Full-screen behaviour and game documentation

[Guus Sliepen]

On Sat, Jul 02, 2011 at 04:06:30PM -0500, Guangcong Luo wrote:

> >> There are various hotkeys used to switch between the two modes, some more
> >> common ones are F11, F, Ctrl-Enter. F11 seems to be used in many
> >> window-managers and non-gaming applications.
> >
> > Alt-Enter is also frequently used.
> 
> For reference, from what I know, F11 and Alt+Enter are popular on
> Windows, and Cmd+F and Cmd+Shift+F are popular on Mac OS X. If it's
> not too much trouble, it might be best simply to support all of these.

Ok, but this is not about Windows or Mac OS/X, it's about integration with the
X desktop. In my opinion it should be something that is common for X
applications. If the game runs on Windows or Mac OS/X as well, then upstream is
free to support more hotkeys, or select the best one for the platform.

> As for standardizing on a single hotkey, I wouldn't like F11 as the
> only way, since the F1-F12 keys are being hidden behind Fn modifiers
> [1], F-lock [2], or outright left out [3] by keyboard manufacturers
> more and more often these days.
> 
> [1] cf. Apple's keyboards: http://www.apple.com/keyboard/
> [2] cf. Microsoft's keyboards:
> http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/natural-ergonomic-keyboard-4000/B2M-00012

Ok. But the F-keys are still very accessible on those keyboards, otherwise they
wouldn't work for many applications.

> [3] cf. Logitech's diNovo Mini:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823126039

That is a very bad example, I don't see anyone interested in gaming using such
a keyboard :)

> Alt+Enter never strongly suggested "full-screen" to me. Ctrl+Enter
> means "send message" to me (in situations where Enter would insert a
> linebreak).
> 
> Apple's Cmd+Shift+F might work (what would be its equivalent on Linux?
> Ctrl+Shift+F? Super+Shift+F?)

I guess so. But are there any X applications or games using that combination
already?

> >> Some games bypass the window manager completely when entering full screen mode
> >> (using DGA or other ways).
> >
> > This should be strongly discouraged.
> 
> I don't understand much about how DGA works. Could you give an
> overview of why this should be discouraged?

An explaination of DGA can be found here:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/dga.html

It allows an application to bypass X and get exclusive access to the
framebuffer. One of the advantages is that you can also change bit-depth this
way, but I guess nobody uses something less than 24 bits these days.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
      Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org>
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