PC Gaming
Gaming on PCs as opposed to Dedicated Game Consoles has been a game of catch-up in the last five years or so.
Evan Kirchhoff at 101-280
writes about it and his experience with Valve -- a leading PC gaming company:
PC Gaming: Not Yet Dead Enough, But I Think If We Hit It With The Shovel A Few More Times It'll Stop Moving
At a friend's house last night, we were looking at his new XBox 360 and 42" TV (verdict: you should buy both items immediately; either one taken individually may be less fun), and he was talking about how he'd finally converted to console gaming after one too many sessions wrestling with warring Windows drivers. I nodded smugly: yeah, I've heard of other people being confused by their computers.
Newly inspired by the general notion of "playing videogames", I went home and tried to finally finish off Half-Life 2, a good game I set aside at the 2/3 point earlier in 2005. Apparently I will now never be able to finish Half-Life 2, because the clever automated "Steam" engine that automatically downloads game patches from Valve has decided to patch my game to a point that is not compatible with my current Windows XP graphics drivers, and ATI's graphics driver upgrade system is too much of a miserable shambles to work successfully for a Radeon 9800 card that is for god's sake almost 2 years old now, unless possibly I also install a newer Windows service pack, which then introduces the issue of potentially breaking some of the software I actually need to work on to make money, and at this point I refer you to the technical bulletin "Fuck You, Valve".
I've grown used to the idea that updating a Windows machine will break all previous game software -- I'm down with that. But even with this machine frozen into a specific, favored state (no, I don't allow "Windows automatic updates", or for that matter random hobos sleeping in my car), I evidently have once-perfectly-functioning games that are unilaterally breaking themselves when I'm not looking.
What he is experiencing is a symptom of a significant problem. Microsoft does everything they can to make sure that your application will work just fine on the current version of Windows but there is no guarantee that it will work for future updates, patches or versions. A software manufacturer needs to re-submit their application each time a new patch comes out to have it tested.
And this ignores the interaction between dumb-ass software and other applications. Some software will only work with a specific version of the Windows file xyzzy.dll so guess what, it uploads that version to /windows/system32 and overwrites what may be a newer version that another application depends on (or a version that was uploaded to correct a security problem).
When I was first getting involved in computers, back in the CP/M and MS-DOS era (yeah, I know...), an application lived in a folder. All of the drivers lived in that folder as well. Nothing was written to the system folders. If you wanted to delete the application, you deleted that folder and it was totally gone.
I love the fact that this is still true in a large part with Linux.
The few Windows applications I have written use this programing style as well. It is not hard to do...
Posted by DaveH at January 5, 2006 10:02 PM