windows posts

Windows 7 may have launched less than a year ago but the gang at Microsoft is already at work on its next PC operating system, called (for want of something better) Windows 8. Our sister site Engadget managed to get some mock-up designs for Windows 8 and it looks like one of them shows what appears to be some kind of downloadable software tool for games.

We have to emphasize that the mock ups are labeled "Windows 8 Discussion -- this is not a plan of record" so while Microsoft may be considering some kind of downloadable software store for Windows 8 it may or may not make the final cut. However with the success of Apple's iTunes and its ability to download movies, music and apps quickly you have to think that Microsoft is at least considering some kind of option that would do the same for Windows apps. At the moment there's no word on when Windows 8 would be available.

Stardock's CEO Brad Wardell is never shy about expressing his opinions. Now Wardell, the head of a company that publishes Windows-based PC games like Demigod, Sins of a Solar Empire and the upcoming Elemental along with the Windows PC-based game download service Impulse, sees a big threat to the OS where he makes most of his money from.

In a new editorial on the Impulsedriven.net site, Wardell states that after owning and using the recently launched iPad from Apple, " . . . I have to say that the iPad and other devices like it are going to murder large sections of the Windows based market. And as a Windows software developer, that doesn't make me happy." His reasons include faster performance and the iPad's "instant on" capabilities compared to Windows-based notebooks, saying, " . .. the iPad (and future devices of its class) are just much more convenient." The app store's features and its way to allow developers to make cool programs and charge money for them is also cited as a big advantage.

Wardell states if Microsoft doesn't try to address the problems with Windows in comparison to the iPad's features, " . . . I predict Windows will become purely a content creation device whose content is primarily consumed elsewhere." He adds, "The iPad is only the beginning. Once Android devices and WebOS devices show up, it could spell the beginning of the end of Windows dominance."

At PAX East, just a few hours after NVIDIA announced the launch of the 400 series GPU, a panel comprised of John Kreiner (Terminal Reality), John Abercrombie (Lead Designer at Irrational Games), and Michell Shuster (Co-owner of LanSlide Gaming PCs) came together to discuss the future of PC gaming. Moderated by Jeff Kalles from Penny Arcade, the panel took questions from the audience to figure out where PC gaming is headed, given the trends and approaches publishers are taking combined with the leaps in technology. Although the room was almost filled to capacity with PC gamers and all three speakers are self-described fans of PC gaming, the mood quickly turned a grim comparison with console gaming. It soon became clear that the future of PC gaming was already going through a long, dark and ominous tunnel into the unknown. The only question is whether there's any hope of seeing light at the end of it.

With the October 22nd release of Windows 7 just a week away, Big Download is taking a look back and previous versions of Microsoft Windows and follow the long (sometimes painful) evolution of PC gaming.

WIMP Environment [noun]: Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu) - A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces.

- The Jargon File

These wonderful, powerful, magic boxes of ours can turn long strings of ones and zeroes into dazzling graphics with breathtaking speed, perform tremendous, complicated mathematical computations in the blink of an eye, and, in a pinch, do a fair impersonation of a space heater. They are ours to command, ready to do our (possibly nefarious) bidding. Whether we know what we want or not, if it's within the operational parameters and capabilities, a PC will do exactly what we tell it to do.

Of course, there's a catch or two. First, we need to know how to tell it to what we want. Heuristics be damned, other than on-the-fly spell-checking, no matter how sophisticated the modern PC is, it's not clairvoyant. Ask anyone who's done time in a call center how much disconnect can exist between what a user wants, and what they say they want. Unlike our not-so-hypothetical phone staffer, the computer can't ask questions or make inferences. They're fabulously literal.

The second catch is having some way to communicate our wants and needs to our willing digital minions. And that's where our input devices come into play.

Okay, not awards, per se, but at least some recognition of things that didn't suck -- stuff like improved performance and big price reductions (sometimes). Generational advancement in the CPU and video card arenas brought more power to our desktop systems than ever before. DDR3 stopped costing its weight in gold. The Phenom... got its ass handed to it all year long. (Seriously, AMD? You can't roll out a replacement soon enough.)

Also, one of the biggest legends in the realm of physical vaporware finally came to market, but BI doesn't see a lot of folks ponying up two grand for the Optimus Maximus keyboard. At least it made it to market after a rumor-and-tease gestation period that rivals that of Duke Nukem 3D.

There were a handful of big stories in the realm of gaming hardware in 2008, and, for a change, they were almost all good news for gamers.

So, your computer has done something very, very, comprehensively, unquestionably bad. Unbootably bad. Now what? If you bought a system from HP or Dell or one of the other big players in the OEM PC market, you might be tempted to reach for the System Restore Disk (CD or DVD) that shipped with it to resurrect your moribund system.

A word of advice here: Don't.

Last July Microsoft announced that its Games For Windows Live PC game service would ditch its paid "Gold" membership and turn into a completely free service to use. At the time Microsoft announced that they were also working on a revamp of the actual Games For Windows Live user interface. Today that revamp was officially launched with any Games For Windows Live enabled game automatically updating to the new user interface.

You can see the new UI in the above screenshot taken inside Fallout 3. One of the first things you may notice is that Games For Windows Live prompts you to update the game you are playing yourself if there any any patches available. The interface, instead of being in the center of the game, now rests on top of the game screen with menus and choices that fall down when selected. Games For Windows Live still has all of the features it had in the past, including chat, messaging, game achievements that can be tied into one PC/Xbox 360 Gamerscore tag and more.

Big Download will be chatting with Microsoft reps about the new update for Games For Windows Live later today and we hope to get more info about the future of the service, including possible plans to download full games, and what Microsoft has plans for game features for the upcoming Windows 7 operating system

Alongside their announcement that all Games for Windows LIVE Gold membership features will be free effective immediately (and retroactively for games such as Halo 2), Microsoft also discussed the upcoming DirectX 11 upgrade to their game development API (Application Programming Interface).

Fortunately, unlike the Windows Vista-exclusive features of DirectX 10, DX 11 will offer full support for Vista and all future iterations of the Windows operating system. Full compatibility with all DX 10 and 10.1 features is also expected.

On the technical side, DirectX 11 will also add increased multi-threading resources to allow machines with multiple processes to take better advantage of certain titles. New compute shader technology will be available for developers to one day use a system's GPU as a parallel processor, and tessalation, which, according to the press release Big Download received via email, "blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time," will also be available.

No information regarding a release date for DirectX 11 was made available, though most don't expect its release until sometime in 2009.

Two Blizzard bigwigs -- SVP Rob Pardo and COO Paul Sams -- criticized Microsoft for not doing enough to support and propagate PC gaming in Windows, according to Gamasutra. At GDC Paris, Pardo said: "With Microsoft, I think they have a bit of lip service with PC gaming. They have their own game system now, so I don't think it's really in their best interest to support [PC]." He also suggested that Apple might step up to the plate that Microsoft has allegedly abandoned.

In a yet-to-be-published interview with Gamasutra, Sams continued where Pardo left off. "I kind of look at it and say to myself, and I think similarly to Rob, is that it would be great if they put more emphasis on the Windows operating system, certainly probably the most prominent operating system in the world. Even more so than console boxes," he said. "I think that there's more that can be done."

So add their voices to the increasingly discordant choir of developers simultaneously singing about the life and death of PC gaming. It should be no surprise that Blizzard is committed to the platform, though. Its recently-announced-megaton-of-a game Diablo III will be exclusive to Windows and Mac computers.