Comments on: A Lamentation for Alt-Tab

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:04:00 +0000

To solve this in source, put this in the launch parameters:
-windowed -noborder
Your resolution must be the same as your desktop.
The framerates are fine, it looks just like it did unwindowed, and you can flick between things with ease.

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:00:34 +0000

For those of you having problems alt-tabbing out of Steam games, try disabling the in-game community overlay (file>settings>in-game). It fixed the alt-tabbing problem for Mount and Blade, it might work for other games too.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 04:41:31 +0000

Blizzard games all support perfect ALT Tabbing, in Warcraft 3 you can even do this within the loading screens of most games, they all recover perfectly, how hard can it be for other developers?

By: Alarik

Alarik — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:59:18 +0000

Hmm, I am Alt+Tabbing and haven’t noticed any serious issues lately… Maybe I am just lucky though… From the recent games, I am recalling for example The Witcher – tabbing in and out without any problems. I am running XP with only 2 GB of RAM, single core CPU.

By: P Dante

P Dante — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:02:32 +0000

Just echoing BrokenSymmetry actually… I ctrl+f’d the comments for Guild Wars because I knew someone else would have mentioned it’s alt+tabbing, simply because it was utterly perfect. Why the fuck others can’t get it right is beyond me. It’s little things like that that scream quality.

By: Crispy

Crispy — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:14:30 +0000

@malkav11:
You’re right. I’ve seen games pass as GfW even thought they don’t have menu mouse support, which is pretty much an unwritten law ever since the tail end of Windows 3.1!

By: wikibuddha

wikibuddha — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:43:32 +0000

Ya, well, I want ALT+SHIFT+TAB support!

By: KidJ

KidJ — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:47:01 +0000

I haven’t read all of the posts here as there are so many, but felt I should add something as I have written code to support alt-tab in commercial games, and its not the trivial functionality that most people think it is.

As cliffski mentioned way up top, your Direct3d “device” (read graphics card) is no longer accessable by your application when you alt-tab away in fullscreen mode. This means that any resources which are resident in graphics card local memory are lost, and you must re-create these when you alt-tab back in. Some games use a fair amount of these graphics card local resources, and they can be things like environment maps, which require some time to re-create, so this is why it can take a while to get back into the game. For the most part, Direct3d has your back, as any resources which are allocated in cpu-side memory remain untouched for you when someone alt-tabs away. Direct3d even does enough work internally so that if your application tries to access a graphics card local resource when you have lost your device, it will return you a dummy resource (allocated in system memory), so in some parts of your codebase you don’t have to worry about the fact that you have lost your device at all.

To anyone technical reading this – please don’t flame me for glossing over details here, I just wanted to explain a bit why alt-tab isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Having said that, I still agree that all games should support it in the vast majority of situations, as its not a HUGE amount of work, and if you plan for it from the start of your game then its not hard at all. Problem is that a lot of devlopers try to add support for it at a late stage in the development process (its not very fun code to write and doesn’t help to sell your game a whole lot) and this can produce bugs.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:05:34 +0000

I wouldn’t be surprised if Games for Windows had alt-tab support as a standard and people simply ignored it and got approved for the GfW logo anyway. There’s other requirements that seem to get handwaved away.

By: zima

zima — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:17:42 +0000

I’d love to see more games that support dual-monitor in the way Supreme Commander does…

I’d especially wish for Diablo2 to have it…(I don’t know, perhaps it’s just peculiarities of my visual cortex, but I can barelly make out anything in the way D2 automap is currently implemented (and minimap is too small))

By: Robyrt

Robyrt — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:04:31 +0000

On dual-monitor support: The only example I can think of is Supreme Commander, which puts the minimap on your second monitor. Ironically, this is also the RTS that least requires a minimap.

By: VFIG

VFIG — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:53:43 +0000

@Cargo Cult: Thanks!