Pressing Escape mid-stream on an iPad handed the mouse back to iPadOS:
the captured cursor was swapped for the system one and the game stopped
receiving relative motion, so aiming died until you clicked back in.
Two previous attempts treated that release as unavoidable and built
recovery around it — a re-lock burst, then a click that re-asks. Both
came back from the field unchanged, because both fought the release
after it had already happened, inside the cooldown the platform applies
straight after its own "let me out" gesture.
The release was never unavoidable. This app had no UIKit key handling at
all: every key arrives on the GameController path, which is a parallel
HID feed that does not consume the UIKit event, and the only thing that
ever became first responder was the video view, and only to summon the
soft keyboard. So every hardware Escape reached UIKit unclaimed — and an
unclaimed key press is precisely what lets the system apply its own
default for that key. Apps that read a hardware keyboard the ordinary
way consume the event as a side effect and never see this.
So claim it. The stream controller becomes first responder while capture
is engaged and takes Escape in pressesBegan/pressesEnded, passing every
other press to super untouched. Escape still reaches the host on the
GameController path, so in-game menus open exactly as before; only the
system's own interpretation is suppressed. Scoped to captured input, so
Escape keeps dismissing sheets and leaving full screen whenever the
stream doesn't own the keyboard, and the deliberate ways out are
untouched — Cmd-Escape and Ctrl-Opt-Shift-Q are read off the same
GameController path and clear capture themselves.
The recovery path stays as a backstop and is retimed to match what was
measured: the old burst spent its entire budget within ~0.6 s of the
drop, i.e. wholly inside the cooldown, where the answer can only be no.
Retries now continue at 1.2 s and 2.4 s, and quietly — they don't hide
the cursor or mute pointer motion the way the burst does, so a longer
recovery costs nothing when it fails.
enricobuehler
ea762b849d