1 Commits

Include renames

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
3 people	22495d7245	Docs: research notes on making -window work for all display modes ... Research only. Nothing implemented, nothing scheduled. Captured now so the investigation does not have to be repeated when we come back to it. New file: WINDOWED-MODE.md (repo root), indexed from README.md and the CLAUDE.md next-steps list. Goal being assessed ------------------- Make -window work for every pod configuration, so a full pod (main + radar + MFDs, or a cameraship pair) can be tested on a single monitor as a set of moveable windows. Target order: console (already works), cameraship, -tmfds 1, -tmfds 4. -tmfds 3 deliberately out of scope. Headline finding ---------------- -window does NOT fail for the MFD and cameraship modes - it silently DISABLES them, and the reason is a single line: MW4Application.cpp:1373 use_shgui = Environment.fullScreen ? 1 : 0; use_shgui is the master switch for the entire secondary-panel subsystem and is derived from fullscreen, so with -window it is 0 and DXRasterizer.cpp:1131 never calls HSH_EnterFullScreen2(). No panel is ever created. Console mode only appears to work windowed because it has no panels to lose. What the document covers ------------------------ * Why it behaves the way it does today, with the exact gating code. * What already exists in our favour: the main display is a working windowed reference implementation (primary + clipper + offscreen backbuffer, presented with Blt); the clipper wrappers are already in use; and none of the panel DRAWING code would change, because panels render to an offscreen target and composite - they are indifferent to whether the present is a Flip or a Blt. * The six things that must change, with quoted code: decouple use_shgui; windowed variants of CHSH_Device::InitFirst (DDSCL_NORMAL, no SetDisplayMode, per-panel HWND) and InitSecond (plain primary + clipper + offscreen backbuffer, D3D device on the offscreen); one window per panel; 8 Flip->Blt sites in WinMain.cpp; and explicit frame pacing. * Frame pacing is called out as the item that will actually bite: sh_step advances once per frame and drives MFD channel cycling, so an uncapped windowed rig would not faithfully represent pod behaviour. Same root cause as the known mechlab fast-spin bug. * Reference tables: every panel class with its InitFirst location, device slot and resolution; the SwapRightState member-swap mechanism that any windowed work must keep intact; and the full lifecycle/gating map. * Suggested phasing, with radar-only as the decisive Phase 1 experiment. The risk that decides it ------------------------ Windowed D3D7 device creation is per-GPU, and this would need four windowed devices in one process. Precedent runs both ways: the mission editor hit DDERR_INVALIDOBJECT creating a windowed D3D device on Win11 and needed DDrawCompat (STEP 8), while the game's own windowed main display succeeds on the W4100. Nothing has proven four. If it fails, the fallback means rewriting the panel RENDER path, not just its present - a substantially bigger job. Why this may be worth more than a test convenience -------------------------------------------------- Windowed mode removes exclusive-mode contention entirely, which is the whole reason dgVoodoo2 is currently mandatory for every multi-display configuration on Windows 10/11 (STEP 10). If windowed panels work natively, that is a route to dropping the dgVoodoo2 prerequisite WITHOUT breaking the XP pods, since it needs no external DLL on either OS. Same groundwork as the borderless-windowed migration already parked in STEP 10. Note on citations ----------------- All 22 file:line references were derived directly and verified to resolve to the expected symbol. An exploratory pass had produced line numbers that were substantially wrong (CHSH_Device::InitFirst reported at 717, actually 627; IsMultimonitorAvaliable at 2178, actually 2961), and a claim that the radar renders at 480x640 rotated - the code passes 640,480 like the others. Worth knowing before trusting generated citations in a document intended to outlive the session. Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic) <noreply@anthropic.com> Co-authored-by: GitHub Copilot <copilot@github.com>	2026-08-05 17:31:09 -05:00