Has it been confirmed one way or another if the gadgets can be used in a canvas (full screen)?
A "Graphics 640,480,32,60"-type fullscreen? It doesn't seem so. A "canvas covering the whole desktop"-type 'fullscreen'? Yes. Fairly quick-n-dirty code exploring this follows...
First off, it's not too hard to rescale gadgets to have a consistent look regardless of the window's size:
So, you can make your windows/gadgets look pretty much the same regardless of the size that the user/player has his desktop set at (rescaling them all to take up the same percentage of screen space). It might be possible to change the desktop size, then change it back when done, but I imagine that could be a bit messy if your game dies and leaves it at the wrong size (I'm not up on doing this, and I personally prefer avoiding platform-specific tricks).
The examples below don't do this dynamic scaling, but they could. They also aren't too happy on a Mac, but I'd guess(?) that's just a matter of a little fiddling around (I've been reading of some 1.12/MaxGUI Mac bugs).
Here's the sort of mix of graphical area and control area that I want for my games (the map is a fixed area at left, with a non-movable set of controls on the right):
It seems possible to Alt-Tab away from and back to this app safely.
If you prefer a floating window moving over a full-desktop, that's possible too (I imagine that the "garbage trail" that appears could be reduced/eliminated, but I haven't investigated that since I plan to use the non-moving control area above):
This is all still rather rough, but seems a promising start for one day's exploration. :) All of this (plus the ability to use panels as "image buttons") has me feeling better about using MaxGUI for doing games as well as apps.
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