Windowed mode?

[Al'Kimiya]

I have difficulty keeping interest in games occupying full screen (alt-tabbing doesn't cut it for me). Any word from on support for running in a window in any previews or by the beta testers?

And.. if there is support, can the window be resized in-game?

[Nikolai]

I doubt it's windowed or that it's possible from release on. But I've seen less moddable games get windowed mode mods, so I'd guess it comes if there's interest in it.

[ajbera]

If not windowed, how alt-tabbable is it? IIRC, Civ3 never responded to Alt-Tab on my PC.

[Rince]

Civ3 never responded to Alt-Tab on my PC.

Civ3 was the most Tab-Friendly game i ever played!

[Nikolai]

Oh, I've seen better IIRC.

[Mace]

I could always Alt-Tab in Civ3. Now, you know, if you didn't have another window open, you couldn't alt-Tab, or course. You had to actually have another window open to do it.

[Iceius]

In most cases, games that, by default, run in full-screen mode, can be made to run in windowed mode via a simple command in a shortcut (to the .exe)

However, a few games are hard coded to play at a certain resolution, and in full-screen to boot, but there are ways around this as well - although they are a lot more troublesome to put into play than a simple "-w".

In short: fear not

[MarkG]

windowed mode is supported via a .ini setting

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Mace
I could always Alt-Tab in Civ3. Now, you know, if you didn't have another window open, you couldn't alt-Tab, or course. You had to actually have another window open to do it.

And that's bad. I can alt-tab other games without anything else being open.

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by MarkG
windowed mode is supported via a .ini setting

[Adagio]

Alt+tab

Windowed mode

Options for those who like it

[nbarclay]

I've never gotten in the habit of thinking alt-tab. Instead, I've gotten in a habit of hitting the special Windows key that brings up the start menu. That also brings up the taskbar, letting me switch to a program that's already open. (I'm set up to auto-hide the taskbar, so I can't vouch for what happens without auto-hide.) I don't know whether anyone might find that more convenient than alt-tab or not, but I've been using that technique on Win2K and more recently on WinXP just about ever since Civ 3 came out.

[snoopy369]

Civ3 the biggest problem I had was on exiting, if I have Firefox/IE open, that program (ONE of them if they're both open) suddenly goes to 99% system resources for about 30 seconds ... sounding like they share a resource in some way that doens't quite work as expected.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by nbarclay
I've never gotten in the habit of thinking alt-tab. Instead, I've gotten in a habit of hitting the special Windows key that brings up the start menu. That also brings up the taskbar, letting me switch to a program that's already open. (I'm set up to auto-hide the taskbar, so I can't vouch for what happens without auto-hide.) I don't know whether anyone might find that more convenient than alt-tab or not, but I've been using that technique on Win2K and more recently on WinXP just about ever since Civ 3 came out.

This is exactly what I do as well.

[Mace]

Originally posted by Nikolai


And that's bad. I can alt-tab other games without anything else being open.

Yes, I agree. It always annoyed me a little with Civ3. Eventually I started opening another program (a file manager) so that I could alt-tab in Civ3...