DirectX 11 and Fullscreen mode

emerald381

With the recent announcement regarding the discontinuation of support for DX9, I have been experiencing an issue that has now taken on greater urgency. Up until Friday's (12/2) patch, I had been running DirectX11 in Fullscreen mode (1600x900, 16:9) on a Windows 10 OS with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M card and it was working without issue. Now, if I try to run the game with those settings set before launch, it crashes the game just after I click "Engage" from the launcher. I was able to launch the game in Safe Mode and then tried to switch back to Fullscreen from that point. But when I tried to do this, it would go into Fullscreen mode for 1 second before quickly shrinking to a small window (1/4 screen) in the upper left hand corner of the monitor. If I tried to change the resolution, it would again flicker into full screen for 1 second before returning to the 1/4 screen.

I can run the game in Windowed and Windowed Maximized mode without any crashes or forced window resizes. But there is a big issue with this as everything on the HUD/menus becomes so tiny that it becomes very difficult to actual control anything in game. This would not be a deal-breaker if there was a way I could scale-up the size of the menus/HUD, but I have not seen such options available. Edited to Add: I can (and have been) run the game in Fullscreen normally without issue using DX9 (hence the urgency in posting this due to the recent announcement).

If there is any additional information I can provide to help in understanding this issue (such as system specs), please let me know. I would have provided screenshots, but was unable to capture the problem as it occurs since the crash or fullscreen switch is not a static issue.

dragonsbite

You can try selecting fullscreen in the sto launcher options. Which you probably are already trying. Or open the gameprefs.pref file located in the \Star Trek Online_en\Star Trek Online\Live\localdata folder. You can edit it with notepad. Find fullscreen vertical and horizontal size and put in 900 and 1600 respectively. If you want you can also look for the windowed height and width. Try 870 and 1595. You can also look for "fullscreen" and change 0 to 1 as 0=no and 1=yes.

Using fullscreen or fullscreen maximized has almost the exact same size UI in game. If fullscreen maximized UI is smaller then you were using a smaller resolution when in fullscreen mode, like 1280x720. btw mine switches from 1920x1080 (native) to 1680x1050 for no apparent reason now and then. This normally isn't a problem. However sometimes it is. You can try NVidia control panel/desktop size and positioning/scaling change perform scaling on "display" to "gpu". That way the monitor will always be in 1600x900 mode even if you select in game or in the gameprefs file a smaller size like 1280x720. The gpu will upscale it to 1600x900 and doing so increases UI size.

You can change UI scale in game as well. Options/Basic tab select and change Interface Scale.

If nothing works you can also try changing DPI scaling. Using anything but 100% can cause issues in some games. Right click desktop/select display settings. Change change the size of text, apps blah blah. I sometimes have to do this myself.

emerald381

Hi Dragonsbite - Thanks a lot for your comment. I ran a couple more tests and have some interesting results. If you (or anyone) have any ideas, I'm all ears (or I guess eyes in this case):

So based on your comment regarding Fullscreen vs. Window Maximized (that it should have the same approximate UI size for a given resolution), I came to realize that my Windows Display resolution setting was for 3200x1800 (not 1600x900). So from a UI scale standpoint, I can run a Windows display resolution of 3200x1800 with UI scale 200% or Windows display resolution of 1600x900 with UI scale 100% and that seems to work to address the small UI concern in Window Maximized mode (for the most part...there are some aspects of the UI when scaled to 200% that look odd). Running the game at 3200x1800 however is too taxing for my hardware, but I just wanted to point that out.

I kept experimenting and found that the problem with DX11 and Fullscreen mode only occurs when my Windows display resolution and my desired Fullscreen in-game resolution are mismatched. So for example, when my Windows Display resolution is at 1600x900, I can run DX11 in Fullscreen at 1600x900 (or 800x600, which is the default selection when one initially switches to Fullscreen in-game). However, when I returned my Windows Display resolution to 3200x1800, I could no longer run the game in Fullscreen mode under DX11. If I changed my in-game resolution to 3200x1800, only then could I run it in Fullscreen mode with DX11. So for some reason, when the game has to change its resolution from 3200x1800 to anything else when I'm running Fullscreen mode and a Windows Display resolution of 3200x1800, the game crashes. I get the tell-tale sign of the resolution trying to update (screen flickers momentarily) before the crash occurs. Note: This flicker also occurs when changing the Fullscreen resolution under DX9 (as expected), but no crash occurs.

And I reconfirmed the scenarios from my original post: Windowed, WIndow Maximized, and Fullscreen all work without any issue under DX9 independent of my Windows Display resolution. And DX11 works under Windowed and Window Maximized under any Windows Display resolution. But for some reason, the combination of a Windows Display resolution of 3200x1800 and Fullscreen under DX11 stopped working after the latch STO patch.

Any thoughts?