Run in background

[Shopkeeper Squirrel]

Hi everyone,

First of all - you can pass the two first paragraphs if you want to go right to the point - I must say that bought a lot of games that weren't worth the money, for way less than this one's price. So I was really skeptical about this one... but in the end, I have no regret. Except maybe for my lack of social life since I bought it, so much it's addictive!

That being said, there's still a little something that annoys me. Yes, the bugs and the crashes can be a bother, but the game dev are aware of it and are actually working on it, which is better than a lot of other game devs...! Actually, my problem is about the game not runing in background. As soon as you alt+tab or click outside of the window, in windowed mode, the game stops. It's an issue since I'm a streamer; I like sharing my love for this game with my friends and other people. But as soon as I write in the chat, go check a email, write down what I need to scavenge or anything else, the game just freeze for them. And even if I wasn't streaming: when your character is busy to dig through a pile of garbage without a shovel, that's some time I'd use to, once again, do all of the above; multitask!

So I would like to know if someone knows a workaround: either to make the game think its still in focus, or maybe some .ini file in which there's a bool variable that I could switch so it still runs even in background. And if some of the gamedev happens to read this, maybe you could find a place for this feature in the update 1.3? :P

Thank you and have a nice day!

[ScruffyNote]

I've been having the same problem. I play a lot of single-player games, because I don't have any friends... so I like to alt+tab out to resume downloads in Steam (as they are automatically paused when you launch a game).

Anyway... I have successfully managed to resume my downloads without the game crashing.
-run in windowed mode
-click the minimize (-) button
-THE GAME WILL STOP AS SOON AS YOU CLICK THE MINIMIZE BUTTON
-do whatever you need to do outside of the game
-click the icon in the taskbar to get back into the game
-wait about 2 or 3 seconds and the game will resume

Hopefully this works for you too. It sounds like you were close, but instead of clicking the minimize button you were clicking outside of the game window...

Good luck.

[Shopkeeper Squirrel]

So... the game actually stops when you click the minimize button? That's exactly what I don't want, haha! I want the game to continue by itself when I'm doing other stuff.

[ouilliameuh]

What I'm doing : Shift + TAB and Press the "Windows" key on my keyboard :).

[ScruffyNote]

Originally posted by Antlered Squirrel:

So... the game actually stops when you click the minimize button? That's exactly what I don't want, haha! I want the game to continue by itself when I'm doing other stuff.

Sorry about that... When you mentioned it stopping, I thought you meant it was crashing. That's the problem I was having with alt+tab. Sorry I misunderstood you.

[Apocolyptica]

I have had other applications do that too. The way I have worked around that is by setting up a virtual PC and running the application within that PC. That ways it's always up and running. If I need to do something else on my real PC I just minimize the virtual PC which has no effect of the application. I use Oracle VirtualBox which is totally free and will host Windows 7, 8 etc.

[Shopkeeper Squirrel]

Originally posted by _Gunfight_:

What I'm doing : Shift + TAB and Press the "Windows" key on my keyboard :).

Shift+tab (so Steam overlay) doesn't work. It still runs while I have the game in focus, but whenever I unfocus the game, it pauses.

Originally posted by Sauce:

Sorry about that... When you mentioned it stopping, I thought you meant it was crashing. That's the problem I was having with alt+tab. Sorry I misunderstood you.

Haha, there's no problems; no needs to appologize twice (or even once). Thank you for trying to help anyway!

Originally posted by Apocolyptica:

I have had other applications do that too. The way I have worked around that is by setting up a virtual PC and running the application within that PC. That ways it's always up and running. If I need to do something else on my real PC I just minimize the virtual PC which has no effect of the application. I use Oracle VirtualBox which is totally free and will host Windows 7, 8 etc.

Yeah, I've read about that work around, but I think it's getting a bit too far. Having to 'boot' another computer before getting to play a game. Plus, even though I already used a few virtual PC, I never succeeded to give them internet access, no matter how many hours I tried to do so. So installing Steam and its game doesn't seem like an option. But thank you anyway for your idea!