One of Microsoft's upcoming initiatives in the "Windows Vista" timeframe is a program called "Tray and Play." (GameSpot article from March here)
Personally, I'm okay with it. However, there is one tool that I'd love to get to help with this initiative that I don't see coming down the pike any time soon.
If you've ever developed a title for the Xbox, you may be familiar with their DVD emulation hardware/software combination. You create a folder on your hard drive with the build, "emulate" the DVD drive, play the game for a bit, and then optimize the build based off of the order in which files are accessed on the DVD.
The biggest problem with "Tray and Play" right now is that with most of the CD and DVD mastering packages that are available, we do not have the ability to tell the package which layer to put the files on, or which order to put them in. As a result, games loading off of the CD/DVD may have to seek from one end to the other and back on a regular basis. Load time performance really suffers.
If you want "Tray and Play" to succeed, give us a tool similar to that for the PC. Have it spit out a project file and an ISO image at the end.
I know it's not the easiest thing to do, but you already have a large chunk of the work already done. (Ignore the blog spam at the bottom of that link.)
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