2021-01-20, 06:48
(2021-01-19, 22:27)capewrath Wrote: Hi! I've been using AEL for a while and I absolutely love it. However, I would like some help on a small annoyance that I found. I have an old but somewhat gaming capable PC that I use on my living room as a "console replacement", the OS is currently ubuntu 20.04 with KDE and the kodi version is 18.9. Now, what happens is that if a game for whatever reason changes the screen resolution when being launched, kodi "steals" the screen focus and reappears on top of the game that just launched. Even if the game eventually returns to 1920x1080, as is the case with GTR2, the intro cinematic plays at 640x480 and so it switches the screen resolution causing kodi to appear on top. I know it sounds silly and I'm pretty sure it's more of a kodi thing than an AEL bug, but it does mean that I have to find a keyboard and alt-tab to the game again. While alt-tabbing out of kodi is of course not hard to do, it kinda breaks the whole "sit down, grab a controller, play the game" experience, especially for the kids.
(2021-01-19, 22:27)capewrath Wrote: Does anyone know a fix for this?
Yes!
(2021-01-19, 22:27)capewrath Wrote: Is linux/KDE causing it?
No. Probably when Kodi detects a change in the screen resolution it tries to grab the focus to reinitialize the display subsystem.
(2021-01-19, 22:27)capewrath Wrote: Maybe there is a "not steal focus" setting for kodi that I missed or something.
There is no such thing. Modern applications (including games) are not supposed to change the screen resolution because flat screens do not have several resolutions, they only have one native resolution. As opposed, CRT monitors where able to change the resolution of the display because of their analog nature. For example, in the past emulators like genecyst changed you screen resolution to 320x200, 640x400, etc. Modern emulators like Retroarch and MAME just grab the screen resolution and then adjust their video output to that resolution, for example by scaling the 320x200 native output 2 or 3 times, hence the vertical black bands on either side.
One possible solution is to create a shell script to use a program like xdotool. With xdotool you can control the windows from the command line. If you get into trouble use sleep to wait some time between commands, sometimes if the commands execute very fast you run into race conditions.
