Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[COMPL!CATED]

Hello. While playing Starsector I've been unable to minimise or Alt+Tab out of Starsector. This only starts after loading into the actual game, the menu is not affected by this issue. I tried both fullscreen and borderless windowed at native resolution (1080p). The behaviour I am encountering is that the cursor becomes the system one, and I am able to interact with other windows, but the game is still on top, so I cannot see what I am doing. Game resumes as normal if I Alt+Tab back into it. Nothing, including task manager can be on top while the game is launched, so I can only do anything else if the game is completely closed. I'm running Windows 10 and am happy to provide any additional information.
Please let me know what I can do to solve the issue.
Thanks!
PS. I have a few mods installed:
- Arsenal Expansion
- Combat Chatter
- Dassault-Mikoyan
- GraphicsLib
- Iron Shell
- LazyLib
- MagicLib
- Nexerlin
- Roider Union
- Scalartech
- UAF
- VIC
All of the above are enabled, though I don't think they should affect the behaviour of the game. Still, thought it might be useful in diagnosing the issue.

[Alex]

Hi - sorry about the trouble!

Can you try disabling GraphicsLib through its settings file (but still leaving it enabled in the launcher)? That *may* help.

If it doesn't, then it's hard to say what the problem might be - it could just be a driver issue, or some sort of system setting that's getting in the way, or perhaps some other program that's running at the same time. This normally doesn't happen. Hmm - someone had a similar issue fairly recently, here:

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=25573.msg380491#msg380491

And it seems to have just resolved itself? Somehow? ... that leads me to suggest trying a reboot, if you haven't already.

[COMPL!CATED]

Neither solution works unfortunately. I have the latest version of the Radeon drivers, but they're not exactly known for never causing issues, so it's probably that. Shame I guess but I can live with it.

[Alex]

Augh Thank you for being so understanding! Here's hoping a new driver version fixes this for you at some point.

[x98psfg]

I had the same problem , I was able to fix it by forcing windows to run the game on my dedicated nvidia gpu (it was running on integrated AMD gpu before)

[Brilyn]

I have the same problem. I'm not running any mods, and my graphics drivers are all up to date.

Moreover, I've unchecked the 'Full Screen' box (hoping to fix this), but the game continues to run in full screen.

[Alex]

If you uncheck fullscreen but keep the desktop resolution selected, the game will run in a borderless window, which looks like fullscreen but behaves somewhere in between fullscreen and a normal window. Usually this includes faster alt-tabbing. If alt-tabbing still doesn't work, then this sounds like some kind of issue with the drivers/system, unfortunately.

If you edit data/config/settings.json, you can set alwaysUndecoratedAtFullscreen to false. This will run the game in a regular window at that resolution, though in that case it won't quite fit on the screen, because of the borders and the caption bar.

[Brilyn]

"If alt-tabbing still doesn't work, then this sounds like some kind of issue with the drivers/system, unfortunately."

If I couldn't alt-tab in multiple games, I'd be inclined to agree.

If hundreds of games can alt-tab just fine, but Starsector can't, that's an issue with Starsector.

The issue's with Starsector.

[Alex]

I get what you're saying, yeah. But: most games don't use OpenGL, and it's quite possible that the driver handles OpenGL differently than DirectX/Vulkan/whatever. The game is not doing anything special here other than that, so it's just hard to see what I might change to try to make it work somehow, regardless. And alt-tabbing *does* work in the vast majority of cases.

[Brilyn]

If you can suggest some other OpenGL games, I'm open to trying.

More info: this issue is intermittant. What the issue looks like is if I hit alt-tab, the cursor changes to my default windows cursor, which I can move around. If I alt-tab again, the cursor switches back to the game.

While I typically try to alt-tab when the game is paused, if I experience the issue and unpause the game, alt-tab brings up whatever window is next in the list. If I pause it again, alt-tab continues to work correctly.


I'd like to take back my windowed/fullscreen comment. When I move the cursor to the top of the screen, or sides, it doesn't change to the 'your cursor is over the edge of the screen'-cursor, which is why I said that "windowed mode doesn't work". However if I move it to the very bottom of the screen, the cursor changes. So I was wrong about that: my bad.

What also confused me, though, is that hitting the Windows key has no effect while the game is running, even while in windowed-mode, which is contrary to how other games operate. I play most games in windowed-mode, and usually the Start Menu will overlay the game. It doesn't do so in this case.

Just providing more info in case it might help...

[Alex]

(Minecraft - at least, I think? I'm not sure if MS put out a version that doesn't use Java, at this point. Project Zomboid. Any of the puppygames games. They might all use OpenGL in somewhat different ways, so it wouldn't be 100% conclusive, but it'd still be an interesting data point.)

The main issue, though, is that - unfortunately - I can't actually do anything about this on my end, sort of switching to a different version of the graphics library I'm using, which would not guarantee a fix, and requires significant other changes. The game just creates a window, decorated or borderless, or tells the system to run it in fullscreen; there's not a lot of room for me to change how that's being done.

The issue being intermittent suggests that it might be related to something running on your system, *maybe*? If you have video capture software, or something like MSI Afterburner, it's at least conceivable that it might interfere in some way. Both of those have caused problems at times, though iirc not this particular one.

What also confused me, though, is that hitting the Windows key has no effect while the game is running, even while in windowed-mode, which is contrary to how other games operate. I play most games in windowed-mode, and usually the Start Menu will overlay the game. It doesn't do so in this case.

Interesting! Just tried it on my PC (max resolution, borderless window), and it seems to work right - getting the start menu on top of the game.

Just providing more info in case it might help...

Thank you!

[Brilyn]

More info: it's very consistently tied to the game being paused. It's not 100% correlated, but >90% of the time, if the game is paused, alt-tab doesn't work (other than changing the cursor). I can easily repeatedly reproduce this.

If I hit the windows key while the game is running, nothing noticeable happens, but if I move the cursor over to where the Start Menu should be, the game cursor switches over to windows cursor.

I have video capture software installed (Streamlabs OBS), but not running.

[Alex]

Oh, weird! I'm surprised it's tied to that; the only thing that comes to mind as a possibility is that somehow this behavior is related to CPU usage, since being paused doesn't change anything qualitative regarding the graphics rendering, at least as far as I can imagine. Hmm.

One thing this brings to mind to try - not necessarily related. If you open up data/config/settings.json, there are a number of settings there you can find. One in particular:

"idleWhileWindowNotVisible" - setting that to "false" might be worth a try.

Also, setting "useGLFinish" to "true" may be worth a shot, too.

Both of these are very long shots.

[Histidine]

The last person who couldn't Alt+Tab if game was paused (on Discord) had it fixed by disabling fullscreen optimization in Properties -> Compatibility for starsector.exe.

[Alex]

That's really good to know, thank you! Had no idea this option existed.