Windows 10 handles this game really weird

[ratso]

Switching from windows 7 to 10 recently I've noticed quite a few oddities with my games, notably goldsrc engine games. So I got my goldsrc games working more or less without much issue but Win10 seems to scale the game in a strange way.

When you first start the game, it begins life as a small 640x480? window in the top left of the screen, before scaling out and filling the whole screen. When there is a map change while alt tabbed, you could normally witness the mouse center on your screen at some point during the map change. The mouse now centers to the middle of the original birthplace of the white square, so somewhere in the top left of the screen. All of this is fair enough as long as my game is working I guess I can deal with this nonsense.

Where I get really concerned is when printscreen function yields either a completely black screen, or a black screen with a white square in the top left, no game visible whatsoever. Steam built in screenshot function works just fine and I can capture the game in OBS, so a basic printscreen thing isn't the end of the world. It just makes it that much more inconvenient to share instantly clipped pictures from the clipboard into steam chat.

Messing around trying to get some semblance of normalcy and I notice running a fullscreen resolution lower than your desktop size just scales up a lower resolution render to your desktop size. It doesn't even change my monitor resolution, maybe it has been this way all along since whatever past few recent updates that really made this game worse, game is suddenly incredibly sensitive to mouse polling rate and other mouse settings and other issues that are separate from this thread.

I only ever ran the game in a window 1600x900 over a 1600x1200 desktop because I was on a CRT and it fit snug in that config, now have a 1600x900 cheapo monitor to keep the theme of all my games running 1600x900 without much hassle, useless information but anyways this fullscreen behavior could very well be news to me since I never used it. Running anything in a window or borderless windowed on windows 10 I noticed adds an incredible amount of input latency so it sadly is just no longer an option, as I said in the past I would always run the game in a windowed, even now before I switched to 10 but the input latency I suddenly have in every single game when running windowed makes it unplayable.

The game will also just crash 95% of the time if you do any changing of windowed mode or resolution

I've tried about every combination of hl.exe compatibility properties, driver options, game settings, console settings, launch options. The simplest fix is just to boot back over to 7 and everything just works. The UI is also a lot nicer and snappier ;p

You guys have luck getting the game to act "normal"?

edit - forgot the whole reason I came to post was the weird behavior I noticed related to the white square space. if you run a half-life mod that is placed within the half-life folder, wait for the game to open and go back to steam launcher, you can see the play button is ready again for the mod you have open, because steam switches over to actual half-life as the title it's running instead of the mod, so out of curiosity I click the play button again while the game is already running down in the taskbar, suddenly for maybe a frame I get the white square again and the game is now running, supposedly in my chosen 1600x900 resolution, scaled down to this small white square in the top left corner of my screen. I can fully interact with the game and play it, it hooks the mouse so it never leaves the bounds of the tiny square but it never resizes. an alt tab restores it to "fullscreen" instead of the tiny top left square. I wanted to just document all the BS I notice with this game and windows 10

[cambreaKer]

i rarely play steam half life, i mostly play either on xash3d or the won version, but the steam version acts normal and i haven't encountered many bugs

[ratso]

is xash3d actually feature complete and does it support mods? last I checked it was kind of a faithful android hackjob. I mainly need halflife working for some mods that in their current form probably only work with the steam version of half-life. I know quite a few communities that still use won half-life but sadly the one i'm involved with does not.

so if you change your fullscreen resolution to something lower does it not keep the exact monitor resolution and scale up a blurry image? does your game not flash a white square and then go fullscreen? I figured if you played so many versions of the engine you would know what is normal and what is not at this point unless you have been on windows 10 for a long time and just think all this crazy crap is normal, because it isn't normal if you are on 7.

also does your printscreen function work within steam half-life. i'm trying to attack the issue from different spots and hope it loosens up a solution because the behavior from this game is just all over the place and I'm new to the horrors of win10

[cambreaKer]

i don't know if xash is fully complete, but it's pretty playable.

if you don't want the game to scale the lowres image to your native resolution, you have to enable low video quality in the options.

the game does flash a white square at the start but it's lightining quick and hardly noticable.
i have been using windows 10 for a pretty long time (since 2015) and it's really ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

printscreen does work for me in half life, but when i paste the image to something like paint then only the menu screen comes out.

[ratso]

ok thank you for the information, I appreciate it

quick update edit- I managed to fix two issues, one longstanding since some semi recent update. printscreen works if you are running the game in windowed. and the second issue, I used to love running the game in windowed mode but at some point half-life updated and it would sit underneath windows taskbar cutting off a small chunk and in windows 10 a slightly larger chunk out of the bottom of the game, -noborder for some reason eliminates this issue completely.