_ _ _ _________ _______ ____ _______ | | | | | | | _ _ | | ___ | | _ \ | _____| | | | | | | ___ | | | | | | | | | | | | \ \ | |_____ | | | | | | |___| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | _____| | |_| |_| | | | | | | | | |___| | | |___| | | |_____ |_________| |_| |_| |_| |_______| |_______| |_______| v1.00 for StarCraft & BroodWar ｩ XeN (2007) W-MODE is a "new" "plugin" for StarCraft that enables you to play the game in a window. It was tested on many of the previous versions up to 1.14 but but it was designed to be compatible with ANY StarCraft version. The plugin started as a simple utility to help me in starcraft bugging and debugging. Some plus work on cursor handling made it a cool plugin that turns StarCraft into your favorite desktop game :) Now some more about the plugin, let's have a go! You must have a utility that has XMOD plugin loading capability. At the time I write this the only loader that does the job is scloader2b. Load the plug with this command: scloader2b -xmod wmode.xmod I assume that you copied the plug to your sc directory (and not elswhere) and you got it work succesfully. Voila! Your sc runs in a window... About the resolution an color depth of your desktop: It would not be fun to play sc in windowed mode when your destop resolution is not bigger than 640x480. I recommend you at least 800x600. You can start sc + wmode with any resolution / color depth setting but it does not support palettized modes, that means that you should have at least 16bit/pixel color depth. On 2, 16, and 256 color modes sc will not look sexy. In 256 color modes a game can control all 256 palette indices if it uses DDraw in (exclusive) fullscreen mode, but when windows come to the scene your operating system preserves 20 palette indices for itself, and your 256 color sc screen should adapt to it. It could be solved with octree resolution or median cut or with something similar, but most of the home comps run using 32bit/pixel mode today so I don't want to tire myself with palettes. About cursor handling: In order to scroll your starcraft map you must move your cursor to the edge of the starcraft screen. It would be really hard to aim the 2 pixel with edge of the sc screen with a cursor that can be pulled out from the starcraft window, so the cursor should not be allowed to move out of the client area of your sc window. There is a function built into W-MODE that handles the cursor, it is called "cursor clipping". The hotkeys provided to control this: * ALT+F1 Turns on/off cursor clip. * ALT Temporarily inverts the current state of cursor clip while it is held down. So, if you switch on clipping you can not move out the cursor from the sc screen and you can scroll your map with the cursor. If you hold down the ALT key your clip is turned off temporarily and you can pull out the cursor from the sc screen. When the cursor is outside the sc screen you can release the ALT key so clip is on again but it will be actually activeted only when you move the cursor back to your sc screen. The cursor clip becomes activated/deactivated automatically in some circumstances. It is automatically deactivated for example when you switch to another window with ALT+TAB or your cursor moves over another window that partially covers the sc screen (for example a winamp with always-on-top mode or a hint window of the system tray that says "You have not enough free space on drive E:" :p). Clip is automatically activated when you hold down the left mouse button to use rectangle selection of more units or to scroll the map using the minimap. When cursor clip is off you can use the ALT key to temporarily switch on the clip so as to make it possible to scroll your map in the game. That's all about cursor clipping of W-MODE, let's go 'n' try it! Other hotkeys: * ALT+F10 Enables/disables moving the sc window. If you turn this functionality off you can not move the starcraft window to elsewhere on the screen. By grabbing it holding down the left mouse button. It can be useful when you use other windows (msn...) and you click here and there like a zealot and don't want to move the sc window accidently. * ALT+F11 Turn on/off always-on-top mode. This option is like that of Winamp's. When turned on, your sc window will be always on top of other windows that are not in always-on-top mode even if you interact with a window other than StarCraft's. * ALT+F12 Enables/disables all buttons on the caption of the sc window. This is another security option like switching off window movement for hardcore gamers. The buttons became grey, but you can still switch them with hotkeys. This option does a bit more when turned on than greying buttons of the caption. Switching on this functionality involves that you can not use ALT+F4 to close the window and the screensaver is disabled when the sc window is in foreground. You can switch some of these functionalities not only with hotkey but with mouse by clicking the cool icons on the window if they are not grayed. Known bigs 'n' bugs: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - Getting work the BNET interface while keeping W-MODE StarCraft version independent was not too easy. It can still contain bugs. One known "bug" is the slow display of listboxes. This can be annoying since the chat window was implemented using a listbox and you will see blinking when you send/receive messages. - W-MODE has nothing to do with game music/sound. When you switch from your starcraft window to another all sc sound mutes (at least on my machine). This is totally dependent on your DirectSound shipped with your current DirectX package. It can be worked around, maybe in the future... - Your StarCraft game does not pause automatically in single player mode when you switch to another window than starcraft's. This is actually not a bug, I wanted sc to do so :D Just bring up the menus with F10 in single player mode to pause the game. To set the options you can find a sample wmode.ini file with comments about the possible keys. W-MODE will search wmode.ini in the StarCraft directory. Thats all about the plug, using it is very simple. Bugs found in the beta: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - Click on the StarCraft screen with middle or right mouse button, hold it down and move out the cursor from the sc screen and then release the button. After it you can not click on the starcraft screen with other mouse buttons until you make a click on the sc screen with the button that caused the error. Bug fixed. Times are hard, and I'am rarely online but you can try to reach me at: - www.bwprogrammers.com - www.scindex.com - xenomails|at|freemail|dot|hu Greetingz, XeNotRoN June 2, 2007
Vickay