I run dual monitors and always had issues alt-tabbing in Source games. The minimized Source game would lock up, pull up slowly, or just plain old crash, which was annoying. I recently switched over to windowed mode and found a useful way to set it up to make alt-tabbing much more friendly.
It's easy to setup Windowed mode. You can start up any Steam game, go into Options->Video and set the Display mode to Run in a window. The down side to doing it this way is the title bar and window border that is around the game now. This may not be a big deal if you're running at a lower resolution than your desktop, but if you want full screen, it sucks.
So there's an additional thing you can do with the launch options. You can set this up similar to how you can remove the intro video. You can check how how to set the launch options in detail in the linked post. I'll just list the options you can use.
-sw - Sets the game to run in windowed mode. I'm not sure if you need this if you change the in-game setting, but I do it anyways.
-noborder - Removes the window border when in windowed mode.
So my launch options for DoD:S are "-sw -noborder -novid". Windowed, full screen without a border (assuming my video resolution matches my monitor resolution), and no valve startup video.
When you alt-tab with this setup, it'll leave the game up on the screen and switch you over to whatever window you selected. Switching back to the game is as simple as clicking anywhere in the game window. If you're running dual monitors, you can also pull up any menu where you have a cursor (change class, change team, esc, whatever) and just move your cursor over onto your other monitor. This can be especially useful for messing with web pages or a voice application on your other monitor.
These launch option should work with any Source game (HL2, CS:S, DoD:S, Portal, etc.). I haven't found a comparible option for Gold Source games. If anybody knows one, holler.
Enjoy!
Windowed DoD:S
Started by
Perculator
, May 13 2011 03:51 PM
3 replies to this topic
#4
Posted 20 December 2011 - 08:47 AM
Thanks for the info,
I run 2 monitors and when I move to the secondary monitor my Steam minimizes on the primary monitor then takes a dogs ags to come back up (if it does at all), I will have to give this a try!
Thumper7458
That's the same problem I always had. This should fix it up nicely.
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