Switching workspaces and fullscreening with i3 leads to black screen

[jthistle]

Tested with a couple of games, The Return of the Obra Dinn and Skyrim.

When I switch workspaces with i3 window manager, and switch back to a game running with Proton that I fullscreened, all that displays is a black screen. The only way to recover from this is to quit and relaunch the game. I can still hear the audio of the game. This is not an i3wm issue - I have successfully returned to other fullscreened games that run natively on Linux.

Thanks devs for all your work on this (and thanks to the Wine devs as well). It's a miracle that any of this stuff runs in the first place.

[MuchiMuchiPink]

I use i3 as well with proton and no issues switching workspaces and back to the games. Have you tried borderless for these games?

[jthistle]

No, could you elaborate on how I could try that please?

[MuchiMuchiPink]

borderless is usually an option provided by the game itself. Take Doom for example https://abload.de/img/2019-07-31-195432_1924ikpy.png

in borderless you can resize the window seamless which works better with tiling wms.

[jthistle]

I see. That's not an option with Obra Dinn unfortunately...

[jthistle]

~Interestingly, what I can do is run it 'windowed' and then toggle fullscreen mode in i3 with mod+f. That seems to work nicely.~

edit: Ignore that. That doesn't work.

[jthistle]

Workaround discovered (for real, this time)! You can run mod+shift+R to reload i3 and it will show the game again.

[MuchiMuchiPink]

Nice, tiling can really mess with this. I remembered you could also try setting the launch options for the game to "-borderless -resx=1920 -resy=1080" in steam. Hope this works.

[anonymous133]

Hi, I have also this problem that the screen goes black in World of Warships (Fullscreen - borderless). I switched back to 4.2-9 because I encountered another annoying bug where the mouse is bound to a very small space in the center of the screen so I can no longer look around properly. As if another window has focus and I can only move my mouse inside that space. Will report this seperately.

Both of these bugs don't happen for me with 4.2-9

[andersnylander]

Another workaround to this issue involves trapping the wine fullscreen application inside a wine virtual desktop. I believe this works because the application window is never made aware that it has lost focus when you move between work spaces. Of course, implementing this workaround on a game-to-game basis is a bit more involving, since you have to manually start winecfg inside the proton prefix for the game...

[KMohZaid]

I use i3 as well with proton and no issues switching workspaces and back to the games. Have you tried borderless for these games?

i was trying to run black ops 2 in my i3, but i couldn't found borderless option. in this case, it was windowed

Workaround discovered (for real, this time)! You can run mod+shift+R to reload i3 and it will show the game again.

yea this worked for me when bo2 was set to fullscreen. but it works sometime in my case. ( it mostly fails to work when mod+shift+R opens different workspace on reload, eg. set some workspace to auto focus when browser or messanger opened...)

finally my game is working when i kept screen resolution to default, game to windowed and gamescope off. i3 fullscreen keybind for making it fullscreen afterwards

now i can play bo2 zombie mode with friend and have my other stuff with me (hate to switch between DE)

P.S. : sorry if i didn't provided useful information,