Alt-tabbing problems on Windows 10

[pdedinski]

Hi,

Alt-tabbing on Windows 10 x64 has lots of problems.. First the sound stops and keeps looping while alt-tabbed. Second when alt-tabbing back into the game, the mouse cursor at some point got stuck and I could not even exit the game, and had to kill the process, because I could not move the cursor. This is pretty annoying because I multi-task a lot.

[GameDevChris]

The music glitching seems to be an AGS bug, as I specifically set the game up to allow multi-tasking (i.e. for it to run seamlessly in the background when the game window doesn't have focus). So I'll have to get the AGS programmers to look into that.

Are you running with the Open GL driver? Maybe you could run winsetup.exe and try the Direct3D one and see if that makes any difference. Also, you might try pressing ALT+Tab to put the game into windowed mode first and then alt-tabbing or switching to other programs.

[pdedinski]

Hi,

I have setup the game through the GoG galaxy installer, so I didn't realize there was a setup program. I have played a bit with the options. I didn't realized there was a better scaling possibility which makes things a bit smoother.
When run in Windowed mode it is switching fine between tasks. However full-screen mode is having Alt-Tab problems using both OpenGL and DX9 driver. And it's not only the music glitching (though it is the most annoying one). Every now and then when alt-tabbing back to the game the mouse cursor gets locked.
One solution that comes to mind is implementing a native borderless window at full display resolution which is pretty common in games now.

I have managed to work around this using windowed mode with 'Fill whole screen' along with the 'Borderless Gaming' application to have a fake full screen and have normally working task switching

This utility
https://github.com/Codeusa/Borderless-Gaming/releases

[MusicallyInspired]

AGS has yet to catch up to modern gaming as far as borderless windowed modes go. We're kind of limited by the engine until they improve things to that level. And I don't know how comprehensive a function that would be to implement. There's a bunch of things that I'd like to see implemented in AGS that just don't exist and really should (some simple, some not). Even with the sound engine. But in this case, it is what it is unfortunately. We don't really have that control.

[GameDevChris]

According to the AGS documentation, the music glitching in full-screen mode when alt-tabbing is related to certain graphics cards:

"Note that [running the game in window in the background] does not work with some graphics cards in full-screen mode, so you should only rely on it working when your game is run in windowed mode."