It's a fine way, just not the only one.
That's fine, I'm not saying that we should only do "full screen" this one way, I'm just saying that I would really like to have some mechanism to do it this way if I want to.
Most people run their desktops at high resolutions that may not be good choices for a 3D buffer. Older cards (like the Radeon 7500 in my laptop) can handle FlightGear just fine, but not at 1280x1024.
And some 3D features don't make sense on a desktop: in many cases, it is visually preferable to run a 3D application at, say, 1024x768 with FSAA than to have a single buffer at 1600x1200.
All of these choices involve setting the video mode; this has been a very traditional feature in the windows gaming world.
I'm willing to agree that there are advantages to the "traditional dos gamer" approach of letting the app take over the screen and reset the video mode, and I'm not trying to exclude that, just include this other way of doing things (which can be done with glut game mode right now.)
Users have gotten used to applications taking over the screen and (ahem) mixed compatibility with desktop stuff like Alt-Tab.
But maybe it's time to re-investigate that assumption; it seems like
few people here are interested in running at anything but desktop
resolution, but still want a full screen mode. For myself, I've
always been happy to run it in a window if I wanted to do desktop
stuff and have missed the ability to switch modes and play with toys
liks FSAA.
I'm not saying that having the app take over the computer and reset the video mode is a show stopping bug, just an inconvenience if this is the only way it will work, and an inconvenience that I don't have to put up with right now with glut.
The problem isn't that SDL is unwilling to support what you want: it's
that SDL hasn't traditionally distinguished "fullscreen" from "mode
switch" and (in the early days) didn't have a portable way to
integrate with the desktop world.
So I still don't understand, is SDL unable to open a window covering the entire desktop but with no window decorations? Or can this be done? Or can support for this mode of running be built in and optionally enabled at runtime via some option or combination of options?
Curt.
-- Curtis Olson Intelligent Vehicles Lab FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org
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