On Sat, 2 Jul 2011 21:52:46 +0200 Per Inge Mathisen <per.mathisen@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > Thanks for raising this interesting topic. I am in the middle of > muddling through these issues myself for the Warzone2100 project, and > recently started a portable library for fullscreen handling for Qt > (http://gitorious.org/qtgame). Nice! Do you want to start one for SDL games too? ;) > On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Guus Sliepen <guus@debian.org> wrote: > > 1. Full-screen behaviour of games > > > > 1.1. Should games, by default, start in windowed mode or > > full-screen mode? > > When fullscreen works out of the box almost all the time, games should > start fullscreen, since this is how gamers intend to play the game. +1 > (This applies to most games that can be fullscreen, but obviously not > all.) However, since fullscreen on Linux is a sorry mess, my opinion > is that games should start windowed on Linux for the time being (and > start fullscreen on other platforms). Sad but true :( > > multiple screens are often badly supported, resulting in the game > > running stretched across all screens when this is not desired, or > > the game running in the resolution of one screen but "centered" in > > the middle of two screens. > > Often seen with the Nvidia binary blob driver, which does not support > Xrandr and does its own thing instead. Hopefully Nvidia will fix this > soon. > > Not sure if games should be encouraged to use Xrandr (yet?), but that > should be considered. Is Xrandr supported on other platforms? (eg the bsds). > > Apart from not handling the full-screen situation itself incorrect, > > when the game uses a different resolution in full-screen mode than > > the desktop uses, some games do not properly restore the desktop > > resolution when quitting or when switching back to windowed mode. > > Sometimes they do when quitting via the main menu, but not when > > quitting through other means. > X11 offers no decent API for handling these issues. [...] X11 > lives in the dark ages here, where each application has to do > everything on its own and in addition handle a number of window > managers, each slightly different. While Xorg must be aware of the problem, is there any official tracking of it going on? (eg, bug reports). Would having X handle this stuff mean games could cut any large chunks of code out of their codebases? > > 1.4 Windowed behaviour > > > > When windowed, it is expected that the game plays nice with the > > other applications that are running on the desktop. When the game > > grabs the mouse and/or keyboard input for itself, the user cannot > > interact with other applications anymore. Some games only grab the > > input when you are actually playing the game, and release it when > > paused or in menu screens. This should be recommended behaviour. > > IMHO a game should never block alt+tab, and on alt+tab, resolution > should be restored and any cursor trapping should be released. > However, I am a bit unsure how to implement this in a sane manner. I like the idea, especially if it can be disabled somehow (incase you're clumsy :)). > > It would also be nice if the game, when running, automatically > > pauses when it is running windowed and another window gets focus. > > That is fine for single player games. For many multiplayer games that > is not an option. And in some cases not relevant - turn based games (i'm thinking freeciv) can be left at any arbitrary point and nothing will happen. thanks, kk -- Karl Goetz, (Kamping_Kaiser / VK5FOSS) Debian contributor / gNewSense Maintainer http://www.kgoetz.id.au No, I won't join your social networking group
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature