Arch Linux

Quanttek

Member

Registered: 2015-01-10

Posts: 22

[SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Hey there,

I have some problems when using i3 and full-screen games.
When I open a game I can't switch out of it: When just even hovering over my second monitor the window immediately closes itself without terminating the game. Even going out of full-screen mode and floating mode, when I switch focus, it disappears from the list of my windows, though I can often still hear the sound. This problem appears in all modes (floating, stacking, tabbed, tiling).

Some games I can't even play in the first place, so far only Wine games like LoL or Hearthstone, because their windows vanish instantly without any interaction. The game doesn't close itself, i'm still present in the game, but I can't access the window.

Is there any way to fix this or atleast access a window after it disappeared?

Thanks in advance!

Last edited by Quanttek (2015-01-16 20:39:40)

MK13

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-04-12

Posts: 80

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Had this problem once with CoD2 (wine). After tabbing out with [ALT] + [TAB] the window was gone and I was unable to get it back. Even after killing all wine processes and restarting the game the window was still gone. Restarting i3 inplace didn't work either, just a reboot. Since then I start all games on a distinct workspace and avoid switching focus. Not a great solution, though.

Quanttek

Member

Registered: 2015-01-10

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Had this problem once with CoD2 (wine). After tabbing out with [ALT] + [TAB] the window was gone and I was unable to get it back. Even after killing all wine processes and restarting the game the window was still gone. Restarting i3 inplace didn't work either, just a reboot. Since then I start all games on a distinct workspace and avoid switching focus. Not a great solution, though.

At least I'm not alone, thanks.

Do you have any solution regarding the wine problems with the game window instantly vanishing?

smlb

Member

From: /dev/null

Registered: 2013-05-20

Posts: 60

Website

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

None of these kind of problems here, playing CSGO on Arch and i3 often.

---

Dotfiles

MK13

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-04-12

Posts: 80

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Do you have any solution regarding the wine problems with the game window instantly vanishing?

Nope, sorry, since I have never encountered that kind of problem. My windows vanished only after a change of focus to another window. Can you provide output of

wmctrl -l 

after you started a game but it's running in the background?

Last edited by MK13 (2015-01-13 17:53:20)

Quanttek

Member

Registered: 2015-01-10

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Do you have any solution regarding the wine problems with the game window instantly vanishing?

Nope, sorry, since I have never encountered that kind of problem. My windows vanished only after a change of focus to another window. Can you provide output of

wmctrl -l 

after you started a game but it's running in the background?

While I can still hear the sound of most games in the background, the window doesn't appear in the output. Tested with CS:GO, LoL and Prison Architect

MK13

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-04-12

Posts: 80

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Regardless, could you provide output? It may prove useful for further debugging.
Also, please post your i3 config. Do you start CS:GO over steam? How do you start LoL?

To get a complete picture you could do the following:
1) Enable debug log in i3
2) Start a game
3) get output of wmctrl -lpG
4) post log + wmctrl output here

Last edited by MK13 (2015-01-14 20:35:06)

Quanttek

Member

Registered: 2015-01-10

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

START to ~12:35 is the start of the application
12:50 to END is the log while the application was in the background

There seems to be a repeating pattern

Last edited by Quanttek (2017-04-15 16:47:10)

MK13

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-04-12

Posts: 80

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Do you use i3-git?

Edit:
With i3-git I can reproduce your issue. When tabbing out of the game the window is gone and I can't bring it back. Restarting i3 in-place (Mod_key + Shift + r) brings it back, though. Did you try that?
As far as I can tell this patch causes the issue. Related Bug from i3 tracker: http://bugs.i3wm.org/report/ticket/1279.
This seems to be the desired behavior, even if it may look like a regression. I would recommend creating a patch and apply it to i3-git if you do not want this.

Last edited by MK13 (2015-01-16 16:36:42)

Quanttek

Member

Registered: 2015-01-10

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Do you use i3-git?

I use i3-gaps, a patch for i3 with gaps. Normally it was provided with the AUR package i3-gaps, which got now replaced with i3-gaps-git. Replacing the old package with the new package solved the problem (i3-gaps was using 4.7 as underlying i3 version, while i3-gaps-git is using 4.8.1, so it's basically just updating the package.

Thanks for your help; was really useful at narrowing the problem down.

MK13

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2014-04-12

Posts: 80

Re: [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games

Glad to hear it's working now