Input and games.

[Todd Showalter]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:

> unfortunately that is not how Wayland works at all. All clients are
> isolated from the start, regardless how they are spawned. The idea
> might be ok, but concepts and protocol design will be very different.

    I had a feeling that might be the case.

> Doesn't really help that I've never used Steam, nor know what Big
> Picture is. But I do have a PS3 at home! :-)

    "Big Picture Mode" (let's call it BP for the purposes of this
description) in Steam is a full-screen program that shows things like
your game list, and is basically a glorified game launcher with some
ancillary functionality like updating and installing games, and store
access.  The important thing for this discussion is that if you are
playing a game you launched from BP, pressing the home button
backgrounds the game and foregrounds BP.  That is, you return to BP
rather than the desktop.

    The process is similar to what happens with the home button on the
PS3; the game drops to the background, and the OS puts up an overlay.
Press the home button again to dismiss the overlay and return to the
game.

    I'm not going to argue that this is essential behavior; I don't
think it is.  It may be desirable in some cases, but it might also be
desirable to treat the home button totally separately, maybe have it
bring up a gamepad config screen or something if that makes sense.
The main place it's desirable is in the case of living room PCs, where
people will tend to want to be running things like games and movie
players fullscreen, so a standard "get me back to the OS" button is a
useful abstraction.

    I do think Valve in particular will want to be able to have some
"hand focus to and raise designated window upon home button press"
functionality.  That said, the game could just trap the home button
itself and hand off to the BP window, assuming that's possible
somehow.

                                            Todd.

--
 Todd Showalter, President,
 Electron Jump Games, Inc.