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Microsoft Entertainment Games

Microsoft's Tray And Play Unveiled 142

Posted by Zonk from the quik-start dept.
Gamespot has a look at Microsoft's upcoming plans for PC gaming. In addition to a definite gaming perspective for the Longhorn OS and a commitment to the XNA studios package, they have word that someday we may be loading PC games much like console games. From the article: "Tray and Play is exactly what it sounds like - dropping a game disc into an optical drive and loading it up immediately, rather than having to install it to a hard drive. True to form, the game itself cut straight to a start-up screen in less than a minute (including the game's own built-in load time)."
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Microsoft's Tray And Play Unveiled More

Microsoft's Tray And Play Unveiled

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  • Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by computertheque ( 823940 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @04:26AM (#11908143)
    Honestly, this shouldn't have taken this long to come to fruitation.

    Microsoft has chosen a feature that not only makes sense, but saves time, hd space, and hopefully hastle.

    • Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Hido ( 655301 )
      What would be ideal is to have it load itself without having to use an OS. That way you could dedicate 100% of your resources to the game instead of having to leave some of it for the OS below it. This could ultimately help us OSS people cause I am sure more then a handful of people are using windows for gaming and no other reason.

      • Re:Yes! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SteveX ( 5640 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @08:47AM (#11908998) Homepage
        No way.

        That'd mean I can't pause the game to check my email, talk to people through IM, etc.

        As an option that would be cool, but I'd hate to be required to do that.
        • Why would that even be cool? Who cares. If you have an OS then use it. And as far this 'Tray and Play' being a long time coming. Yeah, it is about time that the PC caught up with Commodore 64 technology.
        • Why not have the option to suspsend the OS kernel in a seperate space in your RAM (or seperate RAM dedicated to such tasks) and then dedicate all your resources to the game and nothing else. Then when you alt+tab (or another keystroke) it will swap the instruction from the aforementioned memory and into your actual RAM.

      • Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dfj225 ( 587560 )
        I don't think that would be possible, considering the vast amount of computer hardware that exists out there. The whole point of the operating system is to act as an interface between the hardware and the application. If you cut out the operating system, you would still have to re-invent many of its functions to get the game to work at all on a range of hardware. The only reason this is possible with consoles is because each platform has the same hardware across each box. You won't find a PS2 that has a

      • Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rpdillon ( 715137 )
        Good idea, but to silence the critics, you should use something like Xen, and run the GameOS alongside whatever normal OS you use (I literally mean "alongide" - I HATE dual booting).

        I switched to Linux years ago (shortly before XP came out), an have struggled with ways to maintain my gaming habit. I end up buying most any big game that comes out for Linux (to support them and because they usually rock), and have been making a lot of use of my PS2, but it would be nice to see publishers and game authors c

    • Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by EnderWigginsXenocide ( 852478 )
      Honestly, this shouldn't have taken this long to come to fruitation. Microsoft has chosen a feature that not only makes sense, but saves time, hd space, and hopefully hastle. Of course, a PC game that's unpatchable, so when the game has a bad reaction to you video card/sound card /ide controller/motherboard/monitor resolution/colordepth/mouse/etc. you're totaly SOL unless there's some provision to burn a new copy of the disk with patch(es) integrated into the new copy.

      • Re:Yes! (Score:2, Insightful)

        by EnderWigginsXenocide ( 852478 )
        Dude, what was I thinking? Screw patches..think MODS! No Counterstrike, no Natural Selection, no Harntox, no Dark Angel, and the list goes on. (PS: the last three are Ghost Recon mods/add-on)

        • Re:Yes! (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Xbox games can have patches and mods so it's not a huge leap to use the same technology with the "Tray and Play" games. The patches and mods are stored on the hard drive and the game checks for them while loading.
          • Yes, the Unreal Championship "patch" is a fine example of this.

          • Re:Yes! (Score:1, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Xbox games can have patches and mods

            Can have, perhaps. Do have, certainly not - I've never seen a patch, not even for games that are blatantly as buggy as hell. And I've CERTAINLY never seen a mod.

            The patches and mods are stored on the hard drive

            s/are/would, if Microsoft permitted them to exist, be/

            • Re:Yes! (Score:4, Insightful)

              by crashmstr ( 753615 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @10:08AM (#11909541) Homepage
              Can have, perhaps. Do have, certainly not - I've never seen a patch, not even for games that are blatantly as buggy as hell. And I've CERTAINLY never seen a mod.
              Um, Ninja Gaiden? Mech Assault maps and gametypes? Unreal Champion maps and gametypes? Knights of the Old Republic with the downloadable Yavin IV space station? I'd say those count as having mods.

              And there are certainly patches for Live functionality. Ever see the message "XBox Live must update..." or something like that? (Microsoft does apparently frown on patches that do not relate to Live and for anything that does not add to gameplay)

              Of course, if you do not have XBox Live, you will probably not see any of this. :)
    • I hate to be pedantic, but it's actually 'fruition.' And I agree completely with you; this sounds really cool, and it's a pity it's taken this long to come around.
      • Its been planned for years. I remember reading about this back in about 2000. Pitty I dont have all my PCGamer issues in a searchable database, I could give you the page to look it up. It goes along with their planned "colour coding" system of PCs that probably wont happen for a long time, if at all.

  • LiveCD? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Pascal Sartoretti ( 454385 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @04:28AM (#11908145)
    Dropping a game disc into an optical drive and loading it up immediately, rather than having to install it to a hard drive

    As I understand, Microsoft is going to release games on a Knoppix LiveCD?

    • Re:LiveCD? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You can bet it works right from Windows and does not require a reboot.

      LiveCD is a extremely crappy distribution mechanism for PC games. "Hay guys! I turned my $1000 PC into a crappy XBox that takes 10x longer to load! But I'm running Gaynix 6-point-0h for FREEDOM!" Please stop bringing it up.

    • Re:LiveCD? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by OAB_X ( 818333 )
      Modern games are too big to run off of a CD unless you LIKE disk swapping, DVD is a bare minimum now, and even then there wont be enough room on a DVD for long. BluRAY is going to be a necessity very soon for practical immersive, detialed gaming experience.
      • I'm sorry, but could you repeat that? I fell asleep during your exposé.
      • " Modern games are too big to run off of a CD unless you LIKE disk swapping"

        Allthough you're right for the real big (mostly) FPS-games ; I was surprised to see that Counter-strike : CZ can be played straight from the CD (without installing) ; Allthough it's using a moderately old game/engine ; Still cool to pop-in a CD on a 'puter, and instantly be able to play.

  • Inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11, 2005 @04:41AM (#11908184)
    I'd been wondering how long this would take...

    Although many people have said, over the last couple of years, that Microsoft intends to kill off the PC as a gaming platform, in the hopes of transporting users over to its own X-Box, I've never believed that this is true. Windows' status as the "gaming OS" is almost certainly a factor in keeping it installed on any number of home PCs. However, there's no denying that PC gaming has had a difficult time of late (although perhaps not so difficult in the second half of 2004, when it finally got some big exclusive releases) and it desperately needs to be more competative with the console market. With keyboard and mouse support in games likely to be more common in the next console generation, this is more urgent than ever.

    Now, I used to be a die-hard PC gamer. I've been gaming on the PC since the days when buying a new game meant an hour tweaking config.sys, autoexec.bat and playing with memmaker just to get the right memory configuration for the damned thing to run. When I finally overcame my long-standing aversion to consoles a couple of years ago and bought a PS2, I was amazed by how much simpler and lower-hassle the whole process is on a console. Even today, playing a PC game involves checking that your system meets the specification, sitting through an install process which could take anywhere from a couple of minutes through to half an hour, depending on the game and your system, determining the settings which will give you the best balance between appearance and performance and then quite often searching for patches to fix the bug that makes the game crash every 5 minutes on your hardware configuration. That this puts people off is hardly a surprise.

    Microsoft's move here is, at least, a first step towards remedying this situation.
    • What's wrong with having different types of computers for different purposes? Your stanfrd PC is general purpose computer, its never going to be as better (read 'easy') at 1) playing games than a console, 2) making a call than a mobile phone, 3) firing spark plugs as an ICU in car, 4) doing weather simulation as a parralleled behemoth. The upside is that is can do all of these things to one degree or another. If you want to plop down in front of a box and start playing a game without thinking about how to s

  • What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dauthur ( 828910 ) <johannesmozart@gmail.com> on Friday March 11, 2005 @04:46AM (#11908203)
    Much like consoles though, I'm sure the modding community that most every game has is going to be quite upset with this new development. Most people, including me, like to tweak, mod, screw around, and mainly just play with stuff... which is why I personally never liked consoles. This might turn into a piracy problem too, because now it's going to be easier to redistribute games.

  • Lame (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @04:48AM (#11908210)
    Half the point of cracks (the legal half) is so you don't *need* to go rooting around for the CD just so you can play a game. Besides, if I'd wanted a console game system, I'd have bought one.

    • Agreed , Now i am no longer a PC gamer (political reasons) but one thing i always did was to get a no cd crack for the games i buy
      Obvious why is it not , CDs are highly perishable and fliping them in and out and all about is suicide(from a disk perspective) in a pc enviroment (the same cannot be said for consoles where cds are ussualy in the box or the machine plus the swapping is far less frequent , although i do prefer carts)
      If i couldnt get a no-cd then i would make an image or copy the cd using clone cd

      • Re:Lame (Score:3, Interesting)

        by OAB_X ( 818333 )
        Always make a backup of your CDs. Alcohol 120% is even able to make (almost) 1:1 backups of SecuRom 4.8+ protected games with a bit of work that are playable on (almost) any system. I rip all my music CDs to my HDD then put them on my bookshelf.

        A CD will not decay if it is handled properly, dont stack your CDs, dont leave them outside the case. if they dont have a case, get one, even just those paper sleeves.
    • I don't see how this can't still be possible... Just copy the whole media and use a crack or using virtual drive to boot it should do the trick.

    • Re:Lame (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Leibherk ( 112156 )
      Just convert the disk to an ISO file and then use that file instead of the physical Disk. If it doesnt work immedatly someone will figure out a work around.

  • what a goddamn bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @04:49AM (#11908215) Journal
    A PC is not a console. There is a reason PC gamers spend several times the amount console gamers do on hardware. It is not just penis extensions. We believe that in exchange for the much higher hardware costs we get much a different type of games that we enjoy more.

    So why exactly is it such a bad idea? First off most PC games still come on CD because more people have a CD player then a DVD player. Going to DVD only games would be easier but so far no game company wants to take the risk of upsetting the non-dvd owners.

    Second is do you really trust microsoft to choose the most optimal installation place for your games? Not everyone of us have just one partition.

    Third you can say goodbay to editing your game files if they are on a read only media. Many PC games have a happy modding community that is unique to PC gaming. But this works only if you can modify the game files.

    Fourth many people who buy their games in the shop still use no-cd fixes because it allows them to play the game they want without first searching for the CD. I am even worse as my gaming PC is a monster wich makes a lot of noise so I put it in another room two doors away. Going back to the days of searching through a stack of CD's before I can play is not a step forward.

    Fifth is that no matter how much more advanced DVD players become they will always be lagging behind the speed of a HD.

    Sixth wich problem does it really solve? People who think installing a game is to nerdie won't be using a PC for gaming in the first place.

    But most important this is microsoft trying to be smart. I love the "Close Combat" series of games but it was a microsoft game and so unlike every other game of that era it required me to manaually set the color depth from 32 to 16 to play the game. Yes a microsoft game was not able to use directx to simply do that for me. If MS wants to make games easier then they should start with their own games. MS flight simulator playing from a readonly media? It would ruin the game.

    Perhaps MS should do a test to see how many windows users have got the autoplay feature they added turned off.

    • Re:what a goddamn bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11, 2005 @05:10AM (#11908272)
      Just to respond to a few of these points...

      First, I don't buy for a minute that more people have CD drives than DVD drives. It's been pretty much impossible to buy a new PC for the last couple of years from any of the off-the-rack vendors without it coming with a DVD drive. The transition from CD to DVD for PC games has taken far too long already and I wish the publishers who haven't already would just hurry up and make the link. If you haven't got a DVD drive, chances are you've custom built your system. In which case, you're perfectly capable of putting in a sub-$50 DVD drive yourself.

      Second, If the installations are only going to be a couple of megs at most for save-games, I don't honestly see that it matters where the install goes.

      Third, nobody's stopping other publishers from releasing their games under the old system if they want to. If id decide they want to make Doom 4 moddable, they can do so.

      Fourth, there's some slight validity to the point about having to look for the disk to play the game. However, with the latest forms of copy-protection, it seems as though the days of CD emulation for playing games may be running out anyway (yes, I know there are work-arounds for all the current systems, but I don't see this lasting). Besides, I somehow manage to get by with my stacks of console games, all of which need the disk in the drive.

      Fifth, whether the DVD drive is slower than the HDD isn't necessarily relevant. If it can run the game with "acceptable" loading times and no stuttering in-game, nobody with any sense of perspective is actually going to care.

      Sixth, I suspect it's intended to make PC gaming more attractive to people who don't necessarily go in for the whole "l33ter than thou - my system is the one-true-way to play games" mentality, but who have expectations regarding ease of use and lack of hassle.

      Finally, I don't think that condemning every move Microsoft makes on the basis of a problem you had with one of their own (now obsolete) games is really a particularly strong basis on which to argue. Just to reinforce a point I made above, this is not going to do ANYTHING to stop you playing "different types of games you enjoy more" on the PC.
      • Fifth, whether the DVD drive is slower than the HDD isn't necessarily relevant. If it can run the game with "acceptable" loading times and no stuttering in-game, nobody with any sense of perspective is actually going to care.

        It IS rellevant. Have you ever had to sit through "loading" screens just to get from one menu to the other on a PC recently (baring console ports)? I cant remember the last time that that has happened. I watch my brother playing NHL Hockey 200X all the time, and to go from the "caland
        • SATA goes now at a speed of 150, IDE HDDs go at 133, slower ones go at 100. Corect me if I am wrong, but CD/DVD ROM drives go at a speed of 66.

          The numbers you are citing are in MB/s, and are the theoretical bus speed of SATA and various PATA UDMA modes. There is currently no single consumer hard drive able to sustain even the slowest mode you refer to (UDMA4), although modern HDs are pretty close. SATA was introduced because it's conceivable that UDMA6 won't be fast enough in the not-too-distant future, b

        • It IS rellevant. Have you ever had to sit through "loading" screens just to get from one menu to the other on a PC recently (baring console ports)?

          Agreed. PC gaming is moving towards zero-load gameplay. Look at the Unreal 3 Engine, one of the features they're hyping is it's predictive loading, so you NEVER see a loading screen.

          Unreal 3, and games using the engine, will allow you to play the entire game, from beginning to end, without ever having to wait for anything to load for even a second (no matter

          • Halo 2 sort of managed to do this (no loading), by using the HARD DRIVE to cache data. As shocking as it might be, not even the X-Box (with the biggest and best hardware in it for a console) could have no loading without the HDD.

            Zero loading gameplay is the next step to making games more immersive and having that "movie like" feel to it. GTA:Vice City had loading times for me going between the islands measured (through completely unscientific means) of less then a second. How did they manage this? (bear in
            • You're right; the X-Box certainly doesn't seem to be capable of preventing load time, and they're are quite evident even in Halo 2. The GameCube, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have much of a problem here. Check out Zelda, RE4, Metroid Prime 1 or 2, and you'll see that while loading still exists, it can be minimized quite well even without a hard drive.
          • You should play Dugeon Seige. While the engine was admit limited in what they could do, I don't remember seeing a load screen beyond the initial start of the game. That was so refreshing. Of course if games loaded like my old ones now do (in less then 2-3 seconds) I don't really care about loading anyway. Alas... 30 second or more load times is common now on the PC :-(
          • Will this even be possible with a CD/DVD based game? Perhaps if the disc is spinning at full speed continuously from the moment you start playing, always loading. But who want to listen to that all the time? Not to mention wear-and-tear on the drive and disc.

            Eh, it works on certain Xbox games. Ninja Gaiden in particular just has a brief load at the start of the game (especially if it isn't in the cache), and then you get a very occasional loading time of a second or two (basically only when you start a ne

      • It's been pretty much impossible to buy a new PC for the last couple of years from any of the off-the-rack vendors without it coming with a DVD drive. The transition from CD to DVD for PC games has taken far too long already and I wish the publishers who haven't already would just hurry up and make the link. If you haven't got a DVD drive, chances are you've custom built your system. In which case, you're perfectly capable of putting in a sub-$50 DVD drive yourself.

        No, it hasn't been nearly impossible t

        • A Dimension 3000 doesn't come with an AGP or PCI-E slot. I don't think people using Intel Extreme graphics chips are the target audience for this kind of gaming. Unless online poker or Solitare suddenly require game CDs.

          The point the original poster made still stands, if you buy a machine capable of gaming then a combo drive is the very least you are going to expect it to be bundled with these days.
    • "Going to DVD only games would be easier but so far no game company wants to take the risk of upsetting the non-dvd owners."

      So people will splurge $300 on the latest-and-greatest video card but can't be bothered to drop the $60 on a DVD-ROM drive? Are you sure we're not talking about penis extension here?
    • I love how everyone is totally bashing this idea.

      Look, it's just simple (as with about 80% of Slashdot's stories): If you don't like it, don't buy it

      If you don't want to play a game that uses Tray&Play, don't buy any. It's not like game installers and downloadable games will suddenly cease to exist the instant this technology becomes available.

      Criminy, get a grip. Close Combat? Those games were, what, 1998?
    • I'm sure it's been said before, but I think they should just leave it as an OPTION. Games have options settings and all, maybe leave something in the options to 'install to HDD' and then people who want to just fire it up and play it can, and other people can install it... best of both worlds?
    • Going to DVD only games would be easier but so far no game company wants to take the risk of upsetting the non-dvd owners.

      Just a minor point. Myst 4 is actually DVD only (Which is a good thing, because it takes up 2 DVDs, with a third for Myth 3 thrown in.).

  • I don't think so [slashdot.org]! Astonishing how quickly they ripped off my idea!

  • Redmond, we have a problem... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Frodo Crockett ( 861942 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @05:01AM (#11908247)
    Will we have an option to install to the HD? I don't know about you, but I don't want to hear my optical drive going "raaaar-rrrrAAAARRR-RRRRRRRRAAAARRRR!!!" every time I start a game or change levels. (Yeah, it's a cheap drive. So sue me.)

    What kind of copy protection will be used? Is this really just a scheme to prevent people from playing with duped cds, or installing a game and passing the cd on to a friend?

    What about patches? Do they really expect every game to be perfect when it goes gold? I think that'd be a pretty tough sell for most publishers and developers right now...

    Finally, this *is* 2005, not 1995. Hard disks are big. There's no reason not to install to the hard disk. The only thing that I can see frustrating consumers right now is multiple-disc installs. (Publishers, please use a frickin' dvd instead of two, three, or more cds.)

    Installing an average game does take a few minutes, but the payoff is much, much shorter load times. Given the choice of spending five or ten minutes installing a game or having load times "under a minute" (read: up to 59 seconds) every time its played, I think consumers would choose to install it.
    • What kind of copy protection will be used? Is this really just a scheme to prevent people from playing with duped cds, or installing a game and passing the cd on to a friend?

      No! Hahahah, we'd never do anything like that. [playsforsure.com]
    • Publishers are starting to jump on the DVD bandwagon. Unreal Tournament 2004 has CD and DVD versions (and a nice "Editor's Choice Edition" DVD version that packs in a bunch of mods and such). Myst 4 is DVD-only (it comes on TWO DVDs, and includes Myst 3 on another DVD). The Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance port was DVD-only back in early/mid-2003. UT2004 and MGS2 both have massive hard drive installs, though (I think 5 GB and 7 GB respectively).
    • It's about simplicity. The game can still cache lots of content to the HD for performance reasons. The idea is to eliminate the install phase because it is an unnecessary complication for many users. This makes the PC model a lot more like the XBOX model - drop it in and it works. The hard drive is a cache and a storage location for patches and updates. All your points are moot - other than the copy protection bit which is nothing new as many PC games have required the disk in the drive to work for yea
  • This actually makes sense. This brings PC gaming inline with the Xbox, which is something that Microsoft wants to do. It simplifies the interface from "Put in in, select your install folder, install the application, find the installed shortcut, Run the game" to "put it in." You can't argue with the elegance of that interface.

    And yes, the first thing I'll do is create a library of virtual DVD's so that I don't have to keep looking for wherever it is that I'm keeping my games these days. But for those pe
  • To people worrying about patches and mods: The Xbox handles this just fine, it's not like they're asking you to remove your hard drive in the process. Seriously, why waste 4GB+ of space on every game? The only thing this is hurting is hard drive manufacturers. As far as I'm aware PC game sales are on the decline - piracy is far too easy, so maybe this will make things a little easier for the publishers to stay in business?
    • X-Box patches, thats more of a dream then a reality. I have seen only ONE X-Box game get a patch (I am sure that there are more) but it was terrible. The UC patch did not deliver what it promised (like bug fixes). Patches depend on replacing game files on the HDD. Otherwise the developer needs to specificaly code exact instructions into the game itself to allow it to query the HDD before launching, then remember to ignore calls from within the game itself and use the HDD versions, its a lot of hassle to do.
      • Love it or hate it, Steam prevents piracy, but it works.

        Sorry for disagreeing with you twice in one thread, but Steam didn't exactly prevent piracy. It was cracked, and as far as I am aware, cracked versions that actually enable you to play online are maintained as Steam or HL2 is updated. If that's true (I never tried, I bought the game), HL1 had a better copy-protection. You might be right about it being one of the few games that was available in retail first, though.

        As far as patches in this system ar
  • Of course I didn't RTFA, but how do they plan to handle the inevitable updating of PC games? Read-only medium works reasonably well with console games since the developers know exactly with what kind of hardware the consumers are going to play the game so they can optimize and overcome the known quirks of the platform. On PCs however, there's infinite combination of processors, video cards and other peripherals. While things like OpenGL and DirectX deal with the majority of technical problems that existed i

    • Re:Patches? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fatmonkeyboy ( 257833 )
      Just becaue the game doesn't "install" to the harddrive doesn't mean it doesn't use the harddrive.

      For instance: the game loader could check the computer for "override" directories and use binaries/data from there before using the ones on the DVD.

      See? Trivial. Some games already do this.

    • Re:Patches? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by milkman_matt ( 593465 )
      Actually, your point brings up a different, interesting point.

      What about expansion packs that PCs are notorious for? Diablo, WC, Starcraft, all of the C&C and RA games.. Consoles don't even bother with these things, but PC games do them quite a bit, how are they going to handle those?

  • Step backwards? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FirienFirien ( 857374 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @05:57AM (#11908411) Homepage
    With the incredibly large hard drives you can get these days, this seems a very illogical step. With most consoles, granted, there's less hard drive space available, and you're used to swapping CDs when you want to swap games.

    I don't want to attempt counting how many games I have. They're all installed on my hard drive, and I can access each one with 3 keypresses (thanks to a nifty app called iKey); I don't want to rootle around in the geeky mess that is my room trying to find the single disc I need to be able to play a game. That's what hard drives are *for* - to fill up with Stuff.

    Also, having playable discs means there isn't the available space for larger or more files (graphics, sounds - all the small things that help make up a game) - installers and compression mean you can get lots of data on your HD from less data on the disc. More files means more beautiful.

  • Combination approach? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Tray and Play is exactly what it sounds like

    Sliding down stairs at high speeds?

    This doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. What's wrong with installing the files on the fly when you put the disc in?

    In any case, I don't see what's necessary from the OS side of things - this sort of thing has been possible since Autorun in Windows 95 - it's game developers that need to implement this, not Microsoft.

    • Its like when games used to come with multiple install sizes, this was done so that people with small hdds could still play the games. Now everything has full installs for a reason, they are faster then partial installs. All you need the CD for is the copy protection.
      • Data transfer rate is slower than a hard disk, but the real killer is seek time. Careful organisation of files can make a CD based game a lot faster. The reason they don't do this is because it's a lot easier to simply copy files to a hard disk.

        It should be possible for most games to load segments on demand. Then speed doesn't matter too much as long as it's fast enough.
  • And you know what?

    After all the above debate, Microsoft still doesn't care one way or the other what we think. :-)

  • PC Games already take long enought to load from harddisk... on removeable media they'll be horribly slow to load. Another problem with PC games on a CD, how do you install drivers and what not due to no 2 pcs being identical hardware wise. Easiest answer... force everyone to have the same hardware (thus a console) PC games are good at what they're good at, imo booting from CD isn't going to be one of those.
  • I don't see the problem with this, as I've wished for ages that they did this.

    I remember when the first CD-ROM games came out. The total installation size was about 1 mb because it read everything from the CD. And I had a speedy Quad-speed CD-ROM drive so I had no problem.

    Now they have 52+x CD-ROM drives, yet the only time it reads from the CD is to grab a 1 gb chunk off of it to throw it on your poor hard drive. I'd like to at least have a CHOICE to play it from the CD-ROM drive because otherwise why
    • How do you propose we mod games on a read-only media? If the developer hasn't put calls into the game to specifically query the harddrive for the mods, there is no way you can mod the game. It just can't work.
      • Copy the games from the CD onto the hard drive. How is that so hard? The game will probably query its relative space, not specifically the CD. And if it does either a) crack it or b) put it in some sort of virtual CD.

        And if the modder can't figure out how to do that, then how the hell is he/she modding the game?
        • Running a virtual drive does not make the disc suddenly writable. I have all of my game discs ripped to my harddrive and I use Daemon Tools to use them, but they are not magically writable. They are still read-only.
    • Yes, well, the problem is you don't have a speedy drive, because there is no such thing. All optical drives are horribly slow, the fastest deliver maybe 10 MB/s when they're in a good mood and 5 MB/s on average. Considering how data transfer from memory to graphics memory to GPU is measured in gigabytes per second (>1 and >10, respectively) and all that data has to come from somewhere, I'd rather it be my hard drive than my optical drive, because the former is 10 times as fast.

      The first CD games, as
      • The whole point is though that the game systems run their games from CD/DVD and they work just fine.
        • They work just fine because they both sacrifice quality (as evidences in low res textures, for instance) and have greater loading times, in various variations. Based on (1) more data means more beautiful (as someone else above put it) and (2) optical drives transmit less data in the same time there obviously is a trade-off and no way around it. Of course, console developers are quite good at making do with less data (1) and smartly streaming data off the CD when it's needed (2).

  • Think people! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Choabac ( 860880 )

    Of course you can patch and mod the game, just look at the Xbox. For Games like Ninja Gaiden you can add new content and change/improve other things like the camera.

    The patch/mod whatever is stored on the HD and the game knows to check the HD for this, this also handles the whole save game file issue. So technically it most likely installs a game folder on your HD where your save game files and modifications can be placed and then is referenced by the game when it's loaded.

    I mean seriously, for such an

    • I mean seriously, for such an apparent tech savvy site, a lot of you seem to be clueless or did the initials MS throw most of you off?

      It's a combination of clueless people and the standard reaction to change that most slashdotters have.

      "Oh my god, they're going to change the way things work! I hate it!"

      Slashdotters are the most unadaptable group of people outside of an old folks home.
  • 'scuze the redundancy, but there's one negative point people haven't made clear here:
    The point of putting stuff on the hard drive is the access time. An open xbox is a great example: play Halo from the CD. Observe the loading times. Now copy it to the hard drive. Observe the new loading times.
    It's TEN TIMES faster to load from the hard drive. (heh, remember loading times on the PS1?)
    Also, observe the sound difference...

    Of course, the difference is subject to the speed of the cd drive, but the CD (DVD) will
  • One difference between console games and PC games is that usually it's effortless to take a console game to a friend's house, and enjoy some four-way action over there. Whereas for PC games, usually you have to 1) agree to a EULA that says you'll only use it on one machine and 2) type in the CD-key, making it remotely possible for the company to enforce that. Will tray-and-play games on the PC be different? Presumably part of the difference is that consoles have more BIOS/tray-hardware/etc security modif

  • I don't want to have to deal with the disk (Score:3, Interesting)

    by glowimperial ( 705397 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @10:48AM (#11909893)
    To me, the big advantage of storing games to HD has always been not having to deal with the discs. I don't know what your desk looks like, but mine is a minefield for discs. I want to be able to load a game onto my drive, put the disc back in it's box, and never see it again. I don't want to have to switch discs, look for their little boxes and expose them to dust, moisture, Pepsi, whatever, inbetween gaming sessions.

    I thought we were moving towards a "just purchase the license, now download the game" model. This seems like a small step backwards, or sideways from the inevitable elimination of physical media as a distribution model. One of my favourite gaming experiences recently was playing the Open Beta of WoW, and going to the store to buy my reserved copy, entering in the serial number, not even removing the discs from their case (thanks for the backups, Blizzard) and playing the game. I see the evolution of that model as being a lot more productive in the long run.
  • It's a nice idea. Nice to see Microsoft thinking about this. It's not like it's a new concept or anything :)

    But the name must change. It's just seems like a big type - tray and pay. It sounds like a bad anti-piracy slogan. Please try and pay for your games. ;D

  • Lots of people sounding off about how this is a bad idea, but there's nothing in TFA that indicates anyone will be forced into using this with games they develop. Those concerned about games like hl2 and such with modding communities, well, I'm pretty sure we will see Valve not using the T&P philosophy, relying on normal method of installing the software to the drive (through physical media or downloads). That's just one example of course.

    I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of games that will bene
  • I think Tray and Play is an important option. I hate waiting 5-10 minutes after getting a new game watching progress bar after progress bar. Brilliant Idea, Microsoft.

    Mod me down, -1 pro microsoft statement.

  • The problems as I See them (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TJ_Phazerhacki ( 520002 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @12:06PM (#11910746) Journal
    1. The only CD's in anything approaching good condition that I currently own are those who were used ONCE, to install the game, and dumped back to the case. My copy of UT2004 is not even readable because when I loaned it to a friend, he dropped the DVD on asphalt - Ouch!! This is a great sceme to get people to replace PC games as often as they replace consoles.

    2. What do we do for Multi CD games? I'd love it if everything were on DVD, but the fact is, publishers have been saying they'[d do this for literally years, and yet they still have the audacity to ship 5-6 cd games without even the OPTION to get them on DVD. Oh, yeah - I want load times like FFIX on the PS again - Please!?!?!?!

    3. I don't care how you optimize the system - my CD drive reads data slower than my HDD, and cant store temp files and config settings. Im guessing that this miracle will use some sort of configured software on the PC - and it will still be slower. Come on, with SATA HDD's getting cheaper, while M$'s solution will clearly take rediculous system resources - whats it going to do, cache it to RAM? - this is for console players who want to use a mouse. Great marketing, poor technology - please remember the Disable button.

  • My copies of Pirates!, Kings Quest I, and Shogun all booted straight from the 5 1/4 drive. Back then it was called "Insert Floppy, Wait 5 Minutes For Loading, And Play." It was awesome. Those 5 minutes gave you ample time to try to understand the copy protection scheme.

  • Uh huh (Score:2, Interesting)

    by UES ( 655257 )
    To me, this seems like a BAD solution to the technical problem of "how can we get a better loading experience" but a GREAT solution to the problem of "how can we make games less likely to be pirated".

  • You're forgetting something (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @01:51PM (#11912016)
    "True to form, the game itself cut straight to a start-up screen in less than a minute"

    It looks like they forgot to include the OS boot time in their calculations. Throw that in and I'm sure it's still up around 3 minutes at least. Real consoles can go from power-on to title screen in less time than it took this tray-and-play to finish throwing up splash screens.

    Of course, more interestingly, considering all the DRM crap we've had snuck on us thanks to AutoRun, why do I forsee myself turning this "feature" off for security reasons?

  • Saving PC Gaming? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @02:07PM (#11912236) Homepage Journal
    Love it or hate it, Tray and Play is actually a good idea. As others have already mentioned, it effectively turns the PC into a console with the same ease of use. And it should also stem some of the piracy headache on the PC, at least the casual pirates. If Microsoft can pull this off, then they are freakin' geniuses! Why? Because there are so many PC configurations out there, that getting this to work on most of them will be a real challenge, not to mention defeating various hacks. But heck, if they can get Tray and Play to work on the Best Buy and WalMart PCs that people are buying these days, then that may be good enough. Will this save PC gaming? I don't know. PC gaming will never die, but this could actually make casual players think of the PC again instead of just consoles. And anything that helps PC sales can only help Microsoft. From a development point of view, Tray and Play looks more like a way to make Xbox to PC ports easier.
  • What do they mean by "Booting" ? Does this mean I could have a PC running Linux (having no Windows Installed as I do now) yet buy one of these Innovative discs and run from a cold start directly off CD?

    It would be awesome if this happens because it would make PC games much more Operating System agnostic. I dont run any windows boxes/ partitions at all - but id sure like to have a bit more of the Gaming pie!

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