Bug#474740: sauerbraten: Hangs on the start on a dual-head system

[Dmitry V. Rutsky]

> > I've tried that, 'sauerbraten -t' works fine
>
> ok, that means that the game basically runs on your system. that's
> good! ;)

I had indicated that in my original report, it even so happens that with my 
previous configuration left over the game sort of runs full-screen --- it 
occupies the whole virtual screen, spanning its 1920 pixel wide window in the 
center across the monitors.

> this sounds familiar to me: i guess that you're running the nvidia
> driver in nvidia's proprietary "TwinView" mode, right?
[skip]
> ah! yes you do! here we've got the potential culprit...
>
> in the past i've been using nvidia's "TwinView" mode for several years,
> and i experienced the same "bug" as you do (and i guess you will
> discover strange things in other games, too?). i wrote bug in
> double-quotes because the strange behaviour is very likely to come from
> a misconfigured - or let's say not fully configured - "TwinView"
> configuration. to complete the configuration you need to set up
> something nvidia calls "MetaModes" in your xorg.conf's "Screen" section
> (as far as i know this is described in chapter 13A "X CONFIG TWINVIEW
> OPTIONS" in /usr/share/doc/nvidia-glx/README.txt.gz). sorry, i cannot
> help you here, because i apperently never understood that option
> correctly and never managed to get full-screen working on my system...

Well, this turns out to be a tricky buisness.  I don't see what else there 
needs to be configured, and I'm not feeling like fiddling with the extension 
configuration any more than I did.  It would be more sensible to see where 
exactly the game hangs.

> as an alternative you can try to disable "TwinView" and instead use
> X.Org's own "Xinerama" extension (see man 5 xorg.conf and search for
> xinerama and LeftOf/RightOf; maybe it's also described
> in /usr/share/doc/nvidia-glx/README.txt.gz). on my system in xinerama
> mode, OpenGL applications worked correctly when rendering in fullscreen
> mode, but i didn't manage to select on which screen the application
> should appear. another disadvantage of the nvidia driver in xinerama
> mode is, that you might lose some rendering performance and nvidia
> didn't support DGA mouse input in xinerama mode, when i tried it the
> last time, which is about 2 years ago. the lack of DGA mouse input
> means, that you need to make your application use X.Org's mouse input -
> for applications which use the SDL library that's easy: just set the
> environment variable SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0 (for
> example: SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0 sauerbraten).

Unfortunately, it seems that due to some old and bizarre issue with the Nvidia 
driver, with Xinerama extension in use my CRT monitor (which has smaller 
resolution) will always come out as the primary device, so I will get the 
login window down and off visible area for some reason and all kinds of weird 
stuff --- it's just too inconvenient.  I've seen a whole tread about it on 
Nvidia forums, and it seems that using this extension is the only way around.

> perhaps you'll also find something in the BTS here:
> http://bugs.debian.org/nvidia-glx
>
> i personally decided to play everything in window mode, because it
> appeared to be the least annoying workaround for the "full screen
> problem" on nvidia.

Full screen mode still feels better, although it is not such an inconvenience 
to play in windowed mode.  Why the default is the full screen mode if it 
hangs more frequently?

Regards,
-- 
	-- Dmitry Rutsky