Re: [fullscreen] Problems with mouse-edge scrolling and games

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 8:21 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
>
> I think that going fullscreen is the right approach, since locking the
> mouse into the window while not fullscreen is really weird and rare, at
> least in Windows.
>
It's quite common for games to have a cursor, grab the pointer and not be
fullscreen. Of course most games that allow for this, use software cursors,
and are apparently not having much problems with it.


>  By going fullscreen, this hooks into the same UI design to allow the user
> to "escape".  Even if this was supported in a window, there'd still have to
> be some UI to tell the user how to exit, which could end up having the same
> problem.
>
A sidenote, if you have more than one monitor, going fullscreen will not
lock the pointer on screen, obviously. It's not terribly common perhaps to
have more than one monitor, but it's also not that rare.


I've been annoyed by the edge-of-screen browser behavior too.  It's a part
> of the screen where you might want to put something, like navigation UI.  I
> haven't come up with a better solution, though.  I don't think having a
> "stronger" fullscreen mode that asks the user for more permission will fly.
>  Browsers try very hard to avoid asking for special permissions--people
> will just agree without reading it, then won't know how to escape from the
> app.
>
> I think that for your use case of edge scrolling, having a fullscreen
> notice appear at the top is OK (if a little ugly), as long as it's
> transparent to mouse events so you can still see the mouse moving around
> (or else you might see the mouse move to 20 pixels from the top, then never
> see it actually reach the top, so you'd never start scrolling).  Menus and
> address bars appearing seems like a bug.  That makes sense for the
> fullscreen you get by hitting F11 in Windows or Command-Shift-F in OSX, but
> application fullscreen should just act like a game, and keep as much as
> possible out of the way.
>

For a fast paced game where you might click and select and do whatnot,
having a slidedown from the top of the window when you hit the border is
not acceptable. People will click it accidentally a lot for instance when
doing a selection. Not being able to offer a fullscreen button in the game
is also bad UX. You end up with explanations for the user to "Please press
F11 to get into fullscreen". You should never have to explain to a user
what ritual he has to perform, if instead you can trigger that action
without the ritual.