Suggestion: borderless windowed mode

[Tim James]

Have you, the developers, considered this as a way to render the game fullscreen but still in windowed mode?

We could do it ourselves if we had more control over the window size. Is there a technical reason why the game only supports a limited set of resolution widths, and the desktop mode is locked to a certain size that it determines at startup?

If we were able to create a custom resolution, we could create an oversized window. For example, I'd like to configure the game to display 1920x1200 pixels, PLUS the normal Windows title bar and borders. The full window would not fit completely on my 1920x1200 monitor. But I could use a utility like ShiftWindow to automatically move that oversized window so the upper left pixel of the game was in the upper left pixel of my screen. The Windows title bar and borders would be off my screen at that point. But that's okay because I can still alt-tab or exit the game normally. This also draws over the taskbar. The game looks full screen but is rendered in a window.

Unless something prevents this implementation, I think it's the way forward to create a fullscreen look with the more robust windowed mode. You'd still need fullscreen mode for people who want to use a lower resolution and let their graphics card scale it up to fit the monitor. This would work best for people who play windowed mode at the desktop resolution.

[Mobhack]

If you would like to rewrite the third-party graphics engine, then by all means it might be do-able.

However as it stands, it only really was written for full-screen applications back in the days of DOS, before being uplifted to a Windows version at some point. The non-fullscreen mode only included was for the purposes of debugging back in the day as that mode was simply too slow to allow proper game play back in the day (2000 or thereabouts?).

The engine is probably written using Directx 5 or maybe 6, back before DX knew of such things as that, I suppose. Its also written in old Microsoft C++ wrapped around a version of MASM that's not available any more. So its source is not compilable on modern systems. (I did try back in 2004 or so in order to get rid of its bug that does not allow resizeable windows. The outer window frame will resize if the graphics engine flag is set - , but the play area remains constant and so can only be resized on the initial Directx set-up call. Hence the separate GameOptions launcher programme).

I could allow you to enter your own custom pixel coordinates - but if you get the aspect ratio wrong, or its too big for the screen space, or is not one of the pixel multiples the engine likes (or whatever) then you'll get the "squashed screen" display that most end users will see if they didn't read the game guide and left the windows task-bar in "pop-up" mode.

However the only windowless mode it allows is the full-screen mode with a title. Windowed mode must be a regular window and not a full-screen border-less dialogue box.

Andy

[Tim James]

Originally Posted by Mobhack

The outer window frame will resize if the graphics engine flag is set - , but the play area remains constant and so can only be resized on the initial Directx set-up call. Hence the separate GameOptions launcher programm

Constant play area is okay if it's just a black border around the play area within the expanded window size. If it works like what it sounds like, you could use ShiftWindow (or equivalent) to at least have a dark screen without having to look at the window title bar and borders, or the taskbar.

Just thinking out loud. It seems like you guys are so close. I'm okay with windowed mode (never even considered it at first because I usually go immediately to fullscreen in any game) but then I started thinking about borderless windows.

If you want to create a test version that allows custom coordinates, I'd be happy to mess around with it. But I understand if you don't think it will work. I don't know anything about the innards.

[Imp]

Most cards & their drivers are optimised to deal with standard screen resolutions, using none standard settings will at the least cause them to work a lot harder & may well cause frame rate & tear issues.
Also if you don't get the alignment perfect your mouse might leave the monitor area before scrolling is initiated.
Alt Tab may also become a bit unstable or at least cause a complete screen refresh