I'd like to present you a windowed mode made using the native Direct3D 9 renderer, which allows some brilliant features, as well as no lags and full FPS (no emulator), stretching of the window, unpinning/pinning mouse from the game window, playing the game on several monitors at once, producing and streaming full HD videos and screenshots on any monitor and system.
The way of windowing the Direct3D 9 mode was originally inspired by Kawoosh, and then I added a lot of features and improvements:
- Stretched mode: enable "Stretch" for needed places in ini. It is still windowed mode, but here it is enlarged to fill your screen in full, and looks just the same as if you were in fullscreen. This is especially useful if your monitor doesn't support 640×480 (and you want fullscreen) or if you plan on speeding up your game (by not having to wait until your monitor switches the resolution): instant return to frontend after the game has ended, instant minimization, ability to set the resolution higher than your own, etc. NOTE: on some GPUs there may be need to enable smoothing if you enlarge from a smaller window to prevent pixelation.
- Multi-Monitor support: enable W:A to display the game spanned across several monitors, placed either vertically or horizontally, in either frontend and/or in-game. With AutoSetResolution enabled, the resulting summed up in-game resolution will automatically be set in WA settings on every launch. When using stretched or fullscreen frontend mode, enabling the Multi-Mon in either in-game or frontend will not clip your cursor in the frontend area. NOTE: performance has to be considered when enabling this option. Your hardware, mainly CPU and GPU, should be supporting it well not to allow any lags during the gameplay. Limitations: the display mode has to be "Extend" instead of "Double". The primary monitor has to be on the left for horizontal setups, or on top for vertical setups, or on top left for square/rectangle-shaped setups. For more than 2 monitors, they should go in numerical order (but maybe not, it's up to you to see it). Maximum texture size supported by your GPU is the limit for the total resolution from summing up all of the monitors' resolutions (if you exceeded the limit, WA will tell you and perform a workaround). Differently-sized monitors are supported but not recommended: it's up to you to decide whether to leave empty space by making the smaller monitor primary or, otherwise, cut a few lines by using the bigger one as primary.
- Unpin and pin the mouse: a feature requested by someone to be able to unpin the mouse in-game and move it over WA's window. This can be useful for border (see below).
Ctrl+G to unpin or pin the mouse. - Active Background: available in both Windowed and Stretched modes. Allows to view the gameplay even when the window is not in focus. This is permanently enabled since 0.6.6.6.
- Run frontend on background: a feature to prevent the frontend menus from self-minimizing when switching to another window. When it is enabled, the frontend will keep running in background. Can be switched using the "RunInBackground" setting under [FrontendSettings].
- Custom frontend size and frontend centering: options to customize frontend position and size, but eating the mouse.
- Window border in-game and quick info: allows to have a window border around the window. Using the previously mentioned unpinning feature you are able to move the in-game window.
Use WindowBorder=1 in the InGame section to enable this. Use Ctrl+D to quickly enable/disable this directly during gameplay.
There's also a possibility to show quick information by enabling QuickInfo=1 in the InGame section. Some quick infos like the ingame resolution, mouse pinned state, topmost state and other things can be shown in there in realtime. - And of course, I made the module intelligent to prevent sillies from running into issues.
Additional notes:
- To fully disable the module without deleting it, use "EnableModule=0" in the ini file. To disable for one session only, run WA with a command-line parameter: /wkargs -nowindow
- This fixes the Windows 7 multiple monitors issue! (thanks Obn3g0n for confirming)
- UAC admin mode does not have any effect when maximizing from taskbar.
- With help of wkLobbyCmd you can switch resolutions on the fly and specify a resolution which is even higher than your own (in this case it'll be stretched to fit the screen). This allows everyone to produce full-HD (and bigger ) screenshots and videos regardless of their monitor. Aspect ratio can be any, as seen in examples.
The maximal possible resolution is your GPU's max texture size (4096×4096, 8192×8192 or 16384×16384, example with 4096×4096) and the minimal is 143×1. To get the best image, use a bit of mathematics if you know your monitor's aspect ratio (16:9, 16:10...) - The frontend is still in the top left corner. I can't tell more on why this happens right now, but it's due to hardly repairable bugs in the game.