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Glossary:Borderless fullscreen windowed

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Revision as of 08:07, 12 January 2014 by Dragonboy (talk | contribs) (→‎Methods)
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File:Borderless fullscreen windowed.jpg
Play StarCraft II and World of Warcraft side by side in fullscreen

Graphics and video

Resolutions

Video settings

Hardware

Key points

Games with this feature may refer to it as "Fake fullscreen", "Full window" or other, similar terms.
Visually identical to normal fullscreen mode while allowing fast, seamless task switching with less risk of crashing.
Eliminates screen tearing without Vsync by using the operating system's own synchronization.
The methods below can force this mode for most games that don't support it, but the game must support regular windowed mode.
AMD/ATI cards do not support Crossfire in this mode.
Most games will have problems with edge scrolling on multi-monitor setups unless the game is run in a multi-monitor resolution.
Running games in this mode will reduce performance as the desktop will remain in video memory

Methods

Borderless-Gaming

Borderless Gaming is an open source and simple to use application for automatically switching your favorite games into a borderless state or manually toggling it. The Github page contains a read-me and a source code

Borderless Windowed

Borderless Windowed provides a simple interface for enabling a borderless state automatically or by toggling a hotkey. The YouTube video with the download link also contains instructions on proper use.

Windowed Borderless Gaming

Windowed Borderless Gaming is a barebones way to force games into fullscreen windowed. It has simple settings, an easy way of adding windows and basic settings, including windows offsetting to compensate for certain games and a resolution setting, used if the game doesn't automatically fill your screen perfectly. Take note, it's recommended you always input your native resolution for image quality's sake as a lot of games overlap the left and bottom parts of the screen by default while still rendering at the selected resolution, resulting in visible stretch marks.

Fullscreenizer

Fullscreenizer is a small tool to force a game in borderlees-windowed-fullscreen mode (basically remove the border from a game's window when it runs in windowed mode and resize it to cover the entire desktop using the above-all-windows bit flag). It does not appear to need to be running in background, for some games. Issues: Some buttons may not match up perfectly with their hitbox in game menus as they sometimes retain their pre-fullscreen position.

AutoHotKey

  • Important AutoHotkey note: Games utilizing PunkBuster as an anti-cheat measure may mistakenly interpret AutoHotkey as illegal and as such will automatically kick you from any respective servers. Battlefield 3 is the most notable example.

This method uses AutoHotKey and a script to set the game window size and position, and strips out the native Windows border style.

AutoHotKey script by briankb

briankb's script appears to be the earliest implementation of this method from February 2011.

AutoHotKey script by XunAmarox

Another AutoHotkey Script

This script will full screen the currently active window onto your primary monitor with the F12 key 

F12::
WinGet, WindowID, ID, A
WinSet, Style, -0xC40000, ahk_id %WindowID%
WinMove, ahk_id %WindowID%, , 0, 0, A_ScreenWidth, A_ScreenHeight
return
Full Screen Toggle AutoHotkey Script

More complicated script which will toggle between full screen and windowed modes 

F12::
WinGet, TempWindowID, ID, A
If (WindowID != TempWindowID)
{
  WindowID:=TempWindowID
  WindowState:=0
}
If (WindowState != 1)
{
  WinGetPos, WinPosX, WinPosY, WindowWidth, WindowHeight, ahk_id %WindowID%
  WinSet, Style, ^0xC40000, ahk_id %WindowID%
  WinMove, ahk_id %WindowID%, , 0, 0, A_ScreenWidth, A_ScreenHeight
}
Else
{
  WinSet, Style, ^0xC40000, ahk_id %WindowID%
  WinMove, ahk_id %WindowID%, , WinPosX, WinPosY, WindowWidth, WindowHeight
}
WindowState:=!WindowState
return
Multiple Monitors

The script can be altered to have the window appear anywhere instead of on your primary monitor. The key is this line: 

WinMove, ahk_id %WindowID%, , 0, 0, A_ScreenWidth, A_ScreenHeight

0, 0 are the coordinates of the upper left corner of the window. You can change these to the coordinates of the upper left corner of another monitor. When multiple monitors are present Windows concatenates them all into one virtual desktop. For example, if both of your monitors are 1600x1200 and they are arranged side by side, your virtual desktop is 3200x1200. In this case to have the window appear on your right (secondary) monitor you'd have to change the code to this: 

WinMove, ahk_id %WindowID%, , 1600, 0, 1600, 1200

Note that the screen size should be entered manually instead of A_ScreenWidth, A_ScreenHeight in case your monitors have different resolutions. If you're not sure what the coordinates of the upper left of your screen are, Windows 7 Screen Resolution control panel will tell you when dragging the displays around.

Script File

To make this into an AutoHotkey script file:

  • In Windows Explorer, File -> New -> AutoHotkey Script
  • Open the newly created file in a text editing program
  • Append the code to the end of the file
  • Save the file and run it

GameCompanion

BUDA20 developed this utility which, amongst other features, allows games to be run in 'FF mode' or 'Fake fullscreen' mode, which is the same as borderless fullscreen windowed. The program is downloaded as a .7z archive, which can be extracted to a folder and does not require installation. It defaults to starting with Windows.

To enable 'FF mode':

  1. Run GameCompanion (which will open in the system tray).
  2. Run a game in the native desktop resolution in windowed mode.
  3. Press Control + Enter to run borderless fullscreen windowed mode.
Background Process Won't Close

Appears to keep the Fallout: New Vegas game process running in the background even if the game has been closed. The game can be shut down properly by going into the task manager to kill the task FalloutNV.exe.

ShiftWindow

This utility was originally developed by grismar for the EVE Online community. ShiftWindow sets the size and position of any windowed game so that the borders are forced off the screen, giving the appearance of a fullscreen window.

  1. Set a game to display at your display's native resolution and in windowed mode.
  2. Run ShiftWindow, and trigger it to resize the game window so that the borders overflow off the screen.

A step by step guide to making any game run in borderless fullscreen windowed is available on Shiny Hacks.

Issues

  • Incompatible with a number of games that do not allow for their window title bar to be forced off the screen.
  • May result in Windows' taskbar displaying over the game window.
    • Tweak for this issue is available called DisableTaskbarOnTop, which allows the game to display over the Taskbar.
    • Selecting automatic hide in the taskbar options may also fix this.

linux / X11 Windowmanagers

If you are running under linux, it might just be that your window manager has functionality to move a window to borderless fullscreen built in.

i3 tiling wm

With i3, simply start the game in windowed mode. Then, move it to a new virtual desktop with the key combo: <shift>-<windows>-<x>, where x is the number of a VT currently unused. After that, switch to the VT using <windows>-<x>, and put the game window into fullscreen mode by pressing <windows>-<f>.

Force Windowed Mode

These utilities can be used to force windowed mode in games that do not usually support it:

  • DxWnd
Download
  • D3DWindower
Download
In order to use the program, the Height, Width and DLL (D3dHook.dll, included in the download) must be filled in.[1]
D3DWindower must be run with administrator rights.
  • 3DAnalyze
Download


References