Disabling the ESC key in the webplayer

Unity Engine
1

The question :
Disabling the escape key in the webplayer - how? Is it possible by any means?

My research:
I’ve read about the topic and the only idea I’ve got is to use windows hooks which surprisingly would work only with windows, apart from the fact that it is a hell of a drag to code and that almost certainly antivirus programs would block it and etc.
The last thing I’m considering is a small application that has only one functionality - blocking the ESC key, which hardcore gamers could download and use.

2

That is simply not going to happen. A website launching something in fullscreen without a standard way of breaking out of it? No.

3

Yes. That could be a deal breaker for ad ware or harassing people but in therms of browser gaming it could be a blessing. And another thing is that the ESC keys functionality may just be moved to some other button.

4

Indeed, but you understand why we can do absolutely no compromising here. It’s a user experience deal breaker.

5

A compromise would be giving the user an option to remap the key himself from the unity webplayer options. This may be considered of big use by many people because in most games the escape key is used to bring the options menu up. At the same time it won’t be an option for harassing the users because only the user himself would be able to remap the key.

6

How could you enforce that? As soon as you’ve exposed that function to developers you’ve lost control of it. Clearly not going to happen.

7

Not exposing the function to developers but to users. Users would have the ability to remap their key, developers won’t.

8

Even if that was implemented, doesn’t it seem a bit contrived? To me it sounds far easier to simply communicate to the user:

“Press randombutton to bring up the option menu.”

Verse

“Press randombutton to bring up the option menu, unless you go into the Unity Webplayer options and then remap the hard-escape-fullscreen button to something else, then escape will bring up the option menu.”

You would still have to take into consideration the users who don’t remap the hard-escape, so you are really only adding a convoluted option. Any users who would be willing to jump through hoops to have escape bring up the options menu would be equally willing to just use a different button in my opinion.

As an end user, it would absolutely suck to play a Unity game in July - remap my hard-escape-fullscreen key at their request, not play another Unity game for 6 months, go fullscreen, forgot what my hard-escape-fullscreen key was bound to. I would almost certainly blame the new game/Unity itself for not letting me get out of fullscreen, not that game I played 6-months ago and forgot about.

Pandoras box is not as good as Pandora radio.

9

It have never been a big deal but It may bring convenience to some people I think.