Running fullscreen in Linux with Multi-Monitor

[cprince]

Many Linux distributions report some rather unusual screen resolutions to the game if you're running multi-monitor setups and this causes some odd quirks. I've just patched the game to allow you to specify a viewport in screen coordinates like this as a launch parameter (note the quotes around the whole string and the escaped quotes):

"vx=\"0\" vy=\"0\" vw=\"800\" vh=\"600\""

The origin (vx, vy) is the bottom left of the window (yeah, maths, eh!) in desktop screen space and vw and vh are the size. If you've got a game that starts up in some daft position halfway across two monitors, try putting in some appropriate values here to get it positioned to cover your entire main monitor.

You can also tweak the actual game .sh file and add the following option:
-Dnet.puppygames.applet.Game.windowed=true \
next to the other -D options (note trailing slash) and it will force it into windowed mode.

Cas :)

[Dr_Barnowl]

Problem with this patch : the mouse pointer can still exit the viewport. Clicking outside the viewport causes hilarious results (the screen switches and you die, lots).

[cprince]

aye, I am looking for some APIs that will allow me to constrain the mouse at the moment. Might have to wait until someone patches LWJGL with new new APIs there.

[Grimnir]

Hey Cas, archlinux bro using a tiling window manager here. I'm still getting wierd resolution problems. Is there somewhere other than Steam where I can specify the resolution, perhaps in the droidassault.sh file?

[cprince]

You can put those args directly into the .sh file if you like. You might be better off running it windowed.

Right now all we've got to go on is what xrandr gives us so if that's returning crazy fullscreen modes, that's what we get.

[Grimnir]

Putting the args directly into the .sh file certainly did something lol. Instead of a mostly blue screen where I could mouse over invisible options I have gotten to a mostly red screen where music plays. I guess I've reached the main menu. Progress in a way. Still have nothing but collumns of color.

I have tried to run it windowed in the way you specified above but that didn't seem to do anything.

Probably a dumb question but as far as I know you used the same engine for most of your games. Is there anything you did differently as far as windowing/resolution between Revenge of the Titans and Droid Assault/Ultratron? Revenge of the Titans works fine on my setup fullscreen or windowed and so when I had problems with Droid Assault and Ultratron it came as a surprise.

[cprince]

Ah, Droid Assault and Ultratron have fancy pants shader effects in them. You might be experiencing some curious driver problem if even windowed mode isn't working for you.

If you fire up DA in windowed mode, and then force kill it with kill -9 from the commandline, the next time you run it up it will whine that it didn't close nicely last time. A side effect of this is that it will also turn off the fancy shaders. See if that helps.

[Grimnir]

Just tried that and played through the first level, everything seems to be working fine now. Thanks man

[Iceweazel]

I've only played this under Linux so far, but windowed seems to be the way to go as drivers for nvidia/amd seem to be the only weak spot I've seen. thanks for the viewport option.

[Not Mr Flıbble]

The game's starting up in windowed mode by default – fine so far. However, on exit, it resets the display (as if exiting full-screen) – and, in doing so, it switches off the second monitor. (Radeon, open-source, if it makes any difference – it shouldn't, though.)