Input and games.

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Todd Showalter <todd at electronjump.com>wrote:

> 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 think the best way to do it is to simply treat it like an available
hotkey.  If the user wants to configure the home button to do something
special at the compositor level they can do so.  This may include bringing
up the window switcher as pq said, going to desktop, going to the media
center, etc.  Otherwise, it gets passed to the client as a regular button
event.

As far as steam and BigPicture goes, I think they run some sort of an
overlay anyway so that their in-game chat etc. works.  Whatever they use to
handle that could also handle the home button.  I'm not sure what they'll
use to do that in the wayland world.  They may have some sort of embedded
compositor or just a client-side library that all their games include.
Whatever way they do it, they can handle the home button through that.

--Jason Ekstrand
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/attachments/20130430/10cb132e/attachment.html>