Fullscreen mode

I'd like to see a real fullscreen mode for the game. Currently the fullscreen option just does borderless windowed fake fullscreen mode, which while it looks the same, will do nothing for people who have performance problems with games in windowed mode like me. I don't know if GameMaker supports fullscreen, but it would be very nice to see.

 

Fullscreen gamemaker I'm pretty sure has zero effect on performance. If your computer has a resolution of 1980x1080, your 3x mode will be fullscreen with no border anyway. If you don't, fullscreening the game will just cause pixel tearing, making the whole pixelated look of the game interpolated and ugly looking.

The game needs the option to enable static coin and experience items, (or to make them invisible entirely) and to decrease the time that corpses stay around for.

 

The performance impact of fullscreen mode in games is very hardware-dependent. Since I frequently encounter performance problems with games in windowed mode and have a computer powerful enough to maintain a constant 60 fps in this game even 90 minutes in, yet still experience constant stuttering in this game (and Don't Starve as well, which also does not have real fullscreen mode,) the game only having windowed mode seems to be the most likely culprit.

I just tried Wanderlust Rebirth since it's the only other game I have that I know uses Game Maker, and it seems to have the same problem with stuttering and no real fullscreen mode. Does Game Maker not support fullscreen?

 

I don't exactly know what constitutes as "real fullscreen" because I'm unaware of what actually happens with the graphics card when switching to a fullscreen application, but from my experiences, gamemaker simply becomes a borderless window the same resolution as the moniter, and goes on top of everything else. Sort of like VLC or Pre-W8 WM player's fullscreen mode.

 

Yes that seems to be exactly what Game Maker does, at least with the two games I've tried. It's also what pretty much all media players do, although some have an option to use real fullscreen (sometimes called exclusive fullscreen) as well. Real fullscreen mode, rather than creating a window on the desktop, basically takes control of the monitor from Windows. It doesn't allow any other programs to be visible while the fullscreen program is active. This frees up resources for the game to use and also separates the game from the Windows DWM (hardware accelerated desktop) which windowed mode games are dependent on. Games tend to run a little faster and generally smoother in fullscreen for these reasons. On the negative side, games running in fullscreen are forced to minimize if you alt+tab (DX10 and 11 games often switch to windowed mode instead) which used to be a big problem causing games to be very slow loading back or causing crashes. This was the main reason for the creation of borderless windowed mode, to stop the forced minimizing and alt+tab issues. The vast majority of modern games have few to no issues with alt+tab in fullscreen though and will recover very quickly.

I did try running Risk of Rain with the DWM disabled and while it is smoother, I think a real fullscreen mode would improve it even more. But since Game Maker may not support fullscreen, I may be out of luck here.

 

I just took a look around on the GMC and it looks like there are no "true fullscreen" extensions for GM7-8.1. I think Studio may support it but unfortunately RoR isn't programmed in Studio.

This could be due to GMC's "no harmful extensions" rule which discourages GameMaker programmers from publishing anything that mucks around with your computer. (for example, communicating with a website not originally developed for that purpose, hiding tray icons, keylogging, shutting down/logging off, etc)

The developers will need to turn to other places in the game where they can optimize the graphics for lower end pc users.

 

I forgot to mention one thing about windowed vs fullscreen. The game only has control over vsync in fullscreen mode. In windowed mode, if using Windows DWM, vsync is always on but can be unreliable depending on the hardware setup (this is my problem.) In windowed mode with the DWM disabled, vsync is always off which causes screen tearing and stuttering. What I need is reliable vsync, which I can only get in fullscreen mode.

This isn't about low end PCs. As I said before I can maintain a constant 60 fps even 90 minutes into the game when it becomes very chaotic where I've heard many people complain about performance problems. I experience stutter due to being in windowed mode since the game window is controlled by the Windows DWM with its unreliable vsync behavior. I suppose my only option is to play the game with DWM disabled since the vsync off stutter is less intrusive than the DWM stutter.

 

I wonder if a program exists that gives a selected program exclusive fullscreen...

 

I have actually been looking for one, but I'm not sure if it's possible due to the way it's handled in DirectX. What I do find a lot of is programs that will allow normal windowed mode games to run in borderless windowed mode.

 

I know this post is months old, but I was hoping for something to come out of this so I can record using ShadowPlay.