[SDL] Alt-F4 not working on Windows

[Bob Pendleton]

Hoo boy, this takes me back. I was involved in the port of Doom II to the
Mac back in the middle 90s.... Of course, Doom and all of its decedents use
the mouse to move you forward and backward and to turn left and right. It
turns out that that use of the mouse was forbidden by the Apple usability
guidelines. There Mac fans up in arms over the failure to comply with the
holy word as writ by by great lord Mac. We got flamed left and right. Oh my.
OTOH none of those Mac fans could tell us any other way to navigate in the
game. We asked what they thought we should do and the result was "comply
with the guidelines". Of course, the guidelines were written without any
consideration for how you would use a mouse in a first person shooter so the
guidelines were useless.

What it came down to is that you had to violate the guidelines to implement
the game. Letting some companies guidelines or even their hard and fast
rules interfere with game design is like refusing to change your mind when
faced with new evidence. It doesn't make sense. Sure, you have to balance
design against social norms, but you need not be, and in some cases must not
be, controlled by the norms. If my design works best when I give some
meaning to alt-f1 through alt-f10 then I should be able to implement that
without having to change the source code of SDL to do it. IMHO, SDL should
allow you to conform to the norms of your system if you chose to. It must
not enforce the norms of a particular system. And, most importantly, it must
not do things like making alt-f4 == SDL_QUIT on windows but not on Mac or
LInux or whatever else I want to code for.

Oh well, that is one of the many things I learned from working on that port.
Another is to never never never call functions with side effects in the
argument list of other functions. :-) Oh, and BSP trees are cool but hard to
debug.

Bob Pendleton

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Mason Wheeler <masonwheeler at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Hoo boy. Things always get muddled when people bring up words like
> "freedom" in the context of software development.  My take on this is,
> creative freedom is nice, but it *definitely* needs to be restricted,
> because the most important freedom of all is the right of the computer's
> owner to have the computer do what he or she intends for it to do.  If you
> legitimize the practice of taking absolute control of the computer out of
> its owner's hands, even in games, you make it that much easier for truly
> scary stuff like TC to get its foot in the door.
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Tim Goya <tuxdev103 at gmail.com>
> To: A list for developers using the SDL library. (includes SDL-announce) <
> sdl at lists.libsdl.org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 1, 2008 4:07:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [SDL] Alt-F4 not working on Windows
>
> >Darwinia uses ALT-TAB by design to switch between "programs" and other
> >conventions because the game simulates a fictional OS.  SDL should not
> >restrict that kind of creative freedom.
> >
> >Tim
> _______________________________________________
> SDL mailing list
> SDL at lists.libsdl.org
> http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org
>



-- 

+ Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer
+ email: Bob at Pendleton.com
+ web: www.GameProgrammer.com
+ www.Wise2Food.com

+--------------------------------------+
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/attachments/20080501/1e30084f/attachment.htm