Borderless Windowed Mode

[beyond.wudge]

Like Starcraft 2, SWTOR or Mass Effect 3 is there a way to get a true borderless windowed mode for AI war.

This is the perfect game to be grinding some nights to but the transition to desktop isn't seamless and takes too long (roughly 10 seconds each way).

Even in very intense games checking on certain online resources (AI war wiki, AI war forums) for info and solutions is affected by the lack of a true borderless windowed function.

Also, when using youtube for music it makes the transition in and out every 3-4min much more noticeably clunk.

Playing in a normal window just doesn't feel right.

It would _measurably_ and _significantly_ improve the practicality and importance of the gaming experience and the hours I would sink into this game if I could seamlessly transition into the background without sacrificing 'presentation.'

Added bugtracker report: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=6791

[Mánagarmr]

AI:War actually had borderless mode prior to the unity release. The loss of that function was waged against the absolutely staggering amount of improvements brought by Unity. We're still hoping that borderless window mode will be patched into Unity.

[beyond.wudge]

What features unity bring?

[Nic]

Looking around, this link seems to yield the most handy third-party solutions.

...But these only works perfectly if it was possible to set the game to an oversize window -- the window seems to have a maximum size of a tad under fullscreen, so this script interacts pretty badly with the game -- the display looks off, and the mouse isn't in sync with where interface components are.
Window Relocator simply moves the game's viewing window to the top left corner, and with the game's maximum window size, you'll end up with some empty space to the bottom and to the right.

I'm not sure if Unity supports either oversize windows or true borderless windows, although some cursory search holds some hope for the latter.

[Wanderer]

Alt-Tab without losing the game window would be a significant boon in the 22nd century.  Particularly to those of us with 2 monitors and wanting to work and play simultaneously.

[beyond.wudge]

Yeah it's a must have feature I think.

These days multi-tasking is a way of life and this game really begs for that ability without actually hampering the playing experience.

[Mánagarmr]

What features unity bring?

Some of the things are mentioned in this thread.

 Also, as is likely mentioned in the thread, the limitation is not in AI:War itself, but in the graphics and interface engine that encompasses AI:War (being Unity). So if you want faux-fullscreen back (as we all do), we have to bugger the Unity developers to include it, because there is literally nothing Chris and Keith can do about it. Well, aside from sitting down and coding a new engine from scratch, and we can safely say that's not going to happen.

[beyond.wudge]

Oh I see. Maybe I should pester the unity makers about it.

[TechSY730]

Oh I see. Maybe I should pester the unity makers about it.

Good luck with that. The Arcen devs have been bugging them repeatidly not only about that, but also far bigger (as in Unity itself messing up or crashing) problems, like a better garbage collector (so the game will get rid of unused stuff instead of crashing once tons of memory gets used), single monitor support that doesn't get messed up in the presence of multiple monitors, the game "holding down" keys when it loses focus, and not always releasing them when it gains focus again (so if you alt+tab out of the game, frequently, the game will still think alt is held down when you go bring AI war into focus again).

And these are not small issues, but the Unity devs have seemingly been ignoring these things.

I'm almost tempted to say find yet another engine to switch to without these major issues, but from what I understand, Unity was the "lesser of all evils" (which is pretty sad actually)

They could roll their own engine, but they already tried that. It proved to be even more trouble developing and maintaining then working around Unity is.

So, yea, I'm not sure what they should do about all this.

[keith.lamothe]

The Unity devs are actually pretty good in general, it's just that whatever 4-digit dollar figure they're getting from individual companies with 2 seats (like us) just doesn't warrant them paying attention to edge cases that only we hit (we're doing a lot of our own thing; we weren't looking for an engine to mold our style, we were looking for something that was deployable and would let us do what we were already doing).  And if it's a bigger issue that a bunch of people are hitting then they do try to fix it.  Certainly the current version of Unity is quite an improvement over what they had when we started on it.  But most of the improvements are for their main audience, not a couple of dudes making strictly-2D games.

The main problem with the old engine (which I miss dearly) is that it required .NET.  Therefore it could take 1-2 hours to install the game on some systems that didn't have .NET (SlimDX too, but it was less of an issue).  Further, it's not all that uncommon for folks to have messed up .NET installations, and since .NET is so deeply embedded into the OS there were more than a few customers who could not get AIW to run properly (or at all) until they actually reinstalled their OS.

Unity games, on the other hand, can be run off a jumpdrive and zero installation (we do actually have an installer, but all it really does is copy files).

Various graphical tricks that we use all the time now (like UV animation, etc) are also really easy in Unity, but were really hard/impossible in our old engine.

But in general, if Microsoft really cared about making .NET apps deployable in a reasonable fashion, we might still be using it

[Hearteater]

I actually researched game engines recently and it came down to Unity and XNA.  Some other promising candidates were just too alpha-y or hadn't had much activity recently which concerns me.  So XNA won over Unity on cost and just being easier to get going.  I really needed a bare-bones engine and Unity would cost money for that.  I wish I could avoid the .NET install, and I keep holding out hope someday there will be a solution.  But for now I'll deal.  Sadly I lose Mac any chance at Mac support, but hey, I could always port to XBox if things go well (lol...I suspect that'd cost me more than it would be worth).  So far I'm quite happy with XNA.

[keith.lamothe]

XNA, when I looked at it, was more of a way of developing games than just an engine.  Somewhat the same can be said for Unity, but we have more freedom with that than we would with XNA.

If I had my druthers, I'd do an embedded-mono-runtime with no prerequisites (which is basically what the Unity player is, with a bunch of stuff on top of it), but I have no idea how to do most of the graphics programming to re-implement our graphics layer to make it more than text-adventures   And even aside from that it'd be a ton of work and a ton of bugs to chase down, etc.  And I'd still lose a lot of the main things I liked about .NET.  So for now simply making games is more fun (for everyone involved) than making game engines.

[Hearteater]

I suppose so, but Unity seemed more confining than XNA in terms of framework (at least for the free side of Unity).  It really feels like writing an application with some additional libraries more than anything else.  I'll need a better deployment method than their ClickOnce publishing because that install is too ugly for me to abide.  Other than that and the .NET install, seems pretty wide open.

[Trollhunter]

I created an account to try and move for borderless windows. With a gaming computer running two games at once, I think it's pretty important for this game to have a borderless window setting so anyone can switch through their different games or whatnot.

[TechSY730]

I created an account to try and move for borderless windows. With a gaming computer running two games at once, I think it's pretty important for this game to have a borderless window setting so anyone can switch through their different games or whatnot.

I would love that too. However, the engine they are running on, Unity 3D, currently does not support a borderless windowed mode.
So you should probably join the bandwagon and bug the Unity developers about this.

However, there are some nifty utilities by basically forcing it to run in borderless windows mode and resizing the window to your screen. (You can do all kinds of fun stuff to windows in Windows programatically).
However, some have reported that when used on AI war, it can sometimes cause oddities like the mouse not lining up right or other weirdness. In fact,

Looking around, this link seems to yield the most handy third-party solutions.

...But these only works perfectly if it was possible to set the game to an oversize window -- the window seems to have a maximum size of a tad under fullscreen, so this script interacts pretty badly with the game -- the display looks off, and the mouse isn't in sync with where interface components are.
Window Relocator simply moves the game's viewing window to the top left corner, and with the game's maximum window size, you'll end up with some empty space to the bottom and to the right.

I'm not sure if Unity supports either oversize windows or true borderless windows, although some cursory search holds some hope for the latter.