Exclusive fullscreen mode not possible anymore

[fladd]

In Pygame 1, fullscreen OpenGL windows used to be in "exclusive" fullscreen mode.
In Pygame 2 they are by default "desktop" fullscreen mode. This is in principle no big problem, however, there is currently no way to make the "exclusive" anymore, due to the code here: https://github.com/pygame-community/pygame-ce/blob/2.2.0/src_c/display.c#L952/

Exclusive fullscreen mode is important, since (at least under Windows) they it seems to be the only way to bypass the compositor.

For more information about why this is important, please see here: pygame/pygame#3619 (comment)

[robertpfeiffer]

This is still on our radar, and I think we will address it with the 2.3.0 release by introducing a lower-level windowing API that lets you use old-style full-screen again.

[fladd]

@robertpfeiffer Has this been implemented in 2.3.0? I don't think I saw it in the release notes.
Is there any (new) timeline of when (or if) this will get fixed? We are currently still holding back on a new release of Expyriment due to this.

[fladd]

Still wondering if this is something that pygame-ce will fix. It has since been fixed in the original pygame, which is why we will stick with this one for the current release. However, if things change on the pygame-ce side, we might still consider switching to it in the future.

[ankith26]

Hello, sorry for the late reply. It is possible to use non desktop fullscreen with the pygame.Window API which was made public in pygame-ce 2.5.2

For advanced usecases such as yours, I would suggest using this newer API as it would give you more fine grained control and comes with a nicer OOP API and multi window support as added benefits. If you find something is missing there that would help your usecases feel free to let us know.

As for why the original pygame.display API made the jump to defaulting to desktop fullscreen, I'm not fully aware why that was done. I see that upstream pygame has already reverted that and does non desktop fullscreen by default now, but I'm not sure if we should do that in pygame-ce as well, it has the potential to break someones code that relies on desktop fullscreen to work