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Unread 11-10-2011, 01:43 PM
ecirbaf's Avatar
ecirbaf ecirbaf is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2011
Posts: 5
(I hope it's ok to post in this old thread. There aren't a lot of topics in this sub-forum and I found this particular topic through search engine so I figure it would be more helpful to post my tip here.)

How to play almost fullscreen (at the very least, without those ugly desktop window borders)

Okay, this will sound a lot more complicated when explaining, but it's fairly simple once you get it setup.

First a few facts:

1) YES you can use ShiftWindow with the DirectX 10 option to resize the window, or some other program. However, those programs simply scale your window contents. At higher res you may not notice the column/lines doubling, but that is what it does. DirectX (I assume) simply stretches your windowed viewport to the desktop resolution. This is bad obviously because it does not truly resize the viewport, but the main reason, and the key here, is the game still believes you run in the windowed resolution (ie. less than full screen). This causes the mouse targetting issues that Kaisoul mentionned.

2) To answer Kaisoul (the OP), the WindowedResolution setting of your UserPreferences.ini file does contain the Width and Height, encoded as (width << 16) + height. This has no practical use in my tests, as whatever you put in there will be "clamped" when the game loads anyway. If you put in a larger than desktop window size, it won't work. So it ends up being no different than simply editing it to eg. "1680x1200".

A solution:

1) Hide the taskbar before launching game so that the viewport (inside of the window) area is as large as possible.
2) Use AutoHotkey script to remove the window borders.
3) Optional: Move the window slightly upwards, so that you can have the taskbar on during game, and have most of the remaining desktop area filled by the game.

Setup:

- Install Autohotkey http://www.autohotkey.com/
- Edit the default AutoHotkey script (should be in notepad the first time you run it) with:

; Set your resolution
w = 2548
h = 1409


; Window to fullscreen
LWIN & LButton::
SetTitleMatchMode, 2

WinGet Style, Style, A
if(Style & 0xC40000) {
WinGetPos, X, Y, Width, Height, A
WinSet, Style, -0xC40000, A
;WinMove,A,,0,0,w,h
WinMove,A,,6,0,w,h
} else {
WinSet, Style, +0xC40000, A
WinMove,A,,%X%,%Y%,%Width%,%Height%
}
return

Once you are comfortable with this, you can move the script to a backup location if you like, and simply create a shortcut to the .ahk file on your desktop to run it.

- Taskbar Eliminator http://www.aviassin.com/taskbareliminator

- Go to your Desktop "Window Appearance" settings where you can edit the titlebar and such, and reduce the "Border Padding" to 2 instead of 4. This makes the gap around the game window very small.

- Edit the w and h values at the beginning of the script to enter your desktop resolution minus window borders and titlebar.

Now this is the trick. You can NOT scale the window to full screen. If you do this, you will have mouse targetting issues, because the game will NOT change its "internal'" resolution. All you can do is hide the borders, and use a dark desktop image (or none), so that it appears almost as fullscreen.

To find out the exact "inside" window resolution, start autohotkey so that it sits in the taskbar. Launch the game without the taskbar, and use the Window Spy option from Autohotkey.

The values change depending on resolution AND your window appearance settings (theme).

All setup?

Ok now it's not so complicated.

Whenever you want to play...

1) Run Taskbar Eliminator to instantly hide the taskbar (unhide with Alt-T, this is not mandatory, but it's a lot faster than switching the Auto hide option of the taskbar settings...).

2) Run Autohotkey. It should have the icon in the tray area.

3) Launch LOTRO.

3) When the main game window is open (the borders should fill the entire desktop area)
press Left Window key + Left mouse click. This removes the window borders, and moves the window up, so that the top of the viewport matches the top of the desktop.

4) Since there was space left by the titlebar and bottom border that you can NOT use (re-read above, you can NOT increase the window size), you may want to toggle the Taskbar back in.

Now you're playing almost fullscreen, minus the taskbar.

There is a small 4-6 pixels gap on the sides, which should barely be noticeable, assuming your desktop background is very dark (or you can adapt the desktop image).

The vertical space from the titlebar and bottom border that would be left unused is taken by the taskbar, so you can keep an eye on the clock, chat etc.

Stickies ( http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/ ) can make a great notepad while playing in this mode. You can even keep it "on top" and with transparency if you like..

I don't like the taskbar

If you really don't want the taskbar at all, you don't have to use it. You can adjust the x,y coordinate in the script (see WinMove line), to center the "borderless" window. However there will be a larger gap on top and bottom.

If the extra gap doesn't bother you, you can play like that, and keep the taskbar on Auto-Hide.

Last edited by ecirbaf : 11-10-2011 at 01:55 PM.
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