Fsck you. Give me money. (Now with IndieGoGo)
-
-
Does game have focus? Pass to game. Otherwise don't.
-
How does it know it's a game?
-
Does game have focus? Pass to game. Otherwise don't.
But the OS doesn't know if the program with focus is a game or a word processor or a browser or something else. So how does it decide when to pass to the program or to toggle a stickey keys?
-
How does it know it's a game?
By which APIs it is using? (I don't think most word processors use DirectX or OpenGL…)
-
But the OS doesn't know if the program with focus is a game or a word processor or a browser or something else.
How many non-games make extensive use of DirectX/OpenGL?
-
if it is full screen
-
How many non-games make extensive use of DirectX/OpenGL?
Video players, some DVD/BluRay rippers, and who knows what else. In any case, it doesn't matter. The OS is not supposed to know what a particular EXE is because the OS is not supposed to behave differently for different program types. Identifying an EXE as a game breaks the OS behavior model, and doing it the way you propose opens up the door for bugs.
-
-
The OS is not supposed to know what a particular EXE is because the OS is not supposed to behave differently for different program types.
Except if the program (or something in a managing position over the program, to be pendantically accurate) specifically requests different behaviour.
-
But that is on the program developers, not Microsoft.
-
Video players
Pass the file contents to a hardware codec; hardly extensiveDVD/BluRay rippers
Again, hardware codec; hardly extensive.Browsers.
Ah yes, I forgot 99% of the web has the graphical fidelity of GTAV on max settings.
-
Didn't say they made sense, but that I've seen such programs able to use DirectX/OpenGL. Point is, that's a bad measuring stick. The program should ask for special treatment instead of the OS determining if it is needed. (see comment by @dkf)
-
You do realise half of the code in Windows is precisely the OS determining if it needs to apply special treatment, an amount of wasteful cruft that is the result of decades of people and corporations with far more money than sense blaming Microsoft for every tiny problem, even when they have nothing to do with it? Why would games be any different?
-
And you do realize that I have been saying "should"? I have been talking about best practice. Since we are talking about something that isn't done, let's talk about best practice instead of designing another candidate for the front page.
-
And the best practice is for the game to request special treatment. It's also best practice to write programs that need minimal permissions and use environment variables. But that didn't stop 20 years of hardcoded
C:\Windows
and mandatory admin rights, did it?
-
I hope you are right, for the sake of API cleanliness. But they did that in the past
I quote the interesting part.
I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.
This was not an unusual case
Now if WCF could add a knob for apps to declare them as games it would be quite useful. There are already knobs to tell OS not to run screen saver when you are watching a video.
-
-
Well that was dumb. They should have passed it back to Simcity's devs.
-
Are you seriously saying that the SimCity devs should have distributed a fix for users of Windows 95? At a time when a 56k modem was a rarity on the scale of a genuine Rolex?
-
Fuck you. Give me that freed memory.
-
Are you seriously saying that the SimCity devs should have distributed a fix for users of Windows 95? At a time when a 56k modem was a rarity on the scale of a genuine Rolex?
Yes.
-
Congratulations, you've helped 5% of gamers that faced the bug. Meanwhile, the other 95% are saying "Microsoft broke my game!"
-
Patches were sometimes released on disc back then, you know.
-
Right, and how many people actually applied them?
-
The people who's game wasn't working probably did
-
Really? Every single one of them was totally logical about the whole thing and happened to buy the PC mag the fix was distributed with?
-
You are in quite the mood today. In order to avoid shoving a stick up your ass, I think I'll just drop this conversation.
-
I'm not the one pretending there was ubiquitous fibre optic broadband in 1995; hell, it's 2015, and it's still not ubiquitous!
-
Slap fight!
-
-
Yes, well done, you found an image of a floppy disk. Want a cookie?
-
You keep it. Sounds like you need it.
-
So MS fixed a game that came out years before and should have passed it back to Maxis even after Maxis pushed the sequel? Uh... wut?
-
@aliceif said:
Before or after the hidden file extensions bullshit?
Whoever at MS thought up that idea, along with whoever approved it, should be given a job tending rabbits.
It actually makes sense for the sort of person who doesn't even know there's settings (and therefore would leave it at the default). The purpose was never to hide the extension, the original purpose was to make sure the user didn't accidentally remove the extension when renaming the file.The real mistake was using the file's extension to determine the file type.
-
But that problem should be solved with the big scary warning message whenever you change the extension.........
-
They added that later... after the people who turned extension hiding off kept overwriting their extensions. Also, a design that accomplishes a goal without big scary warnings is usually better than a design that has them.
-
Eh, didn't know which came first.
The scary warning is precisely the correct thing to do in this case though, because the other option hides (security-relevant) information from end-users. Which is definitely Doing It Wrong.
-
In theory, the supposedly hidden information is shown in the icon. In reality, non-tech users have no idea what a file format is. My father still opens files by first opening the program and then using File...Open to open the file.
-
In theory, the supposedly hidden information is shown in the icon. In reality, non-tech users have no idea what a file format is. My father still opens files by first opening the program and then using File...Open to open the file.
The same icon that can be overridden by certain file types?
Filed Under: Cat_pictures_new.exe
-
Even then, it's still in the "File Type" column.
-
I may be wrong, but that column isn't displayed in the default view in Explorer; it's just a list of small icons with names
-
Ah yes, I forgot 99% of the web has the graphical fidelity of GTAV on max settings
but 99% of the money in GTAV was made on the stockmarket which is inside (fake) a broswer inside the game!
Filed Under: How is that for a twist?
-
Which is not obvious, and hidden unless you're in details view (iirc)
Hiding the file type is a terrible solution to a fairly irrelevant problem - and the warning dialog is a much better way to approach this. So, now, since we have the warning, let's not hide the file type be default...
-
Video players, some DVD/BluRay rippers, and who knows what else.
2-D and 3-D modeling and rendering programs, both CAD and CGI. Photoshop and its cousins.
-
-
What did I start? O_o
-
Someone changed the title of my thread. CENSORSHIP! I demand blood and bone marrow.
-
-
The "offenders" are plainly visible in edit history. You should know who to go after.