3-Feb-2007 Some of the biggest names in PC game development air their views on the new OS and DirectX 10 Like or not, Windows Vista is here, and it's spearheading Microsoft's grand plan to usher in a new era of PC gaming; DirectX 10 is raising the technology bar and promising a whole new gaming experience, we've been told numerous times by the company.
But what do the developers, those who have to work with the new operating system and the latest version of DirectX, think of the new platform?
"...the core features of Vista itself potentially will do more to drive the success of PC gaming... DirectX 10 is only part of the picture", reckons BioWare president Greg Zeschuk about the latest Windows operating system.
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"...Vista features like easy Install, parental controls and the Game Explorer will make it easier and more seamless for people to manage, install and play games. PC gaming has been challenged significantly by things like the 45-minute install and I'm hopeful that Vista will provide a much better user experience for not only the gaming, but also everything else surrounding the experience of actually playing," he adds.
Breaking down barriers between the user and the PC game is certainly a positive move on Microsoft's part and should in theory make the PC a more attractive game platform, but it's not just the public that the company is smoothing down the difficulty curve for with Vista.
Epic Games' vice president Mark Rein believes Vista will "ultimately be good for games, it's going to get us a lot closer to the hardware, much in the same way you can get significantly more power out of an Xbox than the same piece of parts configured into a PC."
"I think there's lots of good things in Vista that will help gaming", opines Rein, although he says he's "bitterly disappointed" that Microsoft has developed a 32-bit version of Windows Vista. In terms of moving PC gaming forward, he thinks the biggest thing Microsoft could have done "was maybe give us 64-bit only."
For Warren Spector, president at Junction Point Studios, one - if not the - key improvement Vista brings to PC gaming is raising the graphics-standard level. "The biggest thing", he says, "may be the graphics requirements of the new operating system."
"If we can move the low-end graphics bar up, that alone will ensure more systems out there are capable of running modern games. Low end graphics solutions are a nightmare for games. Bringing up the bottom end, which Vista will force, is all good for us."
Interestingly, id Software's John Carmack reckons that, while "There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games... there really aren't any for Vista."
"They're artificially doing that by tying DX10 so close it, which is really nothing about the OS. It's a hardware-interface spec. It's an artificial thing that they're doing there. They're really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it", he added in an interview with Game Informer during this year's GDC.
Carmack revealed that personally, he wouldn't jump at something like DirectX 10 at this current time but rather wait until "there's a really strong need for it". He also said he thinks that there isn't "any huge need for people to jump right now... All the high-end video cards right now - video cards across the board - are great nowadays".
When it comes to DirectX 10 in games, Gas Powered Games founder and creative director Chris Taylor's thoughts are not far removed from those of Carmack. "It's going to take awhile for developers to fully exploit the new features that the new DX10 cards offer," he explains, although adds that "the results will be worth it and take us all well into the future."
But for Taylor, while the biggest changes DirectX 10 will introduce is in visual realism "and/or in the frame rates we experience... both of which can have a huge effect on the gameplay", at the end of the day what really matters is the evolving of game designs. We reckon there may just be a few people who agree with him on that one.
"...it takes more than powerful API's and next-generation GPU's to make a game better," Taylor says. "We really need to work on new game designs... designs which push out past the established, comfortable boundaries we live within today."
