play it again and again, knowing exactly were the enemies are going to come from, mining the exact places, dying, doing it again… That’s not playing, it’s grinding. It doesn’t have anything to do with the IA, it’s just unbalanced. And it’s not fun after the 10th time. I don’t consider myself an exceptional player, but I’m not a n00b either. And I had to play that quite a lot of times to finish it. And it was really frustrating. Now, with saving and loading, they would have been a lot less. Does that mean I was getting an advantage from using it?. Not really. It means I was using saves to pass a really bad designed part of the game without hating the developer too much.
But yeah, I was referring mainly to the saving as a “I have to go now and I don’t want to leave the computer on to avoid losing my progress” method. When you are a dad, you don’t have that much time between baby, work and sleep (the little you get). And if your checkpoints are 20-30 minutes apart, I can’t really play your game, because the third time I lose progress because I have to stop playing and I couldn’t reach a checkpoint, I’m going to uninstall the game and play a better designed one.
Now, if anyone wants to use quicksaves to progress, it’s their choice. But I’d argue that we should ALWAYS have that choice.
@grumpy: Hi, I’m a PC Gamer. I don’t have Windows installed, and haven’t for about 2 years now. The success rate for games running in Wine is a damn sight higher than 1%, you know – even Spore almost works perfectly in Wine now, only a couple of weeks after release.
Additionally – erm, OpenGL [i]is[/i] a stable API, and the kernel API fluidity shouldn’t affect games developers at all (why the heck are you trying to load modules into the kernel with your game?).
And, additionally, additionally – clearly id software, for example, are Massive Geniuses, then, since pretty much everything they’ve ever done works perfectly well in Linux, natively. (And, for example, World of Goo will, all of Introversion Software’s back catalogue does, etc.) There is a problem with reading direct mouse location and mouse-warping workarounds in the current versions of xorg, but there’s a patch in the works for that after the Wine developers complained about it.
@grumpy – This is why I added the Wine section simple things can be done in windows programming to be more ‘Wine’ friendly, and linux gaming programming will only get better when developers start supporting it more. I personally think it is linux next big step to start sorting out its gaming platform, nows the time to jump on the boat.
Ubuntu has made linux a real alternative platform for the home user, I myself run Ubuntu but i must admit i do have a windows install for the special games that refuse to work under wine… but I haven’t booted that up in ages.
@roryok: It’s an original Xbox, which can do 720p – it’s just not that many games supported it.
@rocketman71: Your example is an interesting one – but it’s not the checkpoint that’s the biggest part of the problem – it’s the fact that the encounter is unbalanced. A good checkpoint system (Halo, or HL2 say) should mean you never have to replay more than a few minutes, and not having to navigate menus or stab keys to flick between savegames means that reloading after being killed doesn’t disrupt the flow of the game or your sense of immersion as much. I’d say that’s preferable to a big LOADING sign being stuck in the middle of your screen. I take your point about checkpoints being 20-30 minutes apart – there’s no real reason for them to be that far apart, and that’s usually the sign of a sloppy port.
However, I’d much rather have a decent checkpoint system than rely on the quickload and the quicksave, because invariably I will get so caught up in a game I won’t want to break my sense of immersion and will forget to save. If the game then chucks a hideously balanced encounter at you and the last autosave was half an hour ago at a map transition… ooooh, that makes me mad.
@iain: yes, I’ve had the same problem, with Bioshock. I played for like 40 minutes without saving, and then the game crashed (for doing Alt-Tab, no less!) and I lost all that play. And it took me 2 months to get back to it, so angry I was with the programmers for that.
So, for me, the best is both approachs: put checkpoints (autosaves), not very far appart, let me play from any of them (I’m not happy with how I was in the middle of the level, I prefer to restart it), but also let me save whenever I want.
That way, you will save only if you really have to, but if you die, you don’t really lose much. Otherwise, we all end up like F5 drones: kill baddie, press F5, kill baddie, press F5, oh I died… F9 (yes, I put F5 as QS and F9 as QL, I’ve always agreed with #7).
Checkpoints wouldn’t really be that much of a problem to me if half the developers really knew where to put them.
Also, they should be transparent. “CHECKPOINT REACHED” in the middle of the screen also puts me off the game.
Interesting… I guess you’d have to buy a composite RGB cable for it or something. Makes me wonder if XBMC can manage 720p video
Being able to save games to an off-site location via in-built FTP gets my vote (apologies if it’s already been mentioned, I just didn’t have time to read 170+ entries on this thread). Free webspace comes with most, if not all, ISP accounts these days.
Perhaps RPS can condense this list and present it as a fait accompli to developers around the world, under threat of the readers of RPS never buying a game again from developers who don’t sign up to the charter?
Stongly agree about number 8.
I played Mass Effect yesterday and there are a couple of fights there with longish unskippable cutscenes right before difficult fight. And on top of that it is impossible to save during fights so each time I failed a fight I had to sit through the same (by this time rather boring) cutscene leading to much frustration on my part.
If all my save games are going in one place I better be able to say where. Nothing fucks me off more that installing games to E: and then finding C: is full of 100mb save games.
Also wtf is up with 100mb save games.
There is a reason I have more than one drive and don’t install crap to the OS partition. Don’t just decide you actually know better and go ahead with putting stuff there anyway.
LoL this whoel article reminds me of just released “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames” only thing thats proper… is the game dosent need the CD xD
For Vista, saved games should clearly be in C:\Users\\Saved Games. I haven’t seen a single game use it though.
I’m fine with My Documents/My Games for non-Vista users but, saved games are not documents and realistically C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\\\, is the technically correct place to put them. (I think, anyway. Its been a few years since I’ve had reason to look at Microsoft’s recommendations for this kinda thing) Other than backing up, in which case you’ll want to back up the rest of Application Data too since it contains all the settings for your programs, there is little reason to touch saved games and so putting them in a hidden folder is fine.
While we’re on this save thing, how about developers do the common sense thing and have both checkpoints AND save anywhere like Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R does? Then the only people who can’t be happy are the weak willed who just have to use save anywhere despite it insulting their very being.
Yes, which means a Linux port isn’t necessary for you. :)
And sure, OpenGL is a stable API, but games need access to more than OpenGL. Unfortunately, OpenGL is also roughly 8 years behind DirectX. And the development tools for it are nonexistent. Debugging or profiling or tweaking OpenGL code is a massive headache, whereas Microsoft and DirectX have truly amazing tools available to assist in that. And as the Braid blog post I linked to shows, try finding one single usable, low-latency and stable audio API for Linux. It does not exist.
And yes, some developers put the necessary resources into a Linux port. But here’s the kicker. They 1) don’t do so at release (yes, most of id’s game run on Linux. How many of them did at release day?)
Yes, and it only took them 15 years to realize that this could be a problem. How about this then? When this patch is done, integrated into the main X11 source tree and a developer can rely on this being supported on *every* Linux box that tries to play the game, *that’s* when it might make a bit more sense to make a Linux port. But surely you’re not claiming that because glaring problems may one day in the future be fixed, developers should attempt to write software that works on the same platform *today*? Once these issues are fixed, it may be possible to write a Linux port of your game without too much trouble. Until them it will remain something that takes a significant amount of resources to work around the most glaring shortcomings, and when all is said and done, you get access to a what, 0.74% larger user base, of which at least the first 0.65% will refuse to pay for *any* piece of software.
AbyssUK:
No, the time to jump on the boat is when they *have* sorted out their gaming platform. And I don’t see why 1) it would improve if more developers made Linux games (wouldn’t that just encourage a status quo? Hey, look at all these developers who don’t mind the weird mouse wrapping issues or the shaky, high-latency sound. Why should we fix it then?), but also 2) why is it the responsibility of game developers to help fix this broken mess? Game developers make games. And if a platform doesn’t support them in doing that, then I can’t blame them for choosing a different platform.
And like you say, you have Wine *and* Windows. Most Linux users do. So native Linux games isn’t exactly of the utmost importance for the PC gaming market, is it? Would you be willing to pay more for a native Linux port of a game? Are there games you’ve skipped, that you would have bought if only they were available on Linux?
Oh, and didn’t see your comment about Wine before:
How will people do that? Oh, you mean the game should be opensourced too? Sure, that fits perfectly into the business model of most games. I’m sure EA won’t mind at all that you open source your game after they spent years alienating their user base with DRM everywhere. Fits perfectly into their strategy.
Two problems here. First, debugging is hard enough as it is. I doubt many developers are just itching to debug on Wine on top of all their normal problems. And second, why should they spend their precious time “aiding the Wine dev teams”? They’re making a game here, submitting patches to completely unrelated software is a waste of time. It doesn’t help their game get done, it just drives up costs.
Are there some guidelines somewhere telling you what you should or shouldn’t do to guarantee Wine compatibility?
@roryok: What you need are component leads like these. XBMC will output in anything up to 1080i, assuming your TV can handle it.
hate to be devils advocate but you’ve talked about alt tabbing before and I’ve explained the trade off before so what are you actually asking for?
and about the patches i can see why it can happen that patches break the save game but it wouldn’t be hard to write a convertor that jumps you somewhere or restarts you near where you where kind of thing.
this also ties in with my idea that all games should be random access and have fast forward/rewind functionalites by default like a DVD.
I’m asking for Alt-tab in all PC games, Sombrero.
ohh sorry i thought you were asking for it to be quick, yeah, alt tabbing in pc games shouldn’t crash your pc or the game defo, that drives me absolutely insane as well!
@grumpy:
I’d rather play games natively in Linux than have to use Wine for them, because there’s an inherent cost in efficiency in having another translation layer between the hardware and the game. It’d also be nice for developers to know that I was playing their game in Linux – at present, running a game in Wine looks like a vote for Windows as far as the game developer is concerned, because they have no way of telling what platform I’m going to be using. Steam does know if it’s in Wine (because of the fake devices that Wine reports to it), but not many other systems phone home to developers to let them know what system I’m using.
The point, re: low-latency sound, and the mouse-warping issue in xorg, isn’t that Game Developers Should Fix This – it’s that No-One Made a Big Fuss About This, so No-one Tried to Fix It. If more people tried to port games to Linux, so that it was actually a driving force in the community, then more time would be spent on fixing things that the game writing community cares about. As it is, the majority of parties interested in X, for example, don’t care particularly about the mouse-warping issue, so it wasn’t fixed for 15 years – because no-one really complained about it to them. The Wine devs complained and… oh, look, someone patched it.
There are several games that I’ve skipped because they wouldn’t work satisfactorily in Wine or Linux – Crysis is one of them. In addition, I only bought Darwinia, and ET:QW because they had native linux ports – in ET:QW’s case, it wasn’t sufficiently interesting to me otherwise. The same was true of UT2004, and I didn’t buy UT3 when they failed to make the promised Linux client available. So, yes?
@grumpy
The Ubuntu guys have announced recently that they’ll be pouring piles of money and effort into OpenGL, X, GTK, KDE, Qt and GNOME. That should certainly help get the ball rolling.
Just to leave my comment on the whole Save Folder topic, the folder in My Documents is usually just fine, I don’t like it, but it works.
What I have a problem with is games like B&W2 (yes, I liked it and there is nothing you can do about it) that put 500mb worth of saves and settings in the folder. I have about 2tb worth of space spread over 4 drivers and since the system drive is the oldest it is also the smallest. Automatically putting saves on c: when that drive is running out of space is not always a good idea, i know a good lot of people who still partition their system drive to about 10gb space for the system itself and then install to other partitions.
Also, on the QS/QL topic, if you don’t want it, don’t use it. No one is forcing you to use it in most games today, but sometimes you have to leave the computer and need to save since someone might want to use it.
If you include QL don’t do as Clear Sky and block it when the player dies, needing to wait two seconds before I can go to the menu to load last game is really annoying.
In order for your game to qualify for the “Microsoft Games for Windows” sticker, Microsoft says that you must save things such as screenshots and save games under the following path:
C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\MyGames\GameName\…
Besides being over half a dozen directories deep before you get to the game’s directory, two of those directories along the way are hidden! Local Settings and Application Data are hidden directories by default!
Now granted all this has something to do with Admin rights on the machine and such and it is amazing how many games will choke up and die when run on machines where the user doesn’t have admin rights. But still you’d would have thought Microsoft would have thought this through a little more.
I also read something recently that makes me believe that Microsoft have relaxed their “Games for Windows” requirements so this may even have changed, though I doubt it because of the Admin rights problem.
Also I should say that I didn’t actually read the Microsoft requirements, but that is what I was told when I stopped banging my head against the desk after seeing where we were putting the screenshot directory.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I actually find quicksaves somewhat annoying. It makes me play the game carelessly and just relying on the save instead of trying to be more carefull.
Stuff wasd, there’s no space over there. Move over 1 to esf, and change d to c for a more natural thumb permanently on the button.
Now you’re gaming.
If by gaming you mean constantly jumping backwards. It’s a game of sorts I suppose.
This is Gamer’s Bill of Rights. Rightly so.
@grumpy – wow you really are grumpy, you’ve obviously missed the whole ideal of Linux and why wouldn’t a games dev want to reach out to more customers?
Your link to the braid devs problems etc was a perfect example of how linux works.. he has a problem he has asked for help, people are helping him out. Am sure after the community helps him out and he gets the right help and support we’ll see a braid linux port soon enough and the linux game dev tools will benefit from his problems and solutions. He’ll get more sales [ at least me and Sam :) ] and the next adventure into games development will be easier and more documented for the next guy or indeed for braid 2 :)
As a Game Developer, I’d like to say a very big YES to all those points except (2).
Sorry if this has already been covered in the comments (read some but not all, naughty me), but savegame location just isn’t that simple.
The main problem is for computers with multiple users. If the game has it’s configuration data in My Games, no other user on the machine can access it reliably. I agree that it is a good place if you are the only person that will be playing the game on that computer, but the developer cannot rely on this being the case.
If you put the files in All Users/blah blah blah, at least all users can access the files. I think a good installer should offer the Install just for me/Install for all users option, possibly with a short explanation of what the choice actually means.
@AbyssUK: Oh ho. You haven’t read through the discussion at all, have you? Flamebait and trolling galore, and look, linux port has been dropped. Well, it was hinted at that they might pay someone else to do the grunt work of porting it to linux, because that’s what it boils down to in the end – something akin to shoveling manure, from the tone in the threads.
I confess that I use a separate computer (and monitor) for all my during-gaming internet usage, so alt-tab support isn’t especially critical for me. Still, it’s worth doing. Windowed support is critical for the aforementioned reasons, though.
Always, always let me customize my install as much as possible. Default to a single, universal set of settings that everyone uses, for sure. But I don’t ever want to install a game to Program Files (especially with how finicky Windows is over that folder), and I don’t ever want to put save files or other program elements in my user directory. I also don’t ever want a desktop shortcut, and you would be *amazed* how many games (and other programs) dump that useless garbage all over your desktop without ever asking.
I’m aware of the security and account issues that have led to using the user directory, but I have the same issue other people have with this system: I have multiple drives, and when I install a game to a particular drive it’s because that drive has enough free space to handle the game and its attendant files. The system drive may not. Moving the user directory to a different drive doesn’t address the issue – it’s still a single location for files I want spread out to ease the burden. Besides, it makes far more intuitive sense to have all my game’s files in one spot – on an individual game basis.
Of course, the best solution, savewise, is to have a default directory set at install (user-customizable) and then for manual saves, pop up a save dialogue box like you get in Word or other such programs. It can’t possibly be that hard. Macintosh games were doing it over ten years ago. If you don’t have permission to save somewhere, then Windows won’t let you specify that as a save location. Simple.
@ everyone who doesn’t want there my documents filled up with game folders
if it is standardized it wont:
XP c:/documents and setting/%username%/ my documents/saved games/%game name%
look thats 1 more folder
Vista C:/users/%username%/saved games
look its not even in the my documents folder
saved games dont take up that much space
it gives you easy back up of saved games
good for security
dont give me it has subfolders and its messy, just dont look there you dont need too. everything is gonna be in a subfolder somewhere.
Sorry, but savegames should be in the game folder, not in “My Documents” nor in “Users”. Why?.
I install my system in C:. My games in E:. Whenever I reinstall my OS (which is much more frequently than I’d like given the POS that is Windows), if I don’t want to have to reinstall the games, I have to:
1) Pull the appropriate entries from the registry from each game
2) Copy the savegames, configs, etc from each game from wherever they chose to put them (My Documents, My Games, Application Data, Local Settings, you name it)
3) Reinstall
4) and 5) Restore the above
If configs and settings were all were they should be (i.e., in the game directory), I would just need to do (3). As soon as I reinstalled the OS, all my games would be working without doing a thing.
Also, about the permissions thing: when your game is installing, it is working under admin permissions. Can’t the game give permission to All Users to Read & Write the newly created save directory before finishing the installation?. Then, you could have %GameDir%/Saves/%ProfileDir%, where profile would default to the currently logged on user. That way you can have profiles, and access any profile with any user without having to log off and log on with another account. Magic!.
Finally, about the certification process: I don’t give a fuck about what Microsoft says, and a Vista logo with a “GAMES FOR WINDOWS certified” on the front of a game makes me want to buy it LESS. Microsoft is not defending gamer’s interests there, it’s just yet another push towards Vista, as anyone that listens to the bullshit that
Xbox360PC’s white knight Kevin Unangst says in every interview should know.I’m much more likely to buy a game from someone that puts saves in the gamedir (and respects all that we’ve been saying here, plus most of Stardock’s Bill of Rights), than from someone to gave money to Microsoft and did 4 or 5 stupid and useless things just for the right to put the Vista logo in the front of the DVD case.
Edit: and for the nth time, “My Documents” is for documents, dammit!. Game configs and saves are not documents!!!. It’s bad enough that I have to keep constantly deleting “My Music” and “My Pictures” to have to put up with “My Games”. I hope that whoever idiot thought that “My Documents” was any kind of bin where you could put anything you wanted was fired long ago (although knowing Microsoft he/she is probably a Executive Director of Something by now).
#11 – Your game must include autosave, otherwise you’re a silly fool. The amount of times I’ve lost hours of play from an unforseeable crash to desktop is a lot!
Awesome.
11- Gimme the friggin’ same keys positions to move in a fps; just positions so that it works on every keyboards no matter the layout; use templates (WASD/ESDF with graphic schemes etc) to get players quickly enjoying. this one is particularly dedicated to Indy Games (hate when the game seems cool but that the controls are shit because of my lame french azerty layout); No, I don’t like to set each fucking keys before playing, did that too many times now!
@rocketman71
just forget about XP then. Vista is setup the way you want. well closer anyway
C:users%username% then all separate folders such as my docs, my pics, my music, my games
just one user folder have it in there.
1 folder to back up
1 folder to restore when things go bad
this folder also has the ntuser.dat in it this is the registry hive. my docs, my pics, my whatever
and yes every PC has a E drive to put games on. come to think of it no they don’t. we don’t all have your PC. windows is made to be put on 1 hard drive for the people who buy 1 hard drive. don’t say well just make it that you have to have 2 hard drives to install windows just so your games can go onto that second drive. most people don’t play games or don’t start gaming till after they buy a PC.
4 PCs
4 different E Drives
1st PC, E is a HDD
2nd PC, E is a DVD burner
3rd PC, E is a virtual DVD drive
4th PC, has no E but it does have 2 HDDs one with windows, one with linux. dual boot
what you are saying is good, but it just cant be done due to the variation in hardware configs and what users want to install stuff to. no matter what MS will always play it safe and have configs on C and give you the choice of where to install the program