Notes on games spin

[Hans de Goede]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hans de Goede wrote:
>> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> Hans de Goede wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Not in this case, thje idea is that the (error) dialog gets shown 
>>>> when the user tries to launch a 3d game from the menu.
>>>>
>>>> The idea is to create a generic wrapper script and then modify all 
>>>> opengl games to use this (atleast all in the kickstart file)
>>>
>>> I think this would way too annoying. I just want to provide a gentle 
>>> nag. Not to frustrate users every time they try to launch 3D games 
>>> which I suspect will happen if we modify all the related menu entries 
>>> to launch a dialog box.
>>>
>>
>> Note that the dialog will _only_ be shown when dri (direct rendering) 
>> is not available, so if we wouldn't show the dialog (and not start the 
>> game) the user would get a slide show (software rendering) and 
>> navigating a menu with the mouse when you get 3 frames per second can 
>> be quite annoying.
> 
> Here is a alternative solution:
> 
> Login time, check whether DRI is enabled and popup a message "Your 
> system does not have open accelerated 3D drivers available or installed 
> on your system. This means that you will not able to play 3D games 
> efficiently. Click here for more information" and point them to a wiki 
> link in Fedora with more information.
> 
> Have a check box below saying "Don't remind me, next time" or just bring 
> this dialog box up only on first login for a new user.
> 

The user then still won't know which games use opengl and which games he/she 
thus shouldn't try to start. Starting one of them will result in a slide show 
with very poor response to mouse keyboard events making it hard to quit the 
game again. This is IMHO not user friendly, so I believe its better to check 
for dri when a game is launched and refuse to launch, with a message dialog 
explaining why.

Regards,

Hans