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

Exactly. Having an “exit from fullscreen” bar or some OS auto-hide elements like docks and task bars popping up  at the edges when you play an intense twitch game is simply horrendous. We have several playtests feedbacks arguing in that direction.

Not to mention that a lot of our alpha players have multi-monitors configurations where the mouse is “escaping” on the secondary monitor, even while full screened, which is a terrible experience.

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From: Florian Bösch Florian Bösch
Reply: Florian Bösch pyalot@gmail.com
Date: February 24, 2014 at 11:32:13 AM
To: Glenn Maynard glenn@zewt.org
Subject:  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.