Is there a solution to fullscreen yet?

[Verain]

Bioware's general coding incompetence has left me angered yet again.

Some time ago, I discovered how to launch SWTOR in "windowed" mode. I used this exclusively, and eventually started having my task bar auto-hide whenever I would play SWTOR.

Unfortunately, this isn't acceptable for Galactic Starfighter, where whenever I would need to pull the mouse down I would suddenly and inexplicably be seeing a bunch of junk pop up- this is because my (hidden) mouse cursor, still being tracked by windows, was down at the bottom, and Win7 was showing me the windows there, so not only did the taskbar pop up, but so did, say, even Chrome window. Annoyface.


Ok, so. I'm running in 1600x1024 with 60hz refresh. I set SWTOR to that in "fullscreen windowed" mode, and.... blackscreen.
I set SWTOR to that in "fullscreen" and, no problem! But if I tab out WINDOWS IS BROKEN.


In fact, somehow, it has set Windows to an invalid mode. Booting in safemode doesn't fix it (I think it could from msconfig- supposedly there's a basic video option under boot). Instead I reboot and tell it to boot safe mode (which works) then reboot from safemode and jam F8 (difficult because my BIOS also takes F8 and when it does everything goes tits up- I can choose the windows boot manager, but that SKIPS the "read F8" section, meaning that there's a tiny window between "BIOS will take the F8 and you can't fix your shit" and "Windows is already booting you up into invalid graphics mode, too late!".

Anyway, once F8 works (or see below) I can start in a "low res mode" or w/e, and from there I can just pick 1600x1024 (you know, the mode I set SWTOR to, the mode that broke windows, but actually the mode I run in all the time).




WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS?



How can I do any of these things:

1)- Set a fullscreen mode and tab out.
2)- Set fullscreen windowed mode AT FUCKING ALL.
3)- Be windowed mode but not have my fucking taskbar shitting up any part of the screen NO MATTER WHAT I DO WITH MY FUCKING MOUSE, WHICH HAS TO TRAVEL ALL AROUND THE SCREEN TO PLAY

Any of those? Would be fine.


Such terrible coding. Like, so bad. I'm not aware of any other games with this kind of "breaks your windows" crap. This is like the 90s with autoexec.bat or not having enough RAM because of a mouse driver.




Here's what I did to make my Windows be able to be repaired at least, should I ever press alt fucking tab.


These steps make the Advanced Boot Menu options come up every time your machine starts. If you have a fit getting there, this can be good. There's also one time options, and many users will not have an issue pressing F8 or using the Windows 8 boot feature- this is for Windows 7, though I believe it works in 8 as well

1- Start menu -> Run
2- Navigate to C:\Windows\System32. Right click on cmd.exe and hit run as administrator.
3- cd \windows\system32
4- dir bc* should reveal bcdboot, bcdedit, bcdprov.dll, bcdsrv.dll. If you just see bccrypt and bccryptprimitives, you are somehow not in privleged mode.
5- bcdedit with no arguments. If you get some garbage error, you have to follow step c from here:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...7-2dbe92369202
Which is 'bcdedit /set {current} Description "name you want"'
So I used:
bcdedit /set {current} Description "Win7".

Then I could type bcdedit and two entries, one for my bootloader (identifier: {bootmgr}) and one for my hard drive (identifier: {current}).
The second one has a lot of items, one of which was description, now containing the "Win7" I just typed in.
6- Then I went:

bcdedit /set advancedoptions yes

Then typing bcdedit shows the same as before, but a NEW attribute (advanced options) with a new value (yes). Note that if you want to reverse this, you will
bcdedit /deletevalue advancedoptions
If you instead did another set with the value to no, you won't be able to get into your F8 menu at all- that's how you disable it entirely.

[gamz247]

1600x1024 is an uncommon resolution, and doesn't seem to have been used for monitors in over 10 years. Unless your monitor is that old, I would suggest setting the resolution in Windows to the default, then try running TOR in windowed mode to set it to the new resolution before switching it to Fullscreen-windowed.

[moff]

I never had that problem, I play in windowed full screen mode since launch and I played a lot of starfighter.

[Reavyn]

I play in windowed mode and have no problems whatsoever (1920x1080).

Anyway, alt+tabbing out and having everything screwed up, seems more like a driver issue then a game issue to me. Happened to me in another game as well. Updated the drivers and the issue was gone.