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The right of ALT+TAB is the right of LIFE
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RPGDot Forums > CRPGs General

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JemyM
Vault Dweller
Vault Dweller




Joined: 28 Nov 2001
Posts: 753
Location: Sweden
   

The year is 2000.
This is the era of broadband connections. Now more than ever the average person can fully use everything Internet have to offer.

Personally I am a teamleader of a internetproject with +40 people. I have all theese people on my ICQ and they send me e-mail all the time. We reicive alot of questions by ICQ with lost users who like a bit of support, and I try to help as much as possible.

While ICQ is hot, Peer to Peer is also hot. This is the era where, regardless copyright issues, almost everyone downloads their like of music via the Internet. And music is not everything, you can instantly find a cool trailer of a movie you want to see, download demo's and patches for the games you play.

With broadband you never need to shut down your internet, and there comes the servers. FTP server, Peer to Peer servers, HTTP Servers... I personally have my job-application on the internet, available to all companies I search jobs on. If I update it on my harddrive, its updated on the net.

Except for that, the computers can be used for almost everything... I have my phone-book in my computer, with all numbers to important people/companies that I cannot have in my head. My computer is used for a Stereo, a Movieplayer, communication (its easier to send a ICQ message with a quick question than calling by phone, so you can save your money for more important phonecalls).
I use it to keep track of my income, my bills... I download recepies for dinner, and I buy stuff directly via my computer...

But some companies are not aware of this... Some gamecompanies have the bad habit of 'locking' our lives by forcely remove the feature ALT+TABbing out from their games. Especially games like strategygames or rpg's that takes a long time to play either shut down your life for long moments, or forces you to shut down the game. This is the same "We ownz j00" mentality that was born with spammers or popups... The belief that as long as the person that uses our product he probably dont have a life around it...

STOP THAT!

Let us keep our right to our computers without shutting your game down!

Do not accept this now, or in the future.

"Possibility to ALT+TAB" should be in every review of a game out there.

Best Regards
JemyM


Post Mon Jan 28, 2002 6:05 am
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Incindium
Captain of the Guard
Captain of the Guard




Joined: 17 Oct 2001
Posts: 187
   

Umm they aren't doing it to be malicious you know... Most likely they either have some code that dumps all keystrokes that aren't built into the game on the floor or else there are potential stablility issues with being able to alt-tab away from the program and they just disabled it rather than try to fix the problem they just prevent you from causing it. Yeah they should have spent more time fixing the code to make it work, but is it a big deal with anyone but a very small % of users, no. The reality is that there are probably many more important problems and bugs that needed to be fixed and alt-tabbing just didn't make the list...

[ This Message was edited by: Incindium on 2002-01-28 13:30 ]
Post Mon Jan 28, 2002 7:29 pm
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Vampire777
Village Dweller
Village Dweller




Joined: 29 Jan 2002
Posts: 6
Location: Sweden
   

If they have a good reason for eliminating alt+tab, I have no problems with it. In MMORPG´s they do it to try to prevent cheating. That is a good reason in my book.

_________________
-----

Humanity is.... Overrated... - Christof Romuald
Post Tue Jan 29, 2002 2:28 pm
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Vampire777
Village Dweller
Village Dweller




Joined: 29 Jan 2002
Posts: 6
Location: Sweden
   

If they have a good reason for eliminating alt+tab, I have no problems with it. In MMORPG´s they do it to try to prevent cheating. That is a good reason in my book.

_________________
-----

Humanity is.... Overrated... - Christof Romuald
Post Tue Jan 29, 2002 2:29 pm
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JemyM
Vault Dweller
Vault Dweller




Joined: 28 Nov 2001
Posts: 753
Location: Sweden
   

I use my computer for more than MMoRPGs.

I rather allow cheaters in the games I play, than loose my abilities of communication. After all, its just a game.

Best Regards
JemyM
Post Tue Jan 29, 2002 4:12 pm
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Maggot
Magister of the Light
Magister of the Light




Joined: 17 Jul 2001
Posts: 392
Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
   

Disallowing ALT-TAB to prevent cheating seems to me to be a rather limited measure. It gives unfair advantage to people with two computers, for instance.


Anyway, this is my computer, and I personally sometimes choose to do other things while playing games. Disallowing ALT-TAB to patch up some bug in your own product seems downright rude to me.

Post Thu Jan 31, 2002 5:03 pm
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sauron38
Rara Avis
Rara Avis




Joined: 14 Jan 2002
Posts: 4396
Location: Winnipeg's Sanctum Sanctorum
   

Can you not just go in to windowed mode with F3? Though you must be in marvin mode to do so, it allows you to do something (like typing this) while Gothic is running. Then you go back to Gothic and press F3 again to get back in to non windowed mode. So it does alow Alt-tabing.
Post Thu Feb 07, 2002 2:37 am
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