Full Screen Mode

Full screen mode is that state of the program where the main program window fills the screen and the window frame has no title bar, resize frame, or other operating system decorations. This is sometimes referred to as borderless full screen window mode.

Shores of Hazeron can be played in full screen mode on all supported platforms.

Microsoft Windows

On Microsoft Windows, the main window has a one-pixel thin border line. By Microsoft's design, a borderless full screen window cannot have free floating subordinate windows, such as tool bars and dialog boxes. Free floating child windows do not stay in front of their parent full screen window if it's border is not visible. There is no way to paint that one pixel border black. There is no known work around or override for this behavior.

For most games this does not present a problem. It is customary for games to paint all of their user interfaces in the context of the game itself. This enables a great deal of control over the appearance and behavior of user interface objects. Doing so is not difficult when the user interfaces are relatively simple.

Shores of Hazeron relies on the operating system to help with those user interface objects. The game presents far too many complex user interfaces to attempt to recreate them using OpenGL. The development effort to do that would be gigantic, with little gained, simply to duplicate the considerable effort undertaken by the operating system developers to present robust consistent user interface objects.

We have worked closely with the Qt developers to find a solution. They are as helpless to this design decision as everyone else. If a solution is found, we will promptly remove that border line.

Exclusive Full Screen Mode

Video hardware can be used in an exclusive full screen mode, sometimes referred to as legacy full screen mode. In this mode, the game has full and complete control of the video hardware. This is best for optimum smooth uninterupted gaming performance.

That level of video control was often needed in the early days of windowing operating systems. At that time, computers weren't fast enough to do both at the same time, play a game and run a robust operating system.

Modern computers can easily handle this task, so the need for exclusive full screen mode is gone. Today, good performance can be seen on computers running multiple high performance games simultaneously.

The down side of exclusive full screen mode is that an application running in that mode must paint and manage all of its own user interface objects. As stated in the section on Microsoft Windows, that would be a large undertaking with little benefit to Shores of Hazeron.

Shores of Hazeron does not run in exclusive full screen mode.