Doomsday Engine

Patch: Change the default screen mode from fullscreen to windowed

• http://sourceforge.net/p/deng/bugs/_discuss/thread/0c0d943a/be3c/attachment/patch

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I don't see how this fix actually solves anything. Surely it
is better to fix the cause of the problem instead.

What is actually causing the instability?

Can you give a more detailed explanation of the problem?

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Most users will use the default configuration when they are giving a try
to new software packages. Only after few days of just playing with the
software, they consider to play with the configuration to get better
results.

So just imagine such an user: she tries to run the software and the
result is a black screen and no way how to recover from the failure
other than to mercilessly restart the X server or the whole system. How
a terrible first impression ! And this bad impression is much worse on
Linux than on Windows, since under Windows people generally expect
such crashes and so they save their work and close their applications
before experimenting.

This instability may be caused by many reasons: unstable X server
may crash when changing video modes or display nothing more than
a black screen; SDL may fail to cleanup properly after an unexpected
event such as an unexpected signal or a flaky hardware that cannot
support the video mode the software tried to set.

Making the windowed mode "the factory default" improves the first
impression greatly. At least there is no need to restart the system after
the software fails. Namely the windowed mode is less prone to fatal
crashes with no recovery than the fullscreen mode, because the X
server does not need to stuff funny setups to the hardware. And
therefore the software should use the safer windowed mode as the
default and tinker with the peculiarities of the fullscreen mode only
after the user permits it to do so.

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It is very likely that the cause of the crash I'm complaining about is
somewhere else. I suspect the NVidia graphics card's proprietary
interface from being the root cause of this weird behavior (I don't have
any proprietary NVidia drivers on my Linux box). There is no way how
to prevent from such crashes but this little patch will help newcomers to
avoid being trapped with them.

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Not many users play games in a window and I imagine most
would be annoyed at having to figure out how to make it
fullscreen.

I can appreciate the problem but most users expect a game to
launch in fullscreen mode, therefore it should be the
default mode.

This wouldn't be a problem of course if Doomsday could
switch between windowed and fullscreen mode via a button in
the control panel/console command and the setting saved in
the config, rather than, or as well as the command line
switch. Which would actually be a good idea anyway, as would
the ability to toggle various settings like AA and vsync.

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OK, I understand. So I'm closing this bug here. Maybe I suggest the X
developers a config item to disallow applications switching to
fullscreen so people like me can use it to avoid these traps.