Application focus and flickering

[Antonath]

I'm running two monitors off my system. What I'm trying to achieve is Hz on one, and other applications (Photoshop, to be specific) on the other. So far, I've been quite successful. I've got both applications running on the correct monitors and I can use my mouse and keyboard for either one. I even maintain a decent frame rate in Hz, despite running two applications that eat resources faster than players at taverns after an Epic run

My problem is this: When I change focus to Photoshop, the Hz interface starts flickering, sometimes showing other windows that are "behind" it, sometimes having random parts of the UI or landscape flash and flicker. It's rather distracting, especially when I'm trying to pay attention to the second monitor. Changing the focus back fixes things pretty much immediately.

Has anyone come across a similar situation? Am I stuck with this, or is there a work-around? I'm considering running Hz as a windowed app while in this setup - will that help and if so, how do I change the "windowed" graphics properties to match the non-windowed before switching, so I don't have to re-arrange my UI yet again?

Any suggestions or advice greatly appreciated.

[Fidri]

I'm using a dual monitor setup too, and I've never had any problems while running in windowed mode. Doing this while the game is fullscreen might produce all kind of weird things. Things like this happen with other games too, it is generaly not successful.

Changing to windowed mode is done via the options menu, or with

/setpref fullscreen false

setting it to true of course switches it back on.
If your desktop is running the same resolution as the game, you won't have much problems with you UI. It will only have a few pixels less vertically, due to the start bar and the application name bar. UI components are placed relative from the edges of your screen, so some might move up or down a bit and overlap, but they won't disapear from your screen.
One thing I have seen a few times while launching in windowed mode is that all UI components look compressed and out of aspect ratio. Simply minimizing and maximizing the window fixes it.

[Antonath]

I tried windowed mode last night, with mixed results. The first time I tried it, it was ok - I maximised the game window, and everything worked fine. The second time, it went totally wrong - the window didn't start maximised, and was tiny. Resizing it managed to screw up all the UI element locations, even pushing some off screen where I couldn't get to them. Fortunately, I had another copy of the correct prefs file, so I didn't lose my layout.

Is there a prefs file that contains dimensions for the windowed mode?

[Fidri]

If I'm correct, it uses the same variables from the ClientPrefs_Graphic.def file in you prefs directory as when you'd be in fullscreen mode.

int mainWinSizeX = xxx
int mainWinSizeY = xxx

When your window was tiny, did you try minimizing and maximizing a few times, like I said? This has always fixed the issue for me, I've never had to replace pref files to fix it. Or do you mean maximizing actually was the reason you lost some of your UI elements? Hmm maybe we're talking about two different things here.

[Antonath]

When it appeared minimized, instead of just hitting the maximize button, I decided to drag out the window. I did this in several steps, which is what seems to have screwed up the UI. I suspect if I'd just hit maximize everything would have been fine. I'll do some experimenting tonight.

[Steelclaw]

When you resize your HZ window, the UI should get rearranged so it's visible at the new window resolution. It might take a minute, you can also try /loadui.

Windowed mode might solve the flickering issue, but may have... different issues. For me, whenever a window pops up in front of HZ, all the pixels in the HZ window to the left or right of the window on top will show some previous state of the HZ window. Once I had the task manager open in the corner, which caused a big band across the bottom of the HZ window to 'freeze', which included my chat windows. For an hour, I was wondering why nobody was talking.

[Antonath]

I think that's what happened, then. It got too clever for itself and arranged the UI for a window that can't have been more than 200px wide... As for loadui, I hadn't considered that. I keep forgetting that command does anything other than flush a few buffers. I also assumed the UI would have been saved in its borked state. Does it only save changes on exit?

[Steelclaw]

No, the client saves the UI every few seconds and whenever you do /saveui.

Heh. 200px wide? That must look awful. (I've been down to around 480px before and that was just unusable).