Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghostly_s | Hacker News Reader

tldr; the author considers "none" to be "impossible options." save your time.

From a Windows perspective, launching the start menu without explorer.exe should be impossible (at least for non-wizards), which is why they thought this was impossible. It doesn’t make sense for a user to kill the start menu to relieve memory pressure, unless of course it’s a pig. Which it is in Windows 10+ :(

It’s been a while since I games or windowsed, but don’t you want to kill the start menu anyway so you don’t accidentally hit the windows key and interrupt your game?

I remember that would be kind of an issue like 15-20 years ago -- not sure why, but switching out from a 3D game to the desktop would take forever (I mean I can imagine a bunch of reasons -- ram was expensive, hard drives were slow, swap was more of a thing, processors were single core, graphics cards had terrible drivers, etc etc -- the reasons are too numerous for me to nail it down).

Nowadays on any reasonably performant system, it would just possibly pop the start menu up for a second, and then you'd click on the game -- everything should be fine outside of super competitive situations. Hitting start was always a rare event anyway, but now it's been degraded from a rare catastrophe to a rare minuscule inconvenience.

It used to be a lot more common for games to run a separately set screen resolution than the OS, so transitioning in and out of a game might change your screen size. Windowed mode and "Windowed (Fullscreen) were usually to not do this, and generally were easier if you task switched while gaming (especially for MMOs). I think nowadays it's much less common for games to run at a different resolution than you've already set your display to.

> I think nowadays it's much less common for games to run at a different resolution than you've already set your display to.

I would guess the opposite? 4k monitors are fairly cheap while GFX cards which can run games at that resolution with a decent FPS are expensive. Maybe hardware has gotten cheaper or way more performant in the last years though.

I think more than likely the majority of people have either a 1080p or 4K display, and if they do, they are using that resolution both when on their desktop and when in a game.

But if you remember back in the VGA days, it wasn't uncommon to have a game set an 800x600 resolution even though you had a 1024x768 display, so switching in and out of the game came with some delay to manage that.

A lot of games now have an option to render the UI at native resolution but render the actual game at a lower resolution for performance reasons.

Disabling that doesn't require killing the start menu.

> It doesn’t make sense for a user to...

Famous last words of many a unemployed junior developer...just sayin'.

> But the Start menu is a UWP program, so it is supposed to be launched a special way, with specific command line arguments

Specific arguments aren’t the same as no arguments. The distinction is important here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com