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The dreaded ALT-TAB

thades · 2001-02-24T01:10:55

Hey everyone. I''ve taken the past THREE months off from programming !!!!! I know, I know, but I had finals and ALL sorts of shit to do (I''m a psych major, understand, I''m in this for making fun games, not androids)...anyway, I''ve got a bitty problem with my game and I''m hoping someone can help me. Alright, so I made my game run fullscreen hardcore as a "pop-up window" (This is in windows, Visual C++ for the record), so as to avoid moving window-over-window silliness and, quite frankly, to make my game huge and cool. However, my game kind of throws a hissy fit when you tab out of it. I''ve got an event handler running like a good boy (I am a hardcore devotee to LaMothe''s methodology!), so I''m wondering...when the user hits alt-tab, I must get *some* message about it. What is it? And what do I do with it? I figured I could have the game freeze ops until the focus is restored. Furthermore, how do I know when the focus is restored, and what do I do to get things going again? Any ideas, thoughts, or experience at all would help, I am certain. Thank you very much for your time. /*********************************************** "We are men of action. Lies do not become us." ***********************************************/

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by serratemplar January 15, 2001 09:52 PM

12 comments, last by serratemplar 23 years, 1 month ago

SigKILL

122

January 18, 2001 09:18 AM

I just want to mention that you get the WM_ACTIVATE message when another window is activated (like through alt-tab, mouse clicks, through the task bar or if an application activates a window (like with SetActiveWindow()).

himh

122

January 18, 2001 04:41 PM

Off screen surfaces can become "lost" as well. I believe all surfaces in local video memory get marked as lost because of the mode switch which resets the local memory heaps. I have yet to see a nonlocalvidmem surface lost. When in doubt, restore it. Better safe than sorry.

himh

a38750

164

January 19, 2001 01:48 PM

Does that mean a full game has to restore all of it''s textures and images (and sound buffers)? Isn''t that what half the level loading is? I can alt-tab in and out of half-life quite quickly.

wise_Guy

122

February 24, 2001 01:10 AM

Hmmm... how come none of this ever works in my games? When I alt-tab my program, it goes to the task bar, and you can''t do anything to it. When you right click, nothing happens, and when you click it, it doesn''t send any messages =(

Anyone know what''s wronge?

The dreaded ALT-TAB

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The dreaded ALT-TAB

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