RE: [GD-Windows] os version

[Tom H. <to...@3d...>]

At 06:04 PM 2/11/2002, Brian Sharon wrote:
>The official stance is you can't disable it, so don't even 
>try.  Unofficially, I know you can block it in some cases, but I still 
>don't think you can disable it in all cases on 2000/XP.  And your users 
>don't really want you to disable it anyway.  They want you to deactivate 
>the windows key so they don't hit that in a game, but people like to be 
>able to alt-tab away if they need to.

Correct. Don't disable these things, but make your game handle them 
properly. Everquest (for example) goes to great lengths to prevent you from 
tabbing out because they don't want you to be able to run things like 
SoftIce, but the end result is that if you hit the Windows key on 2k 
(something you _can't_ block) or some other window like AIM or ICQ pops up 
in front then the game crashes.

>Possibly Quake tears down everything when it loses focus - releases all 
>textures and shuts down GL - and then starts everything back up when it 
>gets focus back.  That seems like a safe approach, at least.

When you're in full screen and lose focus the "right" thing to do is 
restore the display mode and minimize the app. Doing this screws up your 
context so you have to release all the textures and any AGP/Vidmem vertex 
buffers and recreate them when you restore the context. It isn't pleasant, 
but it's the only thing you can do and still get reliable behavior.

Tom