Re: installs in PC gaming

"Magnulus" <Magnulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> looked up from reading the entrails
of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:


"McGrandpa" <McGrandpaNOT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:tY2Ff.25299$1%5.16630@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Like the old PS port to PC, Tombraider? It required you have the cd in
the install drive to play from. Terminally slow. Nope, leaving data to
play from on optical drives is very bad. Absolutely unnecessary today.

It depends. If it saves hard disks space, what is the problem? If not
installing every last bit of game data to a hard disk is so so bad, then why
do most console games get away with it?

Because console gamers don't know any better?
Because console games are designed with smaller levels that can be
loaded reasonably quickly from the optical disk?

[See every thread about PC games dumbed down to console levels when the
game is being designed for both.]

1) he hasnt a clue about disk access and relative reliability
2) he is unable to seperate copy protection from data access

No, I'm just saying is that if you are going to require the disk to play
(copy protection), you might as well save some HD space and leave some of
the data on the optical drive. Also, many poeple don't like their PC games
taking half an hour to install, which is what's happening increasingly with
PC games. It's going to turn people off from PC gaming when they can just
put a DVD in a console and start playing a game immediately.

Optical drives are a) much slower than HDs.
b) have to spin up before anything can be read.

Even going back to games like Diablo, which was run pretty much from the
cd-rom, you got a significant boost in performance by copying the .mpq
to the harddrive - and this was back in the days when cds _didn't_ have
spin-up lag since they were only up to 4x.

Why on earth would anyone want to limit their gaming to a slow optical
device when harddrives are so cheap?

Back when Diablo came out, not having that 150 meg mpq on disk almost
made sense, since harddrives weren't that big unless you paid a lot of
cash.

When you can buy 200 gig drives for under $100, the "saving" of running
4.3 gig of stuff from the optical instead of a full install to the HD is
just silly.

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr
.

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