Borderless Window mode.

[LordPariah]

I was talking with Bikerdude over skype after he'd remoted in and fixed an issue, and a thought popped into my mind. He directed me to the forums to suggest this feature.

 

I hope this is the right subforum for suggestions. If it isn't move it.

 

How about Borderless Window mode? When you have the game windowed with no window border, covering your whole screen. This allows for increased performance in some cases, as well as easy alt tabbing - which even in fullscreen mode doesnt work with TDM.

 

What do you all think?

 

TDM needs borderless window mode in my opinion. When I hear a steam message or a skype call, I have to save and exit the game, interrupting everything and having to reboot it. It's really slow and inelegant. And considering how long the missions are, I sometimes have to do so multiple times. I'd much rather do it fast and easy with Borderless winodow, without having to hassle through alt tabbing and exiting the game and restarting it and such.

Edited October 19, 2014 by LordPariah

[Tels]

As a linux user, I've never heard of borderless window mode and it sounds like a workarond to a broken fullscreen mode. I can just ALT-TAB fine, eve open a new console if I must.

 

So, the options here are:

1. fix fullscreen mode on windows (and find out why it is broken in the first place, I thought we fixed it a long time ago?)
   
2. add borderless window mode (is that a unversal thing? Or only for certain Windows versions and graphic cards?)
   

[Tels]

Addendum: http://pcgamingwiki....screen_windowed

 

This talks about a lot of third-party programs to achieve borderless windowing, and only Unity seems to support it native. I'm also unsure why BLM would fix have the following property:

 

Fast, seamless task switching with no risk of crashes or freezes with no performance costs.

Eliminates screen tearing.

AMD/ATI cards do not support Crossfire in this mode.

Most games will have problems with edge scrolling on multi-monitor setups.

A forced Windowed mode will need to be set first for games which do not natively provide a borderless mode.

 

If your fullscreen is tearing, you are doing it wrong.

 

So it seems the only thing it fixes is switching back to the desktop, and it introduces new issues to do so. That sounds the typical Windows[0] fashion to me, instead of making the OS fullscreeen switching robust, let thid-parties partially fix it with third-party tools which introduce other problem.*sigh*

 

0: Linux is catching up, don't worry....

Edited October 19, 2014 by Tels

[Lux]

Yeah, "Eliminates screen tearing", doesn't belong in their list.

 

I also wouldn't say, "no risk of crashes or freezes". Reduced is probably a better word there.

 

As far as I know, there is no SLI/Crossfire setup that supports it. If its not a fullscreen app, only 1 video card is being used.

[SteveL]

You can minimize tdm on Windows from fullscreen without using 3rd party apps: ctrl-alt-del > task manager > right-click darkmod > minimize.

 

I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows how we can fix alt-tab.

[Tels]

You can minimize tdm on Windows without using 3rd party apps: ctrl-alt-del > task manager > right-click darkmod > minimize.

 

I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows how we can fix alt-tab.

 

Serpentine worked on this, AFAIR. But since we lost the SVN revision history before r5137 and the current history doesn't seem to mention "fullscreen" or "alt.*tab", I can't seem to find it.

[Eli2]

... But since we lost the SVN revision history before r5137 ...

 

If there is need i have a full repo clone here that i could push somewhere.

[OrbWeaver]

Yeah, "Eliminates screen tearing", doesn't belong in their list.

 

I suspect it is shorthand for "Eliminates screen tearing if you can't be bothered to implement proper vertical sync yourself and would rather rely on the compositing window manager to do it for you with a (presumably) horrible performance cost".

[AluminumHaste]

I don't get those claims either, borderless fullscreen is still a windowed application, just stretched to the edges of your monitor.

You will always have slower performance if using the same resolution, in a windowed application, because the OS is still being drawn in the background.

The only reason you get improved task switching is because it's already windowed.

 

And as mentioned, crossfire/sli don't work in windowed applications.