SOLVED Custom Resolution Not Loading in Fullscreen

[Allawayjh]

Hello everyone!

I'm Jen. I occasionally work on games with Dave Gilbert, and am finishing my Masters in Game Design this year. I've decided to make an adventure game in AGS for my master's thesis, given my skill set. At Dave's recommendation, I started building a game with a custom resolution of 1280x720. He said that he frequently saw larger resolution games in the forums and it would allow for crisper fonts down the road. The game seems to build in windowed mode, however when I try to run the game in fullscreen, we only get a black screen with nothing loading. We did some Display("Hi") functions for when the first scene loads, and they run when we run the game in windowed mode, but NOTHING loads in fullscreen.

Dave mentioned he has seen multiple larger resolution games in the forums over the years, and we are both curious what the solution to this is. I'm a little scared to build more of the game until I get the resolution issue resolved given how crucial it is to have resolution fixed early on.

Thanks all for help,

Jen

[Crimson Wizard]

Are you running with DirectDraw5 or Direct3D renderer? I myself had experienced the black fullscreen when I run games in DirectDraw5 mode after I installed contemporary graphics card on my PC.

[Dave Gilbert]

Isn't directdraw kind of unsupported these days? I always steer people away from DD for that reason.

[Allawayjh]

I'm running it in Direct3d

[Crimson Wizard]

Is your game 32-bit?

There is a way to enable logging which may shed some light on what is going on, if you go to the folder from where you run the game, edit acsetup.cfg (any text editor) and put the like "log=1" under "[misc]" section, then run the game; the log should appear at "%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\.ags"

[Jack]

Does it do the same thing when set to DD5?

[Allawayjh]

So, the good news: It works in fullscreen in Direct Draw 5. The problem is, as Dave has telling me, Direct Draw is not great for developers since it's not supported on many computers nowadays and while it works for me, it won't work for many others.

That said, Dave just ran my game on his computer and it worked just fine, so now this appears to be an issue with my computer. Any idea on where to start with that? It's a recent machine, bought in january of this year, so it should be able to run.

[Crimson Wizard]

What operating system is there? I am not quite certain, but I suspect it may have something related to the version of DirectX.

[Allawayjh]

It's Windows 10. I have an Asus 2 in 1 laptop, 15.6" screen.

I just made a smaller resolution test game, which loads while windowed, but when I tried to play the smaller resolution at fullscreen, it STILL wouldn't load. So it's clearly a problem with my computer and Direct3d drawing. I just checked my display adapters, and according to my computer, they are both up to date.

So, what's going on?

[Slasher]

longshot

search windows for dxdiag as see what it says regarding dd and d3d

[Allawayjh]

In the Display and Render sections of DxDiag, it shows both directdraw and direct3d as enabled.

At this point, we've figured out that my computer just doesn't show ANY AGS game in fullscreen, period, in direct3d mode. Even though direct3d is enabled according to the dxdiag.

Any other ideas?

[Snarky]

Could this be one of those Direct3D 9 vs. Direct3D 10 dealios? (They're not compatible, so even if you have D3D10 or newer you'll still need a separate version of D3D9.)

Here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35&nowin10

[Allawayjh]

Downloaded that file, and also did a maintenance update on my display drivers.

Direct3d works and loads, even in the bigger resolution, in windowed mode. I still can't get any size game to work on my computer in full screen mode.

At this point, it just looks like I'll be testing in windowed mode and if I need to do work in fullscreen, I'll have to move the build to a different computer?

It's just so bizarre.

[Crimson Wizard]

I want to ask, is the game freezing when starting in fullscreen, or it runs but does not draw anything on screen?
Also, if you don't mind and have little free time, could you make it write the log while in fullscreen? I explained how enable logging few posts above

There is a way to enable logging which may shed some light on what is going on, if you go to the folder from where you run the game, edit acsetup.cfg (any text editor) and put the line "log=1" under "[misc]" section, then run the game; the log should appear at "%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\.ags"

[Dave Gilbert]

I noticed this was marked as "solved"? What was the solution?