Re: Proposing _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN_EXCLUSIVE

[Nathaniel Smith <njs pobox com>]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin kde org> wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
>
> On Tuesday 23 October 2012 16:26:20 Ryan C. Gordon wrote:
>> I've been doing Linux video games for over a decade now, and we've never
>> really had a satisfactory means to handle fullscreen games on X11. I see
>> this mailing list discussed fullscreen problems briefly in February, but
>> I wanted to make a formal proposal of how the system should handle
>> applications that want to "go fullscreen."
>>
>> This is a first draft that Sam Lantinga and I put together, envisioning
>> how we would like SDL to cooperate with the Window Manager to solve the
>> problem.
>>
>> Being a first draft, anything that's silly is totally open to change. We
>> have an SDL patch that implements the client side of this spec, but no
>> one's tried to implement the Window Manager side of things yet.
>>
>> Comments and criticism are appreciated!
> Thanks for bringing up the issue, we (KDE window management) actually hate
> that games change the resolution and I don't think that moving the
> responsibility to the window manager will solve anything.
>
> I try to explain the problems we have with this from the workspace
> perspective. In KDE Plasma we have a desktop shell which is strongly widget
> based and our users arrange the widgets on the whole screen. Also windows are
> manually placed and so on.
>
> Now if a game changes the resolution this gets completely destroyed. The
> manual layout is completely broken and cannot be restored (!) once the screen
> resolution changes back. A resolution change normally does not happen
> automatically, but only after a user e.g. plugged in an additional screen and
> configured it.
>
> Also windows get completely messed up when the resolution goes down. Most
> likely too large windows will get maximized and they will stay maximized once
> the screen resolution is changed.
>
> For the user it is not visible that the screen resolution changed at all. All
> she sees is that the desktop is f*** up once she ended the game. Even worse if
> the game crashed.
>
> A very unpleasant experience and our users are angry about it (I could show
> you bug reports...).

Yes, everyone agrees on that. But games are going to keep changing
resolution no matter what you write on this mailing list, so the
question is whether there's anything that can be done to make the
users less angry when it happens. (And they will also be angry if
their games don't support changing resolutions.) Certainly KWin is
potentially in a better place to see that manual layouts and things
don't get broken than a random SDL program is... if you can't preserve
manual layouts, then who should the game developers be talking to
instead?

-n