World of Goo recently had a well-publicised Radiohead-type “Pay what you want for the game” sale (here’s a summary). Cleodhna had downloaded it, so I decided to grab it and give it a go in a brief lull at work.
I played it for a bit, then quit - to discover that all of my windows on my main screen had been squashed and/or moved.
I have 8 virtual desktops (what Apple calls Spaces), and this machine was last rebooted a fortnight ago. That’s a lot of windows.
The basic problem appears to be this: World of Goo changes the screen resolution to something smaller, and switches to full-screen mode, but doesn’t do this in the right order, or misses out some other switch or API call. So Mac OS thinks it’s like you decided to change the screen resolution permanently, and goes through every window that doesn’t fit on the screen and resizes it.
Those many, many 80x40 Terminal windows? Resized to something like 80x30. Safari windows taking up most of the screen? They’re now shrunk down to half depth. A bunch of page scans open to pretty much full-screen, carefully positioned next to each other so I could flick from one page to another by clicking on the next available window? Again, cut to half size.
This is a basic issue of programming games on Mac OS X. Many, many other games get it right. There’s no excuse to botch something as fundamental as this.
World of Goo is now permanently gone from my machine.
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