macOS: SDL_QUIT quits the game immediately with no confirmation (accidental mid-game exit)

[ercanatay]

Summary

On macOS, SDL_QUIT is turned into an immediate Sys_Quit with no confirmation, which makes it easy to quit a game mid-session by accident. Retail Half-Life (and the engine's own menu) shows a quit-confirmation dialog, but the SDL_QUIT path bypasses it.

Environment

• OS: macOS (Apple Silicon / arm64)
• Engine: Xash3D FWGS 0.21, build 4127, commit 009855c, apple-arm64 (continuous build)
• Game: valve (Half-Life 1), local listen server

What we observed

While playing on a local listen server, the app exited cleanly in the middle of the session. With -log enabled, engine.log recorded:

Note: Issuing host shutdown due to reason "caught SDL_QUIT"
...
Stopped with reason "caught SDL_QUIT" at ...

This is a clean shutdown, not a crash — there is no Crash: signal ... line from the POSIX crash handler and no macOS crash report (.ips) is generated. So the engine received a normal SDL_QUIT and exited immediately.

Source

In engine/platform/sdl2/host_sdl2.c the quit event is handled unconditionally:

case SDL_QUIT:
    Sys_Quit( "caught SDL_QUIT" );
    break;

SDL_WINDOWEVENT_CLOSE is not handled in the SDL_WINDOWEVENT switch. Meanwhile the in-game UI already has a quit confirmation (GameUI_QuitConfirmationTitle / GameUI_QuitConfirmationText), but it is only reached via the menu — an OS-level SDL_QUIT skips it.

On macOS the default SDL2 Cocoa app menu exposes ⌘Q → SDL_QUIT (and ⌘W on the window), so an accidental modifier press during gameplay can terminate the match instantly with no prompt. On a Mac keyboard the Command key sits right next to the keys players use for movement/crouch, which makes this easy to trigger unintentionally.

Question / suggestion

Would you be open to gating SDL_QUIT behind the existing quit-confirmation when a game/map is active (i.e. Host_IsLocal() / an active client), while keeping immediate quit at the menu or via an "already confirmed" path? That would match retail Half-Life behavior and avoid accidental mid-game exits, without changing dedicated-server or menu behavior.

Happy to test any patch on macOS arm64. If this is intended behavior (or better solved by running fullscreen), feel free to close — just wanted to document it since engine.log clearly shows it's a clean quit rather than the crash it looks like in the moment.

[a1batross]

It's pretty much intended behavior but I never thought it should be implemented differently. Makes sense to me to call up the quit dialog if the menu is loaded.