True full screen for game mode on mac (and other reasons)

Post your ideas and suggestions how to improve the game.

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Myricae
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True full screen for game mode on mac (and other reasons)

Post by Myricae »

Hi, i know this is probably a super niche suggestion, but i saw i'm not the only one who would benefit from this (i saw others speak about this on the forum). I'm one of the 5 people who play on mac, and a while ago apple developed something called Game Mode, which basically does a bunch of cool things to prioritize resources while gaming. Unlike most things from apple in regard to gaming, it's actually pretty good and does work well, it actually does what it says. The only problem is, it doesn't work with factorio, and only factorio (for me at least). After a bunch of digging i think i discovered why, with 99.99% probability it's because game mode works only with full screen games for a bunch of reason, and factorio full screen is actually a borderless windowed mode, so game mode can't activate. Creating a true full screen mode should resolve the issue immediatly. Not only that, even previously this Bordless windowed mode caused an (only annoying, nothing terrible) issue on macs, since unlike with full screen, dragging the cursor on the top of the screen makes the superior dock of the OS come out, which is pretty annoying in games and it's the reason you always use full screen while gaming on macs. I don't know if this is a lot of work to do (i imagine not? but i'm not a develeper) but this would be a simple fix that solves 2 annoying problems for us 5 mac users, and since you already coded factorio in ARM64 to avoid using Rosetta (i love you guys for this) it would be a shame not doing this small helpful change! :D
Sorry for the poem, also sorry if there are grammar mistakes, I'm still not super good with english.
Illiander42
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Re: True full screen for game mode on mac (and other reasons)

Post by Illiander42 »

> I don't know if this is a lot of work to do (i imagine not? but i'm not a develeper)

It would be a completely new graphics front-end. A lot of the code could probably be reused, but it would need all the expensive bits of testing (the bits that are hard to automate (checking that things render properly to the screen)) done as though it were a whole additional platform being ported to.

Borderless windowed fullscreen is a pretty common graphics mode for games on UNIX OSs (Linux, Mac, etc...). It has the added advantage of letting you have other things open on other monitors when you have more than one monitor plugged in and makes it really easy for game devs to let you select which monitor the game plays on.

Apple should fix their OS setting to accomodate this very common game setup.
Myricae
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Re: True full screen for game mode on mac (and other reasons)

Post by Myricae »

Wow, i had no idea it would need so much work, sorry for my ignorance; software development is even more complicated than i thought. It's a shame, but it is what it is. I agree with what you said about apple, although i read the reasons they did it this way and it made sense, but knowing the company even if they could improve it to work in borderless i doubt they would. Thank you for answering though, hope you have a good day
Illiander42
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Re: True full screen for game mode on mac (and other reasons)

Post by Illiander42 »

I don't think just implementing it would be a lot of work, all the work is tied up in the quality control (testing).

Basically the same problem an ARM Linux port has.
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