Why alt + tab is great & why it's not.

I have some concerns about alt+tab being available..

Firstly I personally love to be able to alt+tab in an online game. It allows you to make textures, play music, and look up websights without having to sign in and out of the game. But there are people who would take this and turn it into a disadvatage for everyone else.. (if alt+tabbing isnt going to be available when sl goes live then disreguard this post)

In my experence with being a beta tester, allowing the alt+tab command to be used usually allows people to run hacking programs. (I'm not exactally sure what the programs would do or how they work.) I've used editors and trainers for offline one player computer games, and from that I know that in order to edit the game you have to alt+tab or load the saved game.

So my concern is this: I'd hate to give alt tab up, but I dont want some kid who's played for 3 days to have a bunch of $ or land.

Is there a way to allow alt+tab but prevent hackers? :/

Lynn

I agree but most hackers preffer windowed mode. Which we also have. But the savvy hacker can run multiple machines with packet sniffers and well other nifty tools. Hackers are just that Hackers. They will ultimatly find ways to exploit anything they wish to. Lok at Diablo2exp. That was supposed to be hack proof in the begining, lol now its a joke.

True..

That reminds me of warcraft 3... blizzard banned a crap load of people for using a hack... i think it was a thing that revealed the map... (i didnt play it much online cause i kept getting my bum stomped)

I just figured that if alt tabbing was disabled it would cut down on the attempts to hack, sence most other online games dont allow alt+tabbing (massive multi player games). But was hoping there was another way to minimize the potential of hacking with keeping alt tabbing in the game.

Lynn

yup that was called Maphack, commonly used in Diablo2exp

Besides... disabling useful features like Window-Switching only hurts the honest player. Many popular games already have their 'hacking community' which can work on programs that do not require any windowed operation.

They are commonly known as 'Pre-loaders' which in effect.. start up BEFORE you start the Game's executable file, and load themselves into memory. Then they can simply add their own 'commands' or macro-scripts to the game's interface and the Game Client (as well as the gaming company) would not be the wiser...giving the player various cheats to where the 'loot' is.

EverQuest has their share of these 'utilities' out there and there is little Sony can do about it short of making public threats or constantly changing their Client's 'offset' codes. But the hackers are quick to release updates with the new codes as well.. so it is a constant Cat-and-Mouse game being played.

<DISCLAIMER>
I apologize in advance for the somewhat brusk tone of this post, but over the past three weeks I have really come to enjoy this very enriching experience, and getting knocked out of it so easily for some very simple, common, and/or dumb reasons only to have to wait 17 hours before getting my next opportunity to log in and stick around as long as the system will allow is terribly frustrating to me as a user.
</DISCLAIMER>

I have been frozen out of the game for the twentieth+ time in my three weeks here because the client is excruciatingly poor at handling window switching back and forth (from SL client to ANYTHING in the outside world...even NOTEPAD)!

Whether it be an intentional scripting cut and paste operation so that I can look at the script and work with it when not in the game, or an accidental "Whoops, I hit the Windows key by accident, now I'm hosed", this problem needs to go away URGENTLY!

My "crash du jour" was my Outlook client (running in the background because my PocketPC PDA was in the chute charging and syncing) popped up an appointment reminder for a meeting I am attending tomorrow morning, which killed me off. To add insult to injury, I could not even shut the machine down cleanly and had to hold the power button in for 5+ seconds to even get the machine to power down! (typical of any crash from my SL client)

I even tried to be clever and set the screen resolution to off, which in theory should give me a non-full-screen client, but then when I restarted, the client told me that my video card was generic GDI and not supported blah blah blah and I had to go into the settings.ini file to turn full screen on before I could even get back in. (That was after I uninstalled and reinstalled the client once because I had read somewhere else that that was the only way to solve that failure). If the card works in full screen mode, why would it not work in Window'ed mode? I don't get that at all.

I cannot imagine this being such a herculean programming task that it cannot be fixed by one or two people spending a few hours looking at it sideways. And I know I am not the only person suffering from this particularly vicious bug as I have talked with other users who also say their SL client freezes them out when they do similar things. Sure, some work, but from my unscientific poll, the ratio is nowhere near 50/50. This needs attention.

It is extremely frustrating--especially when all I want to do is spend time in the world and work on projects and scripting and see how far I can stretch the world! Ok, so the "login time window" is limited and for a reason (good or bad is debatable). Ok, I can accept that. Don't like it, but I can accept it. But either the client's Alt-tab behavior needs to be fixed, or you need to simply prevent the outside world from affecting the SL client. Earth and Beyond does a wonderful job of handling alt-tab switching and behaves very respectably with no leaks or loss or anything. On the flip side, I know that EQ blocks working with the outside world entirely (or at least it used to when I was playing) and that was fine too. I don't care which way it works, just pick one and stick with it--PLEASE!?!?!?

Personally, I agree with Kira. Pre-loaders get around the alt-tab thing, so by preventing alt-tabbing, you're just punishing the legit users. If taking it away is the call, however, so be it.

If LL decides this is not a high-enough priority issue to resolve, fine--I have an alternate possible solution: provide a second login window. Maybe make it a shorter one. Maybe make it an hour or two after the first one ends. For example, keep the first window from 4:00pm to 10:00pm and make a second window from 11:00pm to 1:00am or even 12:00am. That way people that got the boot after the close of the first window get one more chance at getting back in. Either that or widen the window in the first place, which I am sure you will get little argument from the user base on that one.

Some of us (maybe even most of us) would spend way more time in the world doing, playing, creating, and testing if we had more access to it (the world)--or less ways to get knocked out of it. I will leave it to LL to figure out which one is easiest to implement in the near term.

Maybe a dumb question but.....why are folks worried about the window key or alt-tabbing when you can go into your settings and setup SL to run as a windowed program from the moment ya start it, you get the minimize/maximize/close tabs in the upper right corner and everything.

If anyone hasn't tried this (game is closed right now so I can't read the settings) just go into your video settings and under resolution thers an option labeled "none" I believe...maybe another name, that'll startup SL as a windowed proggy from the get go. Don't forget to restart SL once ya change resolutions.

While I've had many problems with my client locking up (and having do the hold the power button down thing), the alt-tab (actually the Windows key) has never been a problem for me. I can't stand to run SL in windowed mode, and I always run it in 1280 x 1024 full screen mode, as I have a 21" crt monitor, and I *really* value the full-screen experience.

I've gotten into the habit of using the tab key, like when someone i.m.'s me on msn - it'll pop up on the SL screen but it's flickering like crazy, so I have to flip out of SL to answer it. But the funny thing is, I've never had the client crash while doing "outside" programs, although I've had SL, IE, msn i.m., PS7 and Flash all open at the same time (good machine, good machine..lol).

The problem I DO have is whenever I'm doing something like editing my appearance or something, it'll just freeze. (Not too often, but it does happen on occasion) Can't do nothing at all...the tab key doesn't work, the quit doesn't work, and even ctrl-alt-delete doesn't work. But this has never happened while I was using other programs, which is the weirdest thing.

Zanlew, what do you have your draw distance set at? I was having a ton of probs in the beginning, as I had it set at 512 meters...if you have it set that high, you're guaranteed to have problems...lol...if you're attempting to overnight it, it's best to dial that down to 64 meters, and your av composite down to 1 or 2...this does ease the strain on your system and improves the odds of maintaining your log-in..my record so far is something like 16 hours without losing it (and I only have 512 of RAM..lol).

Z, most likely the reason you can't run in windowed mode ("fullscreen off" as it is known) is you might be running windows in less than 32-bit color. SL runs in 32-bit, and when running full screen, it can have its way with your display, but if it runs in windowed mode, it has to bow to the resolution/colordepth that windows is running under. Unfortunately, no one has bothered to mention anywhere in the error messages that this is the case. Hopefully this will also clear up some of your "alt-tab" woes. I always run in windowed because alt tab has never been the most stable for me - its gotten better since I have started, and many users can use it without incedent. That being said, I haven't played in fullscreen for about 7 months now.

BBC

Thanx BBC, I will try that. Yeah, if that does in fact work, then it would be nice if someone mentioned that somewhere. I have a 23" LCD that does 1600x1200 native, so I have plenty of real estate to run in Windowed mode. I usually don't run in 32-bit color depth as it only takes more power and doesn't usually add any value, but if I can run SL in Windowed mode with 32bcd set, I am all over it!

Actually I did try that very thing, but when I did, the SL client then told me that my video card was not supported. With the tip that BBC just gave me, this may get me around that. If it does, then I can stop complaining.

Still, windowed mode or not, this alt-tab thing should be "resolved" one way or another.

< I have a 23" LCD that does 1600x1200 native, so I have plenty of real estate to run in Windowed mode. >

Wow...I'd love to run SL on a monitor like that (full screen of course)....must be nice!

J

With a monitor like that, life in general is nice, but games are EXCELLENT!

The main reason I'd quit alt-tabbing was it just up and stopped working for me, every time I tried it'd try to focus on an object...so I went to windowed.

When wife's asleep should see me trying to play on a 54" big screen I've got the pc tapped into

Ok, I did manage to get Windowed mode to work after BuhBuhCuh gave me the heads up on what I was missing to make it work. Now that I have that working, all my other problems are gone. I was able to stay on as long as I wanted (once I could get in at all), and normal Windows system events did not freeze me, and I was able to cut and paste between my script editing windows and Notepad. What a joy! I hope LL never turns that off, but if they do, I hope they don't turn it off until after they got Alt-tab working.

But for now I can deal without...ahhh, the sweetness of success!

I think maybe they should have a preferences option that a user can set to disable ALT+TAB and the Windows key, so people who don't have a use for those shortcuts don't have to worry about it accidentally b0rking SL.