old games do not start in fullscreen properly.

[propthrower69]

On arch, with Window Maker 0.95.9 I have found some old games will not start properly when in fullscreen.

I tested urbanterror, both the quake3mod variant and the stand alone variant. Then I tested Prey (2006).

system information:

OS: Arch amd64 (linux-kernel 5.12.14-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT)
wmake version: 0.95.9
gpu: rx 470 (amdgpu driver, using xorg not wayland)
cpu: i7 4770

almost 20 years ago I had windowmaker on slackware and never had such issues. I even moved back to it from fvwm/cde because they have similar problems. It might be the most sane wm/de left for linux I think.

I am not a programmer so if there is any additional information I can provide let me know, the games dont provide any errors outside the usual console spew they do while loading. Even when they crash xorg, xorg logs are less than helpful and are as clueless as I am.

[propthrower69]

Some other games I just tested are quake 4 and rally-quake3. Same issue.

[gryf]

I have performed some tests regarding this issue, and as a representative Urban Terror was used (simply because I'm lazy, and package for this game exists in my OS).

I can confirm, that it will no switch to the fullscreen, and it will try to change screen resolution according to selected one. I'm not sure about tricks it uses for changing screen options, but for sure that was done in hackish way. I was curious about the root cause why game window dosn't change to fillscreen, and found out it doesn't set _NET_WM_STATE(ATOM) to _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN, which is the case for any other "modern" games, which meant to be run in fullscreen.

I guess, Window Maker is doing right thing - if NET_WM_STATE is not set to full screen, it should stay windowed. That's probably a valid case to report an issue the UrbanTerror devels.

As a workaround, you could bind a shortcut (either using menu entry, or by using xbindkeys) to force certain window to fullscreen. I'm using shortcut Super+f to execute "wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b toggle,fullscreen. You'll need wmctrl, obviously.