fullscreen support for games

[Lionel Ulmer]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 01:03:02PM +0100, Glynn Clements wrote:
> So start a second X server at 16 bpp and run the game on that.

Up until the point in time the game moves from 16 bpp back to 32 bpp (and
before you ask me, those exist and was the reason I added depth conversion
to the Wine tree :-) ).

And it's also a bit on the overkill side, not to mention a bit hard to
set-up for beginner users.

> 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.

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).

Of course, interactions with GLX would be left as an exercise to the reader
:-)

> Suspending the other programs isn't realistic. E.g. if they are
> network clients, suspending them will likely cause connections to time
> out.

Well, I doubt he meant suspend it in the litteral sense (even in Windows,
those applications continue running in the background) but do a bit like on
a Desktop change (i.e. unmap all those applications windows from the screen)
and, if possible, flush out of the GFX card memory back to 'main' memory all
their used pixmaps / textures / buffers / .... to free it for the game.

        Lionel

-- 
		 Lionel Ulmer - http://www.bbrox.org/