So... what happened to fullscreen mode lately?

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FnrrfYgmSchnish
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So... what happened to fullscreen mode lately?

Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

Just noticed this while testing out one of my games the other night... it seems like sometime very recently (Etheldreme?) the way the OHRRPGCE does fullscreen has changed, and not for the better.

Previously: Fullscreen mode made the game take up... well, the full screen. If there were black bars on the top or bottom, they weren't noticeable -- I want to say either they weren't there at all, or there was only a little bit if you had a squareish monitor. There was no window mess cluttering up the top of the screen, just the game. Because it was fullscreen mode, not windowed.

Now: It's not really "fullscreen vs. windowed" anymore so much as "small window vs. big window that tries to be fullscreen." And weirdly enough, it actually turns out "more fullscreen" if you double-click the bar at the top of the window (which used to be the only way to get this "big window" mode) rather than using the standard ALT+ENTER fullscreen, which leaves a weird border around the entire game screen and looks pretty awful and makes the black padding at the top and bottom of the screen glaringly obvious. Well, having the bar at the top alone does that too, but the border with tiny bits of desktop streaming through around the edges definitely makes the effect worse.

I've attached some screenshots of "big window" and "slightly-less-ugly big window" modes that seem to have replaced the old fullscreen. They are shrunk to 50% so as to not be ludicriously huge, but it should still be pretty easy to see what I'm talking about. Hopefully this was a bug of some sort and not an intentional change...
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New Ugly Fullscreen Mode
New Ugly Fullscreen Mode
uglyfullscreen.png (40.49 KiB) Viewed 2403 times
Slightly-less-ugly fullscreen from double-clicking the window
Slightly-less-ugly fullscreen from double-clicking the window
slightlylessugly.png (15.39 KiB) Viewed 2403 times
Last edited by FnrrfYgmSchnish on Sun Feb 04, 2018 8:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

What operating system are you using?

Also, I am curious which backend you are using. There is a key that let's you switch backends while you play... F9 I think?
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

I'm using Windows 10. Tried hitting F9 and it doesn't seem to do anything at all -- no debug message comes up (like when using walk-through-walls or similar) and nothing seems to change.

I did stumble across the debug menu when trying the other F-keys, and apparently the one to switch backends is CTRL+F8. Looks like my graphics backend is gfx_directx currently; switching to SDL brings back the old fullscreen! Switching to FB also brings back the old fullscreen, but then causes the game to turn into a blank white screen and crash when I go back to windowed mode -- whoops.
Last edited by FnrrfYgmSchnish on Sun Feb 04, 2018 8:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Ah, right! Ctrl+F8 it is then F9 must be in custom.

You can make the game always start in gfx_sdl by moving or renaming the gfx_directx.dll file found in the same folder as game.exe
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Post by TMC »

There's no longer any need to delete gfx_directx.dll: if you change the backend using the Graphics Backend Menu (Ctrl-F8), the change is permanently remembered.

gfx_fb (and maybe others too) doesn't behave well when you switch between backends, I'm not surprised it crashed. If you want to try it out, first change to gfx_fb and then restart game.exe.

I made some changes (most bugfixes) to gfx_directx's fullscreen handling back in May, which would have been included in Dwimmercrafty.
But I don't know if that's related. fullscreen still works fine for me on Windows XP, the way you want it to.

gfx_directx has some relevant options you can try changing, but it doesn't even have a mode where it will leave black bars on all four sides of the screen, so something is definitely pretty broken here. This could be due to some kind of change in Windows itself (I see something about fullscreen breaking in lots of games in the Windows 10 Creators Update).
Could you try switching back to gfx_directx, restart game.exe, and then click on the little 'RPG' icon at the topleft of the window and select Options. Try changing the Aspect Ratio Preservation and Smooth Draw options and see if that makes a difference.

Edit:
In the post I linked, someone suggested this:
I think that I found the solution.

Go to the game executable, right click on it then go to Properties > Compatibility, check the box "Disable fullscreen optimizations" apply and play.

I don't know what this option do but it's really messing with all my games on Creators Update.
Last edited by TMC on Mon Feb 05, 2018 3:29 am, edited 8 times in total.
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

I think that I found the solution.

Go to the game executable, right click on it then go to Properties > Compatibility, check the box "Disable fullscreen optimizations" apply and play.

I don't know what this option do but it's really messing with all my games on Creators Update.
After some poking around, it looks like this works! Fullscreen is back to normal even in gfx_directx with this checkbox on. Guess it was a Windows weirdness issue rather than an OHRRPGCE issue.

Speaking of fullscreen issues, though, it doesn't seem to work at all in gfx_fb. On top of the white screen and crash that I got the last time (when switching to gfx_fb in-game), I tried again with it already being set to gfx_fb ahead of time... and now instead of the white screen happening, fullscreen becomes "magic invisible screen," with the game going... somewhere else... rather than going fullscreen. It acts like it's minimized, except switching to it is impossible and in the task manager it goes back and forth between being "not responding" and not. Eventually (after multiple attempts to close it through right-clicking it on the taskbar and picking "close window") it goes back to windowed mode and un-freezes. Doesn't seem to change at all with the fullscreen optimization checkbox, so it looks like fullscreen in gfx_fb is just plain broken (at least on my computer, anyway!)
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Post by TMC »

Great, thanks for the testing! Since it's a compatibility setting there's probably a way that we can tell Windows it should be enabled by default (embed a .manifest file in the exe?) I suspect it's going to be painful to do that though. I'll look at it later.

We don't care much about gfx_fb but try to keep it working; we haven't used it as the default on any OS in many many years and it doesn't have much of a future, although I was only aware of rather minor issues with it, not fullscreen being completely broken on any OS. The only purpose of gfx_fb is to provide an alternative in case the other backends don't work for someone. I doubt there's much I can easily do about the problems you describe.

Ironically even though we don't care about gfx_fb, we actually run all our testcases with it, because it runs them a bit faster.

Also, I see that the person who posted that on that EA.com thread later added:
Nyamp escreveu wrote:I think that I found the solution.

Go to the game executable, right click on it then go to Properties > Compatibility, check the box "Disable fullscreen optimizations" apply and play.

I don't know what this option do but it's really messing with all my games on Creators Update.
An Microsoft employee answered this for me, go to "Settings > Games > Game Bar" then uncheck "Show Game Bar in fullscreen games verified by Microsoft" so there's no need to check this compatibility box in every game!
Last edited by TMC on Mon Feb 05, 2018 1:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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