fullscreen support for games

[Glynn Clements]

Lionel Ulmer wrote:

> > That's primarily becuase Linux/X11 developers are likely to consider
> > breaking existing X programs to be a problem, whereas Microsoft
> > considers it an opportunity to obtain revenue from upgrades.
> 
> Well, if we always acted like this, I doubt we would have Render, XRandR and
> other extensions like this, we would still be writing Xaw applications. I.e.
> if we always erect the X protocol and backward compatibility as sacro-sanct,
> we won't be able to progress much further.

I don't see how Render affects clients which don't use it.

RandR is theoretically problematic, although few programs actually
care about the size of the root window. Most only care about their own
windows, and it's always been the case that the WM can resize
top-level windows at will.

OTOH, pulling a Visual out from under an application which is using it
is likely to be a very real problem for applications which need to do
their own graphics.

> And I would imagine doing a solution (a kludge if you prefer) where 'old'
> applications who do not support this depth switching would still continue
> working, except the X server would do depth conversion (so they would
> continue as if the depth did not change) whereas 'new' applications could
> handle this (if this were added to QT, GTK+ and SDL, I think it would cover
> 90 % of all X applications currently run).

You're forgetting about the non-OSS world, where Motif/CDE is still
used. Vendors of such applications tend not to provide upgrades for
free. Needless to say, users of such systems tend to be less satisfied
with "no problem, we just need to modify GTK/Qt to match" than OSS
developers. OTOH, users of such systems are less concerned about
support for games.

Note that Windows skipped the conversion bit, favouring a dialog box
warning you that changing the depth without restarting could cause
problems.

Although the risk is less on Windows, as the most common library
interfaces did user-space colour conversion (to provide a better
experience on colour-mapped displays). It's more of an issue with X,
where the application is responsible for converting RGB to Pixel
values.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>