A Proposal To Fix the Full-Screen X11 Window Mess 358
jones_supa writes "The SDL developers Ryan Gordon and Sam Lantinga have proposed a window manager change to work out the full-screen X11 window mess, primarily for games. The proposal is to come up with a _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN_EXCLUSIVE window manager hint that works out the shortcomings of the full-screen hint used currently by most games, _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN. Ryan and Sam have already worked out an initial patch for SDL but they haven't tried hooking it to any window manager yet. Those interested in the details, information is available from this mailing list message. One of the key changes is that software would make the request to the window manager to change the resolution, rather than tapping RandR or XVidMode directly. Martin Gräßlin of KDE was rather wary about the patch and said that games changing the resolution just tend to mess up the desktop."
Seems like a reasonable idea, given a bit of time to mature as a spec. In KDE's case, a separate daemon from the window manager handles resolution changes so going through the WM would add complexity, and the plasma shell still has no way to realize that it shouldn't reflow the desktop widgets. Setting window properties seems like a sensible IPC method for communicating intent though (without making yet another aspect of the X desktop reliant upon the not-very-network-transparent dbus): "hey, I need to resize, but just for me so don't reshuffle the desktop and docks."
No assistance required (Score:3, Funny)
Martin Gräßlin of KDE was rather wary about the patch and said that games changing the resolution just tend to mess up the desktop
KDE doesn't need the help.
Re:CRT's -- Simple fix. (Score:2, Funny)
Force ALL games to run at 640x480 -- problem solved.
Except for those i386 Linux systems who are trying to run Half Life 2 .. perhaps we should lower that resolution to 320x240, just to guarantee we're not butting heads with the window manager. After all, the first goal of every Linux game designer should be to ensure the tail log window you're running is properly proportioned at all times.