Re: [AD] ALLEGRO_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW flag

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 23 Jan 2010, at 17:22 , Elias Pschernig wrote:
> The attached patch adds a new display flag called
> ALLEGRO_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW which makes al_create_display ignore the
> passed width and height and instead creates a fullscreen window as big
> as the desktop. It's ignored under Windows and OSX for now.

It's not clear to me what it does exactly.
Does it create a window that fills up the available screen space, meaning something that has a border, a title bar and leaves room for a taskbar/doc/whatever you call it? Or does it create a full-screen display that has the size of the desktop?
In the latter case, why do we need a separate display flag for that? Can't you already query the desktop resolution and create a display with that resolution?
Either way - I think the name is confusing.

> If someone figures out how to do things with Xinerama and XRandR (or can
> fix XVidMode) this may not be needed any longer as al_get_monitor_info()
> and al_set_current_video_adapter() should be able to achieve the same.

Hmm.
So, is this actually a new feature, or is it something that works around problems with our full-screen X11 implementation? I get the impression it's the latter, in which case I think the proper solution is to fix said functions rather than add a feature that is not generally useful on other platforms.

> But even then the flag makes things much easier for the user as X11
> decides on which monitor to place the window (here it is for example
> always the monitor the bash window from which I run my game was on,
> which is just perfect).

I'm not sure I understand. Wouldn't it be better in that case to add an option "don't care" to al_set_current_video_adapter() and let the window manager decide where the window goes (on OS X I don't think you actually get that option, but never mind that, we just pick a default ourselves in that case)?

Evert